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 and AstraZeneca Plc. “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.”
Putin Critique
Medvedev used his Davos speech in 2011 to highlight the “new opportunities” for foreigners “for doing business with success” in Russia. The message was more upbeat than the one then-premier Vladimir Putin delivered in 2009, in which he said the global crisis had shown the dangers of rampant greed in the U.S.-dominated global financial system.
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Lithuanian prosecutors open investigation into multi-million dollar tax fraud by Russian organised crime group
Prosecutors in Lithuania have opened an investigation into a multi-million dollar tax fraud carried out by a Russian organised crime group which used the Baltic nation’s banks to launder some of their money.
Lithuania is now the fourth European nation to investigate how millions were stolen from Russian tax-payers in a highly complex scam that involved criminal networks aided by corrupt members of the Russian state and judiciary. Switzerland, Latvia and Cyprus have also begun similar investigations.
The money trail links back to the so-called “Magnitsky case”, a $230 million tax fraud that has become a major source of international embarrassment for the Kremlin because of mounting evidence that prominent officials within the Interior Ministry, tax offices and the judiciary aided the scam.
Sergei Magnitsky, the Moscow based lawyer who uncovered the fraud at the behest of a British hedge fund, died in prison in November 2009 nine months after he was arrested by the same officials he had accused of being behind the heist.
The scandal has led to increasing friction between Russia and the West with the United States recently approving legislation banning a number of officials linked to the scam from entering America or holding assets there. Moscow was infuriated by the moves and responded with a ban on American couples adopting Russian babies.
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Anti-Putin jibe wins applause at Russian awards ceremony
A prominent Russian cartoonist won loud applause at a usually politics-free awards ceremony when he suggested President Vladimir Putin shared responsibility for the death of an anti-corruption campaigner in a Moscow jail.
Putin’s opponents frequently lambast him during protests and on the Internet, but criticism of the president is rare at mainstream cultural events and in most broadcast media.
Cartoonist Yuri Norshteyn broke that taboo when he took the stage on Saturday and criticized Putin over the jailed lawyer’s death in 2009 that prompted the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions on Russian officials.
Commenting on a previous speaker who had said Russia did not have enough doctors, Norshteyn said: “Immediately, I linked this … with when Putin said Magnitsky died of heart failure.”
“I think he died of a failure of heart on Putin’s part and on the part of the prison boss,” he said.
The comment was a reference to Putin’s statement, at a news conference in December, that Magnitsky had “died not from torture, nobody tortured him, but from a heart attack.” The Kremlin’s own human rights council has said he was probably beaten to death.
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Keeping the pressure on Putin – Moscow is turning into a bully again
Alex Goldfarb had an idea.
The veteran Russian dissident and longtime New York resident was standing in Union Square when it came to him.
He was there a week ago for an anti-Kremlin rally to protest Russia’s new law banning American adoptions of Russian orphans. It’s an especially vindictive measure that is solely intended to serve as political revenge for recent U.S. legislation that blacklists human rights-abusing Russian officials. Goldfarb, however, was thinking beyond a day’s worth of street theater.
“We should start a campaign to get Mayor Bloomberg to name a street in New York after Pussy Riot,” he said, referring to the feminist punk band made world famous after three of its members were arrested and subjected to a ridiculous show trial for performing a “punk prayer” denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral.
Two of the members of Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, are serving out their two-year sentences in a labor camp. One of the women, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released in October.
In many ways, that trio has become the face of the protests against Putin’s ineradicable grip on the Kremlin. The three young women turned into an unlikely cause célèbre, with the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney showing their support.
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Putin hounds Russian whistleblower in his grave
THE mother of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in custody after accusing officials of embezzling £140m, has condemned a decision to put her late son on trial as illegal and morally reprehensible.
In Russia’s first posthumous prosecution of its kind, a court is to try Magnitsky on tax evasion charges more than three years after he died in a Moscow prison, where he was beaten and denied medical help.
“Maybe they’re planning on bringing the sentence to my son’s grave. There’s no limit to these people’s cynicism,” said Natalia Magnitskaya. “To put a dead man on trial is not only shocking beyond words; it’s also a travesty of justice. These people have no conscience. I’ll be boycotting this trial and urge all Russian lawyers to do the same. It’s perverse.”
Magnitsky died in prison in November 2009 while awaiting trial on tax evasion charges. His family and friends say the charges are trumped up and were brought as revenge after he reported a gang of corrupt officials and criminals to the police. The case was closed when he died.
Under Russian law, proceedings against a deceased person can be resumed only at the request of the defendant’s family to clear their name. But Magnitsky’s family strongly opposed reopening the case in protest at Russia’s notoriously biased and politicised judicial system.
“After Sergei’s death the case was reopened and sent to trial, not at our request but by prosecutors,” said Magnitskaya, 61, who has ignored several court summonses. “It’s blatantly illegal.
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A Russian Lawyer’s Death Triggers a Global Money Hunt
In 2009, a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow jail after uncovering the biggest known tax fraud in Russian history—a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case has touched off a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of having a role in Magnitsky’s death and Moscow retaliating on Dec. 28 by barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans.
Now about that $230 million. Russian authorities said it couldn’t be found because essential records were destroyed in a truck crash. A sawmill worker and a convicted burglar pleaded guilty to masterminding the heist, which involved filing bogus tax-refund claims. Both got five-year sentences.
Magnitsky’s associates, though, keep looking for the cash. An investigation spearheaded by his former client, Hermitage Capital Management, a London-based investment fund, has traced $134 million through bank accounts and shell companies in at least 17 countries. Banking records obtained by Hermitage and reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that millions wound up in offshore accounts and real estate owned by Russian officials, their relatives, and the former owner of a Russian bank. Authorities in four of these countries confirm that they have opened money-laundering investigations.
In the Magnitsky case, Hermitage accuses government officials of stealing from taxpayers, and the Kremlin has made no apparent effort to recover the money. “That’s the most awful thing—it is our money,” says Roman Anin, a reporter at the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta who has worked with Hermitage on its investigation. Russia’s Interior Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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Russia’s Anti-Corruption Moves Draw Renewed Skepticism
Is Russia finally getting serious about corruption?
Russia’s Interior Ministry has taken the rare step of spearheading a high-profile international investigation, charging a former member of the board of directors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development with seeking a bribe from a company that wanted a loan.
Yelena Kotova, who sat on EBRD board from 2005 to the end of 2010 as a representative of Russia, Belarus and Tajikistan, denies the allegations.
Coming after the introduction of higher fines for bribery, more investigations, official jawboning on the issue and a higher ranking in the latest Transparency International data, does this signify the turning of a page?
It does not, according to two attorneys who work with companies in Russia.
“It’s good that the Russians are investigating corruption,” said Danforth Newcomb at Shearman & Sterling, but he said he hasn’t detected any significant improvement in the level of corruption there.
Likewise, Daniel Rothstein from a New York law firm with the same name, said his view, partly based on conversations with professional colleagues in Russia, is to “doubt there is a trend toward cleaning up private or public corruption.”
Both lawyers point out corruption investigations in Russia are often used for settling scores. “Unless you’re inside the case, it’s impossible to know the significance of any corruption investigation in Russia,” said Rothstein.
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Do EU sanctions work?
The European Union has increased its use of sanctions against “outlaw countries” in the last few years. But one analyst argues that it has failed to police them – as a result, the efficacy of sanctions remains unclear.
For an international power often dismissed as too soft, the European Union is becoming increasingly fond of using sanctions to coerce other countries to its will. But a new paper by Konstanty Gebert, of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), accuses the EU of a “wilful blindness” in the way that sanctions are imposed, which has led to inconsistent successes and protracted deadlocks.
As of June 2012, the EU had sanctions in place against 26 countries around the world. And there has been a sharp increase in the last three years – from 22 decisions in 2010 to 69 a year later. Most of these have been focused on “outlaw” countries like Syria and Iran, but the EU has also shown that it is more willing to spread these diplomatic and economic weapons around – imposing them on 16 different nations in 2002, but to 28 in 2011.
The term “sanctions” can of course refer to a range of measures, some political, others economic. Some aimed at governments, others at individuals within those governments, and others still at private individuals. Often it comes down to freezing financial assets, or blocking trade in certain industries.
And the aim of sanctions can be equally wide-ranging – they can either be punishment for severe human rights violations or democratic backsliding, or deterrents to prevent countries from carrying out actions that could threaten European security.
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Magnitsky’s mother asks lawyers to stay away from son’s trial
Sergei Magnitsky’s mother asked Moscow lawyers not to participate in the posthumous trial of her son, which she thinks is illegal.
Natalya Magnitskaya, the mother of murdered Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, wrote a letter to President of Moscow’s Chamber of Lawyers Genry Reznik, and asked all Moscow lawyers not to participate in the trial over her son, who died in a pre-trial detention center in 2009, RBC Daily reported.
Preliminary hearings have been set for January 28. On December 26, Sergei Magnitsky’s family lawyers and William Browder’s Hermitage Capital managers quit the process calling it a “political punishment by Russian authorities.”
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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
