Investigators raid home of Russian celeb Ksenia Sobchak

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian investigators on Wednesday raided the home of Ksenia Sobchak, the glamourous daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin's one-time boss, in a move that has sent shockwaves through the country's political scene.

Sobchak, a 40-year-old TV star, has often been critical of Putin, but many Russian opposition figures have described her as a Kremlin project. In 2018, she became a liberal challenger in Russia's presidential election, finishing a distant fourth with about 1.7% of the vote in what her critics described as a Kremlin effort to add a democratic veneer to Putin's sweeping re-election.

Investigators said that the search at Sobchak's luxury home in a prestigious Moscow suburb was part of a probe into alleged wrongdoing by her media director, Kirill Sukhanov, who was arrested on charges of extortion.

Sobchak on Tuesday rejected the accusations against Sukhanov as 'œravings and nonsense'ť and described his arrest as part of the authorities' efforts to stifle independent media.

The state Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies said that Sobchak had fled Russia. Tass claimed she had bought tickets to Dubai and Turkey to mislead the authorities but eventually left for Belarus, from where she moved to Lithuania.

Sobchak hasn't commented on the allegations and her whereabouts were unknown.

Sobchak is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, a liberal mayor of St. Petersburg for whom Putin served as a deputy in the 1990s.

Sobchak has 9.4 million followers on Instagram, and her glamour, sharp wit and defiant ways have made her both loved and loathed.

She first gained fame as a fashionable socialite and reality TV star and was once dubbed the 'œRussian Paris Hilton,'ť but later sought to shed her spoiled and arrogant image.

Sobchak got involved in politics when she joined the massive protests in Moscow against Putin in 2011-12, and later reinvented herself as a serious TV journalist and opposition activist.

Sobchak has denied serving the Kremlin's agenda by running as a challenger to Putin in 2018. But opposition leader Alexei Navalny denounced her for discrediting the opposition by joining the race, saying that she was a 'œparody of a liberal candidate'ť and her involvement in the campaign helped the Kremlin cast the opposition in a negative light.