The Fund Manager At The Center Of Russia’s Tragic Hermitage Saga Talks Putin And Corruption
Bill Browder was one of the first Westerners to make a fortune in post-Communism Russia.
After arriving in the country in 1997, his fund Hermitage Capital Management started with $25 million and was at one point thought to have invested $4.5 billion, making it one of the largest foreign investors in the country.
However, in 2005 that all changed. While Browder had initially supported Vladimir Putin, he found himself barred from entry to the country.
When he began to investigate, tragedy struck. In 2008, Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer who was working for Hermitage Capital, was arrested after he reported allegations of a huge tax $230 million fraud to the authorities. He found himself accused of the very crimes he was reporting, and was thrown into prison.
Magnitsky died in prison in 2009. A Russian report later found he had been “tortured, beaten to death”. Despite his death, Magnitsky remains on trial, and no one has been charged with his death.
Browder and Hermitage are now based in London, where they still control $1 billion in assets.
However, Browder remains active in Russian life. Last year he released this video of their corruption allegations, and his pressure was able to get visa sanctions from the US and Canada on the officials involved in the death of Magnitsky.
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Kasparov: Why Vladimir Putin Is Immune To American Reset
Lecture to Heritage Foundation by Garry Kasparov
Thank you for inviting me to attend this important event here at the Heritage Foundation today. My thanks to Speaker Boehner[1] and all the other participants for their interest and their comments.
For a little introduction of myself, there’s one fact from my biography that is always omitted. Many here might not be aware that I myself am from the Deep South, right next to Georgia. I’m referring to the Deep South of the Soviet Union. That’s my hometown of Baku, Azerbaijan, where I was born in 1963, next to what is now the Republic of Georgia.
Of course, much has changed since then. There are no more Communists in the Republic of Georgia—much as there are no more Democrats in the state of Georgia—and Georgia is as good a place as any to begin my talk on the Putin regime’s immunity to America’s attempts at a “reset.” Georgia is currently under great pressure from the U.S. and others to allow Russia to join the World Trade Organization, despite two large pieces of Georgian sovereign territory being occupied by Russian forces.
Many in the media and even some governments refer to Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “disputed territories,” not occupied, ignoring the fact they were taken by military force. Often, this is the same media that refers to parts of Palestine as “occupied” by Israel. Despite heavy pressure from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Georgia has remained staunchly pro-democratic and pro-Western, and yet it appears that getting Russia into the WTO is of greater importance to this U.S. Administration than protecting the rights and territory of an ally.
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Twelve More Years of Vladimir Putin? Nyet!
White is the colour of political protest in Russia: it stands for clean elections and clean government. Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB regime might in theory be able to provide the first of these, organising a more or less fair contest in the presidential election on March 4. But the second is impossible: theft and deceit are not just problems in the Russian political system — they are the system.
Russian political life has awoken from a 12-year coma. After the upheavals of the 1990s, stability and rising living standards mattered far more than the openness of political procedures or the contestability of official decisions. Now that has changed. Politics, once dismissed with a weary shrug, is the hottest topic in Moscow and other big cities. The internet is humming with parodies, many savagely funny, of Putin and his cronies. One of the best is a Borat-style hymn of praise to the Russian leader by a Tajik crooner, so pitch-perfect in its rendering of the style of official pro-Putin propaganda that many found it hard to work out if it was indeed a spoof, or just a particularly grotesque example of the real thing.
A more brutal take was from some beefy paratrooper veterans, growling: “You’re just like me, a man not a god. I’m just like you, a man not a sod.” That too became an instant hit on YouTube. When the band appeared on stage at the latest big opposition demonstration on February 4, the crowd already knew the words. The song’s success highlights two important trends. One is the interaction between the internet and political protest. That is quite new in Russia, where in previous years people went online to play games, visit dating sites, and follow celebrity gossip. Now cyberspace has become the greenhouse for opposition political culture. The other point, no less sinister for the regime, is that the habits of mockery have spread to parts of society that used to be rock-solid supporters of the regime, such as veterans of elite military units.
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Two tax officials accused of embezzlement by Magnitsky out of Russia – FSB report in court
Two former tax service officials whom Sergei Magnitsky, a Hermitage Capital lawyer, suspected shortly before dying at a Moscow prison of embezzling about 5.4 billion rubles from the budget, have left Russia.
This information became known at a Tuesday session of the Basmanny District Court hearing an appeal by Magnitsky’s colleague, Jamison Firestone, against investigators’ inaction.
Firestone, in particular, complained that law enforcement bodies failed to detain tax service officials Olga Tsaryova and Yelena Anisimova to probe their possible involvement in the embezzlement scheme.
A report presented at the court by the Federal Security Service (FSB) says that Tsaryova and Anisimova had left Russian territory, and therefore an investigator could not present them with summons to take part in a pretrial investigation.
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UK MPs to stage debate over Russia’s human rights record
Three former foreign secretaries are backing a Commons debate and vote on Russia’s human rights record which will take place next week.
It is widely expected that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will return as President in this weekend’s election.
The Commons debate will focus on the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer investigating tax fraud who was found dead in Moscow in 2009.
MPs claim it illustrates deeper and wider human rights problems in Russia.
The debate was granted after a request by Conservative Dominic Raab and former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband to the Commons Backbench Business Committee.
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OSCE Special Rapporteur Calls for Prosecutions in Magnitsky Case
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Human Rights Rapporteur Coskun Coruz called for the prosecution of Russian officials involved in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the termination of the posthumous trial against him, and an end to the intimidation of his family.
“As a member of the OSCE, Russia should fulfill its human rights obligations and adhere to the norms and values of the OSCE,” said Corkuz in a statement Monday. “In the harrowing death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Russia’s lawlessness is absolutely not fitting into OSCE’s values. What is particularly shocking is the unprecedented prosecution of a dead man,” he continued.
Coruz’s statement was a response to an appeal from Ludmila Alexeeva, chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, for the OSCE to urge its member state to stop the trial against Magnitsky. “The prosecution of the dead lawyer and the intimidation and harassment of his family by police is a new low and an alarming symptom of the complete degradation of the Russian justice system and the absent rule of law,” she wrote in advance of last week’s meeting of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Vienna.
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Tax Officials Accused by Magnitsky of Stealing $186M Flee Country
Two tax officials accused by former Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky of stealing 5.4 billion rubles ($186 million) in a corruption scheme cannot be questioned in the case because they left the country in May, a newly released Federal Security Service report said.
The FSB report was presented at a hearing in a lawsuit filed by Magnitsky colleague Jamison Firestone against investigators for failing to open probes against government officials accused by Magnitsky of stealing public funds, Interfax reported Tuesday.
The two tax officials mentioned in the FSB report, Olga Tsaryova and Yelena Anisimova, were accused by Magnitsky of stealing $186 million in a tax refund scheme, Firestone’s lawyer Alexander Antipov said at the hearing Tuesday.
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We should get smart about how we use sanctions
Governments rarely want to be seen to be doing nothing in the face of a humanitarian challenge. This is the dilemma presented by the terrible pictures out of Homs – but such challenges evidently go far beyond Syria. Because going to war is rarely an option, this has led to an increasing reliance on the use of economic sanctions. Given London’s leading role as a world financial centre, when taken by the UK such measures can have a strong effect.
Yet how and when should we use such sanctions? Can we make greater use of them? In particular, there is a growing case for better use of “smart” sanctions – the subject of an important call today from my colleague Dominic Raab MP.
The UK’s current use of sanctions can be divided into three broad categories. First, economic sanctions used as an instrument of policy, helping us to achieve our overseas objectives. For instance, the UK has joined with other European countries and the US in prohibiting exports to Iran that might assist its nuclear programme.
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Putin and his cronies have plundered Russia for a decade, but though he’ll win Sunday’s sham election, his days are numbered
For the past four years, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev, who has the nominal post of president, have been engaged in a huge propaganda operation to fool Russians and the West.
With much fanfare, they have pretended to reform their benighted land. Mr Medvedev denounced corruption, and they pretended to be friends with the West, particularly through a warming of their relations with the U.S. in 2009.
But this has been a sham to conceal the truth: that Russia is shamefully misruled.
The ruling former KGB regime has squandered tens of billions of pounds and missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernise the country.
It has no real interest in friendship or co-operation with the West, whatever our gullible diplomats and officials may think. It wants to launder money in London, but not to adopt our values of liberty or the rule of 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
