Kadyrov Faces Sanctions Under Magnitsky Act
One month after U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, it is clear that Russo-American relations have entered a difficult period.
But the dispute over Moscow’s adoption ban might mark only the beginning of the difficulties Obama is facing with the Kremlin in his second term, which officially starts with Monday’s inauguration ceremony.
The Magnitsky Law states that no later than 120 days after its Dec. 14 signing, the president must submit to Congress the names of those facing sanctions. That list is likely to contain Ramzan Kadyrov, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The Chechen leader “is on the list of Russian officials to be sanctioned, as [the commission] recommended,” the organization said in a report published on its website earlier this month.
The report argues that Kadyrov “condones or oversees” mass human rights violations and instituted a repressive state based on his religious views. “At least nine women have been killed for ‘immodest behavior’ since 2008, with Kadyrov praising the murders, and the killers did not stand trial,” it said.
Kadyrov has long been accused of involvement in murders, torture and disappearances of political opponents and human rights activists both in the country and abroad. He denies wrongdoing, and his spokesman, Alvi Karimov, reiterated Tuesday that the report’s accusations were baseless.
Read More →
Europe’s Mounting Reluctance to Bail Out Cyprus
There is growing resistance in Europe to the planned aid program for Cyprus, because it would also benefit illegal Russian money parked in bank accounts in Cyprus. The government in Nicosia is willing to make concessions, but Brussels is demanding more reforms.
It was a long way to go to deliver a short message. German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew almost four hours last Friday to Cyprus, where she spent a few minutes campaigning for the conservative presidential candidate in the February 17 election, Nikos Anastasiades. Speaking in the city of Limassol, Merkel praised Anastasiades, saying that she had known him for a long time and valued his openness to change, and that the country urgently needed “structural reforms.”
After smiling for the cameras, Merkel returned to wintry Berlin.
Her destination in the eastern Mediterranean has a smaller population than the little German state of Saarland, but that hasn’t stopped it becoming one of the biggest trouble spots in global politics at the moment. The question of whether the government in Nicosia should be allowed to bolster its ailing banks with more than €17 billion ($22.7 billion) from Europe’s bailout funds is dividing the euro zone, causing uncertainty in international markets and adding to the woes of the coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, made up of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP). Now that the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party have announced their opposition to the plan, Merkel’s coalition could for the first time fail to muster a parliamentary majority on an important decision relating to the euro crisis.
Read More →
Kremlin’s Chief Attack Dog Vacations in US
In just one year, Alexander Sidyakin, a member of the Duma from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, went from little-known functionary to the regime’s most prominent attack dog on the Russian pro-democracy movement. He has used the parliamentary rostrum to accuse Putin’s opponents of being a “fifth column” and “instigators of mass unrest,” and to stomp on a white ribbon, the symbol of the pro-democracy protests, which he called “a symbol of treason, a color of an exported revolution, which foreign political technologists are trying to impose on us.” He has accused Russian NGOs that advocate for human rights and democratic elections of “being, in one way or another, under the [US] State Department,” because “someone is trying to poke their snotty nose in our affairs.” He has defended the police crackdown on anti-Putin demonstrators in Moscow last May, because, as he put it, “if we allow [the protesters] to dictate their own terms, we will end up with an ‘Arab Spring.’”
Sidyakin’s words were backed up by action: he was the author of two of the most notorious repressive laws signed by Putin last year: the law on public rallies, which raised the maximum fines for “violations” to 300,000 rubles ($9,900—ten times Russia’s average monthly salary), and the law on nongovernmental organizations, which forced Russian NGOs that receive funding from abroad to tag themselves as “foreign agents.” According to Sidyakin, the groups targeted by his law will likely include the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, the poll-monitoring Golos Association, and Memorial Society—one of Russia’s most respected human rights organizations, founded by Andrei Sakharov. As for the new law on rallies (which, as he boasted, he “wrote personally”), the lawmaker boldly declared that “the right to protest is not absolute.”
Read More →
Russian orphans pay price for Putin’s new cold war
Many Russians are celebrating New Year’s Eve today. By the Julian calendar — still recognized by the Orthodox Church — it falls on Jan. 13.
Not celebrating are Russian orphans, particularly those with life-threatening illnesses. Many of them will die this year from lack of adequate care after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill that bans U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
There are at least 740,000 orphaned or abandoned children in Russia, by U.N. estimates. Many of them die of illness or commit suicide, news of which sometimes trickles even into the Kremlin-controlled media. About 1 percent of those children get adopted annually. About half of the adopted children used to go to foreign homes, mostly American.
Enter Mr. Putin, who signed the bill Jan. 1 — as a New Year gift to Russia’s corrupt bureaucracy.
Before he did that, he announced at a press conference in Moscow that the parliament had passed the ban in response to recent U.S. legislation — the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 it considers anti-Russian.
Named after a Russian lawyer who exposed a $230 million embezzlement by the Russian establishment and subsequently died in custody, it prohibits corrupt bureaucrats from getting U.S. visas and freezes their U.S. accounts.
Read More →
Herod’s law
STANDING outside the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, appealed to his compatriots with a traditional new year’s greeting, urging them to be more “charitable”, “sensitive” and “caring for those in need”.
Sincerity has never been Mr Putin’s forte, but this time his words risked being seen as a mockery of the virtues he preached. Only three days earlier, on December 28th, he signed a law that bans Russian orphans from being adopted by American families, depriving some of his most vulnerable citizens of their chance for a better life. The fact that Mr Putin signed it on the day marked by many Christian churches as the Massacre of the Innocents was a coincidence, but it added to the dark symbolism of the law, which has promptly been dubbed as “Herod’s law” and “cannibalistic”.
Formally, the ban is part of the Kremlin’s response to America’s Magnitsky Act, passed by Congress in 2012, which blacklists Russian officials involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, and, more broadly, those accused of rights abuses. Magnitsky, who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a London-based investment fund, died in pre-trial detention three years ago, after exposing a $230m tax fraud by Russian police and tax officials. His death became a symbol of corruption and impunity.
Instead of investigating the crime exposed by Magnitsky and going after those who drove him to death, the Kremlin accused America of meddling in its domestic affairs and threatened retaliation. In fact its anti-Magnitsky law is aimed not so much at America as it is against its own citizens.
Read More →
Swiss prosecutors freeze local bank accounts in quest for Magnitsky funds
Swiss federal prosecutors have imposed freezes against local bank accounts in the amount of millions of francs as part of an investigation into the money laundering case connected with Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death, Swiss media outlets reported Wednesday.
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 Switzerland. Russia has refuted the accusations on numerous occasions.
Read More →
Bill Browder: The Man Behind Russia’s Adoption Ban
Last month, when Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, it was widely seen as the latest indication that U.S.-Russian relations were spiraling downward. So who caused this turn of events? The obvious political figures certainly played their roles. But perhaps no one was more central to the unfolding drama than a businessman turned unlikely human-rights crusader named Bill Browder.
Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, had been general secretary of the American Communist Party, but his grandson spent most of his career in a very different pursuit: making money. Bill graduated from Stanford Business School the same year the Berlin Wall fell. “My grandfather was the biggest communist in America,” Browder recalls thinking at the time. “Now that the Berlin Wall has come down, I am going to be the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.”
In 1996 Browder moved to Moscow and founded the Hermitage Fund, investing fortunes from America in newly privatized Russian companies like Gazprom. (Two years later he renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Britain.) At its peak, Hermitage was worth $4.5 billion. But Browder earned a reputation in this period as a “shareholder activist,” launching his own investigations into the shady dealings of Gazprom and other Russian companies—and angering the Kremlin in the process. He was expelled from Russia in 2005 and declared a threat to national security.
Read More →
Whatever happened to the Magnitsky money?
Efforts to track down hundreds of millions of stolen dollars from one of Russia’s loudest scandals suggest it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death in a Moscow prison in 2009 has come to symbolize the confluence of corruption, repression and human rights abuse that’s flowered under President Vladimir Putin. His imprisonment and torture, detailed in a documentary film and many journalistic accounts, have brought the Kremlin condemnation from around the world.
But one key part of the scandal remains unsolved: What happened to the $230 million Magnitsky claimed bureaucrats had embezzled?
Now a recent investigation by a media NGO called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, together with Barron’s and the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, has gathered documentary evidence apparently tracing some of the stolen money to two well-connected businessmen.
A workaholic lawyer hired by the London-based fund Hermitage Capital Management to track down money stolen in its name, Magnitsky was jailed by same police he had accused of taking part in Russia’s largest tax fraud.
He died a year later at age 37, alone and in a pool of his own urine after being beaten by prison guards, allegedly to make him recant his accusations. He had been refused medical aid for the pancreatitis he developed in prison.
Read More →
Are our lawyers being used by the Kremlin kleptocracy?
Bill Browder’s successful campaign against the Russian authorities who stole his company and contributed to his lawyer’s death has landed him in an English libel court.
One of the main aims of Russian foreign policy is to stop Bill Browder. The pugnacious financier has developed a devastating way of parting Putin’s gangsters from their money. I cannot tell you how much they hate him for it.
At the instigation of Browder’s researchers in London, parliaments are passing “Magnitsky laws”, named after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after revealing how criminals had taken $230m (£143m) from the Russian taxpayer. The US, Britain and other EU countries are considering or have already implemented a ban on entry to, and the freezing of the assets of those responsible for his detention and death, those who benefited from the conspiracy Magnitsky uncovered.
The Kremlin crime gang fears revolution. Maybe there will be a democratic uprising. Maybe a new bunch of thieves will replace the old bunch of thieves. In either event, they would want to flee abroad and enjoy their loot. Now, thanks to a novel human rights campaign, they may not be able to enjoy uncontested possession of stolen goods.
What would you do in their position? Ideally, you would want outwardly respectable people and institutions to discredit the campaign against you; to make it seem as if you were the victim of unwarranted smears. The willingness of the English law to help on these occasions has led to organisations as varied as the United Nations and the Obama White House to treat England as a global threat to freedom of speech.
Read More →
-
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
