Russia drops inquiry into death of Sergei Magnitsky
Investigators have dropped an inquiry into the death in jail of Sergei Magnitsky, stating that the whistleblowing lawyer’s agonising death, which became an international scandal, was not the result of malpractice.
“A decision has been taken to end the criminal case because of the absence of a crime,” the state Investigative Committee said. “No pressure was exerted on him, nor was there any physical violence or torture.”
Magnitsky was imprisoned for 11 months without trial in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka jail after exposing an alleged embezzlement scam by interior ministry officials. A Kremlin-ordered human rights council since found that he was beaten up immediately before his death, on 16 Novermber 2009, but there has been little effort to punish the officials responsible. As the case unfolded, Magnitsky’s name has become politicised. President Vladimir Putin stated in December that Magnitsky had died from heart problems and not from torture, and state-run television has run a number of smear programmes against him.
“This was expected,” said Magnitsky’s mother, Natalia Magnitskaya, after today’s decision. “I don’t believe that it is possible to obtain justice in Russia today because there are people in power interested in concealing it.”
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Russia Rules No Crime in Magnitsky Probe
Russian investigators have ended their probe into the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after accusing Russian officials of large-scale embezzlement of tax money, saying he suffered no abuse while incarcerated.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said Tuesday that it had closed its investigation into Magnitsky’s death because it found no evidence he was subjected either to “special conditions” or to “physical abuse or torture” in prison. It said he died of cardiac failure.
Magnitsky, a lawyer who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, which was the largest Western investment firm operating in Russia, accused Russian law enforcement and tax officials of a scheme by which they fraudulently received refunds for taxes that Hermitage paid in Russia, totaling $230 million.
Magnitsky was subsequently arrested on charges of tax evasion. He died in prison at age 37, after being detained for nearly a year and saying he was denied medical attention.
In 2011, an investigation by then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s human rights council found that Magnitsky, who had pancreatitis, had been “completely deprived” of medical care before his death. It added there was “reasonable suspicion” to believe Magnitsky’s death was triggered by a beating.
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Sergei Magnitsky: Russia can’t sweep his death under the carpet
Well, it’s official. Russia’s investigative committee has gone ahead and announced that the investigation into the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky has been closed. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer and father of two who died in November 2009 while being held in pre-trial detention. Before he went to jail, he had just happened to accuse some very powerful people of some very serious tax fraud. Having worked for the global investment advisory firm Hermitage Capital Management at the time of his imprisonment, he was now accused of the very same fraud he had apparently uncovered.
His death became an international scandal and led to the introduction of the Magnitsky Act in the US, which banned people implicated in his death from obtaining US visas, among other restrictions. Russia retaliated with the introduction of the Dima Yakovlev law, named after a Russian orphan who had died while in the care of his adoptive parents in the States. The law banned all adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans.
According to the investigative committee’s official findings, Magnitsky died because he was a very sick man: he was not tortured or treated differently, he was just in poor health. Whether Magnitsky received adequate medical treatment in detention is not mentioned. Both Magnitsky’s family and the human rights activists that have been involved in bringing this case to wider media attention have alleged that Magnitsky did not receive treatment because he wouldn’t testify against his employers.
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Russia drops Magnitsky prison death probe
Russian detectives are dropping their investigation into the death in prison of the lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
The Investigative Committee said no crime was committed against him. He was detained in 2008 after revealing alleged an embezzlement scam by interior ministry officials.
His family and the Presidential Human Rights Council say he was badly beaten and denied medical treatment.
Despite his death, he is himself being put on trial for fraud.
The Investigative Committee, the Russian equivalent of the FBI in the US, said Magnitsky had been legally arrested and legally detained and that he had not been tortured.
“Based on the preliminary investigation’s results, a decision was taken to end the criminal case due to a lack of evidence of a crime,” the Committee said.
Magnitsky, who died at the age of 37 in pre-trial detention after developing pancreatitis, was arrested after testifying that interior ministry officials, with organised criminals, had used the UK-based investment fund Hermitage Capital to embezzle $230m (£150m) by filing false corporate tax returns.
In December, a Moscow court acquitted a prison doctor accused of negligence over the lawyer’s death. Dmitry Kratov had argued that he was unable to ensure medical care because of a shortage of staff.
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Russia drops probe into whistleblowing lawyer’s death
Russian investigators on Tuesday dropped their investigation into the 2009 death in jail of a whistleblowing attorney whose case led to a crisis in relations between Russia and the United States.
The investigators said they had no evidence that Sergei Magnitsky died at the age of 37 from beatings by prison staff, as his family and US-born former employer William Browder claim.
“Based on the preliminary investigation’s results, a decision was taken to end the criminal case due to a lack of evidence of a crime,” the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
Magnitsky is currently facing a posthumous trial — Russia’s first — along with Browder into alleged tax evasion.
The Russian lawyer was jailed shortly after disclosing an alleged $230-million fraud scheme being run by senior tax and law enforcement authorities and accused of carrying out the fraud himself.
An attorney for Magnitsky’s mother Natalia said he intended to appeal the decision in court.
Magnitsky’s prosecution by the very same officials he had singled out for fraud has come to symbolise the Kremlin’s failure to crack down on corruption and institute the rule of law as repeatedly promised by President Vladimir Putin.
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Russian Investigation Into Magnitsky’s Death Dropped
Russia’s Investigative Committee has dropped its investigation into the death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky,.
The committee posted a statement on its official website on March 19 saying Magnitsky was placed legally in pretrial detention and died there from heart complications in 2009. The committee said there was no evidence of a crime.
In 2008, Magnitsky, who worked for the London-based Hermitage Capital Investments, implicated top officials from Russia’s Interior Ministry, Federal Tax Service, Federal Security Service, and other agencies in a $230 million scheme to defraud the government.
The officials Magnitsky accused of taking part in the tax-refund fraud initiated proceedings against him on tax-evasion charges, leading to his arrest.
Magnitsky’s relatives and supporters say he was beaten and medically neglected while in jail, which led to his death in a Moscow detention center a year after he was detained.
In November 2012, the Russian authorities charged Magnitsky posthumously with tax evasion. The lawyer’s trial is expected to resume on March 22. His former boss, Hermitage Capital investments CEO William Browder, remains outside Russia and was charged in absentia.
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Cyprus deposit grab is fiscal Magnitsky bill for Russia
The decision by the Cypriot government to grab up to 9.9% of deposits in its banking system is the financial equivalent of the Magnitsky bill as far as the Kremlin is concerned.
“The decision is unfair, unprofessional and dangerous,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said of the deal struck between the German-dominated EU finance ministers meeting and Cyprus over the weekend in Berlin.
The deal has been widely condemned by commentators, as it undermines the very foundations of the European banking system. All European deposits are supposed to be protected by a deposit insurance scheme that guarantees the safety of deposits irrespective of what happens to the bank holding it.
The reason why Europe has contemplated such an unorthodox solution is the political problems that Germany has with using its taxpayer money – as the bulk of the EU money will come from Germany – to bail out Russian oligarchs and gangsters hiding money abroad.
“The driver for the latest attempt to bail-in depositors appears to be German politics, and concern therein that German tax-payers’ money was likely being used to bail-out the weight of Russian deposits in the Cypriot banking system,” Timothy Ash, a strategist at Standard Bank, wrote in an emailed note. “German politicians seem to have adopted a very moralistic approach to the Cypriot bail-out, which may well now reflect ‘bail-out’ fatigue more than anything, plus the close proximity now of Bundestag elections [due in September].
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IBAHRI expresses concern over the posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, Russia
The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) expresses concern over the posthumous reopening of criminal proceedings against Sergei Magnitsky, raising several procedural issues. The most salient issues identified by the IBAHRI include:
– The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation decision of 14 July 2011 does not give law enforcement agencies a basis to pursue or revive charges against a deceased person;
– The rights to choose counsel, prepare a defence case, and be present at one’s trial are enshrined in Article 14(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The rights to defence and to a fair trial cannot be exercised by a deceased accused person;
– The entitlement to a fair and public hearing, enshrined in Article 14(1) of the ICCPR, provides that there must be a strong and clear justification for excluding the public and media from the trial proceedings. This expectation is all the stronger in these extraordinary circumstances. The failure to conduct an open process reasonably leads to adverse inferences; and
– Russian courts were made aware of the manner in which Magnitsky was investigated, and the conditions of his detention, in great detail by Magnitsky himself while he was still alive, with no apparent effect.
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Cyprus and Magnitsky
There’s an irony in the fact that the grudging bailout of Cyprus by other members of the European Union came at the end of the same week in which the late Sergei Magnitsky was due to go on trial in Russia.
Magnitsky was the Russian lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after pursuing Russian officials who seized companies from his client Hermitage Capital and allegedly perpetrated a $230 million tax fraud. It’s a quirk of Russian law that the dead can be put on trial, with Magnitsky charged with the same offenses as the officials he pursued (The initial hearing on the case was delayed until March 22). His treatment led to U.S. sanctions on those officials in the form of the “Magnitsky list.”
What does this have to do with Cyprus? The Mediterranean nation has become what the good-governance group Global Financial Integrity described in a recent report as a “laundry machine for dirty Russian money.” GFI’s report said $128.8 billion flowed into Russia from Cyprus in 2011, more than five times its gross domestic product.
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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
