Lebedev targets Russian secret police for damages

Financial Times

Russia’s secret police have long been immune to the law that they supposedly uphold, a state within a state that acts with virtual impunity in the tradition of its KGB forebears. But now, a disgruntled banker has decided to test just how aloof they are from the law, with a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Moscow court.

Alexander Lebedev, the billionaire owner of The Independent and Evening Standard newspapers in London, launched the lawsuit claiming damages of 350m roubles ($11.6m) to his business reputation following a raid by masked special forces on his National Reserve Bank in November.

The lawsuit is the first of its kind in Russia to target the FSB, according to Mr Lebedev. “It’s the first time to my knowledge that any one has tried this,” he said.

The object of the suit is Directorate K, a division of the Federal Security Service responsible for economic crime, which has figured in many scandals in the past.“Directorate K is up to their eyeballs in murky dealings,” said William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, who claims his company was targeted by dir­ectorate and interior min­istry officers in a 2007 fraud. After Hermitage’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, claimed to have unearthed evidence of official involvement in a fraud, he was arrested and died in prison in November 2009.

The FSB declined to comment for this article.

The Magnitsky case underlines how dangerous it is to take on Russia’s law enforcement authorities, though Mr Lebedev, a veteran himself of the KGB when he worked abroad in London during the early 1990s, seems unfazed.

“You have to be kidding,” he said, when asked whet­her his time in the KGB had given him insight into his opponents. “In our day, no one in the foreign intelligence directorate who rec­eived an illegal order would ever carry it out,” he said.

The suit names a “Captain Volotovsky” of Directorate K, author of a report issued in 2010 that authorised the November raid, accusing NRB of stripping the assets of a bank it had acquired in 2008.

NRB has since been cleared of the accusations, according to NRB’s lawyer, Anton Dorokhov. Mr Lebedev said it was enough for NRB simply to show the court that it had tried to inform the authorities of asset stripping at the bank, before it had been acquired by NRB, for the charges to be ­dismissed.

Mr Lebedev believes the raid was either a pretext to put pressure on him as a result of his political activities, which include owning the opposition weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta, or simply a an attempt to extort or steal money.“My explanation is simple: it’s just a raider attack on a bank with a billion [dollars of] cash sitting in its account,” he said.

He has one foot in the opposition camp and one in the establishment: over the summer, he joined the All Russia Popular Front, an amorphous political group created by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, though he said he was there to reform it from within.

Andrei Soldatov, an exp­ert on Russia’s secret services, said he doubted Mr Lebdedev would prevail in court. “You cannot sue a law enforcement agency for carrying out an operation,” he said. “My feeling is that he is using this conflict as a tool for publicity.”

Nonetheless, the suit will be followed by others subject to arbitrary seizures by the law enf­orcement agencies, which have a reputation for corruption. “Raiding” is slang in Russia for when agencies shake down businessmen for bribes. займ на карту срочно без отказа микрозайм онлайн https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php unshaven girl