Justice for Sergei Magnitsky!
Magnitsky was a tax lawyer who uncovered the largest tax fraud in Russian history and paid for it with his life.
This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an important state visit to Israel, where, understandably, the issues of Iran and Syria were at the fore. The case and cause of Sergei Magnitsky were not on the agenda.
Admittedly, Sergei Magnitsky is not a household name in Israel, let alone on the Israeli foreign policy radar screen. But his story raises significant questions about the culture of corruption and impunity in Russia, its flawed judiciary and the ruling regime’s abuse of the rule of law.
Magnitsky was a tax lawyer who uncovered the largest tax fraud in Russian history and paid for it with his life. He blew the whistle on widespread government corruption, involving senior officials from six Russian ministries.
The very officials against whom he testified then arrested and detained him, beginning a nightmare in which he was thrown into a prison cell without bail or trial, and systematically tortured for one year in an attempt to force him to retract his testimony.
Despite the physical and psychological pain Magnitsky endured from his captors, he refused to perjure himself, even as his health deteriorated.
Denied medical care for the last six months of his detention, he died in excruciating pain at the age of 37, having developed a severe pancreatic condition while being held in the Butyrka prison – a notorious Czaristera jail in Moscow that that also held Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Raoul Wallenberg.
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Russia promises ‘harsh’ response over progress of Sergei Magnitsky bill
Miriam Elder in Moscow. Wednesday 27 June 2012
Reprisals threatened over Senate committee’s approval of law designed to close borders to officials linked to death of lawyer
Russia has condemned a US Senate committee’s approval of a bill that would ban officials accused of human rights abuses from entering the United States.
On Tuesday, the Senate’s foreign relations committee unanimously passed a bill named after Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer who died in jail in 2009 after uncovering an alleged corruption scheme involving Russian tax officials and police. His arrest and subsequent death are widely seen as symbolising the absence of rule of law inside Russia.
Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, called the committee’s decision “counterproductive”. Russia’s response would be “harsh” and “not necessarily symmetrical”, he told state television on Wednesday.
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Magnitsky documentary suggests fraud, collusion between Russian officials, police detectives
By Kathy Lally and Will Englund
MOSCOW — Shortly before the Russian government was defrauded of $230 million in 2007, the officials who approved the whopping tax refund at the heart of the scheme traveled to a sunny Mediterranean resort with the police who would later investigate the theft.
This wasn’t their first trip abroad together, nor was it the first or last scheme that would be traced back to the same set of tax officials and police, along with a banker who handled the proceeds of the thefts. Their relationship, newly revealed in travel records provided to The Washington Post, illustrates a level of collusion at the heart of the Russian government that allows corruption to flourish despite repeated official promises to vanquish it.
The 2007 case, unveiled by a Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, has become widely known. Magnitsky’s death in custody in 2009 has prompted the U.S. Congress to take up a bill named in his honor that would impose sanctions on Russian officials connected to his death, freezing their assets and prohibiting visas.
Russian authorities have said the tax officials were tricked into approving a fraudulent return. The prospect of U.S. sanctions has infuriated the Russian government, which has vowed to retaliate if the law is passed.
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New Bill With Bipartisan Support Would Blacklist Group of Russian Abusers
U.S. News & World Report
27 June 2012, 16:02 GMT
For months, freezing wind blew through an overcrowded, smoky jail cell where Sergei Magnitsky was being tortured and held. Magnitsky, a Russian attorney who revealed the largest alleged tax-refund fraud in the country’s history, was held in conditions so poor, he contracted gallstones. Despite appealing for medical attention on 20 separate occasions, he was never treated.
After being relocated to multiple prisons, being poorly fed (if at all) and enduring deplorable conditions for nearly a year, Magnitsky died on Nov. 16, 2009, shortly after eight riot troopers handcuffed him to a bed and beat him with rubber batons.
William Browder, the Chief Executive Officer of Hermitage Capital Management, has recounted the horrifying tale repeatedly in senators’ and representatives’ offices across Capitol Hill in an effort to pass legislation that would blacklist all of those responsible for Magnitsky’s death.
Magnitsky worked as Browder’s lawyer at Hermitage, when he discovered $230 million in taxes the company paid were embezzled in an elaborate scheme by police, government officials, bankers and the Russian mafia. Magnitsky researched the crimes and testified against those involved and six weeks later was arrested. Browder estimates more than 60 people were involved in his death, from the guards who beat him to the ring of government officials who were responsible for his capture and imprisonment.
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Explosive Video Documents Depth of Putin’s Mafia State
World Affairs
Michael Weiss
It is no longer possible to distinguish where organized crime ends and the state begins in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. An extraordinary 17-minute video just exhibited by the anti-corruption website Russian Untouchables shows how an elite crime syndicate headed by a longtime gangster, Dmitry Klyuev, and including active agents of the Russian Interior Ministry and Moscow tax offices, managed to steal close to $1 billion from state coffers in fraudulent tax claims. It was the Klyuev Group that attorney Sergei Magnitsky exposed after one of his clients, Hermitage Capital, was raided and its corporate documents pilfered in order to defraud the Russian state of $230 million in a sham corporate tax refund—a refund which was processed in a single day by the co-conspirators themselves. After Magnitsky exposed it, the Klyuev Group had him framed, tortured, and murdered, then blamed for the crime. The substance of this new video, all obtained through Magnitsky’s relentless legal work and backed by bank, state, and airline records, is both the reason for his death as well as his testament. All the evidence corroborating what Magnitsky uncovered can be accessed at the Russian Untouchables website. What follows is a precis of the film.
Dmitry Klyuev was a petty crook who was hired in 2002 by Igor Sagiryan, the president of Renaissance Capital, one of Moscow’s most prominent investment firms, to act as a “tax advisor who had skills in arranging tax refunds through the Russian court system,” according to another Renaissance executive who testified in court. The scheme involved arranging a refund for a company Renaissance had only recently purchased; it was completed within 6 to 8 months.
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THE MAGNITSKY CASE
June 28, 2012
Posted by Steve Coll
William Browder’s grandfather, Earl, led the American chapter of the Communist Party for more than a decade during the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt; he admired Joseph Stalin, and in his final years, after retirement, he offered anti-capitalist shibboleths around the family table. Young William rebelled by earning a M.B.A. at Stanford University and entering business. In 1996, he co-founded a London-based hedge fund, Hermitage Capital, which invested in the Russian stock market in the era of the great thefts of state assets masquerading as privatizations, during the time of President Boris Yeltsin.
Hermitage did very well, but Browder became an increasingly vocal shareholder activist. He denounced the corruption and criminality rampant in Russian industry. Initially, he welcomed the rise of President Vladimir Putin, but by 2005, as it became evident that Putin’s henchmen had not come to clean up Russia but to build a criminal enterprise of their own, Browder became an irritant. Russia barred him from the country, but Hermitage managed to sell its holdings at a profit and get the money out to the West. The profits were so large that Hermitage made a two-hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar tax payment in one year to the Russian treasury.
In 2007, officers from Russia’s Interior Ministry raided the hedge fund’s Moscow office and hauled away corporate records. When they saw records about the tax payment, raiders allegedly conceived of what Browder and others have described as a brilliant fraud. A group of Interior Ministry and tax-department officials and professional criminals conspired to forge documents, create dummy companies, and invent contracts that showed that the two hundred and thirty million paid as tax should be refunded. Russian tax officials approved the request, but the refund seems not to have been sent to Hermitage—instead, the money was allegedly divided up among the conspirators.
Around this time, Sergei Magnitsky, then a thirty-five-year-old Russian lawyer for Hermitage who worked for an American firm, opened an investigation. In 2008, he testified to a Russian commission about the evidence of the conspiracy he had uncovered. He was thereafter arrested and accused of committing the massive fraud himself. In prison, he was kept in appalling conditions, fell ill, and was allegedly beaten with rubber truncheons. He died in custody on November 16, 2009.
On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. William Browder is among those who have been lobbying for the bill; Magnitsky’s supporters yesterday posted an eighteen-minute video presenting new evidence in the case. The Magnitsky Act would require the State Department to identify and sanction Russian individuals that it judges responsible for Magnitsky’s death, as well as other Russians “responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Those listed by State would be denied visas to the United States and could be subjected to asset freezes and banking bans in the West.
The Obama Administration has lobbied against the bill, arguing that it already tracks and denies visas to the Russians it judges responsible for Magnitsky’s death. The State Department does this without publicity or transparency, however. The current approach also does not impose any financial sanctions; there is evidence that some of those accused have purchased expensive real estate and cars and opened fat bank accounts in Dubai, Cyprus, Switzerland, and Moscow.
There are other, unspoken, reasons for the Administration’s reluctance: it needs Russian coöperation on pressing problems—Syria’s civil war, Iran’s nuclear program, and U.S. supply lines to Afghanistan. If Obama is reëlected, the President may also push for a new nuclear-arms treaty to enact cuts well beyond those already agreed to in the New START treaty.
The Administration’s effort to hold the bill off seems likely to fail, for complicated reasons. Next week, Russia’s parliament will approve the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization, marking its arrival within the rule-bound global free-trade regime. For American businesses to benefit through greater trade in Russia, however, Congress must repeal an outdated Cold War-era sanctions law, known as Jackson-Vanik. But the congressional coalition that has come together around the Magnitsky Act (first introduced by Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, a Democrat, but now supported by many Republicans) wants Obama to accept passage of that bill in exchange for Jackson-Vanik’s repeal.
The naïveté about Putin prevalent within the Bush Administration during its first term is long gone. Yet the question is whether the benefits of the Magnitsky Act–emotional satisfaction, a modicum of justice for some of Magnitsky’s persecutors, and other limited sanctions against Triple-A-level bad guys–justify the costs, including certain Russian retaliation of some type and a possible break in coöperation on Iran or Afghanistan.
The answer is yes. It is not a great idea for Congress to make foreign policy one emotionally charged bill at a time. Yet the virtue of the Magnitsky Act is that it rejects the fiction, so often presented at the theater of G-8 and other summits, that Russia is a normalizing country. Russia’s government remains, in substantial part, an oil-and-gas-bloated criminal enterprise. The country’s politics look brittle; thousands continue with remarkable resiliency to protest Putin’s legitimacy.
Obama’s willingness to swallow his own voice on human-rights issues, for the sake of foreign-policy pragmatism, has been a disappointment of his Presidency. Here is a way for Congress to speak for him. It should.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/06/the-magnitsky-case.html#ixzz1zAZ3Ze3o
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We Must Be Doing Something Right
June 27, 2012
Russia is outraged-outraged!-that a US Senate committee had the temerity to pass the Magnitsky Act:
Moscow expressed outrage on Wednesday over a U.S. Senate panel’s approval of a bill that would penalize Russian officials for human rights abuses, and warned Washington that adoption of the sanctions would force Russia to respond in kind.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act,” named after a Russian anti-corruption lawyer whose death in 2009 while in pre-trial detention drew widespread condemnation.
Despite broad support in Congress, the bill’s future remains uncertain, partly because the Obama administration is unenthusiastic about a measure that Russia says would be an unwarranted intrusion into its internal affairs.
“The effect on our relations will be extremely negative,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted by state news agency Itar-Tass as saying.
“We are not only deeply sorry but outraged that – despite common sense and all signals Moscow has sent and keeps sending about the counterproductive nature of such steps – work on the ‘Magnitsky law’ continues.”
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FPI and Freedom House joint event: “Toward a Democratic Russia”
Yesterday in Washington DC, the Foreign Policy Initiative and Freedom House along with Senator Ben Cardin, Senator Kelly Ayotte, Kristiina Ojuland MEP and former Russian PM Mikhail Kasyanov debated how Russia can move towards democracy in the future.
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‘Magnitsky law’ makes progress in Senate
By Catherine Belton in Moscow and Geoff Dyer in Washington
A US Senate committee has approved a bill named after Russian anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky that would impose sanctions on human rights abusers as new evidence emerged concerning the events leading up to Mr Magnitsky’s death.
On Tuesday the Senate foreign relations committee approved the “Magnitsky Law”, which has also passed a committee in the House of Representatives and which imposes restrictions on the financial activities and travel of Russian officials allegedly involved in the case.
The vote was held as friends and former colleagues of Mr Magnitsky released evidence that showed those accused by the lawyer of taking part in a lucrative tax rebate fraud had flown on numerous trips abroad with the owner of the bank that received the funds.
Mr Magnitsky died in a pre-trial detention centre in November 2009, more than a year after he alleged that a circle of interior and tax ministry officials had conspired to defraud the Russian budget through a $230m tax fraud scam.
The federal prison service has assumed partial responsibility for his death, accepting he was denied medical attention, while a government human rights council concluded that he was probably beaten to death while in custody on separate tax fraud charges.
His case has become a big irritant for the Obama administration’s efforts to “reset” relations with Russia and Moscow has threatened retaliation if the Magnitsky bill becomes law.
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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