Russia puts Sergei Magnitsky on trial – three years after he died in custody
On Monday, for the first time, Russia will put a dead man on trial.
Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer, will face charges of tax fraud that his friends and family say are fabricated. He will not actually face them at all, though: Magnitsky has been dead since 2009.
He was arrested the year before after concluding a multimillion-dollar corruption investigation that pointed the finger at a host of low-level Russian officials. Like thousands of other Russians each year, he never came out.
Unknown to the public when he was alive, Magnitsky’s name has come to symbolise the deep ills that haunt Russia since his death – its Kafkaesque justice system, its torturous prisons and even its vengeful foreign policy.
When the United States passed a bill banning those involved in Magnitsky’s death from entering or even keeping bank accounts in the US, Moscow responded by banning Russian orphans from being adopted by Americans.
Kremlin anger at the Magnitsky bill, now being considered in countries across Europe, has dominated domestic politics since the turn of the year.
“We found their achilles heel,” said William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management and Magnitsky’s former employer, who has launched a global campaign to avenge his death. “Following the money and freezing the money is by far the most effective tool there is when dealing with a kleptocracy.”
Browder, who is based in London, was once Vladimir Putin’s biggest fan, becoming the largest portfolio investor in Russia by the end of Putin’s first term in 2004.
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Good News! They Hate Me in Russia
Sergey Selyunin apparently thinks Madonna and John Kerry should be barred from Mother Russia, along with dozens more. I can’t believe I made the list! By Eli Lake.
In my career as a journalist, I have been fortunate enough to report from Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, India, China, and North Korea. I have never been to Russia, though. If a Russian blogger gets his way, I may never get the chance.
As of Thursday, I am an official enemy of Sergey Selyunin, the proprietor of a website devoted to listing what he considers official enemies of Russia. You know, like Madonna, Vanessa Redgrave, Hillary Clinton, and Eli Lake. Our photos, along with other politicians, activists, artists, and journalists from around the world, are on the site’s infinite scroll, each of us stamped with “pathological russophobe” in giant red lettering, in both English and Russian. Selyunin recommends that we all be barred from entering Mother Russia.
I found out about the list after Noah Shachtman, editor of Wired’s Danger Room, tweeted Tuesday how he was on the list along with my editor, Tina Brown, and New Yorker editor, David Remnick.
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Trial by Russian television convicts whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky as MI6 agent
As Russia prepares to mount a posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, state-controlled television has aired a documentary accusing the dead whistleblowing lawyer and his bosses of being part of an MI6-led conspiracy.
The documentary, which aired on Russia’s NTV on Wednesday night, said that Mr Magnitsky and William Browder, the US-born British head of the investment fund that hired him, were involved in the “crime of the century” against the Russian state.
Both the television programme and the trial, which starts on Monday, appear to be part of a vitriolic rearguard action by the Russian state, after Mr Magnitsky’s fate became the catalyst for international pressure on Moscow. Mr Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 while investigating an alleged $230m fraud perpetrated by a group of corrupt Russian officials that defrauded the Russian state. However, instead of locking up the culprits, Russian investigators moved against Mr Magnitsky himself. Locked up in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, he was refused medical treatment for a pancreatic condition, mistreated, and died in 2009.
Since then, his case has become an international rallying cry, with the US Congress passing a resolution banning Russian officials involved in his death from travelling to the US or owning property there. Enraged by the move, Russia retaliated by drawing up its own list of US officials to be banned from Russia, and also outlawed US citizens from adopting Russian orphans. President Vladimir Putin also said on live television in December that Mr Magnitsky had died of heart failure, not mistreatment, and added that the case needed further investigation, as the lawyer himself had been no angel.
Since those words, the Russian state appears to have ratcheted up a campaign against the memory of the dead lawyer, his family, and his former employer, Hermitage Capital. Hermitage, headed by Mr Browder, had employed Mr Magnitsky to investigate the fraud.
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The enemy within
MARTYRED human-rights activists; fatally brave journalists: Russia, alas, has plenty of other cases of violent death that are as deserving of outrage as Sergei Magnitsky’s. So the fuss over one lawyer’s demise might seem overdone. Yet there is something grimly instructive about Magnitsky’s story. In a stark, almost cartoonish way, it has demonstrated that Russia is run for the benefit of a ruling clique, rather than in the interests of its people. As this gruesome affair has degenerated from brutal tragedy to bleak farce, those interests have been relentlessly disregarded by officials, politicians and the courts.
To recap: Magnitsky worked for Hermitage Capital Management, once the biggest portfolio investor in Russia. Bill Browder, its boss, was a long-term and zealous fan of Vladimir Putin, even as the vices of Mr Putin’s rule became unignorable. That devotion did not help Mr Browder when, in 2005, one of his campaigns against corporate malfeasance in big Russian companies apparently irked someone important. Mr Browder was ejected, and his fund went with him. The broader benefit Hermitage brought to the Russian economy evidently mattered less than the threat his activism posed to the kleptocrats.
The ensuing attack on Hermitage eventually involved a huge fraud, by officials and police officers with the connivance of the courts, which used the wreckage of the firm to purloin a tax refund of $230m from the Russian exchequer. Magnitsky blew the whistle on this scam. He was arrested, jailed for a year in dreadful conditions, and in 2009 died of neglect and abuse. No one has been convicted as a result of his death; some of those allegedly involved in the fraud have been awarded medals. The message could not be clearer: notwithstanding a recent, selective push against corruption, in Mr Putin’s system stealing from the Russian people is often forgivable. Exposing such theft, on the other hand, can be suicidal.
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Russia: why Magnitsky matters, even to hard-headed investors
By curious coincidence, Russia is prosecuting a dead man on the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death. Just days after the commemoration of the Soviet leader, the trial is due to start on of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who died in a Moscow jail after accusing officials of fraud.
It perverts the law in a way which even the ruthless Georgian did not attempt. But Stalin would have appreciated the idea: like his show trials, it is a demonstration of power, not of justice. Many foreign investors will say this has nothing to do with them. They are wrong. It has.
Indeed, Russian prosecutors have established a direct connection with the investment world by naming as Magnitsky’s co-defendant his former client, Bill Browder, a UK-based American fund manager, who was once the biggest investor in Russia.
Browder’s troubles began after he criticised the management of Gazprom, the state-run gas monopoly. He was denied entry into Russia and put under investigation by interior ministry officials whom he and Magnitsky later accused of involvement in a $230m tax fraud.
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Russia: historic Magnitsky trial brings corruption and rule of law into spotlight
Russia is set to make history as the country’s first modern-day posthumous trial gets underway in Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court.
The case, involving deceased defendant Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pre-trial detention in a Moscow prison cell in 2009, has attracted worldwide media attention and brought the issue of corruption in Russia and problems with the country’s judicial and penitentiary systems all firmly under the international spotlight.
Another quirk of the trial will see the other defendant, Bill Browder, the founder of investment fund Hermitage Capital and Magnitsky’s client at the time of his arrest, examined in absentia, making him one of the few foreigners ever to stand trial in absentia in Russia.
After several months of delayed proceedings, a judge ruled on 4 March that the trial should go ahead despite the tense political backdrop between Russia and the US. Browder, who has been instrumental in leading an international campaign to investigate Magnitsky’s death and bring those guilty to account (Russian lawyer’s death in pre-trial detention – one year on), succeeded in bringing his campaign to the US last year and in December President Barack Obama signed into law the Sergei Magnitsky Law of Accountability Act. Russia reacted strongly to the news by enforcing a ban on Americans from adopting Russian citizens.
In spite of the huge amount of international attention that the case has attracted, a recent study by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) suggests that the Russian public are not as aware of the Magnitsky case as might be expected, notes Alexander Nadmitov, managing partner of Nadmitov Ivanov & Partners. ‘According to the poll, on 15–16 December 2012, 35 per cent of Russians knew nothing about Sergei Magnitsky,’ he says. ‘53 per cent had only heard of his surname and knew nothing else about Sergei Magnitsky, six per cent said that he died in the preliminary detention jail, two per cent said that he was a fighter against corruption who exposed financial fraud, one per cent of respondents had heard about him in the connection with the Magnitsky List, two per cent said that he was a lawyer and an advocate of a foreign company and one per cent said that he was a public politician.’
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Russia Put Dead Man on Trial to Avoid Looking Silly
On Monday 4 March a man called Sergei Magnitsky will go on trial in Moscow for fraud and tax evasion. If he’s found guilty, it’s not clear where Mr Magnitsky will serve his sentence, because he’s been dead since 2009.
Now this is what I call a courtroom drama. Will the defence put their client on the stand, and risk submitting him to cross-examination – presumably via ouija board – or alternatively, will they insist on his right to remain silent?
Will Magnitsky get bail, or will the authorities consider him a flight risk?
Meanwhile, the preliminary hearings for the inquest of Alexander Litvinenko were going on in London last week. He was the Russian former intelligence agent who died of polonium poisoning in London in 2006. The British government is moving to have a lot of the evidence heard in secret on grounds of national security, but also apparently for fear of annoying the Russians and making it more difficult for British companies to do business in Russia.
That’s the key thought to hold – the fear of of making it more difficult for British companies to do business in Russia.
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Russia plans new fraud charges against Hermitage’s Browder
The Kremlin is about to shoot itself in the foot again after it announced that it will open an investigation into Hermitage Capital Management’s Bill Browder for illegally trading in locally listed Gazprom shares during the naughties.
Browder has gone from being Russia’s biggest portfolio investor to spearheading a relentless campaign in exile in London against the Kremlin following the death of his associate, the accountant and auditor Sergei Magnitsky, while in custody in 2009.
The two sides hate each other, but this time the Russian government took the initiative after a senior Interior Ministry official told journalists on March 5 that companies belonging to Hermitage violated the so-called ring fence around Gazprom’s locally listed shares that banned foreigners from ownership. “The Interior Ministry’s Investigative Department is investigating a criminal case concerning the illegal purchase of Gazprom shares by legal entities that were majority owned by foreign nationals, notably William Brower,” said Mikhail Aleksandrov, head of the department’s section which investigates organized crime and corruption cases. Aleksandrov said that Russia lost some RUB3bn ($97m) from 29 transactions with Gazprom shares concluded by Browder’s firms.
Hermitage denied the allegations. “The ownership of Gazprom shares was completely legal,” the company said in a statement. “It was approved by the Russian authorities and the Russian Federal Securities Commission as well as Gazprom itself. If one took these accusations seriously, then every foreign investor in Russia should be under arrest.”
Browder claimed that the charges are politically motivated and as a result of his campaign to sully the Kremlin’s name and hold high officials to account for Magnitsky’s death. The US Congress passed in December a bill called the “Magnitsky Act”, which withholds visas and freezes financial assets of Russian officials thought to have been involved with human rights violations.
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Russia Opens Case Into Browder’s Hermitage Buying Gazprom Stock
Russia opened a criminal case into purchases of OAO Gazprom (GAZP) stock by Hermitage Capital Management Ltd. as prosecutors prepare for the trial of the fund’s founder and his dead legal adviser on tax-fraud charges.
Hermitage head William Browder is accused of illegally buying about 131.6 million Gazprom shares for about 2.1 billion rubles ($70 million) at a time when foreign ownership of the world’s biggest natural-gas producer was restricted, Mikhail Alexandrov, head of the Interior ministry’s investigative directorate for organized crime and corruption, said today on state television.
“Buying Gazprom shares through derivative structures was entirely legal,” Browder said by phone today, adding that neither he nor Hermitage has been notified of the case.
The accusations follow separate tax evasion charges brought against Browder, a British citizen whose London-based fund was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. Browder, who has been barred from entering Russia since 2005 as a security threat to the state, is being tried in absentia on the same accusations made against Sergei Magnitsky, a Hermitage tax and legal adviser who died in a Moscow prison in 2009. Magnitsky’s family has said the posthumous trial is “politically motivated.”
Browder attempted to use share ownership to exert influence on the company, Alexandrov said. He estimated the damage to the government at no less than 3 billion rubles.
Buying and trading shares of Gazprom by foreigners was restricted before the state raised its ownership in the gas producer to more than 50 percent in 2005. Russia had banned foreigners from holding more than 20 percent of the stock and restricted them to American depositary receipts.
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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
