Bill Browder, The Brit Fighting Russia Death Threats And Libel Suits To Take On The Kremlin
A Russian policeman planning to sue a British hedge fund boss through British courts, for alleging he was part of a conspiracy to torture and murder lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, could end up “driving a truck through British law”.
The case, if a judge allows it to be heard, will be a true test for the long battle for libel reform in the UK.
On Wednesday, a judge will consider whether an hitherto unknown Russian official, Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Karpov, can use the British justice system and British lawyers to fight his case.
Russian officials have called financier Bill Browder a fraudster and a fantasist, and he is the subject of death threats, legal battles and diplomatic crises.
But, he says, it will not deter him from fighting for justice for a friend who he believes died at the hands of Russian authorities.
Browder alleges Russian officials falsely imprisoned, tortured and killed his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky after both he and Browder blew the whistle on a massive scandal, involving criminal gangs colluding with Russian authorities to steal millions from Russian taxpayers.
“They are so desperately trying to cover it up, that they are willing to kill the key whistleblower, prosecute him posthumously, and pursue me in every possible way, including threatening my life,” Browder told The Huffington Post UK.
“We weren’t the main victims of the fraud, the Russian people were the victims. But the other victim was Sergei, who exposed the fraud. When he died, it changed my life. I couldn’t live comfortably knowing he died because of me.”
A British judge will hear arguments this week from both sides as to whether the case is an “abuse” of the British legal system, because it concerns a Russian litigant.
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Latvia – like a Virgin island
If you’ve ever wondered what sort of tax dodges they get up to in the British Virgin Islands, take a trip to Latvia and speak with Kristaps Zakulis, chairman of the country’s financial regulator, the Financial and Capital Markets Commission (FKTK). Zakulis displays impressive knowledge of and enthusiasm for talking about the Caribbean archipelago whenever Latvia’s own offshoring industry is mentioned.
During the course of an interview lasting less than an hour, he racks up a couple of dozen uses of the words “British Virgin Islands”, “former British colony” and “John Smith” – all the more impressive when the conversation was supposed to be about his agency’s investigation into the links between Latvian banks and the notorious Magnitsky affair in Russia.
The annoyance Zakulis expresses over anything bearing a Union Flag was clearly supposed to provoke your correspondent into a fit of patriotic indignation, yet never having been to the Caribbean archipelago or of a high enough net worth to open any tax-efficient account more impressive than a Post Office savings book, it was a wasted expenditure of energy.
But Zakulis’ probable point is that whatever is happening in Latvia is happening elsewhere too – which is certainly true as far as offshoring goes. To an extent the point could also be applied to the Magnitsky case, as banks in Moldova, Lithuania, Estonia and Cyprus holding accounts from the UK, Belize and – you guessed it, the British Virgin Islands – have been named by lawyers representing Hermitage Capital Management of laundering $230m in the case that led to the death in detention of their lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. According to the lawyers, around $63m of that total was laundered via six Latvian banks in 2007 and last year, Hermitage filed a complaint in Riga demanding the authorities look into its allegations.
Latvia’s Economic Police initially seemed disinterested, but did eventually open an investigation that is ongoing though yet to bring any criminal charges.
To its credit, FKTK was much more active in conducting an investigation and even found one bank culpable enough to impose the maximum fine it is allowed by law, LVL100,000 (€142,000). But the Magnitsky case has a way of making everyone it touches look absurd, from the ridiculous contradictory accounts of how the lawyer met his death in the first place to his ludicrous posthumous conviction pushed by the Kremlin. The Latvian connection does not disappoint in this regard either, for FKTK refuses to say not only when the fine was imposed, but even the name of the bank that is supposed to pay it.
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US lawmakers fed up with Russia, Putin
U.S. lawmakers say they’re increasingly frustrated with Vladimir Putin and are demanding that President Obama crack down on Russia following a slew of recent spats with the United States.
The country over the past two weeks has sentenced Putin’s biggest critic to five years in prison and posthumously convicted a dead whistle-blower championed by Congress. To top it off, the Kremlin is now considering asylum for NSA leaker Edward Snowden, a move lawmakers warn would bring U.S.-Russian relations to a post-Cold War low.
“Enough is enough,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared Friday upon introducing a resolution calling on the September G-20 meeting in St. Petersburg to be moved to some other country if Russia doesn’t turn over Snowden. “It’s time to send a crystal clear message to President Putin about Russia’s deplorable behavior, and this resolution will do just that.”
Schumer’s co-sponsor on the resolution, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), made international headlines earlier this week when he told The Hill that Obama should consider pulling out of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi if Snowden gets asylum.
“I would just send the Russians the most unequivocal signal I could send them,” Graham said when asked about the possibility of a boycott. “It might help, because what they’re doing is outrageous.”
The feeling is bicameral.
“I’m absolutely frustrated with Russia,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). “Every day the human rights situation continues to get worse.”
McGovern is the House author of legislation targeting alleged Russian human-rights offenders that was named after Sergei Magnitsky, an anti-corruption whistle-blower who died in police custody. McGovern urged the administration to add higher-ups in the Putin government to the list of people banned from traveling to the United States or holding assets in the country.
“We gave the administration a very effective tool – they need to use it,” McGovern told The Hill. “Now isn’t the time to be quiet, now is the time to speak up about what’s going on over there.”
“We haven’t been pushing them that hard, and they’ve been no help to us on Syria. It is important that we push back, and if we don’t, who will? Nobody.”
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Putin, a hypocrite on Snowden, Navalny
One of the many disturbing aspects of the NSA spying revelations is how much joy they have brought to the world’s chronic violators of human rights and political freedoms.
On Thursday in Moscow, where former NSA contractor Edward Snowden awaits his asylum papers, a Russian court removed a major critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin’s list of worries, sentencing the charismatic opposition leader Alexei Navalny to five years in jail on theft charges. Amid intense anger at the verdict and fears that it would raise Navalny’s profile, the court agreed on Friday to release him pending appeal.
The trial and the predictable verdict, as the European Union foreign affairs chief said, “raises serious questions as to the state of the rule of law in Russia.” That’s putting it mildly. Navatny is the most prominent, but just one in a long series of politically-motivated prosecutions in a country where the courts seldom make a move that displeases Putin.
Navalny was particularly worrisome to the Russian president. He had gained an enormous following by speaking out against corruption and cronyism, labeling Putin’s United Russia “a party of swindlers and thieves” and using social media to help mobilize the president’s critics. He had just announced he would run for mayor of Moscow. But, like other Putin opponents with any possible chance to loosen the president’s complete hold on power, he will likely go to prison instead. Now that he’s released, Navalny is considering whether to stay or withdraw from the race for mayor.
Meanwhile, Putin and his backers are having a field day. They claim it is Washington that leads the world in violating human rights, even as dozens of people who dared protest against Putin’s rule face trial or languish in jail, in a country where a number of journalists who criticized the president have turned up dead under mysterious circumstances.
When Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the wealthiest man in Russia, decided to turn his attention from business to politics, the tax authorities turned on him. He was sent to prison in Siberia, and when he became eligible for parole, the state filed another case, winning another conviction which extended his sentence.
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Obama May Cancel Moscow Trip as Tensions Build Over Leaker
President Obama may cancel a scheduled trip to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin in September as the standoff over the fate of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor seeking asylum there, takes its toll on already strained relations between the United States and Russia, officials said Thursday.
Canceling the meeting in Moscow would be seen as a direct slap at Mr. Putin, who is known to value such high-level visits as a validation of Russian prestige. While the White House may be using the meeting as leverage to win cooperation as it seeks the return to the United States of Mr. Snowden, who is now staying at a Moscow airport, the reconsideration also reflects a broader concern that the two countries are far apart on issues like Syria, Iran, arms control and missile defense.
The conviction on Thursday of Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent leader of the opposition to Mr. Putin, on embezzlement charges further underscored the deepening divide between the two countries as the White House pronounced itself “deeply disappointed” at what it called a trend of “suppressing dissent and civil society in Russia.” The verdict and five-year sentence came a week after the posthumous conviction of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer investigating official corruption who was arrested and died in custody.
“We call on the Russian government to cease its campaign of pressure against individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption, and to ensure that the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of all of its citizens, including the freedoms of speech and assembly, are protected and respected,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
The talk of human rights rang hollow to the Kremlin given the Snowden case. Mr. Putin has suggested that Washington is being hypocritical in complaining about Russian actions while seeking to prosecute a leaker who exposed American surveillance programs. But Mr. Putin has also made clear that he does not want the showdown to harm ties.
“Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are far more important than squabbles about the activities of the secret services,” he told Russian reporters who asked Wednesday about the scheduled Moscow meeting.
The White House announced the coming meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin when the two leaders met in Northern Ireland last month. It was added as an extra stop on a trip to St. Petersburg for the annual gathering of the Group of 20 nations. But while Mr. Obama is still committed to going to St. Petersburg, officials said he is now rethinking the Moscow stop, not just because of the impasse over Mr. Snowden but because of a growing sense that the two sides cannot agree on other issues enough to justify the meeting.
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Putin re-embraces repression
A FORMER KGB colonel like Vladimir Putin was never expected to be a champion of human rights, but the Russian President has failed to live up to even those reduced expectations. The five-year prison sentence imposed on his most prominent opponent and anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny, is an indication of the extent to which his clampdown is escalating and of the need for the West to reassess its response ahead of the G20 summit in St Petersburg in September.
Even members of the Kremlin’s so-called human rights council have described the trumped-up embezzlement charges brought against Mr Navalny as “punishment for his political activities”. The relentless campaign aimed at silencing opposition is the harshest crackdown on dissent since the collapse of communism. Days before the conviction of Mr Navalny (who has been released on bail pending appeal), Mr Putin’s determination to wreak vengeance through a servile court system was also evident when Sergei Magnitsky, an eminent human rights lawyer, was posthumously convicted of tax fraud to besmirch his name. Magnitsky had exposed a $US230 million embezzlement scheme benefiting regime officials. He died in jail after being beaten and suffering untreated pancreatitis. Punk band Pussy Riot was imprisoned for staging an anti-Putin stunt, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once one of Russia’s richest oligarchs and who fell out with Mr Putin, has spent 10 years in jail on charges his critics agree were a travesty of justice.
The Kremlin is using the corrupt court system to provide a veneer of due process and legality for brutal repression as dozens of other activists await sentencing. Mr Putin’s disregard for human rights extends to the supply of weapons to the Syrian regime, which have been used to slaughter tens of thousands of its own people. The fugitive American security contractor Edward Snowden says Russia and Latin American countries that have offered him asylum have his “gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless”. Mr Putin’s Russia is no such thing.
Current abuses recall the dark days of Soviet repression and the West must leave the Russian leader in no doubt about its abhorrence. After decades of communist repression, Russians deserve better than blatant corruption, intolerance and authoritarianism. займ срочно без отказов и проверок займ на карту без отказов круглосуточно zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php займы на карту
As Russia harms human rights, other democracies must step in
THE EMBEZZLEMENT case against Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was so outlandish that even calling it a show trial was too generous. Navalny — anticorruption activist and candidate for mayor of Moscow — wasn’t allowed to present any witnesses. The judge, Sergei Blinov, has reportedly never found a defendant “not guilty” in his career. The abnormally harsh five-year sentence handed down Thursday came as a shock, and the judge’s decision to release Navalny on appeal after protests in several cities did not dispel that sentiment.
Navalny’s punishment for criticizing Putin follows another bizarre legal case: the recent posthumous conviction of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison after exposing massive government tax fraud. For the Russian government, it wasn’t enough to arrest Magnitsky for blowing the whistle, or to engineer his death — as many suspect. Authorities took the extraordinary step of convicting him from the grave of the very crimes he sought to expose.
These cases, along with yet another investigation of financier-turned-Kremlin-critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has already spent a decade in prison, signal the rapid deterioration of what freedom was left in Russia. They also highlight the need for a concerted effort by major democracies to raise pressure on Russia without fully alienating its leadership.
Now there is an effort underway to beef up the Magnitsky Act, passed last year in the wake of his death, which sanctions Russian officials believed to be linked to his case. Currently, 18 midlevel Russian bureaucrats have been barred from entering the United States. Any assets they have on US soil will be seized. US Representative James P. McGovern, the Worcester Democrat who championed the act, wants to expand the list of names to include higher-ranking Russian officials. “We know there are people close to Putin who are responsible for a lot of these abuses,” McGovern says. “The question is: Do human rights matter? If they do, we can’t be silent.”
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Why Need a New Bulgakov
Where are you Mikhail Bulgakov when we need you? The Russian surrealist writer had to wait in 25 years in his grave before his masterpiece satire on Stalin’s Russia, The Master and Margarita was published. Stalin’s body was a decade into his embalmed state before Bulgakov’s book came out.
Will the world have to wait that long before a modern Russian artist describes in a novel, film or play the surreal destruction of justice and democracy on display in today’s Moscow.
Alexei Navalny, the witty, rumbustious, street-smart Russian opposition leader was jailed last week on faked up charges of fraud. He was carted off to begin his five years in prison when suddenly, like one of Bulgakov’s apparitions, three wise men, Russian ‘judges’, appeared, and decided he could be freed on bail.
Both this first verdict and the new release are Kremlin orchestrated operetta. Navalny now faces the political prisoner’s dilemma. Does he stay in Moscow and run for political office as Mayor and face certain defeat at the hands of the Putin election fixing unit in the Kremlin followed by a return to prison? Or does he skip to a democratic country and have his moment of fame and freedom before relapsing into the miserable life of a political exile?
Meanwhile in another surreal moment, the G20 finance ministers met in Moscow to discuss tax evasion and cleaning up the world’s lax tax régimes. In Moscow? The home of the greatest group of state-sanctioned tax dodgers seen in world history?
The irony is just too delicious. At a meeting of Russian oligarchs in 2003 which was filmed and shown in Norma Percy’s remarkable BBC documentary series on Putin, the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khordokovsky is seen telling Putin that he and fellow oligarchs can no longer recruit the best minds from Moscow’s elite universities. Instead the brilliant young men wanted to become tax police officials because that was where the real money was to be made.
Their zeal was not to obtain a fair share of new Russian wealth for the people and state but to help the new pol-biz elites avoid tax with the help of accountants and lawyers in London amongst other world centres of tax avoidance.
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Unjustly convicted in Russia: the dead and the living
Two extraordinary convictions this month show that the rule of law in Russia only exists on the sufferance of President Vladimir Putin. One of the two people found guilty was not only innocent but already dead. The other was almost certainly innocent and a prospective presidential candidate, a protester against the Putin regime who once said, mysteriously, that he wished Russia to become “a big, irrational, metaphysical Canada.”
The norms of law around the world permit a finding of innocence in favour of an accused person who has died, but it is outrageous to convict someone who cannot defend himself because he is dead. Sergei Magnitsky’s exposure of certain corrupt Russians resulted in retaliation. He was imprisoned, and he died in jail in 2009. The United States Congress upped the ante by excluding some of the Russians involved from entering the U.S.
In 2011, Dmitri Medvedev, president of Russia at the time, expressed his belief in Mr. Magnitsky’s integrity, after a human-rights council cleared him, but he has since equivocated. Mr. Magnitsky has been almost literally pursued into his grave.
As for Alexei Navalny, he rose to international prominence in the protests against Mr. Putin’s re-election as president, in which the votes in his favour were evidently overstated. Mr. Navalny is a campaigner against corruption, an engaging character, an effective, lively blogger – but not a Westernizing liberal. For example, he takes a dim view of immigration. He is a nationalist of a kind not easy to grasp outside Russia, someone who could belong inside a Dostoyevsky novel.
That is probably all the more reason that Mr. Putin may fear him as a rival, unlike consistently liberal dissidents. This year, Mr. Navalny has been running to become mayor of the city of Kirov. The charges of embezzlement against him were not supported even by the prosecution witnesses against him, but the judge convicted him, with a five-year jail sentence, and the added result that he cannot seek public office – either as mayor or president.
Irrationality may have some charm for some semi-mystical Russians. Blatant bias in the courts, however, has no merits. The late Mr. Magnitsky should be exonerated, and so should the living Mr. Navalny. займы онлайн на карту срочно hairy girl https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php займы без отказа
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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
