Preliminary hearings of Browder and Magnitsky tax case due at Tverskoy court
Moscow’s Tverskoy district court on Monday will have preliminary hearings of the tax-evasion case of the head of Hermitage Capital investment fund William Browder and the late lawyer of the fund Sergei Magnitsky.
The sides will file their motions after which the date of hearing of the merits of the case will be set. The interests of the sides will be represented by appointed attorneys Nikolai Gerasimov and Kirill Goncharov. They were given time until March 4 to examine the findings of the case.
The lawyer of Magnitsky mother, Natalia Magnitskaya, before the beginning of the Feb. 18 session read out for the press her message to the judge of Tverskoy court saying that she finds the trial illegal and the relaunching of criminal persecution after her son’s death without a corresponding application from the family cynical.
“I am not authorizing anyone to represent the interests of my son in Tverskoy court. The person who assumed this duty will be acting contrary to his interests,х” the statement says.
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Russian mob money ‘bolsters Cyprus’
YOU can buy a mink coat or rent a Ferrari at the click of a finger. Many of the street signs are in Russian and so are some of the radio stations. Welcome to “Limassolgrad”, as the locals have taken to calling their town on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
It may be the southernmost town in the EU, but Limassol’s popularity among Russians puts it high on the agenda for finance ministers meeting in Brussels tomorrow to work out how to prop up Cyprus’s rickety banking system with the latest eurozone bailout.
With only 1m inhabitants, tiny Cyprus poses a giant dilemma for the overlords of the EU: Russian mobsters are believed to have deposited so much money in its banks that suspected money launderers might become big beneficiaries of the bailout.
Yet asking depositors to carry some of the burden, an idea being promoted by the Germans and Finns, could trigger a run on the banks and rekindle the sovereign debt crisis by undermining trust in the euro.
Underwriting a suspected money-laundering hub could prove just as disastrous for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. The last thing she needs is accusations of rescuing the Russian mob as she prepares her campaign for re-election later this year.
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Russia: The Logic Of Putting A Corpse On Trial
In a case compared to the show trials of the Stalin era, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is being tried, despite dying in November 2009.
The posthumous prosecution of Sergei Magnitsky must make sense to someone senior here – the will of the Russian courts tends not to stray far from that of those in power.
The official narrative is that Mr Magnitsky was being investigated for tax fraud at the time of his death, death is not a bar to prosecution in Russia, and in the interests of justice the case should continue.
To the rest of the world it looks like they are putting a corpse on trial.
This case perhaps perfectly illustrates the apparent disconnect in thinking between those inside the Kremlin and the international community.
To understand the logic on the Russian side, you need to understand the background.
Mr Magnitsky was a Moscow lawyer hired to work on the account of British-based investment fund Hermitage Capital.
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‘Farcical and sinister’ trial of lawyer in tax fraud case who died in prison
A macabre new chapter in legal history will begin in Moscow today when the Russian authorities put a dead man on trial for tax evasion.
Sergei Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya, said that the proceedings were immoral, illegal and designed to turn her son, a lawyer and anti-corruption whistleblower who died in prison three years ago, into a criminal.
Magnitsky’s co-accused, Bill Browder, a US-born British investor who was once one of the most vocal Western cheerleaders for the Putin Administration, said last night that the case would “bring Russia to an entirely new level of depravity; even during the worst moments of Stalin’s purges they never prosecuted dead people”.
Amnesty International has called the hearing — in a closed Moscow courtroom — “farcical but also deeply sinister”. According to Russian law, a criminal case can be restarted after a defendant’s death but usually only if the deceased’s relations are seeking his or her rehabilitation. Natalya Magnitskaya has written repeatedly to the authorities to say that neither she nor any of her son’s relations want the process to go ahead.
Last week Magnitsky’s brother-in-law was summoned for questioning by the Interior Ministry and then given a gag order. A scheduled pre-trial hearing in January was twice postponed because the family refused to recognise the case. The State has had to find its own defence lawyers as well as a prosecution team.
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Magnitsky: Posthumous Trial To Go Ahead
Russia pushes ahead with the posthumous prosecution of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a prison cell in 2009.
When the case of the state vs Sergei Magnitsky is called in a Moscow courtroom later, the defendant will not be in the dock – he has been dead for more than three years.
In a case that has been compared to the show trials of Stalin, Russia is pressing ahead with the posthumous prosecution of a whistle-blowing lawyer.
At the time of his death Mr Magnitsky was investigating what he believed was a massive tax fraud – worth around £150m – targeting both the British-based investment fund he was working for and the Russian state.
He went public with his evidence in October 2008, naming several senior police and tax officials, but the next month he was arrested.
The 37-year-old was held without trial for almost a year, during which time he became seriously ill – he lost 40lb and was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones – but despite repeated written requests he was denied medical treatment.
Mr Magnitsky said he felt he was being physically and psychologically pressured to withdraw his testimony, but he refused – instead he documented the conditions he was being held, describing raw sewage overflowing from the toilet in one cell and the sound of rats running along the corridors at night.
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Hearing resumes against dead Russian lawyer
Moscow on Monday resumes a controversial hearing against a dead person: Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive tax evasion schemes, was arrested and died in prison, causing great concern over human rights in the West.
In principle, such a trial should not exist. “It’s impossible,” Russian premier Dmitri Medvedev said in an interview with CNN at the end of January this year. The Russian penal code, he added, does not allow for the prosecution of people after their death. According to an early 2012 decision by the Russian constitutional court, an exception is only possible in the event of posthumous rehabilitation.
Yet it does not appear to be a case of rehabilitation when on Monday (04.03.2013) a preliminary hearing in the case of Sergey Magnitsky continues. Critics claim that his case has been casting a dark shadow over the Russian judiciary system for years.
The deceased’s mother has described the court proceedings as “cynical” and “illegal.” Human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement voicing concern over “a dangerous precedent that could lead to a deterioration on the human rights situation in Russia.”
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Russia opens macabre show trial
Russian authorities, in a legal twist bizarre even by their standards, are pushing ahead with the trial of anti-corruption whistle blower Sergei Magnitsky posthumously for alleged ”tax evasion”.
The prosecution of a dead man – a first for Russia, something that not even Joseph Stalin did – promises to be as shocking and puzzling from the Western perspective as last year’s inquisition of the punk rockers of Pussy Riot.
The trial, scheduled to begin on Monday in Moscow, will feature two empty chairs facing the judge, one for the dead lawyer and one for his former client, London-based investor William Browder, who will be tried on the same charges of ”tax evasion” in absentia.
The Kremlin, operating from its own logic, needs to discredit these two men in order to shore up its position, both domestically and internationally, political analysts and lawyers say.
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Mr Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest investor in Russia until the fund manager started exposing massive corruption, irritating the Russians so badly that they declared him a ”threat to national security” and expelled him in 2005. Mr Browder wound up his business in Russia and evacuated his staff.
”I didn’t want to end up like Khodorkovsky [Mikhail, the jailed billionaire oil tycoon],” he said. ”I thought that was the end of it but it turned out to be the beginning of the worst possible nightmare.”
He said that after he left Russia, his offices were raided and seized documents were used to fraudulently re-register some of his companies.
He hired Magnitsky to investigate. The lawyer discovered that the scammers, unable to steal assets because they had already been liquidated, applied instead for a refund on $US230 million of taxes Hermitage Capital had paid.
”They didn’t steal from us but from the Russian state,” Mr Browder said.
”It was the largest tax refund in Russian history. It was approved in one day, on Christmas Eve 2007. It could only have been done with the complicity of senior officials.”
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Putin’s government clings to strategy of the Big Lie
A meteor streaked across the Russian sky and exploded over a populated area with the force of a nuclear bomb last month, injuring hundreds of people and casting the light on the world’s largest country that has failed to put anti-Americanism in the rearview mirror despite more than two decades of post-Soviet development.
Once dashboard-camera video footage of the phenomenon spread across the Internet, Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the founder and leader of Russia’s ultra-nationalist LDPR party and a former vice chairman of the lower house of the country’s legislature — announced that it was not a meteor falling but a secret U.S. weapon being tested.
A showman of Russian politics, Mr. Zhirinovsky is notorious for making outrageous public pronouncements aimed at pleasing Russian President Vladimir Putin. The latter uses Mr. Zhirinovsky as a scare for those in the Russian middle class who are unhappy with the country’s systemic corruption and his autocratic regime that perpetuates it.
Unfortunately, many uneducated Russians believe Mr. Zhirinovsky and support him and Mr. Putin, bringing to mind a propaganda technique that Adolf Hitler termed the Big Lie — a lie so preposterous that people believe it to be the truth because they can’t imagine anybody making it up. According to opinion polls, close to half the Russians do not believe the United States is a friendly country.
Until recently it was not that important for us in the U.S. because the livelihood of the Russian elite depended in part on the goodwill of the West, and its leader, the United States.
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Family of Sergei Magntisky accuse Russian embassy in London of ‘deliberately disseminating false information’
The mother and the widow of Sergei Magntisky, a whistle-blower who died in a Moscow prison cell after months of torture, have accused the Russian embassy in London of “deliberately disseminating false information” by claiming his family wanted his posthumous trial.
The mother and the widow of Sergei Magntisky, a whistle-blower who died in a Moscow prison cell after months of torture, have accused the Russian embassy in London of “deliberately disseminating false information” by claiming his family wanted his posthumous trial.
Mr Magntisky died three years ago after exposing a massive tax fraud carried out by elements of the Russian Interior Ministry and underground criminal networks. But instead of going after the perpetrators of the fraud, Russian prosecutors have taken the unprecedented step of launching a posthumous prosecution of Mr Magnitsky, blaming him for carrying out the scam he uncovered.
After a series of reports in the British press following the latest court hearing in Moscow earlier this month, the Russian Embassy in London put out a statement stating that the trial was going ahead because Mr Magnitksy’s family “insisted on his posthumous rehabilitation”. The statement added: “According to the information available, this is precisely what the mother of Sergei Magnitsky and his advocates insist on.”
But that claim has been angrily denied in a letter to the embassy by Natalia Magnitskaya and his widow Natalia Zharikova which has been seen by The Independent.
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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
