02
March 2011

British prime minister concerned over lack of progress in Magnitsky case

RIA Novosti

British Prime Minister David Cameron has expressed his concern over a lack of progress in the investigation into the death of Russian anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in police custody.

Magnitsky, who was defending British investment company Hermitage Capital Management against tax evasion charges, died aged 37 in a Moscow pretrial detention facility in November 2009 after being refused medical treatment for pancreatitis. The lawyer’s death provoked uproar both in Russia and abroad.

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25
February 2011

Barroso-Putin tete-a-tete: three victims named

EU Observer

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso named three prominent victims of the Russian regime in a private conversation with the Russian leader in Brussels on Thursday (24 February).

Barroso spokesman Michael Karnitschnig said his boss called for “progress” on the cases of Sergei Magnitsky, Anna Politkovskaya and Mikhail Khodorkovsky during a tete-a-tete with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin which lasted at least 30 minutes and during which only the two men and their interpreters were in the room.

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24
February 2011

Bereaved sons and mothers urge Barroso to be brave with Putin

EU Observer

With Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the EU’s Jose Manuel Barroso to spend one hour in a man-to-man talk in Brussels on Thursday (24 February), close relatives of Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky, Alexander Litvinenko and Mikhail Khodorkovsky told EUobserver what Mr Barroso should be asking.

Ilia Politkovsky, the son of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist shot in the head outside her home on Mr Putin’s birthday in 2006, wants to know why the crime has not been solved.

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24
February 2011

Russia’s chief whistleblower wants to jail the corrupt

The Guardian

Alexey Navalny leaps out of his chair and draws five black circles on a whiteboard. The circles represent players in Russia’s multibillion-dollar oil industry. With boundless energy and lightning speed, he draws lines and connects the dots, telling the story of what he calls classic Russian corruption.

In Russia, this is not done – at least not publicly. Navalny is speaking in a country that has seen its greatest government critics jailed, exiled and killed. But the 34-year-old lawyer, smart, self-confident and apparently fearless, has made a career of going after Russia’s untouchables. As Russia’s chief whistleblower – a one-man WikiLeaks – he has focused in the past three years on using the law to obtain information from the infamously secretive state-run corporations that fuel the country’s economy and line the pockets of its highest officials.

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24
February 2011

Sergei Magnitsky and the Rule of Law in Russia

The Wall Street Journal

Earlier this week, in a Wall Street Journal interview about investing in Russia, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin surprised me. He cited my experience in Russia as an example of the strength of the Russian investment climate. Mr. Sechin argued that, based on the “economic efficiency” of my investments in Russia, I should be “a happy man.” While Mr. Sechin is correct that my investors realized significant returns on their investments in Russian equities, I would hope that no one ever has to endure the nightmare that my colleagues and I suffered in Russia after achieving this success.

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23
February 2011

Russian media tycoon Lebedev under pressure after Putin’s villa report

Ekho Moskvy Radio

Russian businessman Aleksandr Lebedev, who together with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev controls the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, has become under “unprecedented” pressure after the paper published reports according to which a villa is being built for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in southern Russia, editor in chief of The New Times magazine Yegveniya Albats said in the “Special opinion” programme of the Gazprom-owned, editorially independent Ekho Moskvy radio on 15 February.

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22
February 2011

Russia’s Energy Czar Speaks

Global Post

Igor Sechin is one of Russia’s most powerful officials and one of its most secretive. A deputy prime minister tasked with overseeing the oil sector and one of Vladimir Putin’s closest confidantes, he rarely gives interviews. So it’s a big deal when he does, and the Wall Street Journal scored one, published today. It’s definitely worth a read.

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21
February 2011

Bugs, bribes and burglary: Tony Brenton discovered how far Russia’s rulers would go to keep power…

Daily Mail / Mail Online

Should you get home to find the door to your flat unlocked from the inside, that’s just the FSB (the KGB’s successor) letting you know they called. If you pick up the phone to hear your voice played back, as I have, someone is recording your conversations.

Such was my life in Russia during my time as a senior official and then as British Ambassador from 2004 to 2008.

Occasionally the surveillance and harassment were merely funny, such as when a female colleague spotted a handsome man three times in the course of the same day before realising this was the FSB trailing her.

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21
February 2011

No more Western hugs for Russia’s rulers

The Washington Post

This year started quite symbolically in Russia. In the last days of 2010, government authorities decided to demonstrate their power and their intolerance for being challenged: The verdict issued at the farcical trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev had no relation to jurisprudence; leading opposition figures were detained for as many as 15 days on purely political grounds.

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