Philips looks into Russia sales after U.S. fund complaint
Philips said it is looking into allegations that its medical equipment sales to Russia – one of the emerging markets where it is experiencing strong growth – ran afoul of the U.S. Magnitsky Act.
The act was passed in the United States with a view to sanctioning several Russian officials thought to be responsible for the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who worked for Hermitage Capital, an American fund which invested in Russia.
The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that a complaint had been filed by William Browder, the co-founder of Hermitage Capital, against Philips.
The newspaper said Browder alleged that Philips appeared to have violated U.S. sanctions laws by selling its ultrasound machines and CAT scanners to RT-Medintegrator, which it said had been headed by one of the Russian officials named in the Magnitsky Act.
“Philips is aware of Hermitage Capital’s allegations. We are looking into the matter, but at this point we cannot provide any further comments,” the company said in an emailed statement. займ на карту займ онлайн на карту без отказа https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php срочный займ на карту онлайн
Exclusive: Obama Declines to Add Names to Russian Sanction List
The administration had been preparing to beef up its list of Russian human rights violators. But at the last minute, they balked. Why?
The Obama administration has decided not to add any new names to a list of Russian human rights violators this year, an abrupt reversal that has left congressional officials and human rights advocates stunned.
For weeks, State Department officials had been signaling that they were preparing to expand a list of Russians subject to visa bans and asset freezes under a law signed by President Obama last year called the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law and Accountability Act, named after the Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died after being tortured in a Russian prison. Magnitsky was later convicted posthumously for tax evasion in a prosecution widely viewed as politically motivated.
In April, 18 Russian officials were sanctioned as a result of the Magnitsky law, which was heavily supported by lawmakers in both parties. The sanctions caused a rift in U.S.-Russian bilateral relations, and the Russian government retaliated by announcing their own visa ban list of alleged U.S. human rights violators and instituting a ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans.
Now, one year after the initial Magnitsky law went into effect, the State Department had been preparing to add between 10 and 20 new Russian names to the list—including Alexander Bastrykin, former First Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia and former Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office—according to officials, congressional aides, and experts.
But Thursday, administration and congressional sources said that the Obama team had abandoned plans to expand the list, thereby avoiding a new confrontation with the Russian government during a sensitive time in the U.S.-Russian relationship, as the two countries work together on issues like Syria and Iran.
“We had multiple high-level assurances that there had been new names,” one Congressional aide told The Daily Beast. “Now we hear today that there’s not going to be a new list. There’s no explanation.”
A mandated report on the implementation of the Magnitsky act was due on Dec. 14 but has still not been sent to Congress. The new names were widely expected to be added to the list when the report was delivered.
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Yanukovych Must Go: Ukrainians Will Protest as Long as His Corrupt Regime Exists
For the second time in nine years, anti-regime protesters have filled the streets of Ukraine. But now, the stakes for the European Union and the United States have risen. Ukraine’s latest political upheaval, which pro-European protesters have dubbed the Euro-Revolution, began in late November when President Viktor Yanukovych rejected a long-awaited agreement to boost political and trade ties with the EU. Demonstrations exploded after riot police brutally attacked protesters camped out in Independence Square, the site of the 2004 Orange Revolution, on November 30. Within a week, mass protests demanding Yanukovych’s resignation spread across the country. Several hundred thousand marched in Kiev, while mostly young activists set up barricades around government buildings and knocked down a statue of Lenin.
Mykola Azarov, Ukraine’s prime minister, called the peaceful demonstrators in Kiev “Nazis” and compared the statue’s toppling to the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001. European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, meanwhile, praised the “young people in Ukraine’s streets” for “writing a new history of Europe.” The demonstrators’ slogan (“Ukraine is Europe!”) signifies much more than a desire to join the EU. For them, as for most Ukrainians, Europe is a symbol of democracy, national dignity, human rights, and freedom — everything they believe, correctly, the Yanukovych regime opposes.
Although much of the world has focused on the demonstrations in Kiev, anti-regime discontent is hardly limited to the capital. Opposition channels, Web sites, and social media have broadcast continuously from Independence Square or the Euromaidan (“Eurosquare” in Ukrainian), providing accurate information and countering the slanted reporting of regime-controlled and Russian sources. Several journalists have even resigned from Ukraine’s First National TV station in protest. Up to 50,000 Ukrainians have marched repeatedly in Lviv, where the elite Berkut police units pointedly refused to intervene. In the west, the Europe-leaning officials who run the Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Ternopil, and Volyn provinces have effectively escaped the regime’s control.
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Corrupt money hides in Dubai, officials turn blind eye – Eva Joly
Money allegedly stolen by Russian officials in a major scandal and funds looted from Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank are sitting in Dubai but international authorities have failed to hold the United Arab Emirates to account, a leading French politician said this week.
Eva Joly, a former magistrate known for exposing high-level political and business corruption in France, said officials should demand that Dubai give back the money stolen in Russia’s Magnitsky case and from Kabul Bank.
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in jail, had been investigating an alleged large-scale theft by Russian officials while Kabul Bank nearly collapsed over corruption in 2010.
Joly called on the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to place the UAE on its black list of countries failing to enforce money-laundering laws.
“This is a shame, and we cannot live with it,” said Joly, a member of the European Parliament who was named to the anti-graft body backed by the United Nations to monitor corruption in Afghanistan.
“I cannot understand why the OECD blacklist is empty. Kabul Bank is the most important bank scandal ever, affecting 13 percent of the GDP of the country… and half of it is in Dubai,” she said at a roundtable discussion on the impact of the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention.
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Gays Are the New Jews
How should the West respond to the Russian government’s homophobic crusade? It is a question that has bedeviled activists and legislators in Europe and America since the Duma passed a law forbidding so-called “propaganda” of same-sex relationships to minors last summer. While the law is criticized as an assault on gay citizens, it is actually something much more pernicious: by forbidding speech that portrays homosexuality in a positive, never mind neutral, light, it is a fundamental abridgement of the freedoms of speech and conscience of all Russian citizens, gay and straight alike. Worse, it has given a green light to vigilantes who have unleashed an unprecedented wave of violence against Russian gays.
In a recent paper co-authored with Ambassador Andras Simonyi of the Center for Transatlantic Relations, I argue that the United States ought to apply the Magnitsky Act against those Russians who have committed human rights violations under cover of this law.
The Magnitsky Act compels the US government to impose visa bans and asset freezes against Russians, whether they be private individuals or officials, implicated in human rights abuses. We name names, ranging from the Duma deputy who authored the law to the leader of a Russian vigilante group, as potential additions to the Magnitsky list. This tactic, we believe, would be far more effective at curbing the Russian government’s abysmal behavior than boycotting Stolichnaya vodka or the upcoming Sochi Winter Olympics, as some activists have proposed.
John Allen Gay takes issue with our proposal, arguing that gay rights should not be a central focus of American foreign policy vis a vis relations with Russia as, say, the reduction of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, and more practically, he believes that taking a harder line against Moscow’s anti-gay policies would do nothing to help Russia’s gays; in fact, he argues, it might hurt them.
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Former prosecutor feels heat over Russia involvement
A prominent Manhattan white-collar criminal defense lawyer is the subject of a federal court grievance complaint, The Post has learned.
John Moscow, a former prosecutor now working at BakerHostetler, shouldn’t be allowed to represent several companies accused of funneling dirty Russian cash into the US to buy pricey Manhattan real estate, according to the complaint.
Moscow was hired in November 2008 by a hedge fund mogul to investigate the Russian money trail.
That conflict of interest should bar him from his current role as defense counsel to the allegedly dirty companies, William Browder, the feisty hedge fund manager who hired him, claims.
Browder says he gave Moscow confidential information that led to federal charges against Prevezon Holdings, part of the allegedly shady real estate scheme.
Moscow represents Prevezon and a slew of other defendants in a civil forfeiture case brought by US Attorney Preet Bharara.
“The same guy I was baring my soul to is now turning to the other side,” Browder told The Post.
“It’s the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen in the legal profession.”
Browder hired Moscow to help him win the freedom of his hedge fund’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested in Russia.
Browder said following the money trail through subpoenas was one of the tactics Moscow had suggested to locate the persons behind the lawyer’s imprisonment.
The lawyer had been looking into an identity theft ring that hit Browder’s Hermitage hedge fund — at the time a large investor in Russia.
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European Parliament Calls for EU ‘Magnitsky List’
The European Parliament has passed a resolution calling on the EU Council of Ministers to impose sanctions on Russian officials implicated in the death of a Hermitage Fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.
The resolution, passed Wednesday, would create a blacklist along the lines of the one adopted by the U.S. in April, which contains the names of 18 people suspected of involvement in Magnitsky’s death and other human rights abuses.
They are banned from traveling to the U.S. and having assets there. The measures caused tension between the U.S. and Russia, with Russia drawing up its own blacklist in response.
“The European Parliament … calls on the Council, therefore, to adopt a decision establishing a common EU list of officials involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky; adds that this Council decision should impose targeted sanctions on those officials,” the resolution said.
This is the fourth such European Parliament resolution since 2009. The EU Council didn’t implement any of the previous resolutions, however.
Magnitsky was imprisoned on tax evasion charges in 2008 soon after accusing Russian officials of stealing $230 million in state funds. He died in jail a year later.
Although members of the Kremlin human rights council said his death was caused by severe beatings, investigators dropped their inquiry due to a lack of evidence. hairy woman займы на карту без отказа zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php unshaven girl
Russian refugee asks Lithuania to adopt ‘Magnitsky act’
Yesterday at Kudirkos Square in Vilnius a group of people organised a small demonstration to support Russian political prisoners. The organiser of the demonstration was Vsevolod Chernozub, the active member of Russian liberal democratic movement ‘Solidarnost’. The event also aimed to commemorate the international Human Rights Day.
“Nowadays almost every country is still trying to keep good relations with the Russian government for different reasons, such as gas, politics, economy, etc. But there are people, who stood up against Vladimir Putin’s regime, and who, as a result, are now suffering in prisons in Russia. The aim of today’s action is to support them and to ask Lithuania and also the whole European Union to adopt the so-called ‘Magnitsky act’”, Vsevolod Chernozub told The Lithuanian Tribune.
‘Magnitsky act’ was passed by the United States and signed by President Barack Obama on 14 December 2012. The main objective of the act was to punish the Russian officials who were thought to be responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky (Russian political prisoner) by prohibiting their entrance to the United States and use of the US banking system.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
