Russia faces questions over acquittal at troubling trial; Charges quashed after Putin denied torture of whistleblower
Russia entered the New Year with new questions hanging over its human rights record, as a judge acquitted the only person charged in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing Moscow tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
It followed months of worsening relations with Washington, which has slapped sanctions against 60 people said to have played roles in Magnitsky’s death. The Russian parliament hit back with a bill forbidding Americans to adopt Russian orphans.
Last week negligence charges were quashed against Dmitry Kratov, who was responsible for medical care in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, at the time the severely ailing Magnitsky, 37, died on the floor of a jail cell with marks of a savage beating.
Magnitsky had been detained and allegedly tortured after uncovering evidence that pointed to senior officials he believed were implicated in the biggest tax fraud scheme in Russian history.
But turning the tables, Russian prosecutors now plan to try Magnitsky posthumously on charges of criminal fraud, along with his former boss, William Browder, who heads the London-based firm Hermitage Capital Management. They allege that the pair conspired in the tax-theft scheme.
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The £1 Million Visa
‘This is like the Cold War,’ a Russian foreign ministry spokesman said in December after President Obama signed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. ‘We will retaliate.’ The act allows for the public naming of Russian officials involved in ‘extrajudicial killings, torture or other gross violations of internationally recognised human rights’. It also allows for their US assets to be suspended and for them to be barred entry into the States.
Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian corporate lawyer who was tortured and died in Butyrka Prison in Moscow in 2009 after accusing various Russian bureaucrats of perpetrating a $230 million tax fraud. The law named after him is targeted at the many corrupt Russian officials who act with impunity at home and then spend their ill-gotten gains in the West. But of course the US isn’t the favoured destination of rich Russians. Most prefer to keep their property, wives, mistresses, football teams, newspapers and children in the UK. What would really hurt corrupt Russian officials is a Magnitsky Act here. But will it happen?
A cross-party motion calling on the government to institute a UK version of the Magnistky Act was approved by the Commons last March. Sponsored by the Tory MP Dominic Raab, who calls Magntisky ‘the new Solzhenitsyn’, the British act would apply not just to Russians but internationally: it would allow for the naming, shaming and banning of corrupt officials from any country. The government responded by saying that a devotion to human rights was ‘at the heart of our DNA’, then argued that it already had a mechanism for excluding undesirables by denying them visas. It would not, however, commit to listing publicly the names of those excluded.
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Magnitsky Investigation Expands to Cyprus
The government of Cyprus opened an investigation last month into whether stolen Russian tax money was laundered through its banks. It has done so with reluctance after Magnitsky’s former employer Hermitage Capital Management submitted paperwork in July 2012 showing that $31 million of this stolen money was moved out of Russia using five Cypriot banks: Alpha Bank, Cyprus Popular Bank, FBME Bank, Privatbank International and Komercbanka. It also pointed a finger to Dimitry Klyuev as the alleged ringleader in the corruption case who owns a Cyprus-based firm called Fungamico, and who was in Cyprus with his associates at the time the money went missing. Cyprus government officials delayed starting an investigation telling Hermitage Capital representatives that they first must consult with Russian officials to determine if money was really stolen before they could start an investigation.
The timing of Cyprus’ Magnitsky probe is terrible for a country that relies heavily on its Russian clients and their large amounts of money deposited in its banks, but that also is waiting on a €17 billion ($22.4 billion) bailout from the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund. If the Cypriot government finds its own evidence that its banks laundered stolen Russian currency, there could be a push from the the rest of the EU for further investigations of all of its Russian banking clients. Der Spiegel reports through a German intelligence (BND) source that Cyprus banks could hold $26 billion in its Russian client accounts. Approximately 50,000 Russians live in Cyprus.
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OCCRP Names Aliyev “Person Of The Year “
Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, has won the first ever Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year bestowed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The award is given for the person who figured prominently in 2012 on stories on crime and corruption in its coverage area. Aliyev was chosen because of new revelations this year about how his family had taken large shares in lucrative industries including the telecom, minerals and construction industries often through government related deals.
The award is chosen by the 60 reporters and 15 news organizations that make up the OCCRP consortium. Runners-up included Albanian drug lord Naser Kelmendi, President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Blog: Are you banking with any of the peeps on the Magnitsky List?
Kenneth Rijock’s Financial Crime Blog
With Canada reportedly considering the adoption of the list* of Russian government figures involved in the death, whilst in custody, of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitsky, you would do well, wherever you are located, to check the names against your client base, for the risk of consequential reputation damage is high. should you find yourself banking any of these individuals. You do not want to be on the wrong side of such a case, where a young, whistle-blowing attorney ends up dead of heart failure in a Russian prison.
The new American legislation, regarding the exclusion of these individuals from entry into the United States, which has strong support in some quarters in Russia, may be the tip of the iceberg, regarding a more assertive American posture on human rights violators, and those who make a mockery out of the rule of law.
*Individuals involved in the tax fraud against Hermitage, and the torture and death of Sergei magnitsky микрозайм онлайн займы на карту https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php www.zp-pdl.com займы онлайн на карту срочно
EU: Magnitsky acquittal will harm Russia’s reputation
Russia’s acquittal of the only man charged over the death of Sergei Magnitsky will harm its international reputation, the EU has said.
Magnitsky, an accountant who in 2007 exposed the fact that Russian officials and the mafia were stealing hundreds of millions of euros of tax money, later died in jail after being refused medical treatment for pancreatitis and after being beaten by his guards.
His case became a cause celebre when the US last year passed a law in his name that will see up to 60 Russian officials banned from getting US visas.
But in what amounts to an extraordinary u-turn for the Russian legal system, a Moscow judge on 28 December said there is no evidence that Dmitry Kratov – the former medical chief at the Butyrka jail, where Magnitsky died – helped caused his death by negligence.
A few days earlier the prosecutor himself called for the acquittal despite previously building a case against Kratov.
The sudden change came after Russian leader Vladimir Putin claimed on TV that Magnitsky died of natural causes.
For Magnitsky’s former employer, the UK-based investment fund, Hermitage Capital, the developments show that his killers enjoy protection at the highest level of the Russian state.
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A Magnitsky law for Europe: The US statute is a pro-Russian, not anti-Russian, act
Even by its own recent standards, Moscow’s response to the US Magnitsky law, which bars Russian officials accused of human rights violations from the US, has been ugly. President Vladimir Putin last week signed into law a ban on US citizens adopting Russian children. In effect, this strands thousands of Russia’s most vulnerable citizens in often appalling orphanages, as hostages to US-Russian relations.
The Kremlin clearly hopes, in part, to persuade other countries not to follow the US. They should not be cowed. For Moscow’s reaction also reflects just how these measures have hit home. Many Russian officials hold property and assets in the west, travel back and forth, and send their children to schools there. So a visa ban and asset freeze on those with at least prima facie cases to answer over rights abuses or criminal activity is a highly effective sanction.
The Magnitsky case, moreover, is egregious, well documented and encapsulates the darker side of Putinism. Tax officials used the shell of an investment fund, whose founder had been mysteriously barred from Russia, as a vehicle to steal $230m from the state. When the fund found out and presented evidence, the authorities did not prosecute anyone implicated. Instead, they arrested the lawyer investigating it, Sergei Magnitsky, and accused him of orchestrating the fraud himself. In jail, he was denied treatment for serious stomach problems and eventually beaten to death.
Even now the case has attracted international opprobrium, Russia has refused to back down. Instead it has launched an absurd posthumous prosecution of Mr Magnitsky for tax evasion. Moscow’s failure to act against the real suspects is at best bloody-mindedness. At worst, it suggests they have high-level protectors, who risk being dragged down with them.
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Is Russia trying a dead whistle-blower because of a US law?
The US recently enacted legislation targeting those Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, spurring an angry reaction from the Kremlin.
At the center of the stormiest US-Russia diplomatic crisis since the cold war stands the enigmatic figure of Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the US Senate has named a punitive new law that imposes harsh visa and economic sanctions against scores of Russian officials who are deemed to have committed serious human rights violations.
The tale of Mr. Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer who blew the whistle on a vast corruption scheme, was arrested by the same officials he had implicated, and was allegedly beaten to death in prison over three years ago, appears to validate all the worst suspicions held in the West about the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last month, is a controversial new breed of legislation that aims to compensate for the perceived failures of Russia’s justice system by meting out punishment to about 60 Russian officials deemed to have been involved in the wrongful prosecution and alleged murder of Magnitsky.
The Kremlin’s incandescent response makes it likely that the mutual acrimony will expand in weeks to come. Mr. Putin called the Magnitsky Act a “purely political, unfriendly act” that demanded a stern riposte. Last week he signed the retaliatory Dima Yakovlev Act, whose key provision is a ban on all adoptions of Russian children by US citizens.
But in an apparent effort to overturn the widely-held Western narrative, which sees Magnitsky as the victim of corrupt officials and a lawless state, Russian prosecutors have announced they will put the deceased Magnitsky on trial later this month, seeking to prove that he and his former boss, Bill Browder, head of the London-based Hermitage Capital, were the real criminals.
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Congress talks about Magnitsky’s torture and death
The United States Congress sometimes includes ‘findings’ in laws it adopts. They’re reasons behind a law — a bit of built-in legislative history.
Here are some findings from the Magnitsky Act, legislation we tabbed as the biggest anti-corruption story of 2012.
The findings reflect America’s expectations for the Russian regime, the principles those expectations are based on, and how the regime has fallen short. There’s also encouragement for ‘the people of the Russian Federation’ and beyond.
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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
