A year on, Magnitsky probe stalls

The Moscow News

15 November 2010 – On 16th November, it will be a year since Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital, died in jail after repeated refusals by investigators to get him treated for gall bladder disease. Despite the ordering of a criminal investigation and a series of high-profile sackings by President Dmitry Medvedev, who tacked prison reform onto his ambitious overhaul of law enforcement, no one has been brought to justice.

“They’re doing something, but to this day, we have neither suspects nor accusations,” Magnitsky’s lawyer Yelena Oreshnikova told The Moscow News. “The time for a hot pursuit has been wasted. It’s difficult to recreate what happened a year ago. But I’d like to believe that the guilty will be punished.”

Three investigators connected to Magnitsky’s case – people who refused to get him medical treatment – have been promoted and given awards.

Another, Artyom Kuznetsov, is suing Hermitage Capital over videos implicating him in helping embezzle $230 million and blaming Magnitsky for tax evasion. In a Kafkaesque saga, despite an international outcry and calls from the Kremlin to pursue the investigation, the probe’s deadline has now been put back for a third time, until next February. NGOs conducting their own, unofficial investigation into Magnitsky’s case believe that high-placed officials – possibly within the Federal Security Service or other law enforcement structures – are the reason that the negligence case launched with Medvedev’s backing isn’t going anywhere.

The Interior Ministry’s investigative committee has repeatedly refused to launch a criminal probe against Oleg Silchenko, one of the three decorated with the Best Investigator Badge last week. But Valery Borshchev, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group who is heading an independent investigation into Magnitsky’s death, says he submitted its findings to the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office in December 2009. Last month, he met top prosecutors who promised a reply – but none came.

“It was Silchenko who refused to give his approval for a medical examination when lawyers asked him,” Borshchev told The Moscow News. “When we talked to doctors at the Butyrka jail, they said that they tried to get him examined, but they met with resistance” from the investigators. “We had believed that our materials would be of interest to the investigation, but apparently the [Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office] didn’t find it useful, since no one approached us for additional information or clarifications. It was a dead-end wall.”

Borshchev found it “strange” that after Hermitage’s accusations against Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov, another investigator involved in Magnitsky’s case, that no action was taken against them, and that Karpov received a professional decoration. “I think that high-placed officials are involved. And a political decision cannot be made about what measures to take against them. That is my opinion.”

Browder’s visa
The reasons for the stalled investigation – and, indeed, for Magnitsky’s death – go back to a dispute between Hermitage Capital, once Russia’s largest hedge fund, and a group of Interior Ministry officials.

It began in 2005, when William Browder, head of the fund, was denied an entry visa. An investigation by the firm led them to implicate investigator Artyom Kuznetsov in a $230 million tax fraud scheme, according to Firestone Duncan, the law firm. In 2007, Hermitage’s offices were raided as part of an investigation Kuznetsov helped launch. Magnitsky was arrested on Nov. 14, 2008, on charges of helping Hermitage Capital to evade $3.25 million in taxes, while an extradition request is still out for Browder.

“The Hermitage story is what’s keeping Magnitsky’s case from being investigated,” Kirill Kabanov, a former FSB officer who now heads the National Anti-Corruption Committee, told The Moscow News.

As a member of the Presidential Council for Civil Society Development, he has been piecing the case together for over a year now, and is due to submit his findings to Medvedev in the next few days. “If the investigators are probed, they will testify about those in whose interests they acted,” Kabanov told The Moscow News. “And among them are officials of the Federal Security Service. It’s not a group of one or two people.”

Kabanov says he has evidence of contacts between the investigators and security officials – evidence that he plans to submit to the president and the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office. Asked if he could identify the security officials involved, he said he knew their names, but could not reveal them in the interests of the investigation. The problem, he said, is systemic, possibly suggesting rivalries within law enforcement structures.

“I don’t understand how a year goes by after the president issues a command, and it turns out that the Investigative Committee [of the Interior Ministry] has not carried out an internal probe.” Nor is the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office questioning anyone from the Interior Ministry, Kabanov said.

A spokesman for the Investigative Committee could not immediately comment on the status of the case.

International outcry
Meanwhile, Magnitsky’s cause has been taken up abroad. Hermitage Capital has called on the European Parliament and legislators in Britain, U.S., Canada and Poland, to impose a visa ban on 60 officials the fund’s officials claim are connected to Magnitsky’s death. In September, US Senator Benjamin Cardin and Congressman James McGovern introduced a bill in Washington that would freeze assets and ban visas of the officials.
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