Britain Bans Entry to Russian Officials Linked to Magnitsky Case
Britain has banned entry to 60 Russian officials implicated in the Sergei Magnitsky case, The Daily Telegraph reported.
A list drafted by the U.S. Helsinki Commission, chaired by Senator Benjamin Cardin, contained the names of officials suspected of being involved in a $230 million tax fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for investment fund Hermitage Capital, or in Magnitsky’s death in prison in 2009.
The Magnitsky law was passed by the Senate in December and requires the White House to publish the names of those suspected of human rights violations, including those linked to the fraud uncovered by Magnitsky or to his death.
In April, the U.S. Treasury Department published a list 18 officials who are subject to visa bans and asset freezes in the United States.
The Home Office’s ban was contained in a previously unreported Parliamentary response in April to a written question from Dominic Raab.
Mr Raab, the Conservative MP for Esher & Walton, asked the Home Office if any of the 60 Russians named on the draft list had visited the UK in the last year.
In response, immigration minister Mark Harper said: “The Home Office Special Cases Directorate is already aware of the individuals on the list and has taken the necessary measures to prevent them being issued visas for travel to the UK.”
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Russian suspects in Sergei Magnitsky death barred from entry to UK
Tory MP calls for legislation against Russians accused of involvement in tax fraud whistleblower’s death in prison.
Sixty Russians accused of involvement in the torture and death of the tax fraud whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky have been banned from entering the UK.
Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009, a year after being arrested following his conclusion of a corruption investigation that pointed the finger at a host of low-level Russian officials. A report by the Kremlin’s human rights commission found signs that the 37-year-old lawyer had been beaten.
The US passed a bill last year blocking people related to the Magnitsky case from entering the country and blocking their assets, and the European parliament has called for member states to follow suit. It has now emerged that the government has banned people identified on a US list from entering the UK.
The ban was revealed in a previously unreported response to a written question from the Conservative MP Dominic Raab, who asked whether “any of the 60 individuals named on the list published by the Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe … have visited the UK in the last year”.
The immigration minister Mark Harper replied in April: “The Home Office special cases directorate is already aware of the individuals on the list and has taken the necessary measures to prevent them being issued visas for travel to the UK.”
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Whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky has posthumous day in court
Some lines you just can’t make up, even if you’re Monty Python.
The latest was from the Russian prosecutor heading the case against tax lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who exposed an alleged massive $230 million tax theft that he linked to high echelons of Russian power.
“Magnitsky is fully incriminated,” he argued, “and there are no grounds for his rehabilitation.”
No rehabilitation!
The prosecutor, apparently, was channeling the Heavenly Host this week in Moscow’s Tverskoi court: Magnitsky died more than three years ago in Butyrka prison, his body bearing signs suggesting a fatal beating, according to the Kremlin’s own human rights council.
After reporting his findings, Magnitsky had been jailed on a tax swindle charge himself – a role reversal routinely used by the authorities. His employer, William Browder of the Hermitage Capital Management investment company, was also accused and tried in absentia.
Magnitsky’s much-derided posthumous prosecution is almost unique in history. But it stopped short of exhuming his body and dragging it into court, as Italian papal officials had done in another politically-loaded case against Pope Formosus in 897 AD.
In Russia, posthumous trials were meant to give grieving families the chance to clear the names of relatives falsely executed for political crimes after the death of Joseph Stalin. But although Magnitsky’s mother protested the Moscow proceedings, her pleas were ignored.
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Trials suggest a growing repression in Russia
Last week was a busy one for Russian authorities, who arrested the only nationally known opposition mayor for bribery, sought six years in prison for crusading blogger Alexei Navalny and asked a court to declare a long-dead lawyer guilty of tax evasion.
The trial of a dozen demonstrators accused of rioting and attacking police at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration ground on. Maria Alyokhina, a punk rocker sent to a labor camp for two years for a singing protest in Moscow’s main cathedral, lost an appeal. An appeal filed on behalf of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has been in prison for nearly 10 years, was rejected.
Leonid Razvozzhayev, an opposition organizer who was kidnapped and returned to Moscow after he sought asylum in Ukraine, was given permission to get married in jail — perhaps because he is not expected to get out soon. He faces 10 years in prison if convicted of planning riots.
And Putin signed not one, but two laws aimed at gays.
By week’s end, it was clear to anyone who held out hope to the contrary that the future here looks more and more repressive. The authorities appeared intent on using all their resources — police, courts, legislature and media — to pursue that end and silence dissent for years to come.
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Capitalism on Trial: How is the “Navalny case” similar to those of Khodorkovsky and Magnitsky?
Obviously the government never learned any lessons from Khodorkovsky’s case, and it’s stubbornly looking for more adventures.
Act Three, Scene One: Timber Logging
Russia is getting drawn into the third landmark political trial of the decade. Khodorkovsky, Magnitsky, and now Navalny. What is common among the three trials is some historical logic, and as a consequence, they have many “overlaps”, even in appearance.
The setting for the first act of the Navalny drama is a forest. But, of course, that’s just the beginning. There will be roads – “Russian Postal Service” – and fools – “organizing public unrest”. So the fans of video production of the “political trash” type should get some popcorn, sit down, lay back and enjoy the TV show.
The Story Outline (Criminal-Political Fiction)
Navalny (the main character, a hero) arrives in the Vyatka region “to implement reforms in that particular region”. After becoming the governor’s advisor on a pro-bono basis (the governor himself pretty much stays behind the scenes) he decides to do a favor for one of his friends (who once happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) and introduce him to the director of the local FGUP – a state enterprise that controls logging in the region (an “absolute villain”, who sells out timber and his moral principles).
The purpose of the whole scheme was apparently to put a company owned by Navalny on the very limited list of entities to which the FGUP is ready to sell timber directly, bypassing intermediaries. Those who ever have to deal with logging in Russia know that buying timber in this country is much more difficult than selling it. This is because the directors of all these logging enterprises would never sell timber to anyone but “their own”, and would never let anyone come near their forest. That’s why the forestry is decaying while those in charge are “getting fatter”. So, Navalny approached one of these “forest brothers” and “asked” him to open his “feed trough” of pines and spruces.
The director had no choice but to bite the bullet, “make some room”, and accept the company suggested by Navalny as one of his favored customers. It has to be noted, though, that the director didn’t get too generous and let Navalny’s protégé buy directly from him. 2% to 5% of his timber worth an estimated 14 million roubles. That is not surprising, since Navalny was not a local police chief, and the impression of his status of a “volunteer” advisor amounted to exactly the 2-5% that he received. If Navalny was a volunteer advisor for the local office of the FSB (formerly the KGB), he could well be entitled to much more, up to 50% …
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First Official Charged in Magnitsky Case — Sort Of
Better late than never, right? Five years after Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive $230 million tax fraud, four years after he died after being beaten in a Moscow jail, a tax official incriminated in the Magnitsky scam has been charged in an embezzlement case.
Olga Tsymai, a former employee of the infamous Tax Inspectorate Number 28, has been charged for “fraud on an especially large scale” for helping fictitious companies receive 4.4 billion rubles ($130 million) in falsified tax rebates. Tsymai made sure the fake companies’ tax rebate applications weren’t checked too closely and helped transfer the money to them to then be laundered at home and abroad.
To be clear, this is not exactly the fraud that Magnitsky uncovered, just a very similar one involving some of the same people. The investigation that Magnitsky began as a Hermitage Capital lawyer involved tax rebates given by the same tax inspectorate and fingered Tsymai’s boss, Olga Stepanova, as a key player. Tsymai herself was listed on the initial “Magnitsky list” prepared by Senator Ben Cardin, although she was left off the final 18-person list included in the Magnitsky Act.
“This is the same practice, but it’s not the same money that Magnitsky was talking about,” Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, told TV Rain. “He exposed an entire scheme and named those who were carrying it out. These names arise in other instances besides the Magnitsky case, and so maybe through this one episode, [the investigation] will eventually get to the evidence that Sergei Magnitsky gave.”
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Official Implicated in Magnitsky Case Charged With Embezzlement
A former Russian tax official implicated in a tax fraud scheme uncovered by the late Sergei Magnitsky has been charged with embezzling 4.4 billion rubles ($132 million) in state funds, a news report said Friday.
According to investigators, Olga Tsymai, a former employee of Moscow’s tax inspectorate No. 28, verified falsified tax return documents submitted by alleged swindlers and actively assisted them in obtaining tax returns through tax inspectorate No. 25, Kommersant reported, citing official files on the case.
Tsymai’s name appears on a list put together by U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin of 60 Russians suspected of being involved in the theft of $230 million in Russian government money, a theft uncovered by Magnitsky, who was subsequently accused himself of taking part in the theft and who died in prison in 2009.
Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law a measure named after Magnitsky that requires the White House to publish a list of Russians suspected of human rights violations, including individuals implicated in the fraud Magnitsky uncovered and in his death. People on this so-called “Magnitsky list” are subject to visa bans and asset freezes in the U.S.
Tsymai’s name is not on that official U.S. government list, which contains only 18 names.
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Magnitsky-Linked Official is Suspect in Fraud Case – Report
A former tax inspector included on a draft version of the Magnitsky List of Russian officials banned from the United States for human rights abuses has become a suspect for Russian investigators looking into a huge tax scam, Kommersant newspaper reported Friday.
Olga Tsymai, a former employee of the Federal Tax Service, allegedly signed off on documents provided to her by an unidentified group of people in 2009 and 2010 allowing certain companies to fraudulently claim large tax refunds, Kommersant said, citing investigators.
As a result of Tsymai’s actions, investigators allege that 4.4 billion rubles ($134 million) was paid out in tax refunds to fictitious companies, from where the money was moved to personal bank accounts or transferred abroad.
Tsymai, who later worked for the Defense Ministry, was included on a draft US list of Russian officials implicated in the death of auditor Sergei Magnitsky. The draft was compiled by US Senator Benjamin Cardin, one of the authors of the Magnitsky Act passed by the United States last year that punishes Russian officials accused of human rights abuses.
Magnitsky, who worked for British investment fund Hermitage Capital, was arrested on tax evasion charges in November 2008, days after accusing officials of involvement in a $230 million tax refund fraud, and died at the age of 37 following almost a year in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center.
No Russian official has been charged in connection with the allegations of tax fraud leveled by Magnitsky, nor has anyone been held responsible for his death in prison. But against the express wishes of his family, Magnitsky himself is the defendant in an ongoing tax fraud trial, the first such trial of a dead person in Russian or Soviet legal history.
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So much for the reset
The news that Russia has no plans to hand over former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden casts an important light on the “reset” policy that has defined US–Russian relations for almost five years.
The Snowden case should be relatively straightforward. He has violated the laws of the US. His passport has been cancelled, and he cannot legally leave the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. The US has asked for his return. In the last five years, the US has returned 1,700 Russian citizens to Russia at the request of the government. Of these, 500 were criminal deportations.
Despite this, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Snowden had the right to “fly in any direction” from the transit zone. This type of response was exactly what the reset policy was supposed to prevent. The policy was based on the notion that President Bush had mishandled Russia and responsiveness to Russian concerns would produce positive results. The policy, however, had a serious flaw. It failed to account for the nature of the Russian system and the psychology of the Russian leaders.
In making policy toward Russia, the US has concentrated on what are called “deliverables” — treaties, agreements, working groups. In the interest of obtaining these deliverables, the US deliberately downplayed Russian violations of human rights. When Putin was elected president of Russia for the third time in elections marked by massive falsification, Obama congratulated him. At the 2009 Moscow Summit, Obama praised the “extraordinary work” that Putin had done in Russia. He described Putin as “sincere, just and deeply interested in the interests of the Russian people.” This was done despite credible reports that while running Russia, Putin had amassed a personal fortune of nearly $40 billion and was the richest man in Europe.
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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
