Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

First Official Charged in Magnitsky Case — Sort Of

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Better late than never, right? Five years after Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive $230 million tax fraud, four years after he died after being beaten in a Moscow jail, a tax official incriminated in the Magnitsky scam has been charged in an embezzlement case.

Olga Tsymai, a former employee of the infamous Tax Inspectorate Number 28, has been charged for “fraud on an especially large scale” for helping fictitious companies receive 4.4 billion rubles ($130 million) in falsified tax rebates. Tsymai made sure the fake companies’ tax rebate applications weren’t checked too closely and helped transfer the money to them to then be laundered at home and abroad.

To be clear, this is not exactly the fraud that Magnitsky uncovered, just a very similar one involving some of the same people. The investigation that Magnitsky began as a Hermitage Capital lawyer involved tax rebates given by the same tax inspectorate and fingered Tsymai’s boss, Olga Stepanova, as a key player. Tsymai herself was listed on the initial “Magnitsky list” prepared by Senator Ben Cardin, although she was left off the final 18-person list included in the Magnitsky Act.

“This is the same practice, but it’s not the same money that Magnitsky was talking about,” Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, told TV Rain. “He exposed an entire scheme and named those who were carrying it out. These names arise in other instances besides the Magnitsky case, and so maybe through this one episode, [the investigation] will eventually get to the evidence that Sergei Magnitsky gave.”