Russia’s judicial system and the Tower of Pisa — a shared fate awaits
It is fairly well accepted that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a democracy in name only. He controls the legislature, which passes laws aimed at giving him greater powers. He controls the police, who demonstrate a heavy propensity for arresting Putin critics. He controls a judiciary boasting a record of convictions of those involved in opposing Putin’s seemingly unlimited authority.
The playing field in Russia has clearly been tilted in Putin’s favor. One can only wonder how much more tilting such a system can endure?
Not unlike the Tower of Pisa, the tilting appears to be a continuing process with little hope it will ever abate of its own accord. Nowhere has this become more obvious than in a recent court ruling in the continuing case of the late Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky was a Russian auditor. He was hired to investigate a dubious claim that a company that had earlier been credited with overpaying its taxes was suddenly being accused of underpaying them.
Magnitsky’s audit uncovered a massive theft of state assets orchestrated by Russian officials working in collusion with a criminal element seeking to leave the company open for exploitation by government officials.
Magnitsky identified a policeman involved in the scandal who accused the auditor of fraud and theft. An arrest was made on Nov. 23, 2008 — not of the policeman but Magnitsky — for fraud and tax evasion. The man who had discovered and reported the fraud was now being charged for committing it!
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EU audit on Cyprus money laundering – whitewash in the making?
Auditors on an EU-sponsored mission to see if Cypriot banks launder money for Russian criminals began work last Wednesday (20 March).
The project has slipped out of view amid dramatic talks on Cyprus’ new bailout.
But it is likely to come back with a vengeance when the Dutch, Finnish and German parliaments vote in April on whether the EU should lend Cyprus the €10 billion it needs.
The German government pushed for the probe in the first place because the Social-Democrat opposition threatened to veto a Cypriot rescue on money laundering grounds.
“This is a matter of concern … for public opinion in several of our member states,” European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso noted on Monday.
There are two units doing the job.
One is Moneyval, a specialist branch of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, whose top man, John Ringguth, a former British prosecutor, was in Nicosia last week to kick things off.
The other is a “private international audit firm” to be hired by Cyprus’ central bank.
The auditors’ terms of reference (what powers they have, which banks they will check) are “confidential,” to use the phrase of one German official.
Moneyval told EUobserver its task is to “focus exclusively on the effectiveness of Customer Due Diligence (CDD) measures in the [Cypriot] banking sector.” In other words, to see if banks check who their customers really are.
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Putin Needs an Enemy After Berezovsky’s Death
After Boris Berezovsky’s death, Vladimir Putin has a problem—who will play the villain to make him look like a superhero? Peter Pomerantsev reports.
If Vladimir Putin didn’t have exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky as an enemy, the joke over the last decade in Moscow went, he would have needed to invent him. In the Kremlin narrative Berezovsky was the ideal caricature Penguin to Putin’s Batman: the evil Jewish schemer in his London palace looking to usurp good blonde Tsar Vlad. Whenever Putin had a problem state media would pin it on Berezovsky: Chechen terrorists have kidnapped a school in the Caucuses? Berezovsky is behind it. Pussy Riot? Berezovsky stooges.
Berezovsky became the symbol of the ideology Putin was presented as the antithesis of: the representative of the wild ’90s of oligarchs and Yeltsin and destitution, as opposed to the “stable” Putin era. Berezovsky was always the perfect foil, reveling in his role as the great schemer, claiming from his London exile he was behind the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, that he would do anything to get rid of Putin. For the last half decade at least, once his last allies in the Russian parliament had been sidelined, it’s unclear whether he had much influence left in Russia at all. So both sides played along: the Kremlin pretending Berezovsky was an all-powerful master of darkness, the other continuing to act as if he were.
There were always rumors, typically conspiratorial for Moscow, that Berezovsky was in fact working with Putin, the two playing out their roles in a choreographed dance. This is hugely dubious, but there was something distinctly theatrical about their sparring, two sides of one performance. Now Berezovsky is dead the Kremlin is faced with a problem: Who will fill the role of uber-baddie to Putin’s goodie?
The easiest thing would be to pluck another exiled oligarch out of the sin bin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the exiled 1990s media magnate, is still around. Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s allies are still at liberty in the West and make no secret of their grudge against the Kremlin. The problem for Putin is that his narrative as the brave warrior against oligarchical corruption has broken down. His rule is perceived to be just as, if not more, corrupt than the ’90s. His parliamentary party, United Russia, is nicknamed the “party of crooks and thieves.” Tales of his and his best friends’ yachts and castles are ubiquitous.
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Kristiina Ojuland: EU Should Prioritse Magnitsky
No progress should be made on granting Russian officials visa-free travel to the European Union without legislation to ban individuals who conspired to torture and kill lawyer Sergei Magnitsky from entering the EU, according to Kristiina Ojuland, member of the European Parliament from Estonia.
Ms Ojuland, spokeswoman on Russia for the ALDE (liberal) group in the European Parliament, made her comments as members of the European Commission travelled to Moscow for biennial policy consultations — which this time are expected to focus on relaxing visa restrictions for Russian officials.
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The Dead Man’s Trial
Without a word, a gloomy cleaning lady in a blue apron and pink rubber slippers over long woolen socks pushed a mop down the narrow corridor. A crowd of tired and quiet reporters shuffled aside to let her pass. Her mop rubbed the dirt from the wet floor of the waiting area of the Tverskoi Courthouse, only to be immediately muddied again by hundreds of boots. Five hours had passed since the scheduled start of the latest hearing in the trial of a dead suspect, the first such trial in Russia’s history. The suspect in question was Sergei Magnitsky, who died in jail at age 37, three years ago. Inside Courtroom Number 4, the benches and chairs remained empty. So did the suspect’s cage (shown above).
“Get out of here!” an annoyed security officer in black uniform shouted at reporters, pushing people away from the court door. Silence filled the stuffy space. People looked lost, trying to understand the true meaning behind the man’s statement. Did it mean that the trial would be once again delayed for many hours, or cancelled entirely? Nothing has made any sense so far. “Is there any scenario, any purpose for making journalists wait for so long?” I asked Vera ?heilsheva, an experienced court reporter for the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “Clearly they want us to lose interest in Magnitsky,” she answered. And today she had no expectations of witnessing the miracle of justice in Russia.
Not one foot budged from the wet floor of the court door. From the day of his arrest in November 2008 to the day of his death in prison in November 2009, the young lawyer never had a chance to have his day in court. But he believed in justice and a fair trial, his family and supporters say, and continued to accuse senior Russian police and tax officials in organizing a $230 million fraud. “He was angry to see evidence of stupid falsifications, stupid lies at his preliminary court hearings, but he believed that somewhere there had to be some heroic judge of dignity and courage,” Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya Magnitskaya, said in a phone interview. Along with Sergei’s family members, friends, and civil society activists, Mrs. Magnitskaya boycotted the trial of her dead son and stayed at home today.
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Managing Magnitsky in a Managed Democracy
Last Tuesday, the Investigative Committee announced that it had closed the investigation of the death of Sergei Magnitsky because they couldn’t identify an “event of crime.” I was immediately inundated with calls from journalists asking if I was surprised or disappointed and what our next move would be.
I was certainly not surprised. Russia is a managed democracy, and the Magnitsky case is also managed. It has become obvious that the highest levels of government have decided to protect the people who stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the government and who killed the whistleblower who exposed this crime.
In late 2007, Magnitsky discovered a crime in progress, and his client, Hermitage Capital, reported it on Dec. 3, 2007, before any tax money was stolen. In the summer of 2008, Magnitsky documented that $230 million was stolen with the help of government officials, and Hermitage reported this as well. The two complaints consisted of hundreds of pages of supporting documents, all of which were ignored by the Russian government.
Prosecutors then accused Magnitsky of being a tax cheat and of committing the very theft that he reported. It based its case solely on the testimony of the people whom Magnitsky accused of corruption and extortion. Prosecutors named Magnitsky’s alleged co-conspirators, but conveniently they were all dead.
When Magnitsky died in November 2009, we were first told that he died from pancreatitis, a condition that he was repeatedly denied treatment for while he was detained for almost a year in pretrial detention. Then, after people began to question why his pancreatitis wasn’t treated and ask whether this was intentional, we were told his death was a result of an unpredictable heart failure. This is the reason there were no arrests in Magnitsky’s death, we were told, and this became the basis for closing the inquiry into his death.
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Trailer of the Week: Political Trial Against a Dead Man
In what might well be the most macabre act in the already appalling human rights record of the current Russian government, the deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is about to be put on trial in Moscow this Friday, although he was tortured to death in a Russian jail over three years ago.
In 2008, when Sergei Magnitsky was defending his client Hermitage Capital Management on a case of alleged tax evasion, he discovered a huge tax fraud of $230 million conducted by Russian authorities, tax officials, police and elements of organized crime. While investigating this massive theft of public money, he was arrested for allegedly colluding with Hermitage and jailed to wait for trial. This trial never came — Magnitsky died in his cell 8 days before the one-year-limit of custody without trial expired, having been denied medical care that he desperately needed after repeated beatings and torture, as was confirmed by a later independent inquiry.
Sergei Magnitsky is the first person to be tried posthumously in Russia after the laws were changed in 2011 to allow that. Magnitsky’s widow, Natalia Zharikova, has condemned the proceedings as “blasphemy” and urged those involved to refuse to take part.
Until this day, all those responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky have been cleared, and on March 19th the Russian officials announced that they are ending the investigation without finding any signs of crime. Yet on a global level, Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, has been successfully campaigning to end the impunity through the so-called “Sergei Magnitsky Act” which seeks to impose international visa restrictions and asset freezes on Russian government officials that are thought to be involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky. In the US, this act was passed into law by President Obama on December 14th, 2012. Russia retaliated by banning US citizens from adopting Russian orphans as well as placing restrictions on NGOs if they have “foreign agents” supporting them. Russian officials are reportedly currently doing wide-ranging checks of NGOs with foreign support in order to limit Western influence and silence dissidents.
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Russia tries dead man who dobbed in tax scam
The defendant cage stood eloquently empty as the posthumous trial of the whistle-blowing auditor Sergei Magnitsky got under way in Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court on Friday.
Mr Magnitsky, who died in custody in 2009 after having exposed a scam by Russian tax officials, is accused of tax evasion, for which a six-year jail sentence could be handed down. His co-defendant, American-born investor William Browder, is being tried on the same charges in absentia.
The case is widely seen as an attempt by Moscow to justify itself following the adoption in the US of the Magnitsky Act, barring officials connected with the auditor’s death entering America.
Mr Magnitsky died in pretrial detention from a mixture of medical neglect and physical abuse but no officials have been brought to justice; indeed on Tuesday Russia closed the investigation into Magnitsky’s death for ”lack of evidence”.
Rather, the authorities believe they can show that Mr Magnitsky and his client, Mr Browder, evaded $US16.8 million in taxes.
The posthumous prosecution had nothing to do with Mr Magnitsky’s claims to have uncovered official corruption, the Investigative Committee said.
Mr Magnitsky’s mother Natalya and widow, also called Natalya, have expressed their anguish at the trial, saying it added to the loss they had already suffered.
But Judge Igor Alisov said the court had ”the right to examine the case against the dead man, including with the aims of rehabilitating him”.
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Sergei Magnitsky uncovered Russia-to-Cyprus money laundering, and look what happened to him
The latest eurozone crisis comes down to controversy over bailing out a Cypriot banking system that is flooded with Russian black money.
The EU-proposed “haircut” solution — with a 9.9 percent levy on large deposits in Cyprus — received zero votes in Cyprus’ parliament and Russian president Vladimir Putin called it “unjust, unprofessional and dangerous.” Attempts to find a compromise have foundered.
In any case, it is clear that powerful people in Russia want to preserve the ability to use Cyprus as a tax haven, alleged money-laundering vehicle, and backdoor into the eurozone.
Just look at what happened to Sergei Magnitsky, the Moscow-based lawyer who was imprisoned and died mysteriously in jail after calling attention to Russian corruption, including alleged money-laundering in Cyprus.
Magnitsky had been working for Hermitage Capital, a fund managed by American Bill Browder. After Hermitage’s offices were raided in 2007, Magnitsky began investigating and later testified that he had uncovered a huge scam by top police officials to embezzle $230 million in taxes from money that Hermitage Fund companies had paid in 2006.
Magnitsky alleged that the corrupt cops had used corporate seals and documents seized in the raid on Hermitage’s Moscow office and set up fake companies under the same names, which then received a full tax rebate.
Hermitage said that some $31 million of that money was then moved out of Russia using five Cypriot banks: Alpha Bank, Cyprus Popular Bank, FBME Bank, Privatbank International and Komercbanka.
The story quickly turned tragic. In November 2008, Magnitsky himself was charged with tax evasion and taken to prison. Kept in Moscow’s notorious pre-trial prisons, Magnitsky unexpectedly died in November 2009. His death was originally attributed to a an abdominal membrane rupture before officials changed that to a heart attack. Magnitsky is one of four witnesses in the case who have died in mysterious circumstances.
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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
