Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Sergei Magnitsky’s posthumous trial gets under way in Russia
Family of lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after being accused of tax fraud say macabre proceedings are a mockery of justice.
The posthumous trial of lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky got under way in Moscow on Friday after repeated delays. Against the backdrop of an empty defendant’s cage, judge Igor Alisov brushed aside objections from defence lawyers, who argued that the macabre proceedings were a violation of the Russian constitution.
Magnitsky is accused of co-operating with his employer and co-defendant, London-based investor William Browder, to defraud the Russian state of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes – charges which friends and family say are fabricated.
Russia’s supreme court approved posthumous trials in 2011 as a way of allowing relatives to clear the name of deceased family members. Magnitsky’s family refuses to participate in the current trial, criticising it as a mockery of justice.
Magnitsky’s lawyer, Nikolai Gerasimov, said: “There have been statements by Magnitsky’s relatives that he was not guilty, but they have not expressed a wish to defend his innocence in the courts of the Russian Federation.
“There was no reason for this trial. I think that the reason for the revival of this investigation was an incorrect understanding of the ruling of the supreme court.”
Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009 after reporting to the authorities a $230m (£151m) tax fraud carried out by officials on Browder’s firm Hermitage Capital. The Kremlin’s human rights commission later found signs he had been badly beaten shortly before his death.
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Russia drops Magnitsky prison death probe
Russian detectives are dropping their investigation into the death in prison of the lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
The Investigative Committee said no crime was committed against him. He was detained in 2008 after revealing alleged an embezzlement scam by interior ministry officials.
His family and the Presidential Human Rights Council say he was badly beaten and denied medical treatment.
Despite his death, he is himself being put on trial for fraud.
The Investigative Committee, the Russian equivalent of the FBI in the US, said Magnitsky had been legally arrested and legally detained and that he had not been tortured.
“Based on the preliminary investigation’s results, a decision was taken to end the criminal case due to a lack of evidence of a crime,” the Committee said.
Magnitsky, who died at the age of 37 in pre-trial detention after developing pancreatitis, was arrested after testifying that interior ministry officials, with organised criminals, had used the UK-based investment fund Hermitage Capital to embezzle $230m (£150m) by filing false corporate tax returns.
In December, a Moscow court acquitted a prison doctor accused of negligence over the lawyer’s death. Dmitry Kratov had argued that he was unable to ensure medical care because of a shortage of staff.
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Russian Investigation Into Magnitsky’s Death Dropped
Russia’s Investigative Committee has dropped its investigation into the death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky,.
The committee posted a statement on its official website on March 19 saying Magnitsky was placed legally in pretrial detention and died there from heart complications in 2009. The committee said there was no evidence of a crime.
In 2008, Magnitsky, who worked for the London-based Hermitage Capital Investments, implicated top officials from Russia’s Interior Ministry, Federal Tax Service, Federal Security Service, and other agencies in a $230 million scheme to defraud the government.
The officials Magnitsky accused of taking part in the tax-refund fraud initiated proceedings against him on tax-evasion charges, leading to his arrest.
Magnitsky’s relatives and supporters say he was beaten and medically neglected while in jail, which led to his death in a Moscow detention center a year after he was detained.
In November 2012, the Russian authorities charged Magnitsky posthumously with tax evasion. The lawyer’s trial is expected to resume on March 22. His former boss, Hermitage Capital investments CEO William Browder, remains outside Russia and was charged in absentia.
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Are Russian killers on the streets of Britain?
A jogger who collapsed and died in leafy Weybridge turns out to have been blowing the whistle on one of Russia’s biggest tax frauds. Mark Townsend reports on a crisis that has pitted the Kremlin against the US Senate and British police.
Shortly after 5.15pm on 10 November 2012, a jogger turned into Granville Road, Weybridge, running along the hedge-lined street of one of Britain’s wealthiest enclaves. Then, 50m from his home, he staggered into the road and died.
In the days that followed, Surrey police believed they were dealing with a natural, if unusual, death. Four months on, the passing of 44-year-old Alexander Perepilichnyy still remains a mystery. Two post-mortems have proved inconclusive, but the outcome of what Surrey police promise is their “full range” of toxicology tests is imminent.
To piece together Perepilichnyy’s final years is to drill down into the core of Russian criminality, according to one account.
What we know of Perepilichnyy is slight. In another age he might have been a rocket scientist. Peers called him a “genius”, a Ukranian whiz-kid with an uncanny knack for numbers. His favourite waste of time was, they say, discussing the theories behind cosmogony and Kondratiev waves – the long-term cycles of capitalism. However by the time Perepilichnyy arrived to study at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – famous for supplying the brains behind the Soviet space race – Russia’s lunar ambitions had curdled with the collapse of communism. Instead Perepilichnyy applied his talents to the world of finance and was, until 2008, a star talent at an asset management firm in Moscow.
That year, on the other side of Moscow, across Red Square and the brown Moskva river, a rival investment fund to Perepilichnyy’s had become engulfed in crisis. Hermitage Capital was under the guidance of a man called Bill Browder, a naturalised Briton based in London who had built the investment firm into the largest foreign investor in Russia. But on Christmas Eve 2007, it had discovered itself to be the victim of a huge and sophisticated scam.
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What killed Alexander Perepilichny?
Three months after Russian businessman Alexander Perepilichny was found dead near his Surrey home, the question of how he died remains a mystery.
Surrey Police have confirmed to the BBC that scientists are conducting a wide range of tests, including attempts to find out if he was poisoned, after two earlier post-mortem examinations failed to find any obvious cause of death. They are still waiting for the results.
Mr Perepilichny, who was 44 years old, died suddenly last November near his luxury home on an exclusive private estate near Weybridge.
Grainy amateur video shows his body lying in a dark road shortly after it was discovered; a woman can be heard expressing her shock at how cold he felt.
For days afterwards it was assumed he had died of natural causes, most likely a heart attack, but then the police received information indicating they should carry out a full investigation.
‘Transnational crime’
“We wrote a letter to the chief constable of Surrey to say he [Alexander Perepilichny] had been co-operating in a major case of transnational crime,” says Bill Browder, head of the London-based investment firm Hermitage Capital, which used to have substantial interests in Russia.
“We said he was a healthy 44-year-old old man who suddenly dropped dead after handing over documents [to us].”
According to Mr Browder those documents led to a breakthrough in his investigation into what he claims was the biggest tax fraud in Russian history.
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Chaos in Moscow court for trial of dead whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky as legal team fail to show
There was mayhem in a tiny courtroom in Moscow today after one of the most controversial trials in recent Russian history – that of the deceased whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky – failed to start.
The case was prevented from proceeding after the lawyers for the late defendant did not show up. Mr Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009 after being beaten and refused medical treatment, will be judged in the first posthumous trial in modern Russia.
He is accused of tax evasion, along with his former employer, William Browder, a US-born British investor.
Mr Browder has been banned from entering Russia and is being tried in absentia. He is the head of the investment fund Hermitage Capital and was accused of tax evasion after falling foul of the Russian government. Mr Magnitsky was investigating these charges in 2008, and discovered that the disputed tax payments had been stolen by police and tax officials. When he reported these findings, he himself was thrown into jail.
Mr Magnitsky’s family and lawyers have refused to participate in the trial, so the court has appointed lawyers to represent the deceased defendant. These lawyers have been told they could risk being debarred if they did not take on the case, but nevertheless were not present at court yesterday. It is unclear if their no-show was a political statement, as they were not available for comment, though the lawyers had told the court they needed more time to read the case documents.
Earlier, Mr Magnitsky’s widow had called on all of the participants to boycott the trial. “I think that if any of its participants have a conscience – and this is key not only in human morality, but also in Russian criminal law – they have a duty to refuse to participate in this blasphemy,” said Natalia Zharikova.
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Russia adjourns dead lawyer trial to March 22
A Moscow court on Monday put dead Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky on trial for tax evasion in defiance of his family’s complaints it was “desecrating” his memory, but swiftly adjourned the process to March 22. Duration: 00:33
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The Magnitsky Money: From Russia…And Then What?
What if $230 million went missing and no one wanted to get it back? That is the puzzling question posed by Russia’s years of unwillingness to investigate the well-documented fraud claims made by lawyer and auditor Sergei Magnitsky.
At least half a dozen European Union countries, plus Switzerland, have been looking into where the so-called Magnitsky money might have gone. But Russia has done virtually nothing to investigate the allegations and documentation that Magnitsky brought to authorities before his death in pretrial detention in 2009.
Earlier this month, attention was focused on Moldova, which is looking into a complaint filed in June 2012 by Hermitage Capital Management, the firm that Magnitsky represented and which was also an alleged victim of the fraud.
‘Documentary Evidence’
Hermitage CEO William Browder — whom Russia has accused of fraud in an unrelated case — told RFE/RL’s Moldovan Service what he is seeking in Chisinau.
“We have given [the Moldovan authorities] documentary evidence that shows money flowing into accounts at Banca de Economii and then money flowing out from those accounts,” Browder says. “We’d like to have the information on who managed those accounts, who was responsible for opening those accounts, what kind of due diligence was done in terms of who was behind those accounts. And ultimately we’d like to have the police and the prosecutor prosecute any person in Moldova or elsewhere who was responsible for laundering this money through Moldova.”
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Push For Magnitsky Sanctions Intensifies In Europe
The battle over the Sergei Magnitsky case is moving to Europe. After being lobbied by activists for nearly three years, the U.S. Congress passed legislation in late 2012 to sanction Russian officials implicated in the prosecution and death of Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing Moscow lawyer who died in pretrial detention. The case has come to symbolize Russia’s perceived rights failings.
The U.S. law, which provides for asset freezes and visa bans on Russian officials who violate human rights, was never meant to be an end in itself. Instead, the legislation was a stepping stone to passing something similar in the European Union.
And that effort is now gaining momentum.
“Russians consider themselves, really, like a part of Europe — Europeans,” says Kristiina Ojuland, a member of the European Parliament from Estonia who has spearheaded the push. “And therefore it’s significant that Europe reacts, not only [to] the Magnitsky case, but in broader terms, reacts against this corrupt, black money that is flying into the EU countries.”
Asset freezes and visa bans in Europe would hit Russian officials considerably harder than similar sanctions in the United States. As Ojuland notes, Russian officials are fond of vacationing, shopping, and educating their children in EU countries. They are also more likely to keep money in European banks.
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