Why Russia’s Attempt to Convict a Dead Man Matters
Today — as though more evidence were required to demonstrate the upside-down state of human rights and the rule of law in Russia — the country’s prosecutors resume their efforts to convict a dead whistleblower of the very corruption he exposed. The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky has properly been called “grim comedy” by a group of French legislators, and it is only the most recent — and patently absurd — element of the Russian government’s strategy to cover up fraud, theft, and human rights violations committed by its own high-ranking officials.
Magnitsky uncovered the scheme — which involved officials from six senior Russian ministries and deprived Russian taxpayers of over $230 million — while working in Moscow as a tax attorney for Hermitage Capital Management, an international investment fund based in London. In 2008, he testified against the officials responsible, and was subsequently arrested and detained at their behest without bail or trial. He refused to recant even as his health deteriorated, he was denied medical treatment, and he died in jail in November 2009 at the age of 37. An investigation into his death — and into allegations that he was badly beaten in prison — was abruptly dropped this week.
Russian authorities continue to insist that he was complicit in the fraud, and they have begun inventing new crimes of which to accuse him in an attempt to further undermine his credibility. Magnitsky is now under posthumous investigation for illegally purchasing shares of Russian energy giant Gazprom, despite the fact the transaction was approved years ago by the Russian Federal Securities Commission. As well, Russian law enforcement revealed last month that it may hold him responsible for the country’s 1998 default for supposedly interfering with a $4.8-billion transfer from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Central Bank of Russia. However, none of these transparently self-serving allegations change the truth that Sergei Magnitsky blew the whistle on widespread corruption among powerful people, and paid for it with his life. Indeed, given the ongoing legal proceedings and smear campaign, even that price now appears to be insufficient.
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Magnitsky’s Defense Requests Recusal of Prosecutor as Posthumous Trial Begins
Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court began proceedings into the posthumous tax evasion trial against deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky on Friday.
Prosecutors say Magnitsky, who died in a pretrial detention facility in 2009, acted as an accomplice to Hermitage Capital and the fund’s director, William Browder, in a tax evasion scheme that saw the men steal $230 million from the state budget. The allegations were made shortly after Magnitsky himself accused tax officials of stealing the $230 million by using fake tax refunds.
At the very beginning of Friday’s hearing, Magnitsky’s defense lawyers asked to recuse the prosecutor, Mikhail Reznicheno, citing the fact that he’d given defense lawyers limited time to read 60 volumes of case materials, the BBC’s Russian service reported.
Magnitsky’s defense lawyers also asked prosecutors to clarify the procedure for a trial against a dead person, requesting that the Tverskoi District Court submit a request for such clarification to the Constitutional Court, which earlier issued a decree stating that posthumous trials violate the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
“There was no reason for the investigation. I believe the case was re-opened only because of an incorrect understanding of the decree of the Consitutional Court,” Nikolai Gerasimov, a lawyer for Magnitsky, said in comments carried by Lenta.ru.
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Sergei Magnitsky’s widow wants abusers banned from entering Britain
The widow of whistle-blowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has called on the British Government to adopt a US-style law to publicly ban his abusers from entering the UK.
Speaking as a Moscow court on Friday begins a “Kafkaesque” trial of her dead husband, Natalya Zharikova, 40, in her first ever media interview, urged Britain to adopt a similar law to the Magnitsky Act approved by the United States in December.
The Act, which introduced US visa bans and asset freezes for Russian officials allegedly involved in Mr Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow jail in 2009, prompted fury from the Kremlin, which approved a controversial ban on American parents adopting Russian children as a “symmetrical response”.
“I would like the UK Government to introduce a similar law to the US Magnitsky Act,” Ms Zharikova told The Daily Telegraph. “Many people in the UK clearly understand the matter and sympathise with us. If it’s not possible to get justice in Russia then it should be found elsewhere.”
Mr Magnitsky died in agony in a pre-trial detention centre aged 37 after being beaten and denied essential medical treatment for pancreatitis. He had been jailed a year earlier by senior Russian police officers whom he accused of organising a £140m fraud in league with tax officials.
No one has been convicted over his death, which provoked outrage worldwide and has become a symbol of corruption and ruthlessness under President Vladimir Putin.
britain and Russia embarked on a mini-thaw last week, when William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, and Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, welcomed their Russian counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu, to London for a rare bilateral meeting. Relations remain fraught however over the poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in Britain in 2006. Any move to ban Russian officials from entering the UK is likely to incense Moscow.
Mr Hague said before his meeting with Mr Lavrov that foreign human rights violators could be anonymously denied visas to Britain, but there is now growing pressure for the Government to “name and shame” Mr Magnitsky’s abusers and publicly block their entry.
Three former Foreign Secretaries – Sir Malcolm Rifkind, David Miliband and Jack Straw – have expressed their support for an explicit entry ban on Mr Magnitsky’s alleged tormentors, who include state officials, judges and police. Other backbench MPs are also lobbying for such a measure.
Moscow’s Tverskoy Court will today [[Friday]] begin a posthumous trial of Magnitsky on fraud charges with an empty defendant’s cage in the room, guarded by bailiffs. The lawyer is accused of the same tax avoidance scam he exposed in what his supporters say is a Kafkaesque attempt to blacken his name beyond the grave.
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Russia rules Magnitsky was not abused
Russian authorities, showing no signs of declaring a truce with critics at home or abroad, took a swipe at both Tuesday by ruling that no crime was committed in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer whose treatment prompted the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions on corrupt officials here.
The finding by the country’s top investigative body contradicted those of a Russian presidential commission, which concluded that Magnitsky was abused and denied medical treatment before his death, and a private investigation by his Western employer, which found evidence he had been tortured.
“He was beaten,” Valery Borshchev, a member of the presidential commission, told the Interfax news agency Tuesday. “There is a death certificate stating that he had sustained a closed head injury.”
Borshchev said he would demand a new investigation. “This defiant act threatens basic and fundamental human rights in Russia,” he said.
Human rights and other nongovernmental organizations have been uneasily waiting to find out how they will fare in this environment. A law requiring groups that receive funds from abroad to register as foreign agents went into effect in November. Last month, President Vladimir Putin reminded the authorities that it should be enforced, according to news reports.
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EU and Russia in visa-free talks, despite Magnitsky ‘regret’
EU officials will in Moscow on Thursday (21 March) try to pin down details on a visa-free travel deal, despite “regret” on Russia’s handling of a prominent human rights case.
The European Commission visit, including a tete-a-tete between commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is part of a good will programme dating back to 1997.
A big point on the agenda is whether to let Russian officials enter the EU without a visa, while relaxing visa rules for Russian businessmen, journalists and students.
“There is now a majority of member states who are in favour of including service passport holders [officials] … If everything goes well, it [a deal] might take place this summer,” a commission official told EUobserver ahead of the trip.
The progress on visas comes despite EU criticism of Putin’s behaviour in the past 18 months – on rigged elections, on his crackdown on NGOs and dissidents and on lack of respect for the rule of law.
In the latest episode, Russian authorities this week closed an investigation into the death in 2009 of anti-corruption activist Sergei Magnitsky, saying there was no crime.
They did it despite evidence he was put in prison, starved of medication and finally beaten to death because he exposed tax fraud by Russian officials.
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Kremlin: No evidence of a crime in whistleblower’s suspicious prison death
Despite independent evidence that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death in prison in 2009 in an incident that has chilled US-Russian relations, Russia’s top investigators have closed the case.
The Kremlin’s Investigative Committee, Russia’s top law enforcement body, has ended its inquiry into the 2009 prison death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, saying it can find no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the way his life ended.
It’s the latest surprise in a case that has long been viewed as the acid test of the Kremlin’s willingness to fight corruption within its own government ranks. The issue has been front-and-center as US-Russia relations have gone into a downward spiral of acrimony and mistrust in recent months. A controversial US law signed by President Obama in December, which aims to punish Russian human rights violators, is named the Magnitsky Act.
The reason the Investigative Committee’s finding comes as a bit of a surprise is because some element of foul play in Mr. Magnitsky’s prison death had previously been the single point that all sides had agreed upon in the extremely complicated, contentious, and tragic story of Sergei Magnitsky.
“This decision by the Russian investigative authorities is a clear indication that they have decided to ignore the conclusions of two independent domestic commissions on the case,” Hermitage Capital, Mr. Magnitsky’s former employer, said in a statement.
“It is a sign of an overwhelming government cover up, and the extent that the Russian government is ready to go to protect those exposed by Magnitsky for committing crimes against the state,” it said.
Magnitsky was a lawyer working for Hermitage when he uncovered what he alleged was a vast scam by top Russian police and tax officials to embezzle $230 million in taxes paid by Hermitage firms in 2006.
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Dead Russian whistleblower at forefront of Cyprus bailout crisis
Sergei Magnitsky discovered a huge Russian tax fraud — $230 million had been stolen from the Russian government, said his ex-boss, William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management, a former major investor in Russia.
In life, Sergei Magnitsky was a modest Moscow tax lawyer with a dogged determination to track financial wrongdoers.
More than four years after his death, he is part of a spiralling banking crisis that has swept up Russian money launderers, Cypriot citizens and their increasingly desperate government in a tornado that could take down the tiny island state, and suck in already wobbly countries in the eurozone.
Cyprus is struggling to stave off bankruptcy with a $13 billion (10 billion euro) bailout that lenders insist must be tied to taxes on Cypriot bank accounts — touching off fury on the island and in Russia, whose high-rollers use it as a tax haven. On Wednesday Cyprus pleaded for an alternative loan from Moscow, so far without results.
Some of Cyprus’s bailout woes may be linked with Magnitsky’s quest for justice, said his ex-boss, William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management, a former major investor in Russia, who hired him to probe murky Russian tax refunds in the mid-2000s.
“Sergei discovered a huge Russian tax fraud,” said Browder in a telephone interview. “He found that $230 million was stolen from the Russian government. But we knew there would be no accountability, so we followed the money ourselves.”
Magnitsky said he had found a “web of corruption” spun by Russian tax officials who allegedly masterminded the biggest Russian tax heist of the century.
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Investigators Close Case Into Magnitsky’s Death
Investigators said Tuesday that they had closed the case into the 2009 death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose name is attached to a U.S. law that has caused tension in U.S.-Russian relations by seeking to punish Russians implicated in human rights violations.
An inquiry into Magnitsky’s treatment and death in a Moscow jail, where he was awaiting trial on tax evasion charges brought after he accused government officials of a fraudulent $230 million tax rebate scheme, revealed no evidence of wrongdoing, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The committee’s findings contradict a 2011 investigation by the Kremlin human rights council, which said Magnitsky was pressured by prison authorities over his testimony in the tax fraud case and was left to die of pancreatitis in an isolation cell. The council’s investigation also found that Magnitsky had been beaten in prison and that there was insufficient evidence to jail him.
William Browder, head of Magnitsky’s former employer Hermitage Capital, said that the Investigative Committee’s action was not a surprise to him and that it was “a result of basically politically motivated intervention by [President Vladimir] Putin to change the narrative of what really happened to Sergei,” Radio Free Europe reported.
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Russia finds no evidence of torture in Sergei Magnitsky case
Russian investigators found no evidence of violence against a lawyer who died in custody after accusing officials and police officers of running a multimillion-dollar tax refund scam, and have ended their probe, officials said Tuesday.
Sergei Magnitsky, who worked as a legal advisor for the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund in Moscow, died in 2009 of heart insufficiency and brain and lung edema resulting from diabetes and hepatitis while in pretrial detention on tax charges, the Russian Investigative Committee said on its website.
Human rights groups had described Magnitsky’s death as suspicious and alleged that he was tortured after his 2008 arrest, denied medical treatment and beaten in the final hours of his life. Magnitsky’s arrest had followed his allegations that officials engaged in tax fraud had embezzled $230 million from state coffers.
“During Magnitsky’s stay in investigation prisons no special conditions were created for keeping him in custody different from the keeping of other prisoners under investigation, no pressure, no physical violence or torture was applied on him,” the committee’s statement said. “Thus in the course of the criminal case investigation no objective data of crimes against Sergei Magnitsky was obtained.”
The case led to a U.S. measure, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, signed by President Obama in December, which imposed visa restrictions and froze the U.S. bank accounts of some Russian officials. Moscow responded by banning adoption of Russian orphans by American couples.
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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
