In Putin’s Russia, Corrupt Officials Responsible for Gross Human Rights Abuses Get Plaudits, Not Punishment, Says Ros-Lehtinen
Congressman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, made the following statement after the Russian government congratulated officials responsible for lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s unjust arrest, detention and death in custody.
Statement by Ros-Lehtinen:
“The Russian government’s act of congratulating officials responsible for the unjust arrest and subsequent death of Sergei Magnitsky shows the true face and extent of corruption among Russian government officials, even to the highest levels. Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who was murdered during his investigation of corruption and embezzlement which implicated dozens of state officials and his sad case is a troubling reminder of the true nature of Putin’s legacy. The fact that these officials are being congratulated further illustrates the Russian government’s contempt for human rights and the rule of law.
“The U.S. must continue to support democratic progress and seek justice for those who have suffered so ruthlessly because they dared to challenge the systemic abuse and corruption within the ruling system in Russia. Congress must continue to pass laws similar to last year’s ‘Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law and Accountability Act,’ which imposed sanctions on those responsible for the harassment, abuse and death of Sergei Magnitsky and the many others who have been silenced by the state apparatchik.”
NOTE: Two weeks ago in Washington, DC, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen was honored to meet with Magnitsky’s wife, son, and mother who pleaded with Ros-Lehtinen to lobby the Obama administration to include many more Russian violators of human rights, as mandated by U.S. law, and Ileana agreed to do so. срочный займ микрозайм онлайн female wrestling https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php займы онлайн на карту срочно
Is Russian crime arriving on UK shores?
Russian money has poured into London, but it is feared organised crime is accompanying it. Panorama investigates a death in a Russian prison that has brought the threat of violence to the UK. Could a whistleblower found dead on the streets of Surrey be the latest victim of the Russian crime wars?
When you investigate organised crime in Russia, strange things happen.
We had almost finished filming when one of our team received an email in Russian from a man calling himself “H”. He said he was a hacker and had been approached by an agent of the Russian state to hack into BBC emails. He had apparently decided to warn us instead.
We had been looking into one of the most notorious organised crime cases in Russia – the theft of $220m from the Russian Treasury in 2007.
The case has become an international scandal and London is at its centre because the man who blew the lid on it is a UK citizen living in the capital.
Bill Browder used to manage billions of dollars of investments in Russia through his company Hermitage Capital. But in 2007, the offices of Hermitage and its lawyers were raided by the Russian Interior Ministry.
A few months later, Hermitage discovered that three of its companies had been stolen. The three companies were then used to commit a massive tax fraud in Russia totalling $220m.
Silenced
In Moscow, a legal adviser called Sergei Magnitsky had begun to investigate for Browder, but within months Magnitsky was arrested on suspicion of tax offences.
For nearly a year, Magnitsky was held in pre-trial confinement. During that time he developed pancreatitis, and on 16 November 2009, he died.
The Russian authorities said he died of heart failure, but a report by the Kremlin’s own Human Rights Council concluded he had been denied medical treatment and his right to life had been violated.
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Ireland Bows to Russia’s Intimidation
If any doubt ever existed that Russia’s newly imposed adoption ban was undertaken not out of genuine concern for the fate of orphans now in the custody of American parents but rather to punish any government that takes a strong line on Russian human rights violators, then recent events in Ireland have just eliminated any such reservations.
On February 27th, Bill Browder, the London-based CEO of Hermitage Capital and the man behind the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which calls for the sanctioning and banning of Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights abuses, testified before the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Irish Parliament (the Oireachtas). As he’s done in Washington and numerous European capitals before, Browder outlined the facts of how his former attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by a Russian organized crime syndicate consisting of Interior Ministry, intelligence, and federal tax officials, who used Hermitage Capital’s corporate documents as cover. Magnitsky himself was then arrested for the crime and tortured to death in pretrial detention; his corpse was found in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison hospital, with his arm handcuffed to a radiator, lying a pool of urine. He is now being tried posthumously in Russia, a legal grotesquerie that not even Stalin had the gall to attempt during the Great Terror. And, unless you’ve not bothered to open a newspaper these past several months, the Magnitsky affair has become the most widely reported human rights scandal in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as well as the driving force behind the eponymous US law, which Putin yesterday described as “imperial” in design at a four-hour marathon press conference.
Following Browder’s testimony, Irish Senator Jim Walsh, a member of the leading center-right party Fianna Fail, drafted a resolution, modeled on what Britain, Holland, Italy, the Council of Europe, and European Parliament have already done, calling on the Irish government to “publicly list the names, deny visas into Ireland, and freeze any assets found in Ireland” of those Russian officials who “were responsible for the false arrest, torture and death” of Magnitsky, “perpetrated or financially benefited from the crimes” that he “uncovered and exposed, and/or participated in the cover up of those responsible for those crimes.” It further called for the passage of an Irish counterpart legislation to the one the US Congress passed last November, and for EU-wide visa sanctions on those officials named as conspirators or accomplices in the affair. The resolution was co-signed by eight members of the Foreign Affairs committee.
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The yoga guru and the British firms at the heart of Sergei Magnitsky’s death
To her students Lana Zamba is simply an experienced yoga teacher, expert in a 500-year-old form of the mystic Eastern discipline. But Mrs Zamba is equally pliable, it appears, when it comes to choosing business directorships.
The yoga instructor, who lives in Limassol in Cyprus, has been a director of no fewer than 24 British-based companies including one at the centre of an alleged multi-million-pound fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the Moscow lawyer whose death in a Russian jail became an international cause célèbre.
Quite why a yoga instructor, who describes herself on the internet as “the leading teacher and representative of the Patanjali International Yoga Foundation”, should head so many different businesses is unclear.
But Mrs Zamba, 47, is named in a series of letters sent to authorities demanding a criminal investigation in Britain into a fraud that led to Mr Magnitsky’s death.
Mr Magnitsky, 37, who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a British-based hedge fund, had uncovered evidence of a £150 million fraud committed by Russian tax officials and an organised crime syndicate.
He was then arrested on tax evasion charges and held in the notorious Butyrka prison for 358 days before his death in 2009, developing pancreatitis for which he did not receive proper medical treatment. He was also beaten in jail.
Despite being dead for four years – and to the anger of the outside world – Mr Magnitsky is being tried posthumously in Moscow for tax evasion.
Hermitage’s investigations into the fraud suggest as much as £35 million was laundered through 10 British companies. One of those companies – Nomirex Trading Ltd, based in an office block in Birmingham – lists only two directors: Mrs Zamba and a company based in Cyprus.
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Magnitsky Act: Holding Russia accountable in lawyer’s death
On Nov. 16, 2009, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died of heart failure in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina Prison, after eight guards are alleged to have beaten him with rubber batons for more than an hour. An ambulance crew that had been called to provide medical attention was detained outside his cell until it was too late.
According to a report issued by then-Russian President Dimitry Medvedev’s Human Rights Council, the death of Mr. Magnitsky, 37, followed his unlawful 2008 arrest and subsequent 11-month detainment, during which he was repeatedly denied medical attention and tortured by his captors while awaiting trial.
Despite these findings, no arrests have been made in connection with Mr. Magnitsky’s death, and none appear to be forthcoming. But his death has since become an international affair, with U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern, D-Worcester, and U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., at the forefront: The two legislators worked together to enact a law late last year that seeks to hold accountable those in Russia who were involved,
The statute, formally known as the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, this month resulted in publication of a list of Russian officials that the State Department says were responsible. These individuals have been barred from entering the United States, with some of them subject to a freeze on personal assets in this country.
At the same time, the Magnitsky law also has triggered a retaliatory ban on adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens, while creating further complications in an already strained relationship between the United States and Russia.
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Russians Go on TV to Say Sanctions Won’t Matter
Just two weeks after the Obama administration imposed sanctions on about two dozen Russians accused of human rights violations, Russian officials organized a very public “so what?” on Saturday, gathering officials on the list and assuring them in televised meetings that condemnation by the United States government would not hurt their careers. The jocular tone of the meetings suggested, in fact, that it might help.
“Are your knees trembling?” Interior Minister Vladimir A. Kolokoltsev asked Oleg F. Silchenko, an investigator who was included on the American list.
“I don’t feel my knees trembling, because there is always only one truth,” replied Mr. Silchenko, who oversaw the detention of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after accusing officials of embezzlement from the federal budget.
Other men and women on the list stepped forward to attest publicly that the American sanctions, which forbid them from traveling to the United States and freeze any assets held there, would have no effect on them at all. Col. Natalia Vinogradova, who oversaw the posthumous prosecution of Mr. Magnitsky, said the ban did not bother her because she had no desire to leave Russia.
“I don’t even have a foreign passport,” she said. “I have never once been abroad.”
Behind Saturday’s extravagant show of indifference, of course, is a deep vein of anxiety. The 18 Russians whose names have been made public (others are classified) are not high-ranking officials or people who stand to lose much if their foreign assets are frozen. But it is unclear how many other names will be added or how many other countries will adopt measures similar to the American government’s “Magnitsky list.”
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UK companies accused of money laundering in Magnitsky probe
British companies laundered millions of pounds stolen from the Russian Treasury in a $230m (£150m) tax fraud that has triggered a major diplomatic battle between the Kremlin and the US, it has been alleged.
At least £35m passed through the foreign bank accounts of about 10 UK registered front companies to “clean” the money, an investigation has found. The alleged 2007 fraud at the heart of the case has been linked with five deaths, including that of Russian anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose story has been turned into a play and documentary.
Evidence that the UK system has been abused prompted one MP to demand the Government follow the US’s lead and ban the 60 Russians implicated in the fraud and Mr Magnitsky’s death, including a number of state officials, from entering the country.
Dominic Raab MP said: “We don’t want Britain to become a playground for these gangsters, let alone a battleground for the violence that tends to follow.”
Among the UK companies named is Nomirex, a shell company owned in Cyprus than names a Cypriot yoga teacher as its director. Between 2007 and 2009, its accounts stated it was “inactive”. However, an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama found that $365m was transferred through its Latvian bank account in that time.
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Russian ‘blackmailing’ of Ireland ‘unacceptable’, says EU group leader
Russian “blackmailing”of Ireland over plans for a law sanctioning officials involved in the death of a lawyer there is “unacceptable” and should be raised at the EU-Russia summit, the head of a European Parliament political group has said.
The pressure being exerted by Russia to drop support for the law or face a ban on adoptions of Russian children “must be met by a solid and united EU stand”, said Guy Verhofstadt, head of the parliament’s liberal group and former Belgian prime minister. He called on the EU’s Council of Ministers, European Commission and high representative on foreign affairs to “clearly state their solidarity” with the Irish presidency in office. “Russian foreign policy once again is showing its ugly face,” he said.
The Oireachtas committee on foreign affairs will on Wednesday consider a motion by Fianna Fáil Senator Jim Walsh calling for Russian officials involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky to be listed publicly, their assets frozen and visa bans issued for them. The committee postponed a vote on the issue last Wednesday because of an amendment by Fine Gael TD Bernard Durkan, which dropped these sanctions. Committee chairman and Fine Gael TD Pat Breen delayed the vote by a week in the hope that consensus could be reached.
The Russian ambassador to Ireland, Maxim Reshkov, wrote to the committee in March warning that moves towards enacting such a law could “have negative influence on the negotiations on the adoption agreement between Russia and Ireland being proceeded”.
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How to Deal With Russia?
How should Europe deal with Russia, Judy Dempsey, senior associate at Carnegie Europe, asks. The answer is simple, Marcel de Haas, senior research associate at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, contends: Europe needs to take a united stance.
Moscow’s policy toward Europe has been “divide and rule,” Mr de Haas noted. Referring to Gazprom’s deals with European gas distributors, he said Russia was playing EU member states off against each other. Gazprom’s tactic was part of a broader energy war between Russia and the EU.
Russia’s Nord Stream and South Stream gas pipeline projects were an attempt to blackmail Ukraine into joining Moscow’s Eurasian Union, Mr de Haas said. Instead of a joint energy policy toward Russia, EU member states were making their own bilateral deals with Moscow, he lamented.
Europe should join the United States and pass its own Magnitsky Act, Denis MacShane, Britain’s former Minister for Europe, argued. The measure would show Russian officials and the government that corruption and harassment of political opponents carried a price, Mr MacShane said.
Moscow wanted to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States, and between European nation states and the EU, Mr MacShane warned. A European Magnitsky Act would show that this tactic did not work, he said. Moscow has exerted heavy pressure on EU member states on the issue. займы на карту онлайн займы https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php быстрые займы онлайн
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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
