Posts Tagged ‘bloomberg’
Khodorkovsky Wants U.S. Visa Ban Over Yukos Lawyer Death
Former Yukos Oil Co. owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky is pressing the U.S. to impose a visa ban and freeze the assets of some 30 officials involved in the imprisonment of a company lawyer who died after being denied medical care in prison.
Vasily Aleksanyan, who had AIDS and developed cancer while in jail, was imprisoned for more than 2 1/2 years until December 2008. The European Court of Human Rights had demanded his release, saying that Russia violated several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights by denying him specialized treatment for AIDS. He died in October 2011 at the age of 39.
A group of U.S. senators last year proposed a bipartisan bill that would impose a visa ban and asset freeze on 60 Russian officials implicated in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail, as well as others guilty of human-rights violations. Four senators last month said they wouldn’t support an Obama administration effort to repeal trade restrictions against Russia without support for the legislation.
“To ensure the deaths of both Aleksanyan and Magnitsky were not in vain, actions must be taken against those responsible for the abuses of their human rights,” Khodorkovsky’s defense team said in an e-mailed statement from New York. “This is the only way to achieve some justice for victims and to dissuade further tragedies in Russia.”
Read More →
Facebook
Twitter
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
del.icio.us
Google Bookmarks
Yahoo! Buzz
Tumblr
StumbleUpon
FriendFeed
NewsVine
Digg
UK High Court throws out Russia-linked libel suit
Britain’s High Court has thrown out a libel case brought by a former Russian police officer against a London-based financier who is a critic of corruption in Russia.
Retired policeman Pavel Karpov sued Hermitage Capital Management and its chief executive, William Browder, who has accused Karpov of being part of a network of corrupt Russian officials.
Judge Peregrine Simon ruled Monday that Karpov had only minor links to Britain, and dismissed the suit.
The case is part of the labyrinthine saga surrounding the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer hired by Hermitage Capital, who accused Russian police officials of stealing $230 million in tax rebates after illegally seizing Hermitage subsidiaries.
Magnistky was arrested in 2008 for tax evasion and died in prison in 2009 while awaiting trial. займ онлайн на карту без отказа buy viagra online www.zp-pdl.com www.zp-pdl.com hairy woman
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
EU Shouldn’t Reward Russia’s Repression With Visa Deal
In its usual bureaucratic way, the European Union is sleepwalking into a huge blunder in its relations with Russia.
The EU’s regular summit with Russian leaders opened in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg this week. The EU — and Germany, in particular — wants to sign a new visa-facilitation agreement with Russia, the EU’s third-largest trade partner after the U.S. and China, taking an important step toward eventual visa-free travel in Europe.
The EU’s representatives in Yekaterinburg will be negotiating this visa deal on behalf of the Schengen area, a borderless zone in Europe that includes most, but not all, EU nations, plus a few from outside, such as Switzerland and Norway. This will make visas cheaper and easier for many Russians to acquire.
Ominously, though, it also means the EU may be about to free up travel for the roughly 15,000 Russian bureaucrats who hold biometric “service passports.” These people represent the beating heart of President Vladimir Putin’s state and include officials from the Kremlin, government ministries and the feared security forces, which Russians call “the organs.”
Giving these people visa-free travel would reward them and Putin for their increasingly repressive policies. It would be a mistake.
Emerging Dictatorship
Russia is no longer an emerging democracy but an emerging dictatorship since Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012 and redefined Russian authoritarianism. The protest movement that arose in response to abuse in the election, which returned Putin to power, has been crushed through arrests, trials, political imprisonment and the potential sentencing of opposition leader Alexey Navalny to a decade behind bars. The space for free speech has been squeezed by a terrifyingly vague new treason law and punitive fines for any protests that the authorities deem illegal.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
CIA Spy Caught in Recruitment Sting, Russia Says
Russian operatives caught a CIA agent trying to recruit a member of the special services in Moscow with a promise to pay as much as $1 million a year for information, the Federal Security Service said.
The spy, identified as Ryan Christopher Fogle, worked undercover as the third secretary of the political section of the U.S. embassy, the FSB, as the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB is known in Russian, said on its website today.
The man the FSB identified as Fogle was detained last night in a sting operation that included video footage and photographs that were later distributed to media outlets and broadcast on state television. Fogle was returned to the embassy today, an on-duty FSB officer said by phone.
One photo shows the contents of the backpack the FSB said Fogle was carrying at the time of his arrest neatly arrayed on a table, including dark and light wigs, sunglasses, a compass, a map of Moscow, two knives, a notepad, a microphone, a plastic cigarette lighter and an RFID shield.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Strongman Putin Is No Match for Corruption
President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on corruption is vital to Russia’s future. It’s also certain to fail unless he recognizes the shortcomings of his methods.
In 2008, under then-President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia began a genuine and somewhat successful effort to bring its corruption laws into the first world. At the same time, the state restricted investigative news media, stepped up its intimidation of nongovernment organizations, persecuted whistle-blowers and subverted the judicial system.
No bureaucracy can police itself effectively. That’s why international conventions (and now Russian law) clearly state that graft can be reduced only if whistle-blowers and nonstate actors play an active role. Yet Putin, back in power after four years as prime minister, is sending a message that he is Russia’s only anti-corruption champion, and that exposing dishonest officials is at the sole discretion of the Kremlin.
Corruption costs Russia about $300 billion a year, a whopping 16 percent of gross domestic product. And that measure doesn’t capture the distorted incentives and lost investment that are side effects. Russia placed last in Transparency International’s most recent Bribe Payers Index, which ranks countries according to their companies’ propensity to offer bribes.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Don’t ’Reset’ With Putin, Crack Down on Him
As Secretary of State John Kerry visits Moscow today to try to shore up fraying relations, the show trial of the dissident Alexey Navalny also should be on the agenda.
The anti-corruption campaigner led demonstrations against Russian President Vladimir Putin after last year’s elections; he now faces a judge who has convicted 130 people and acquitted none in the past two years.
These days, friction between Putin and the West is the norm, and with good reason. Russia-U.S. relations don’t need another “reset.” Instead, the U.S. must carry out an honest recalculation of what it can expect to obtain from Putin — and at what price.
Conventional wisdom holds that Russian cooperation on a range of issues is so valuable — and U.S. leverage over Putin so minimal — that antagonizing officials in Moscow over human rights isn’t worthwhile. The U.S. should rethink that assumption, not merely because Putin’s approach to democracy and human rights is even worse than expected, but also because he has failed to deliver on critical national-security issues, such as Iran, North Korea and Syria.
On Iran, Russia voted for United Nations sanctions in 2010, but has since cozied up to the Tehran regime.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Russia Opens Case Into Browder’s Hermitage Buying Gazprom Stock
Russia opened a criminal case into purchases of OAO Gazprom (GAZP) stock by Hermitage Capital Management Ltd. as prosecutors prepare for the trial of the fund’s founder and his dead legal adviser on tax-fraud charges.
Hermitage head William Browder is accused of illegally buying about 131.6 million Gazprom shares for about 2.1 billion rubles ($70 million) at a time when foreign ownership of the world’s biggest natural-gas producer was restricted, Mikhail Alexandrov, head of the Interior ministry’s investigative directorate for organized crime and corruption, said today on state television.
“Buying Gazprom shares through derivative structures was entirely legal,” Browder said by phone today, adding that neither he nor Hermitage has been notified of the case.
The accusations follow separate tax evasion charges brought against Browder, a British citizen whose London-based fund was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. Browder, who has been barred from entering Russia since 2005 as a security threat to the state, is being tried in absentia on the same accusations made against Sergei Magnitsky, a Hermitage tax and legal adviser who died in a Moscow prison in 2009. Magnitsky’s family has said the posthumous trial is “politically motivated.”
Browder attempted to use share ownership to exert influence on the company, Alexandrov said. He estimated the damage to the government at no less than 3 billion rubles.
Buying and trading shares of Gazprom by foreigners was restricted before the state raised its ownership in the gas producer to more than 50 percent in 2005. Russia had banned foreigners from holding more than 20 percent of the stock and restricted them to American depositary receipts.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Dead Russian Lawyer Magnitsky’s Trial Political, Family Says
A Russian court delayed by two weeks the start of the posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management Ltd. who died in prison, as his family said the case is “politically motivated” and boycotted the beginning of court hearings.
Magnitsky’s prosecution violates his constitutional rights and the family refuses to take part in the proceedings, their lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov, said in a statement read out to reporters today outside the Moscow court holding the trial.
The Tverskoi District Court delayed the first hearing on March 4, the tribunal’s press service said. The trial had been set to open today with court-appointed lawyers for Magnitsky because his family has refused to mount a legal defense.
Magnitsky died in November 2009 at the age of 37 while in pre-trial detention after alleging the biggest known tax fraud in Russia, a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case sparked a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of playing a role in Magnitsky’s death and Moscow retaliating by barring American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who as president in 2008-2012 made the fight against corruption a priority, last month defended Magnitsky’s prosecution for tax evasion.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Russia Threatens HSBC in Police Inquiry, Hermitage Says
Russian police are threatening to seize documents unless HSBC Holdings Plc hands over information required for a criminal investigation into Hermitage Capital Management Ltd., the investment fund said.
Under a new criminal case alleging “fraudulent actions,” Russia’s Interior Ministry is demanding that HSBC’s Moscow unit provide financial and banking information about the fund’s companies dating back to 1996, Hermitage said in an e-mailed statement today. Otherwise, the documents can be taken by force, it said, citing a request from the ministry to HSBC.
Andrei Pilipchuk, a ministry spokesman, declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg. Evgenia Efimova, a spokeswoman for HSBC in Moscow, said she couldn’t comment immediately.
Russia is prosecuting on tax-evasion charges London-based Hermitage head William Browder and a lawyer who worked for the fund, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in November 2009. The trial opened last month.
Magnitsky died at age 37 while in pretrial detention after alleging the biggest known tax fraud in Russia, a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case sparked a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of playing a role in Magnitsky’s death and Russia’s government retaliating by barring American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
