Charges in Magnitsky case brought against scapegoats – Hermitage Capital
The Hermitage Capital fund regards the announcement of the Russian Investigative Committee that charges were brought against a doctor of Butyrka detention facility Larisa Litvinova, and deputy chief of the facility Dmitry Kratov as clearly insufficient and indicating the restriction of the list of persons responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky.
“These are only two persons out of 60 included in the Cardin List of persons involved in the illegal arrest and persecution of Sergei Magnitsky and the large-scale embezzlement of budget funds by Interior Ministry and the tax officials he had exposed,” a statement of Hermitage Capital obtained by Interfax says.
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FEULNER: A malfunctioning ‘reset’
It has been two years now since President Obama heralded a new era in U.S.-Russian relations – a “reset,” as he put it. His plan was to “cooperate more effectively in areas of common interest.” He and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev were “committed to leaving behind the suspicion and the rivalry of the past.”
Fast-forward to the present. Have things improved? Considering that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently called the United States a “parasite” on the global economy, and the State Department has put 64 Russian officials on a visa blacklist, it’s fair to say: not much.
The latest round of trouble springs from the case of the late Sergei Magnitsky, whose name is probably unfamiliar to many Americans. A lawyer for one of the largest Western hedge funds in Russia, Magnitsky in 2008 accused Russian officials of swindling $230 million in tax rebates. Even in post-Cold War Russia, it was a bold move.
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Persecution beyond the grave
One of the bizarre anomalies of the Russian legal system is the possibility to prosecute, charge and sentence people who are already dead.
First we had the grotesque spectacle of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky being investigated for tax fraud 18 months after his death.
Now have an even more obscene case.
Olga Alexandrina, a 36-year-old pediatrician who died with her mother, also a doctor, last year when the small Citroen they were traveling in on Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt was in a head-on collision with a chauffer-driven Mercedes carrying Lukoil vice-president Anatoly Barkov. (Some witnesses said that Barkov’s Mercedes swerved into oncoming traffic in an attempt to overtake, but Barkov’s driver, Vladimir Kartayev, denied this.)
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Russia: Charges against Magnitskiy case doctors see mixed response
Medical officers Larisa Litvinova and Dmitriy Kratov from the Butyrka pre-trial detention centre have been charged with the manslaughter of Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergey Magnitskiy, the privately-owned Interfax news agency reported on 12 August. They are said to have been negligent in providing care to Magnitskiy before his transfer to the Matrosskaya Tishina remand centre, where he later died.
Litvinova and Kratov were among those identified by rights activists as being complicit in Magnitskiy’s death. The Russian rights activists, who were involved in the independent probe, have not responded with a great deal of enthusiasm, expressing concern that charges against Litvinova and Kratov will become something of a smoke screen.
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Russia charges doctors over jail death
Russia has charged two doctors at a Moscow prison with causing the 2009 death in pre-trial detention of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a tragedy that ignited global outrage, investigators say.
The Investigative Committee said on Friday it had “established a direct link between Magnitsky’s death and actions of the doctors in the prison” and had charged prison doctors Larisa Litvinova and Dmitry Kratov.
Litvinova is charged with causing death by negligence and if convicted could face up to three years in prison.
Kratov, who holds the senior post of deputy prison director, is charged with carelessness and faces up to five years in jail.
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Russia charges two doctors over lawyer’s death
In Russia, two years after lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in custody, two prison doctors have been charged with negligence.
The Kremlin’s human rights council has said Magnitsky was possibly beaten to death.
Colleagues say tax evasion and fraud charges which resulted in him being in pre-trial detention had been fabricated by police investigators whom he had accused of stealing $230 million (161 million euros) from the state through fraudulent tax returns. They also say his death was the result of a conspiracy led by the same officers.
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Russia Charges 2 Doctors Over Magnitsky’s Death
Russia said it charged two doctors at a Moscow jail with causing the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, AFP reported.
Magnitsky’s death ignited worldwide outrage, and he has been hailed as a martyr by activist groups. The Investigative Committee said it had “established a direct link between Magnitsky’s death and actions of the doctors in the jail,” and charged doctors Larisa Litvinova and Dmitry Kratov.
Litvinova is charged with negligence and manslaughter, and AFP reports she could face three years behind bars. Kratov is charged with carelessness and could face up to five years in prison. Neither appeared to be contacted for comment by AFP.
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WSJ: “Russia’s dead soul”
Ethicaloil.org By: Alykhan
We wrote recently about Russia’s horrific injustice and state brutality as epitomized by the outrageous case of Sergei Magnitsky, a fairly young lawyer who found himself framed, tortured and effectively murdered by Vladimir “KGB” Putin’s police state for having stumbled, apparently inadvertently, into one of the largest cases of tax fraud in Russia’s history. As befits the perverted nature of Putinian Russia, it was police committing the fraud.
Today the Wall Street Journal editorializes on some the latest developments we mentioned, specifically that Putin’s cronies had slapped down a recommendation by President Dmitry Medvedev’s own independent council that the doctors and police responsible for contributing to Magnitsky’s death be investigated. And that, as a final blow to Magnitsky’s reputation and his long-suffering family, the Moscow prosecutor’s office will re-open criminal investigations into the framed and killed lawyer, instead. The case, says the WSJ, “illustrates Russia’s contempt for law and human rights.” It didn’t mention, as we did, the connection of the Magnitsky case to Russia’s corrupt, state-run oil enterprises, and the unsavoury fact that Russia is one of the United States’ 10 largest oil suppliers. It should have. Americans need to be made aware how they are made to unwittingly support such villainy by the anti-oil sands lobby who would keep them dependent on foreign supplies like Russia’s, instead of more ethical Canadian oil.
Also worth reading is Foreign Policy magazine’s lament this week for the once-hoped for Russian democracy, now made a sham by Czar Putin. “With only four months to go until the Duma elections, and seven months until Russians elect a president…it’s a fake party here, a staged election stunt there,” writes Julia Ioffe from Moscow, while citizens suffer “monumental corruption, creeping stagnation, mounting ethnic tensions, a breakdown of safety oversight for civilian transportation systems, a stumbling reform of the rapidly decaying military, continued insurgency in the North Caucasus, continued dependence on resource extraction, an atrophied industrial sector, moribund and corrupt education and health systems.” hairy girl займ на карту https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php срочный займ
Tit for tat: Moscow lists U.S. officials to be barred. Repays U.S. for rights-abuser ban
The Washington Times. By Eli Lake
Moscow is preparing a list of U.S. officials it will ban from Russia in retaliation for a White House policy to keep Russian human rights abusers out of the U.S.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry this week began preparing a list of officials connected to the U.S. apprehension of suspected arms dealer Viktor A. Bout and convicted drug dealer Konstantin Yaroshenko, according to reports in the Russian press.
The State Department last month announced that it has a list of Russian officials connected to the 2009 slaying of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who would be denied visas to visit the United States if requested.
When asked about the list of U.S. officials on Thursday, a spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington referred to a statement by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov.
“We will surely respond, but our response is not going to be an exact replica,” Mr. Ryabkov said this month. “The lists might differ in terms of composition.”
Mark Toner, deputy spokesman for the State Department, said: “We are aware of the reports in Russian media about a visa ban Russian authorities have purportedly put in place. We have not heard formally from the Russian government on this issue.”
Moscow’s equating Magnitsky, a lawyer investigating corruption at Russia’s Interior Ministry, and Mr. Bout, an arms dealer who is accused of having sold weapons to some of Africa’s and Asia’s most barbaric warlords, drew criticism in Washington.
David Kramer, president of Freedom House, a human rights group funded in part by Congress, said it is absurd to compare Magnitsky’s case to that of Mr. Bout.
“To compare the two cases is absurd,” Mr. Kramer said. “I find the Russian effort to be a poor joke. If this is the best they can do in terms of responding, they are neither very imaginative [nor] all that interested in getting to the bottom of the Magnitsky case.”
Mr. Bout was arrested in Thailand in November and extradited to the United States over the objections of Russia’s Foreign Ministry.
Yaroshenko was convicted this spring of conspiring to import drugs to the U.S. He was apprehended by U.S. special operations forces in Liberia in 2010.
Last week, the White House issued a proclamation declaring it U.S. policy to bar officials guilty of violating human rights and humanitarian law from entering the United States.
The White House’s proclamation and the State Department’s unpublicized list are seen by many observers as an effort to head off legislation known as the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which was drafted by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, Maryland Democrat.
Mr. Cardin’s bill is a new kind of targeted sanction that seeks to punish foreign government officials by denying them access to the West.
In the past, targeted sanctions attempted to freeze assets or punish a nation’s economy by banning exports of advanced technology.
Bill Browder, CEO of the Hermitage Fund, hired Magnitsky in 2007 as outside counsel for his investment firm in Russia. He has become a leading advocate for the new kinds of sanctions in Mr. Cardin’s legislation.
Mr. Browder said Magnitsky was hired to investigate tax fraud against the Hermitage Fund’s Moscow offices, where Interior Ministry officials stole the tax dues paid by the firm.
He was arrested by the Interior Ministry officials he was investigating in 2008. After being tortured in pretrial detention, Magnitsky died in 2009.
“It became clear there is no possibility of getting justice inside of Russia, so we decided to pursue avenues outside of Russia,” Mr. Browder said.
“What officials in all corrupt countries want is to travel to other countries like the United States and Europe and keep their money in those countries and be treated with respect in those countries,” he said. “Cardin’s legislation would take away from them the very things they covet.”
In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Cardin said that “what the White House did was important,” but he still plans to move ahead with his legislation.
He added that he thinks his bill spurred the White House to action. “I expect the Magnitsky case was the driving force,” he said.
“It is very important. I still believe the legislation we have brought forward is important. I am working on potential amendments to move this forward.”
A White House spokesman said the proclamation had been in the works for months and was not related to the Cardin legislation.
Nonetheless, the White House and State Department have taken an interest in Mr. Cardin’s bill.
Last month, the State Department gave the Senate the administration’s comments on the bill: “Senior Russian government officials have warned us that they will respond asymmetrically if legislation passes. Their argument is that we cannot expect them to be our partner in supporting sanctions against countries like Iran, North Korea, and Libya, and sanction them at the same time.”
The comments were first reported in Foreign Policy magazine.
Mr. Cardin said he would work on amendments to his bill, which includes an asset freeze and would force the State Department to name the Russian officials who would be barred entry to the U.S.
Mr. Cardin first introduced his legislation last year; he has since expanded it to bar Russian officials connected to other human rights cases.
The Cardin bill would apply to officials connected to the imprisonment of former Yukos Oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a political rival of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s, and the 2006 slaying of journalist Anna Politskaya, whose work was threatening to Mr. Putin and Russia’s suppression of unrest in Chechnya.
Mr. Browder said he has been approached in the past year by the victims of other Russian government human rights abuses who asked whether the Cardin legislation could include their cases.
As a result, the legislation is much broader now than when it was introduced in 2010.
“The State Department has allowed the door to be cracked open by banning the visas of the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky; however, they have not yet frozen their accounts, they have not yet named their names and, unfortunately, they have not gone after the other well-known murderers of innocent people and human rights activists,” he said. buy over the counter medicines займ срочно без отказов и проверок https://www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php срочный займ на карту
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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