A Bizarre Trial Stirs Western Concerns About Russia
The government of Russia will underscore its place as one of the world’s most bizarre when it begins Monday the trial of Sergei Magnitsky.
It is not bizarre by Russian standards that Mr. Magnitsky was an attorney imprisoned essentially for defending his client, American investor Bill Browder.
It is not even the most bizarre part of the case that the 37-year-old Magnitsky was allegedly tortured in prison and Russia appears to know who did it and has refused to prosecute. This has led the U.S. to pass a law banning travel of corrupt Russian officials to America and a strange response from Russia banning U.S. adoptions of Russian babies.
What is truly bizarre about the trial is that Mr. Magnitsky is dead, and has been dead since 2009, the result of wounds sustained in prison, human rights groups say. The trial would be the first posthumous trial in the history of Russia — there is no record of even one of the famous Stalin show trials being prosecuted against a dead man.
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William Browder of Hemitage Capital Management – Hub Culture Interview
William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, speaks with Hub Culture Executive Editor Edie Lush at the Hub Culture Davos Pavilion during the 2013 World Economic Forum.
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Libel case puts fraud in the public forum
The London court case brought by Pavel Karpov is an interesting development, because if the case comes in front of a judge it would be likely to throw up details that officials fingered for their alleged involvement in the fraud would perhaps prefer to keep quiet.
In Russia, the approach from the authorities over the Magnitsky case has been twofold. Firstly, there has been no real investigation into the claims put forward by Bill Browder and Hermitage Capital about the massive fraud that was perpetrated. The second approach has been to turn the tables and suggest that Mr Magnitksy and Mr Browder are the real criminals.
Just this week Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking in Davos, said that Hermitage’s claims were the “politicised fiction of certain people”. Mr Magnitsky, he said, was “not a truth seeker” but “a corporate lawyer or an accountant who defended the interests of the people who hired him.”
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Exclusive: Briton who took on Sergei Magnitsky network faces libel case in UK
A former Moscow police officer is suing a British businessman who exposed how a network of corrupt officials and shadowy criminal underworld figures were behind the largest tax fraud in Russian history.
Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Karpov has launched libel and defamation proceedings in the High Court against William Browder, a millionaire hedge-fund magnate who has campaigned against corruption within the Russian government after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was tortured and died in police custody.
The 35-year-old officer, who was until recently a Moscow and Interior Ministry investigator, is one of more than 60 Russian officials who Mr Browder has publicly accused of being behind a scam that led to the theft of $230million from the Russian tax payer. Mr Browder has also accused him of being among a group of police officers who arranged for the arrest and torture of Mr Magnitsky when he uncovered the scam and went public with his allegations.
If the case ends up in the High Court, it will shed a spotlight on a scandal that has become a source of major international embarrassment to the Kremlin because of the mounting evidence that prominent officials within the Interior Ministry, tax offices and the judiciary aided the scam.
Mr Karpov insists he had nothing to do with the fraud or the subsequent cover up – or the arrest, torture and death of Mr M. In court documents obtained by The Independent Lawyers from Olswang, the major London law-firm which represents the former detective, say the allegations made by Mr Browder have caused “serious hurt, embarrassment and distress.”
They insist that while Mr Browder’s quest to pursue those who killed Mr Magnitsky might be legitimate, his campaign has wrongfully made false and highly defamatory claims against their client including that he is complicit in fraud, torture, kidnapping and murder.
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Kafkaesque trial denies justice even after death
The trial of a Russian lawyer who blew the whistle on a high-level corruption scandal even though he is dead as a result of mistreatment while in detention is an attempt to deflect attention from those who committed the crimes he exposed, Amnesty International said on the eve of the preliminary hearing scheduled for 28 January in a Moscow court.
Sergei Magnitsky – who died on 16 November 2009 – was charged with the very crimes he exposed triggering a sequence of events that lead to his premature death.
“The Russian authorities’ intention to proceed with the criminal prosecution of Sergei Magnitsky violates his fundamental rights even in death, in particular the right to defend himself in person,” said John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director.
“The trial of a deceased person and the forcible involvement of his relatives is a dangerous precedent that would open a whole new chapter in Russia’s worsening human rights record.
“The legal grounds for the posthumous criminal prosecution against Sergei Magnitski to say the least are dubious and the authorities must halt this travesty.”
The criminal proceedings against Magnitsky were closed 13 days after his death on 29 Nov 2009 as required by the existing law.
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Resetting the U.S.-Russian Reset
The following is a transcript of an interview with Dmitry Peskov, deputy chief of staff and press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, conducted by Paul Saunders, associate publisher of The National Interest and executive director of the Center for the National Interest, Washington, D.C. The interview was conducted Wednesday morning, January 23, 2013.
Paul Saunders: Thank you very much for taking time to talk to us. The “reset” in the U.S.-Russia relationship was one of the first foreign policy initiatives during President Obama’s first term. We heard recently that senior State Department officials have said that the word “reset” should be retired because the relationship has moved in a new direction and it’s no longer necessary to have a reset. How do you see the future of the reset after President Obama’s reelection?
Dmitry Peskov: Well, as a matter of fact Russian Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov would say that is a very popular idea here in Moscow [to retire the word “reset”] and that it is a process that cannot be endless. And if the reset lasts for too long, that means to make something different, a different operation to get the process going. So let’s hope together that this is not the case. Well, unfortunately the flow of our bilateral relationship, the flow of some steps from Washington, it shows a kind of an attitude that unfortunately cannot be treated in Moscow as a “reset” mood. So that’s why we are very sorry because we are looking forward to having a working relationship of close partnership with the United States, developing a mutual responsibility for global security, for global strategic security, for regional security and solving all the issues in that connection and originally by diplomatic and peaceful methods, taking into account each other’s relationship, but definitely it takes two to tango. I mean we cannot build a bilateral relationship of friendship and partnership on our own. Unfortunately we witnessed some steps that in no way can be treated as a “reset” attitude.
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Medvedev Courts Davos Skeptics With Better-Than-China Pitch
Russia has a $10 billion sales pitch for investors at this year’s World Economic Forum: give us your money and we’ll worry about corruption for you.
That was the line from First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week and that’s what Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will try to convince skeptical investors of tomorrow with his keynote address at the conference in Davos, Switzerland, the third by a Russian leader in five years.
Russia plans to raise a record $10 billion from asset sales this year as it seeks to stem capital flight and reverse the state’s creeping hold over the economy, Shuvalov said. The government failed to reach a similar goal last year, when it retained its ranking as the most corrupt country in the Group of 20, an organization it leads this year.
“Russia, regardless of what people are saying, is a place that people can invest, can earn,” Shuvalov said on a Jan. 18 train ride to Moscow from Kaluga, a region that has attracted investment from companies including Volkswagen AG (VOW) and AstraZeneca Plc. (AZN) “If you talk with investors, they say they invest maybe less than in China, but lose less than in China. They say people don’t know Russia.”
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MEP who joined Magnitsky group hopes EU draws Russian “black list”
MEP Leonidas Donskis has joined an interparliamentary group, members of which maintain they seek justice for lawyer Sergey Magnitsky who died in a Russian prison in 2009 after revealing a financial fraud scheme of Russian authorities.
Donskis, the first Lithuanian representative in the group, told BNS he expected the European Union (EU) to have enough courage to respond to the case to follow the example set by the United States’ to draw a “black list” of Russian officials.
“The Magnitsky case has bared a sensitive problem one cannot remain indifferent to. We’re talking about a lawyer who chose to stand up to corruption, unveiled horrific facts of corruption and sacrificed his life, which is already obvious,” Donskis told BNS on Wednesday.
He said his joining the group was a demonstration of the position of the European Parliament (EP) and Lithuania.
Set up in Canada in December, the group now includes 16 politicians from 12 countries: Canada, Estonia, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden.
Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison in November of 2009. Russian authorities had charged him with tax evasion, however, his colleagues maintain that the case was developed in revenge for his testimony, which said that employees of law-enforcement institutions could be connected with the embezzlement scheme he had exposed.
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Lithuania freezes bank accounts related to Magnitsky case
The Lithuanian authorities have frozen several bank accounts as part of the case of embezzled budget funds, exposed by Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison in 2009.
Prior to his death in a Moscow pre-trial detention center, the Hermitage Capital lawyer claimed that Russian tax officials had stolen $230 million from the company and laundered the funds through various European banks. Russia has refuted the accusations on numerous occasions.
Last summer, Hermitage Capital sent requests to the prosecutor’s offices of six countries to freeze accounts held at banks which are thought to have transferred the embezzled funds in 2008. Hermitage Capital believes that banks in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Austria, Finland and Cyprus were involved. The Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Office launched a pretrial investigation the day after receiving Hermitage Capital’s emailed request.
“We have frozen the accounts of all the offshore companies which made transactions through Ukio Bankas. This was done on September 28, when the case was transferred to us from the Prosecutor General’s Office, as the bank is headquartered on our city. The point at issue is a relatively small sum of up to $100,000,” Kaunas Prosecutor Donatas Puzinas told RIA Novosti on Tuesday. He said there are no suspects in the case and that all accounts were managed from Russia and Ukraine, where they were opened at local branches of Ukio Bankas. So far, no Lithuanian nationals are involved in the case.
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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
