Punishing Magnitsky One More Time
Thursday’s ruling by Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court that convicted the late Sergei Magnitsky, the Hermitage Capital lawyer who died in pretrial detention in 2009, of tax evasion charges shows how far Russia is willing to go to discredit itself.
Simultaneously, the court found Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder guilty of colluding with Magnitsky to create an illegal tax-break scheme using two of Hermitage Capital’s subsidiaries in the republic of Kalmykia. On Thursday, Browder was sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison for allegedly failing to pay more than $15 million in taxes in 2001.
Following Magnitsky’s death in November 2009, the case against him was dropped. Nonetheless, the case was resumed in August 2011, loosely based on a Constitutional Court decision stating that posthumous trials in Russia can be held when the family of a dead person requests to clear their relative of charges. But Magnitsky’s relatives never requested the trial against Sergei for the obvious reason that they don’t trust the authorities’ impartiality or their motives. What they did request and demand was an investigation into the cause of his death and a fair, honest trial against those who perpetrated the crimes against him.
But the Investigative Committee closed that investigation early this year, claiming that no crimes had been committed. The deputy head of the prison where Magnitsky was being held was acquitted, and the prosecutor who brought charges for criminal negligence against a prison doctor, who was responsible for Magnitsky’s health while in detention, suddenly withdrew his charges in early April, claiming that there was no corpus delicti.
Even before Magnitsky’s arrest, Hermitage Capital had informed the authorities that government officials had used a fraudulent tax-refund scheme to steal $230 million in state funds. After that, the officials implicated in the crime organized Magnitsky’s arrest and his inhumane conditions in a pretrial detention center. No charges were ever filed against those individuals.
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U.S. State Department Mulls Extending Magnitsky List
The U.S. State Department is considering adding more Russian officials to the U.S. “Magnitsky list” after a Moscow court found late lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and former Hermitage Fund chief William Browder guilty of tax evasion, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry has warned of a harsh response.
Former State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland on Friday called the ruling “a parody of justice” and said the possibility of adding new names to the list was being looked into, Interfax reported.
Nuland made her statement in response to a question from Senator John McCain in which he slammed the verdict handed down by the Tverskoi District Court on Thursday.
The court found that Magnitsky and Browder fraudulently stole more than $15 million in budget funds by way of an illegal tax break scheme using two of Hermitage Capital’s subsidiaries in the Kalmykia republic, Dalnaya Step and Saturn Investments between 1997 and 2002.
Browder, a British citizen, was tried in absentia on tax evasion charges as the British government refused to extradite him.
The State Department’s current spokesperson, Jen Psaki, said at a briefing Thursday that Washington was disappointed with Thursday’s “unprecedented ruling” against Magnitsky and that the trial had discredited attempts to bring the case to justice.
Magnitsky was imprisoned on tax evasion charges in 2008 soon after accusing officials of stealing $230 million in state funds, and he died in prison a year later. His imprisonment and death prompted an international outcry as many believed he had been falsely charged for the very same crime he discovered had been committed by officials.
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Magnitsky Verdict Is In: Russia Is a Criminal State
On Thursday, almost four years after Sergei Magnitsky’s death in a Russian prison, Magnitsky was convicted of tax fraud by a Moscow court.
Back in 2008, after the Yukos show trial, corporate raiding with the help of corrupt police and courts had just become a new fact of Russian life at a time when the country’s new, seemingly liberal president, Dmitry Medvedev, was asking his countrymen to fight legal nihilism.
It so happened that at exactly this time my law partner, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered a staggering case of fraud.
In 2007, police officers raided Magnitsky’s and my law office. They took the corporate documents for three companies belonging to Hermitage Capital, the largest hedge fund operating in Russia. Shortly thereafter, the documents were used to put convicted criminals in control of the companies, and the $230 million in taxes the companies had paid while under Hermitage’s control were refunded in one day to accounts in a small Russian bank owned by a convicted criminal.
The tax officials who refunded the money then went on vacation with the bank owner and bought millions of dollars of property in Dubai. The police officer who had custody of the corporate documents went on vacation with the lawyer who made the refund possible. Nobody — not even the Russian government — contests these facts.
Back in 2008, Magnitsky was sure that if he exposed this fraud, the government would prosecute those behind it. Magnitsky didn’t know whether Medvedev’s declared war on corruption was genuine, but he believed there were at least some limits to the country’s lawlessness and criminality.
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Libel tourism fiasco of Russian ‘torturer’ using our courts to bring claim against British businessman
A former Russian police officer banned from travelling to America after being accused of torture and murder has been allowed to bring an explosive libel claim against a British businessman in London’s High Court.
The case, which will cost the UK taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds, is likely to be one of the most expensive ever heard in Britain.
It is being brought by Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Karpov, one of the men accused of involvement in the arrest, torture and murder of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in Moscow in 2009.
And it follows a high-profile campaign led by Mr Magnitsky’s former boss, William Browder, who wants more than 60 Russian suspects held to account for the lawyer’s death.
But Mr Karpov has hired top UK lawyers to sue Mr Browder for defamation in a trial that opens on July 24. The case is cited as one of the worst examples of libel tourism – where foreign nationals with little or no connection to the UK use the High Court to settle their disputes.
Last night senior Labour MP Chris Bryant said: ‘It is absolutely ludicrous a man I hope will never set foot in this country except to face criminal proceedings himself is able to abuse British libel law in this way.’
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A Whistleblower in Moscow; And we don’t mean Edward Snowden.
‘Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador,” Edward Snowden said on Friday, “have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless.” The self-admitted leaker of America’s national security secrets thanked those anti-American regimes for offering him exile, but then announced plans to seek asylum for himself and his tin ear in Moscow.
A day before, Mr. Snowden’s protectors offered a lesson in modern Russia’s respect for human rights. A court in Moscow convicted Sergei Magnitsky, who had exposed a $230 million embezzlement scheme run by Russian officials, on tax fraud charges. He received no prison term, but not because the Moscow judge had gone soft. Beaten and suffering from pancreatitis, Magnitsky died in agony four years ago while in pre-trial police custody. He was a brave whistleblower who exposed abuses and sought no glory for himself.
This was the first posthumous prosecution in modern Russian history, complete with an empty steel cell in the courtroom for Magnitsky. Stalin killed his victims after a show trial, but Magnitsky in his afterlife has brought a lot of grief to Vladimir Putin, and the Russian leader doesn’t forgive or forget.
Magnitsky was a lawyer for William Browder, a hedge fund manager in Moscow. For years, Mr. Browder lobbied Congress to adopt a law that bars Russian rights violators, starting with Magnitsky’s killers, from banking and travelling in the U.S.
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Sergei Magnitsky trial: this is Putin’s kind of justice
In prosecuting a cadaver the message to Russians was clear: cross us and we’ll nail you, dead or alive.
It was an unusually bad week for Sergei Magnitsky. After a 16-month trial, the Russian accountant was found guilty of facilitating tax evasion by an investment fund for which he once worked, Hermitage Capital, to the tune of $17m. He was only charged because he had accused officials of a tax scam more than 13 times as lucrative, admittedly, but arbitrary legal processes are hardly unknown in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It was misfortunes of a more personal nature that made Magnitsky’s trial unusual. He was dead, having expired in official custody and entered his Moscow grave more than three-and-a-half years earlier.
The chief executive of Hermitage Capital, who was convicted in absentia with his dead colleague, was appalled. According to William Browder, “Putin has brought shame on Russia … for being the first western leader in 1,000 years to prosecute a dead man”. As a statement of history, that happened to be wrong – but the precedents bring credit to neither Putin nor the Russian legal system.
Trials of the dead were actually endemic across Europe for much of the last millennium, born out of half-understood notions of Roman law, and two European rulers became particularly keen on posthumous condemnations.
The future James I resorted to them on several occasions in Scotland: in 1600, for instance, he had two alleged assassins pickled in whisky, vinegar and allspice, put on trial, and then mutilated. Seventy years later, France’s Louis XIV enacted a statute that required all dead duellists, traitors and suicides to be tried for their crimes. Such trials were considered so important that dead defendants were guaranteed the right to counsel (in a law that simultaneously obliged living ones to speak for themselves), while cadavers of limited means were made eligible for legal aid. Any corpses that were found guilty – after due consideration of the evidence – had to be drawn to a gibbet and hung there by the feet for 24 hours, before being hurled into the town cesspit.
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Profession denounces posthumous Magnitsky trial
Lawyers worldwide have denounced the posthumous trial of Russian lawyer , Sergei Magnitsky (pictured) who was yesterday found guilty of tax evasion in a Moscow trial that began following his death in prison four years ago.
Magnitsky died in a pre-trial detention after accusing Russian police of complicity in a $230m tax fraud.
In the same trial, William Browder, chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, which Magnitsky represented, was also found guilty of tax fraud. The London-based hedge fund manager denied the charges.
Browder was convicted in absentia, and sentenced to nine years.
Lionel Blackman, chair of the Solicitors’ International Human Rights Group said: ‘The prosecution of Magnitsky following his death in custody does nothing to enhance the diminishing reputation of Russia with regard to its use of prosecutors and courts to target political opponents or others who seek to expose official corruption.’
Andrew Smith, a partner at criminal, fraud and regulatory firm Corker Binning, which has worked closely on the Russian criminal justice system, described the judgment as ‘a very dark day for the criminal justice system under [president] Putin’.
‘It is fairly well known the charge of tax evasion is the charge of choice for a politically motivated prosecution,’ he said.
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US blasts Russia over Magnitsky conviction
The Obama administration and lawmakers lashed out at Russia on Thursday after the country sentenced a dead whistle-blower on tax evasion charges in the country’s first posthumous trial.
President Obama signed human rights legislation named after Sergei Magnitsky last year. The legislation places travel and financial restrictions on Russians whom the State Department identifies as human rights violators.
“We are disappointed by the unprecedented posthumous criminal conviction against Sergei Magnitsky,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “The trial was a discredit to the efforts of those who continue to seek justice in his case. Despite widely publicized credible evidence of criminal conduct resulting in Magnitsky’s death, the authorities have failed to prosecute those responsible.
“We continue to call for full accountability for all those responsible for Magnitsky’s wrongful death and will continue to support the efforts of those in Russia who seek to hold those individuals accountable.”
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The final act of the Magnitsky farce
The Magnitsky affair has plenty of rivals for “most shameful moment since Stalin”. But, as far as is known, not even the Soviet Union put dead men on trial.
Predictably, the farce of the Sergei Magnitsky trial has ended in absurdity. The lawyer who exposed epic corruption in Russia’s bureaucracy before being beaten to death in police custody has himself now been convicted – posthumously – of corruption.
Perhaps the only surprise is that Mr Magnitsky’s embalmed corpse, or a simulacrum of it, was not propped up in the dock, in a ghastly parody of El Cid. Even so, it is hard to disagree with the judgement of William Browder, the head of the investment firm which Mr Magnitsky represented before he died, that the guilty verdict was “one of the most shameful moments for Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin”. The Magnitsky affair has plenty of rivals for that distinction. But, as far as is known, not even the Soviet Union put dead men on trial. Mr Browder himself was convicted in absentia, and sentenced to nine years in jail.
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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
