Posts Tagged ‘bloomberg’
Russia Says U.S. Human-Rights Sanctions Bill to Harm Ties
Russia warned that a U.S. bill imposing sanctions against Russian officials suspected of human- rights abuses will harm relations between the two countries.
Such a law would be “a gross interference in Russian internal affairs and, of course, it won’t have any positive effect on U.S.-Russian ties, to put it mildly,” Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s human-rights representative, told reporters in Moscow today.
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has proposed legislation that would impose travel and financial restrictions on any official abusing human rights in Russia, including 60 people suspected of involvement in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail in 2009.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry last month warned it would retaliate with unspecified measures against the law. The State Department has said there is “a desire and an interest to make this a matter of law” in Congress and that the Obama administration is discussing the issue as it seeks lawmakers’ support to repeal a 1974 law that restricted trade with the former Soviet Union.
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Putin Snubs G-8 to Punish Obama for Criticism, Official Says
President Vladimir Putin is showing U.S. President Barack Obama his displeasure over the criticism of Russian elections and the lack of progress on a planned missile shield by skipping the Group of Eight summit for the first time as president, said Alexei Pushkov, a senior lawmaker.
The U.S. has “nothing to propose” to Putin at this week’s meeting, while “strong handshakes and smiles” are probably not a priority for him as Russia forms a new government, Pushkov, the head of the foreign-affairs committee in the lower house of parliament, said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Russia’s relations with the U.S. are showing strains as Putin begins his third term as president. The two countries have locked horns over missile defense, the future of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Putin has accused foreign powers of financing the biggest anti-government protests in a decade to destabilize Russia, saying that U.S. criticism of a December parliamentary election emboldened the opposition.
“Why does the U.S. think it can be sure the Russian president will pay a visit?” Pushkov said. “The American side thinks it can call the parliamentary election illegitimate, send its ambassador to meet with the radical opposition that shouts ‘Russia without Putin,’ doubt the presidential election and criticize Russian authorities for half a year.”
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Khodorkovsky Wants U.S. Visa Ban Over Yukos Lawyer Death
By Henry Meyer – Apr 10, 2012
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.”
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Russia to Try Browder With Dead Hermitage Lawyer for Tax Evasion
Russia plans to try William Browder, head of London-based Hermitage Capital Management Ltd., for tax evasion, along with Sergei Magnitsky, the fund’s lawyer who died in custody in 2009, RIA Novosti said.
“Magnitsky and Browder are both accused of severe crimes, which deprived the state of several hundred million rubles,” Alexander Yagodin, a senior Interior Ministry official, said in an interview with RIA Novosti, published today on the state- controlled news service’s website. Calls by Bloomberg to the ministry’s investigative branch weren’t answered today.
Yagodin denied that Magnitsky, who President Dmitry Medvedev’s human rights commission said was facing fabricated charges when he was beaten to death, had uncovered corruption by Interior Ministry officials. The Hermitage lawyer said he was abused and denied medical care in an effort to force him to drop fraud allegations against officials before his death in November 2009 after almost a year in pre-trial detention.
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Violence Stoked Fear to Fuel Putin’s Rise to Power: Book Review
More than 300 hostages — half of them children — were killed in a Beslan schoolhouse in 2004, following a firefight between their Chechen captors and Russian troops. Ten days later, President Vladimir Putin announced a sweeping overhaul of Russia’s political system.
He declared that regional governors as well as the mayor of Moscow would be appointed by the president rather than elected. Members of the lower house of parliament would also be appointed. Political parties would have to re-register, making it all but impossible to get on a ballot without Kremlin approval.
The upshot of the changes was to undermine — if not obliterate — the quasi-functioning democracy that had taken root in Russia since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, writes Moscow-based journalist Masha Gessen in her engrossing and insightful book, “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” From then on, the president would be the only directly elected federal-level public official.
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Browder Targets France, Germany After U.K ‘Russian Visa Ban’
Hermitage Capital Management Ltd. founder William Browder is lobbying Germany and France after the U.K. reportedly followed a U.S. ban on Russian officials over the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Browder, whose London-based fund was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, said he believes the U.K. has barred 60 Russian officials linked to Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow prison in 2009.
The British weekly, the Observer, reported yesterday that the U.K. had secretly imposed the visa ban, citing former Europe Minister Christopher Bryant as saying he was informed of the measure by Immigration Minister Damian Green. The Home Office declined to comment on individual cases, adding in an e-mailed statement: “We can refuse a visa when the individual’s character, conduct or associations makes entry to the U.K. undesirable.”
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U.S. Asked to Blacklist 305 Yukos Attackers by Russian Activists
Russian human-rights activists and opposition politicians have called on the U.S. Senate to blacklist 305 officials in Russia involved in the prosecution of Yukos Oil Co. and its owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
In a letter sent to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, the activists asked them to include the officials in legislation targeting human rights abusers in Russia, according to a copy of the petition posted on Khodorkovsky’s website.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration in July implemented a visa ban on a number of Russian officials after a similar request to punish human rights abusers. Russia warned it would retaliate, threatening to undermine the “reset” in relations between the two countries.
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Nurgaliyev Vows to ‘Burn’ Any Guilty Cops Linked to Magnitsky
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev promised to burn “with a red-hot iron” any police officers who gained illicit wealth and were involved in the prosecution of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
“If something is proved beyond a doubt, I will burn them with a red hot iron myself,” Nurgaliyev said in an interview Saturday in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. At the moment, “we can’t charge them with anything.”
Prosecutors opened an investigation into two prison officials, including a doctor, over Magnitsky’s death in July, two months after President Dmitry Medvedev said all guilty parties in the lawyer’s “tragic” passing should be punished.
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Russia’s Summer of Fire, Intrigue, Political Mystery: World View
Bloomberg
Is lightning striking twice in the same place? Kommersant has sounded the tocsin, warning that once again peat bogs around Moscow are burning: “According to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, on Sunday in the region around Moscow sixteen wildfires broke out simultaneously.”
Authorities said that the fires have been extinguished, but Kommersant quoted Grigory Kuksin, of Greenpeace Russia, who refuted the good news. “In the Gus-Khrustalny district alone, five fires are burning,” Kuksin said. “The situation in the region is bad. There aren’t enough resources to put out fires or even contain them.”
The bogs currently ablaze may prefigure a return of the catastrophic wildfires that last summer coincided with a record-shattering heat wave and raged for weeks, generating lethal smog that blanketed the capital, wrought billions of dollars worth of damage and, at least indirectly, caused tens of thousands of deaths.
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