First Official Charged in Magnitsky Case — Sort Of

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Better late than never, right? Five years after Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive $230 million tax fraud, four years after he died after being beaten in a Moscow jail, a tax official incriminated in the Magnitsky scam has been charged in an embezzlement case.

Olga Tsymai, a former employee of the infamous Tax Inspectorate Number 28, has been charged for “fraud on an especially large scale” for helping fictitious companies receive 4.4 billion rubles ($130 million) in falsified tax rebates. Tsymai made sure the fake companies’ tax rebate applications weren’t checked too closely and helped transfer the money to them to then be laundered at home and abroad.

To be clear, this is not exactly the fraud that Magnitsky uncovered, just a very similar one involving some of the same people. The investigation that Magnitsky began as a Hermitage Capital lawyer involved tax rebates given by the same tax inspectorate and fingered Tsymai’s boss, Olga Stepanova, as a key player. Tsymai herself was listed on the initial “Magnitsky list” prepared by Senator Ben Cardin, although she was left off the final 18-person list included in the Magnitsky Act.

“This is the same practice, but it’s not the same money that Magnitsky was talking about,” Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, told TV Rain. “He exposed an entire scheme and named those who were carrying it out. These names arise in other instances besides the Magnitsky case, and so maybe through this one episode, [the investigation] will eventually get to the evidence that Sergei Magnitsky gave.”

I somehow doubt that investigators will ever get to the huge body of evidence that has been amassed in the investigation that Magnitsky started, which depicts how a cartel of corrupt officials perpetrated Russia’s largest-ever tax fraud. In 2009 and 2011, two low-level convicts already plead guilty to organizing that scam and were given the minimum allowed sentence of five years.

Meanwhile, Tsymai’s boss Stepanova, who is reportedly “recuperating” abroad, still has not been charged in any criminal case. I’d bet that Stepanova is currently spending her share of the stolen budget money in the UAE: A joint investigation by Novaya Gazeta, Barron’s and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project tracing some of the Magnitsky money found that Stepanov’s former husband bought two luxury apartments in Dubai on a group of artificial islands in the shape of a date palm tree.

In charging Tsymai, the Russian authorities, much like they did in the Magnitsky fraud case, have found a fall guy, and lo and behold, it’s the lowest person on the totem poll. Moving on to charge Stepanova or any of the other officials, including FSB top brass, incriminated in the Magnitsky scandal is verboten, and even more so now that the scandal has become a pet cause of the US government.

Yet while the Russian government would never admit the findings of the Hermitage Capital-led investigation into the Magnitsky money to be legitimate, it would like to present something to dispute claims that it is a kleptocracy beholden to the officials that embezzle from it. Tsymai is a good scapegoat because while her hands are by all accounts dirty, her arrest won’t undermine the regime’s tacit contract with its corrupt officials. It’s also important that she’s not on the finalized Magnitsky list: Arresting her won’t legitimize the Magnitsky Act, which Russia maintains is an attempt to violate its sovereignty. hairy girls срочный займ на карту https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php займы без отказа