Answering the interview of Tatyana Akhmedova to the newspaper The New York Times, Akhmedov told RBC that his ex-wife was never interested in his religious views, and Islam perceived it as an "excuse for extremists and terrorists". "She knows perfectly well that I am a faithful believing Muslim. Her statements are as insulting as they are false, "he explained.

"We have lived apart for many years, so her reasoning about my faith is another cunning aiming at deceiving everyone for the sake of extorting a large sum of money," Ahmedov explained. According to the billionaire, after the divorce in 2000, Tatyana Akhmedova has no reason to talk about his future life.

Interview The New York Times ex-wife of the billionaire gave after Ahmedov's lawyers offered to pass to the Sharia court a decision of the fate of the yacht Luna. The latter was arrested in Dubai at the request of the British court.

Akhmedova said that her former husband visited the mosque exclusively as a tourist, never knelt on a prayer rug. "Apparently, he is a Muslim, because he was born in Azerbaijan," she told reporters.

Ahmedov, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $ 1.4 billion, is the former owner of a 49% stake in Nortgaz. He sold it to Novatek in 2012 for $ 1.375 billion, after which he invested part of the money in shares of major Russian oil and gas companies and banks.

In 2016, the High Court of London decided to exact £ 453 million to the former wife of the Russian billionaire on the grounds that after the divorce in 2013, the former spouse did not pay a penny. The name of the billionaire was not mentioned in the court decision. Later, the businessman himself told RBC that the suit was about him. He said that he divorced his wife back in Moscow in 2000, after she confessed to him in treason. The British court found the document on divorce in Russia a fake, indicating that until 2013 the couple lived together. Akhmedov, in response to an interview with RBC in 2017, said that the London court's decision "is not more valuable than toilet paper," and the prospects for it are "the same as that of a donut hole."