FORMER RUSSIAN FINANCE MINISTER ‘EXPLAINS’ WHY $1 BILLION WENT MISSING
By Alexandra Halsey-Storch
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe
MOSCOW, Russia–On Wednesday April 11, 2012 the Former Russian Finance Minister, Alexei Kudrin, attempted to set forth an explanation as to why $1 billion was stolen from the Russian budget while under his supervision between 2006 and 2010.
Former Finance Minister, Alexei Kudrin (Photo Curtesy of The Telegraph)
Kudrin claimed that by no fault of his own was this money stolen. Strangely, and perhaps even unbelievably, “Employees of the Treasury cannot challenge the appropriateness of [the illegal approvals of tax refunds for millions of dollars]. Neither the leadership of the Treasury, nor, especially, the leadership of the Ministry of Finance interfere in this process.” In other words, it simply was not part of Kudrin’s duty as a Finance Minister to protect the funds.
Kudrin went on to state that, “neither the Ministry of Finance, nor I, at that time as Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, had the authority [to investigate the thefts].”
Despite not being able to investigate the crime, Kudrin was aware of the illegal actions taking place. In August 2008, and again on October 13, 2009, Hermitage Capital—an investment fund that has invested about $4 billion in Russia— contacted Kudrin and provided detailed evidence of the tax official’s involvement in the thefts.
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Is Putin’s ‘roof ‘ going to keep out the hard rains of his falling popularity?
By ROGER PULVERS
Special to The Japan Times
Putin’s in a pickle and Russia’s in the soup. At least that’s what many who write about the “Dear Leader” and his country seem to be saying. But is it so? Certainly there is disruption, the kind of disruption that sits just below the skin, breaks out into turmoil, then all but disappears from sight — temporarily.
A wand of disquiet and agitation waves above the land; and anyone cognizant of the chaos of participatory politics that swept through Russia in the decade leading up to the revolution of 1917 may shake either with dread (if you are a bureaucrat or politician) or joy (if you are one who believes in the progress of democracy). Certainly, the events of 1917 showed how that wand can be transformed into a scepter of bloodthirsty authority wielded against the people.
In recent years, renowned journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya and activist lawyer Sergei Magnitsky have been murdered. High-profile magnates like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and reformist businessmen like Alexei Kozlov were arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to penal colonies. Demonstrations of tens of thousands of disgruntled citizens are taking place on the streets of Russia’s cities. These may not be the harbingers of a Russian Spring, but the country’s opposition is no longer locked in ice.
Three members of the all-female Russian militant feminist punk-rock group Pussy Riot were taken into custody for two months for “disorderly conduct” while performing on the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. They face a possible seven years in prison if convicted.
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Russian spy agency linked to dead lawyer
JEROME TAYLOR SATURDAY 14 APRIL 2012
Russia’s spy agency authorised a raid on a British investment firm in Moscow that led to a massive tax scam by allegedly corrupt officials and the death of a lawyer who tried to expose the fraud, new papers show. Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow-based lawyer, died in November 2009 during pre-trial detention after he was arrested by a group of officials who were being investigated for tax fraud. No one has been imprisoned for his death.
Instead prosecutors have begun a posthumous investigation against Mr Magnitsky and Bill Browder, the British founder of the London-based hedge fund Hermitage Capital, which has campaigned to bring to justice those responsible for the lawyer’s death. Mr Browder said the government’s investigation against him for an alleged 2001 tax evasion, which he denies, has resulted in a series of previously undisclosed criminal case files being released to the public for the first time.
Among the 70 evidence files that have been handed to his lawyers are at least three bundles containing memos from the FSB, Russia’s spy agency. Mr Browder says the files show how the agency’s anti-fraud department – known as Department K – played a key role in beginning the investigation into Hermitage, as a result of which the company became the victim of a $230m tax fraud.
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Resetting the Reset
What’s behind Obama’s push against the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act?
MICHAEL WEISS
April 13, 2012
For all his pretensions of being a “transformative” president, Barack Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are rooted in a deeply conservative and nostalgic tradition. When it comes to Russia, the tradition this White House channels most is that of Richard Nixon. This seemingly incongruous resemblance was well illustrated in a recent controversy over the nullification of a Nixon-era piece of legislation, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which binds U.S. trade relations with autocratic regimes to those regimes’ human rights records. Jackson-Vanik is the thorn in the side of Obama’s “reset” policy with Russia, which wants to accede to the World Trade Organization—a major component of the reset. So long as Jackson-Vanik still applies to Russia, American businesses won’t be able to fully profit from that accession. President Obama’s push to repeal Jackson-Vanik has been described as cynical and manipulative by both the veteran Russian dissidents who benefitted from its passage in the 1970s and the younger generation of oppositionists who seek new instruments of American leverage against Vladimir Putin.
The Jackson-Vanik amendment was originally bundled into Title IV of the 1974 Trade Act and restricts bilateral trade with non-market economies on the basis of their allowance of foreign emigration. Written in categorical language and conceived by the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) as a counterweight to Henry Kissinger’s policy of detente with Leonid Brezhnev, the amendment was clearly designed to punish the Soviet Union for refusing to grant emigration visas to its embattled minorities, particularly Jews. The Final Act of the Helsinki Accords was signed the following year, committing the Warsaw Pact nations to conforming to international human rights norms. Brezhnev thought that basket wouldn’t matter so much as the one over which the toughest negotiations about the Final Act depended: “Questions Relating to Security in Europe”, a suite of ten principles that respected the territorial integrity of member states as well as a policy of nonintervention in their internal affairs. Brezhnev was confident that the human rights component would be quietly ignored: Kissinger told him so.
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Tax scam points to complicity of top Russian officials
Two Moscow tax departments at the centre of a tax rebate scam worth hundreds of millions of dollars continued to disburse huge sums long after similar schemes were uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the whistle-blowing lawyer who died in jail after making his allegations.
Revelations that the tax rebate scams continued well after Magnitsky’s death raise questions about the level of official protection the fraudulent rebate operations enjoyed. In total, the fraud looks to have cost the Russian treasury more than $800m from 2006 to 2010.
Magnitsky was jailed on separate tax fraud charges in 2008 soon after he alleged a circle of interior and tax ministry officials had conspired to defraud the Russian government via a $230m rebate involving company seals and charters belonging to his former employer, Hermitage Capital, that were seized in a police raid. His death a year later – he would have turned 40 last Sunday – spurred international outrage, causing the US government to draw up a visa blacklist for officials involved in his detention.
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Russia Slams Attempts to Link Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky Case
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov strongly rejected on Thursday attempts by some U.S. lawmakers to link the repeal of the Soviet-era Jackson-Vanik amendment hampering Russian-U.S. trade with the adoption of new “anti-Russian laws” related to the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
“Attempts to replace an anti-Soviet amendment with anti-Russian laws are categorically unacceptable for us,” Lavrov said.
The Magnitsky case is Russia’s domestic affair which is being dealt with at the highest level, he said, and “before the court makes a decision in this case, we should not interfere.” The U.S. authorities know Russia’s position on the issue “very well,” he added.
A group of influential U.S. senators, including former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, proposed in mid-March introducing a blacklist of Russian officials allegedly linked to Hermitage Capital lawyer Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow pre-trial detention center in November 2009 in exchange for the cancellation of the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
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US Congress tries to replace Jackson-Vanik with anti-Russian legislation – FM
Russia is strongly against U.S. Congress’ attempts to replace the Jackson-Vanik amendment with new “anti-Russian legislation” in the form of the so-called Magnitsky Act that claims to protect human rights and democracy in Russia, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
He warned that the approval by the U.S. Congress of unilateral punitive measures against the persons purportedly responsible for Sergei Magnitsky’s death “will cause serious damage to bilateral relations”.
Lavrov stressed that the Russian leadership pays the closest attention to the investigation of Magnitsky’s death.
“This issue must not be politicised,” he added.
An informed source in Congress told Itar-Tass that the congressmen are not very eager to cancel the Jackson-Vanik amendment because of disagreements with Moscow over Syria and other issues, including human rights.
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ALDE calls for EU wide visa ban on Russian officials involved in the Sergei Magnitsky case
The ALDE Group in the European Parliament has today launched a procedure inside the European Parliament seeking to establish a common EU list of officials responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, for the subsequent judicial cover-up and for the on-going and continuing harassment of his mother and widow.
11/04/2012
The ALDE Group in the European Parliament has today launched a procedure inside the European Parliament seeking to establish a common EU list of officials responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, for the subsequent judicial cover-up and for the on-going and continuing harassment of his mother and widow.
The proposal is to impose and implement an EU-wide visa ban on these officials and to freeze any financial assets they, or their immediate family, may hold inside the European Union, along the lines quietly done, or under consideration, in a number of countries.
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What the Chinese can tell Russia about murder
If China can detain the wife of a top politician on suspicion of murdering a British businessman, can there be hope that Russia will adjudicate the jailhouse death of Sergei Magnitsky? What about the elevator execution of journalist Anna Politkovskaya? Or the nuclear-isotope poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko?
Beijing has detained Gu Kailai, the wife of now-disgraced Communist Party official Bo Xilai, on suspicion of murdering Neil Heywood, a long-time British business associate whose body was found in a Chongqing hotel Nov. 15. At first, Chinese authorities blamed alcohol poisoning, but yesterday they said he was murdered.
The hard facts are clear, most experts agree — this is a real murder, and authorities suspect that Gu and a servant played a role in it. But the rest is politics, said Chris Johnson, a former senior analyst on China for the CIA, and now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Johnson told me that Bo crossed an invisible line: He had seemed destined to be elevated to the all-powerful standing committee of the Communist Party Politburo. But he had created powerful enemies along the way, and ultimately self-destructed when a senior aide fled into a U.S. Consulate on Feb. 6, and divulged details of Bo’s corrupt dealings, and the Heywood murder. Breaking the law and common decency are one thing when you are a senior Chinese official, but it appears that having it aired very publicly is quite another.
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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
