Silence over Russian ‘martyr’; Lawyer’s family hope film will help win justice for man who died a year ago after fighting corruption

The Sunday Telegraph

14 November 2010 – In the eyes of his supporters, he was a martyr in the fight against corruption, who paid the ultimate price for exposing Russia’s biggest-ever tax scandal. In the eyes of the authorities, though, Sergei Magnitsky was a criminal suspect himself, whose death while awaiting trial in a “dungeon-like” prison merited no further investigation.

Now, exactly a year after he was found dead in a squalid jail cell, Mr Magnitsky’s mother and colleagues are to mount a challenge to the Kremlin’s silence with a documentary to be shown to British parliamentarians on Tuesday.

“So far nobody has explained what happened,” said Natalya Magnitskaya, his mother, who has accused the Russian judiciary of “destroying” her son. “I do not understand why this has happened to him. He always respected the law.”

Mr Magnitsky is believed to have uncovered one of the biggest tax frauds in Russian history, perpetrated by a gang of police officers who allegedly plundered the state’s coffers to the tune of £144million.

Those same policemen then turned on their accuser and jailed him, in what friends claim was an attempt to pressure him into denouncing one of his clients, an investor in Russia who had fallen out with the Kremlin.

In the event, Mr Magnitsky did not crack but his health did. He developed a severe pancreatic condition while being held in Butyrka prison, in Moscow, a notoriously spartan Tsarist-era jail that once held the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Three hours after being transferred to another facility, he died aged just 37.

“They put him in dungeon-like conditions,” added Jamison Firestone, the boss at the law firm where Mr Magnitsky worked. “Cells without windows, humidity, they turned off his hot water, and the sewage.”

Since he died, Mr Magnitsky’s story has become a diplomatic flashpoint between Russia and its foreign partners. President Dmitry Medvedev has been forced to change the law to ensure that people charged with white-collar crimes are not jailed before they have even been tried.

Yet the official investigation into his death, which is still open, has gone nowhere. Nobody has been arrested or charged.

Instead, the police officers whom Mr Magnitsky believed defrauded the state, and then tried to cover it up by jailing him, were handed top government awards last week.

The awards were unrelated to the Magnitsky case and came after two of the officers involved in the case were promoted.

Mr Magnitsky’s former client William Browder, a London-based businessman who is chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, said that the plaudits beggared belief. “They are circling the wagons and protecting their own,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

“Every step the interior ministry takes to cover up their crimes is more cynical than the last. It never ceases to amaze me just how evil these people can be.”

Last Friday, Transparency International, an anti-graft organisation, posthumously awarded Mr Magnitsky its Integrity Award.

“He battled as a lone individual against the power of an entire state,” said Sion Assidon, chairman of the awards committee. “He believed in the rule of law and integrity, and died for his belief.”

Meanwhile Benjamin Cardin, an American senator, has drawn up a list of 60 individuals he believes were complicit in the lawyer’s death and is pushing for them to face visa bans and asset freezes in Western countries.

At least two of the accused police have hit back, arguing that they are innocent and have been targeted in a smear campaign to deflect attention from Mr Browder.

Mr Browder, 46, who was born in the US but has since become a British citizen, is a controversial figure in Russia. The grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the American Communist party, he made his fortune during the 1990s by investing money in privatisations during the post-Soviet era.

However, the firm has made a point of exposing corporate corruption in companies it buys into, in the hope of improving managerial behaviour and share prices.

Once a supporter of Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, Mr Browder fell out of official favour after he started complaining about corporate governance in Russian energy giant Gazprom. He was denied a visa in 2005 and has been blacklisted as a threat to Rus-sia’s national security ever since.

In 2007, Russian police raided three of his offices carting off numerous documents. Baffled by the raids, he hired Mr Magnitsky to make inquiries.

The young lawyer quickly concluded that the policemen had used the company seals of two of the companies they had raided to steal the firms, and had then fraudulently demanded a tax refund to the tune of $230million (£143million). Mr Browder said he told all his lawyers, including Mr Magnitsky, to tread carefully.

“They started opening criminal cases against all our lawyers,” he says in the documentary about the affair. “I said: ‘Whatever is going on here, whatever you are doing, it is best to get out of harm’s way’.”

Mr Magnitsky was apparently unfazed and even testified against the police officers he believed had perpetrated the fraud.

It was a courageous act his family was later to regret. His mother said medicine she sent him for a stomach complaint was often held up, and that he was isolated.

He was repeatedly asked to denounce Mr Browder, who denies Russian accusations of tax evasion. Mr Magnitsky said he was only interested in denouncing the police officers he believed were corrupt.

His mother only learned of his death when she turned up at the prison gates to give him a parcel. “At first I didn’t believe it and thought they must be joking,” she recalled “My son was 37. He was full of energy and he was healthy.” “They put him in dungeon-like conditions. Cells without windows, they turned off his hot water займы на карту срочно микрозаймы онлайн https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php https://www.zp-pdl.com hairy woman