Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Browder Placed on International Wanted List
A Moscow court revealed Wednesday that Bill Browder, head of the Hermitage Capital investment fund, has been placed on an international wanted list in connection with an investigation into the embezzlement of Gazprom shares.
But in an embarrassment to prosecutors, the court refused to issue a warrant for his arrest in absentia, saying they had failed to make a reasonable effort to notify Browder about the court proceedings.
The decision to place Browder on the wanted list, made April 8, was disclosed by the Tverskoi District Court as it started hearings into a request by prosecutors to arrest Browder in absentia.
Under Russian law, a suspect cannot be arrested in absentia unless he is first put on an international wanted list. After an arrest warrant is issued, Russian investigators pass the materials for the case over to Interpol.
But the likelihood of Browder facing actual arrest appears slim. Browder, who heads what was once the biggest foreign investment fund in Russia, is at loggerheads with the Russian government amid his successful campaign to blacklist Russian officials implicated in the death of Hermitage lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.
The U.S. announced Friday that several of those officials had been banned from entry into the U.S., and several European countries are looking to create blacklists of their own.
“This is a pure vendetta and everyone knows it,” said Jamison Firestone, Magnitsky’s former boss and a close associate of Browder in lobbying for the blacklists.
“If it was really illegal to buy Gazprom, every Western hedge fund manager in Moscow would already be on the way to the airport,” he said Wednesday by e-mail.
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Putin turns up heat on hedge fund boss Bill Browder
The Kremlin has escalated its battle with Bill Browder by announcing that it will seek the arrest of the outspoken hedge fund manager in a new case.
Mr Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital, was a prominent foreign investor in Russia during the early years after the fall of communism, but he was barred from the country seven years ago amid allegations of tax fraud. The American-born investor is now based in Britain, where he has been a critic of President Putin’s administration. He has lobbied fiercely recently for restrictions on travel to the United States and Britain by Russian officials accused of involvement in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage, in a prison in Moscow in 2009.
Moscow retaliated this month by barring 18 Americans from entering Russia. Yesterday Russia’s Interior Ministry said that it would seek Mr Browder’s arrest on charges dating back to the 1990s.
According to a statement by Hermitage, Russian prosecutors have alleged that Mr Browder embezzled shares in Gazprom, defying rules against foreign ownership, and then used his illegitimate stake to try to influence the gas giant’s management.
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Russia puts Hermitage boss Bill Browder on wanted list
The Russian Interior Ministry is seeking an arrest warrant for the British hedge fund boss Bill Browder in a move that will escalate tension between Moscow and America and the UK.
Mr Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, said it had received notice that a Moscow court had been asked to issue a warrant for his arrest “in absentia” for tax evasion. The fund manager is accused of “stealing” shares in Gazprom more than a decade ago and “interfering” with the energy giant’s strategic policies.
However, in an embarrassing twist, the Moscow court judged refused to issue the warrant saying Mr Browder had not been given enough warning. Hermitage said the court will review the request again in a week’s time. It is only the second time Moscow has sought to put a westerner on the international wanted list; the first was a Spanish national embroiled in the Yukos case.
The latest development, which will be seen as an aggressive attack of the Russian state on business, has been condemned as “politically-directed abuse of justice” by Hermitage.
The claim against Mr Browder has been separated from the Interior Ministry’s case against his former employee, Sergei Magnitsky who is currently the subject of the first ever posthumous trial in Russian history.
In a statement today, Hermitage, which was one of the biggest investors in Russia, said that the warrant “follows a coordinated Russian state propaganda campaign in the last three months, where all Kremlin-controlled TV channels, including NTV, Rossiya, and 1TV ran slanderous programs accusing Mr Browder of murders, stealing IMF money in 1998, causing the Russian default, stealing Gazprom shares, and being a UK spy.”
A Hermitage spokesman added: “President Putin treats the law and the truth like a child in a sandbox. There are no rules. There is no law, and he thinks he can do whatever he wants. This may be true in Russia, but it is not true elsewhere in the world.”
Mr Browder, an American-born British citizen, has campaigned for justice for Mr Magnitsky who died in prison where he was detained on controversial charges for a year. The fund manager has been accused of illegally buying shares in Gazprom in contravention of a presidential decree in 1997 which imposed restrictions on foreigners owning the shares.
Hermitage maintains that “the case itself has no legal prospect because there were never any criminal sanctions for owning Gazprom shares.”
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The tax haven shell game
Frederic Zalac has the details about a company run by a Toronto businessman and its role in a multi-million dollar scam that turned in to an international murder mystery.
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The New Russian Mob
I realize this is a somewhat irresponsible thought, but I keep wondering why anyone should care if some Russian oligarchs and businesses — and corrupt officials — lose a bundle in Cyprus.
Yes, I know, the European Union’s original, ham-handed proposal — a tax on every bank deposit in Cyprus — was potentially destabilizing to the world’s financial system. It raised the specter of bank runs not just in Cyprus but all over Europe. It served as a jolting reminder that the European crisis is still with us. Yada, yada.
But it also turns out that much of the hot money held in the Cypriot banking system is Russian. Russian companies like the low taxes that come with having entities in Cyprus. Because of the wink, wink, nod, nod relationship between Cyprus and Russia, rubles deposited in Cypriot banks are as untraceable as dollars once were in Swiss bank accounts, according to Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition politician (about whom more in a moment). Corrupt officials who embezzle money have long found Cyprus to be a friendly haven. Bloomberg Businessweek reported earlier this week that a substantial amount of the $230 million fraud perpetrated in 2007 against Hermitage Capital — a crime unearthed by Sergei Magnitsky, the brave lawyer who died in prison after he exposed the fraud — can be traced to Cyprus.
To put it another way, the henchmen of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who have gotten rich by trampling over the rule of law, are now getting a taste of their own medicine. In Cyprus, with no warning, the rules changed, and deposits larger than 100,000 euros may now face “haircuts” of as much as 40 percent. Though the purpose of the tax is to save the country’s banking system, the outcome is the same as when Russian officials create phony tax charges to steal a businessman’s assets. People feel they are being robbed. And they become extremely upset.
The funniest part is that according to Reuters, some Russian entities are threatening to sue. Actually, that makes a certain perverse sense: one of the reasons Russian bureaucrats are so quick to move their newly stolen wealth out of Russia is that they want it in a place where the rule of law actually has some meaning. They don’t want done to them what they’ve done to their fellow citizens.
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UK fund boss warned Germany about Russian money in Cyprus
UK fund manager Bill Browder, one of the Kremlin’s harshest critics, briefed German officials on Russian money laundering in Cyprus just before the European Union set tough terms for the island’s bailout.
He said at least $31 million was laundered through Cyprus bank accounts, funds that were part of a $230 million fraud his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky discovered before his death in a Moscow prison in 2009.
Browder said the Mediterranean island, one of the most important conduits for Russian money transfers, opened an investigation in December into the allegations the businessman first made in 2008.
Once the largest fund manager in Russia through his $4 billion Hermitage fund, Britain-based Browder is currently on trial in absentia in Russia on fraud charges. He denies any wrongdoing and says the charges are politically motivated.
“When Cyprus started to ask the Europeans for a 17 billion euro bailout, it seemed to me absurd that we should be bailing out Cyprus if they are unwilling to investigate the most well documented money laundering cases,” Browder said.
Browder spoke with Levin Holle, director general of financial markets policy at Germany’s ministry of finance, at a meeting last month confirmed by the ministry.
“There was a German team of people at a fairly senior level that were involved in structuring the Cyprus bailout. And they were very interested in what we had to say about this,” Browder said.
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Prosecutor to present Magnitsky, Browder tax evasion evidence
Moscow’s Tverskoi court on Wednesday will continue to hear the case against auditor of Britain’s Hermitage Capital Management foundation Sergei Magnitsky who died in a remand prison, and director general of the foundation, British citizen William Browder, accused of failing to pay 522 million roubles worth of taxes.
The prosecutor for the state is expected to begin to present the evidence.
At the previous hearing, the lawyers of Magnitsky and Browder refused to comment on the charges against their clients in the tax evasion case.
“We have nothing to say; we doubt we should participate in the trial at all,” Magnitsky’s lawyer Nikolai Gerasimov said. The court-appointed defense is skeptical about their role. At previous hearings, the lawyers repeatedly requested the court to let them withdraw from the trial or drop the proceedings, but the court insisted on going ahead with the review.
Earlier, Magnitsky’s family informed the court it would not attend the hearing which it called “illegitimate and unjustified.” Browder’s representatives also ignored the hearings.
Magnitsky and Browder are accused of failing to pay over 522 million roubles of taxes /Article 199, Part 2 of Russia’s penal code/. The investigators said the defendants had fabricated tax declarations and misused incentives intended for handicapped persons. Police also suspect Browder of involvement in the theft of Gazprom shares. This episode made a separate criminal case.
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Russian oligarch resigns from parliament after National Post investigation reveals Israeli citizenship, Canadian assets
A Russian oligarch who has maintained high-level influence in Moscow since the close of the Cold War resigned his seat in Russian parliament Tuesday after the National Post revealed he held dual citizenship and had extensive assets in Canada.
Vitaly Malkin tried for almost 20 years to relocate to Canada, investing millions in Toronto, but had been turned away over alleged ties to organized crime. During his failed immigration process he told Canadian officials he had Israeli citizenship and extensive foreign investments.
The Post revealed his past on March 5 and the news ignited a storm of controversy in Moscow because Russian law bars lawmakers from holding dual citizenship and owning undeclared foreign investments.
Mr. Malkin, once listed as one of the world’s wealthiest men, held a seat in the Russian upper house since 2004.
In announcing his resignation from the senate, Mr. Malkin said he has done nothing wrong. He told Russian media he no longer holds Israeli citizenship and was resigning to protect the image of the senate.
“The main accusation is that I was an Israeli citizen in the capacity of the senator,” Mr. Malkin said, according to Itar-Tass, a Russian state news agency. He said he renounced his Israeli citizenship after the rules on holding foreign citizenship changed and before he embarked on another term in senate.
“As far as I understand, I am not an Israeli citizen since August 2007,” he said.
Mr. Malkin said he was the victim of a smear campaign by foreigners motivated by his controversial lobbying in Washington, D.C., this summer against the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law imposing sanctions against Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky.
(Mr. Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who accused government officials of corruption on behalf of American investor Bill Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management. His death in Russian custody is a source of significant friction between the U.S. and Russia.)
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Putin Needs an Enemy After Berezovsky’s Death
After Boris Berezovsky’s death, Vladimir Putin has a problem—who will play the villain to make him look like a superhero? Peter Pomerantsev reports.
If Vladimir Putin didn’t have exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky as an enemy, the joke over the last decade in Moscow went, he would have needed to invent him. In the Kremlin narrative Berezovsky was the ideal caricature Penguin to Putin’s Batman: the evil Jewish schemer in his London palace looking to usurp good blonde Tsar Vlad. Whenever Putin had a problem state media would pin it on Berezovsky: Chechen terrorists have kidnapped a school in the Caucuses? Berezovsky is behind it. Pussy Riot? Berezovsky stooges.
Berezovsky became the symbol of the ideology Putin was presented as the antithesis of: the representative of the wild ’90s of oligarchs and Yeltsin and destitution, as opposed to the “stable” Putin era. Berezovsky was always the perfect foil, reveling in his role as the great schemer, claiming from his London exile he was behind the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, that he would do anything to get rid of Putin. For the last half decade at least, once his last allies in the Russian parliament had been sidelined, it’s unclear whether he had much influence left in Russia at all. So both sides played along: the Kremlin pretending Berezovsky was an all-powerful master of darkness, the other continuing to act as if he were.
There were always rumors, typically conspiratorial for Moscow, that Berezovsky was in fact working with Putin, the two playing out their roles in a choreographed dance. This is hugely dubious, but there was something distinctly theatrical about their sparring, two sides of one performance. Now Berezovsky is dead the Kremlin is faced with a problem: Who will fill the role of uber-baddie to Putin’s goodie?
The easiest thing would be to pluck another exiled oligarch out of the sin bin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the exiled 1990s media magnate, is still around. Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s allies are still at liberty in the West and make no secret of their grudge against the Kremlin. The problem for Putin is that his narrative as the brave warrior against oligarchical corruption has broken down. His rule is perceived to be just as, if not more, corrupt than the ’90s. His parliamentary party, United Russia, is nicknamed the “party of crooks and thieves.” Tales of his and his best friends’ yachts and castles are ubiquitous.
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