Late lawyer’s mother wants Russia to drop probe

Kyiv News

The mother of Sergei Magnitsky, a tax lawyer whose death in detention has become a symbol of broken justice in Russia, says authorities are stonewalling her efforts to stop a posthumous investigation of her son for tax evasion.

The death in 2009 of Magnitsky, a lawyer for British hedge fund Hermitage Capital, spooked foreign investors. Washington has barred entry to dozens of Russian officials it said shared in the guilt for jailing him before his trial in conditions which rights activists said were tantamount to torture.

Two years after his death, Russian prosecutors have reopened a criminal tax fraud case against Natalya Magnitskaya’s son in what she called a violation of her legal rights.

“My complaint that I think it is illegal to restart this case is simply ignored for different reasons. They just refuse to accept it,” Magnitskaya, a former computer science teacher, told Reuters in an interview.

“I say ‘I want to end this case’ and they say ‘No, we won’t accept it, you forgot a comma or you used the wrong ink’.”

Prosecutors declined a telephone request for comment on Thursday and did not immediately respond to faxed inquires.

They have said the decision to relaunch the case was based on a Constitutional Court ruling from July. Magnitskaya’s lawyer says that ruling allows posthumous investigations only to be reopened at the family’s request, to rehabilitate a dead relative.

Magnitsky was jailed for nearly a year without trial. The Kremlin’s own human rights council says broken bones and bruises on the 37-year-old’s body show Magnitsky was probably beaten to death in custody.

An official murder investigation appears to have ground to a halt after two prison medics were charged with neglecting to care for Magnitsky in prison.

Magnitsky had been charged with abetting two Hermitage Capital subsidiaries to avoid 500 million roubles in taxes. The case was brought by the same law-enforcement officials whom he accused of embezzling $230 million of tax refunds.

His family’s lawyers say these same officials revived the case against Magnitsky in an attempt to clear their name after the Kremlin’s rights council dismissed it as “fabricated”.

“He was an idealist. He believed he could change things,” Magnitskaya said. “When all this happened, he said, ‘I won’t leave my country, I didn’t break the law. They stole from my country, I want to return this money.’ … He was tricked.”

Magnitskaya said: “I not only mistrust them, I am afraid of these investigators.”

Magnitsky’s accounts of life in custody, published after his death, describe squalid conditions in freezing, windowless cells. He suffered pancreatitis and gallstones that went untreated despite a doctors’ order for surgery.

“It was inhuman in those cells where he was held. It was like something out of the Middle Ages,” Magnitskaya said.

Magnitskaya, who turned down a recent summons by investigators, has lodged a criminal complaint accusing several high-ranking Russian officials and 11 judges of being complicit in what she said was a corrupted law-enforcement system that led to her son’s death.

Her complaint cited previously undisclosed state documents from three days after Magnitsky’s death, which was diagnosed as a heart attack by a coroner. It said they show that the earliest investigation of his death recommended a murder inquiry.

“Everyone of them played a part: some didn’t bother to investigate, some brushed it off, and some consciously created the unbearable conditions before his death,” Magnitskaya said. займ онлайн срочный займ https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php zp-pdl.com займы на карту