Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Habeas corpus
Irish Times
Sergei Magnitsky, the defendant, will not be in a position to plead. He is dead. His trial, however, following some celebrated historical precedents (notably, Joan of Arc’s), will proceed even though, as Amnesty says, it violates his fundamental rights, in particular that “to defend himself in person”.
The bizarre, and very rare, decision of the Russian authorities to go ahead with the trial is possible because the law allows a posthumous trial to continue – it closed 13 days after his death in 2011 – but only at the request of relatives anxious to clear an accused’s name. Yet Magnitsky’s mother is adamantly opposed to the reopening, and the prosecuting authorities have no intention of clearing his name. On the contrary, the point, it appears, is to discredit both Magnitsky and a US sanctions law named after him which offends President Vladimir Putin and some of his corrupt pals.
Prosecutors accuse Magnitsky and his former client William Browder, a London-based investor, of evading €12.6 million in tax. The former was arrested in 2008 while investigating a €170 million tax fraud. He died in jail after developing untreated pancreatitis. The US Congress passed a law sanctioning officials whom Browder accuses of involvement in the fraud, and Russia responded by banning adoptions by Americans.
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Sergei Magnitsky: How a dead man was put on trial
THE court calls Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. He’s a bit slow to take the stand. He’s a bit quiet. This is because Sergei Magnitsky is dead. He died in a Russian prison from pancreatitis. He’s buried at Moscow’s Preobrazhensky cemetery.
Mr Magnitsky was first arrested in 2008. The lawyer with US firm Firestone Duncan had been working for London-based Hermitage Capital Management. He claimed to have uncovered a massive fraud worth £125m. He told all to officials. He was then arrested for alleged tax evasion and sent to prison, where he was beaten and denied medical help. He was had been held for a year without charge. Well, just under a year. In Russia, you can be held for anything up a year without charge. That time would have lapsed on November 24. He died on Monday, November 16. Such was his misfortune.
He was kept in squalor. In his affidavit, Magnitsky noted:
“…sewage started to rise from the drain under the sink [the] floor was covered with sewage several centimetres thick … for the 10 months I have been under arrest, the investigator has not let me meet with my wife, mother or any other relative”. “Isolation from the outside world exceeds all reasonable limits …
In July 2009, Magnitsky was diagnosed with “gall bladder stones, pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis“. He blamed that on his confinement:
“Prior to confinement, I didn’t have these illnesses or at least there were no symptoms.”
Irina Dudukina, spokesman for the prosecutors’ investigative committee, said in November 2009:
“He was a key witness and his evidence was very important. The tragic news about his death came as a complete surprise. He had complained about the conditions of his detention but never his health.”
Spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee Irina Dudukina speaks at a news conference on the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in Moscow, Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009.
Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital said Sergei Magnitsky, had in effect been “held hostage and they killed their hostage”. He had hired Magnitsky to search for fraud against his company. The Russian elite were not willing to play fair:
In 2005, Mr Browder was banned from Russia as a threat to national security after allegations that his firms had evaded tax, but Mr Browder says his company was targeted by criminals trying to seize millions of pounds worth of his assets. Mr Browder says he was punished for being a threat to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. Since then, a number of Mr Browder’s associates in Russia – as well as lawyers acting for his company – have been detained, beaten or robbed.
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Browder: Tymoshenko imprisonment ‘sends the most terrible message’
William Browder, the London-based head of Hermitage Capital, remains unrelenting in his quest for justice in the 2009 death of his former lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who was tortured, deprived of medical attention and left to die in a Russian prison in 2009, nearly a year after uncovering a $230 million tax fraud allegedly committed by top Russian law enforcement officials. Russian officials say he was not murdered, but died of a heart attack while awaiting tax evasion charges. The people Magnitsky implicated in the fraud arrested him in 2008. A year after his death, several of these officials were promoted.
The traumatic events transformed Browder into an activist. He lobbied successfully for the passage in America last year of the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which denies visas to and freezes the assets of those in the Russian ruling elite implicated in Magnitsky’s murder, corruption and other human rights violations. He now wants to push for a similar law in the European Union, and says such laws may need to be broadened and aimed against leaders in Ukraine, Belarus and other nations where human right violations are severe.
Browder has made himself an enemy of Kremlin leaders, who accuse him of tax fraud. Browder is also a co-defendant in the posthumous tax-fraud trial of Magnitsky set to resume in Russia later this month. He is being tried in absentia, after being barred from entering Russia since 2005.
“This Mr. Magnitsky, as is known, was not some human rights champion; he did not struggle for human rights,” Russian President Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying at a December news conference. “He was the lawyer of Mr. Browder, who is suspected by our law enforcement of committing economic crimes.”
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Browder May Win EU Version Of Magnitsky Law
Hermitage Capital Management founder Bill Browder seems to have convinced the EU to join the U.S. in making life difficult for Russians linked to the death in prison of Browder’s colleague, Serge Magnitsky.
Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer who represented Browder’s hedge fund in a tax fraud case and who accused Russian Interior Ministry officials of defrauding Hermitage, was charged with tax fraud in 2009 and spent almost a year in Moscow’s most notorious prisons where Russian human rights activists allege he was tortured to death.
Only two people were ever charged in Magnitsky’s death, both doctors. The doctor who treated Magnitsky during his last weeks, Larisa Litvinova, had charges against her dropped last year; officials said that statute of limitations had run out. Other officials linked to Magnitsky’s death have been cleared, and some have been promoted.
But Browder, not satisfied with these outcomes, successfully lobbied the U.S. government to pass the Magnitsky law, barring Russian officials tied to his death from entering the country and freezing their assets.
In October, the European Parliament adopted a recommendation to the European Council to establish common visa restrictions for Russian officials involved in the Magnitsky case and freezing their assets in Europe.
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Billion Dollar Hedge Fund Mgr Goes After Putin And Russia, This Time In Europe
Bill Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management in London, is doing his best to embarrass Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Russian government once again.
After successfully and single-handedly lobbying for the passing of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. Senate in November, Browder seems to have convinced European governments to go after alleged Russian criminals in the same way: by banning travel and access to bank accounts in their respective countries.
Browder’s colleague and friend, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer with the Moscow-based law firm Firestone Duncan, was arrested in 2009 for tax fraud affiliated with Hermitage. The billion dollar hedge fund was subsequently kicked out of Russia, and Magnitsky died in prison, a victim, it is widely believed, of poor treatment.
Late last year, Congress passed two laws that make life increasingly difficult for Russians currently on a “black list” at the U.S. State Department for their involvement in Magnitsky’s death. Under the so-called Magnitsky Act, both houses of Congress now have access to that list of Russians the State House had been inclined to keep under wraps out of concern of embarrassing The Kremlin.
Washington and Moscow are going through a revamp, or a reset, of bilateral relations and the current human rights scandals had put a strain in that relationship. Under the new law, Congress now knows which Russians to ban from traveling or having any type of financial business in the United States.
Immediately after its passing, Pavel Khodorkovsky, director of the Khodorkovsky Center in New York, told me that the idea was for some countries in Europe to pass similar legislation.
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Magnitsky fund boss brings Russia blacklist campaign to Europe
The investor pushing to blacklist Russian officials implicated in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has brought his campaign to Europe’s capitals, in a move that could have far-reaching implications for their relations with Moscow.
The London-based head of Hermitage Capital Management, William Browder, was in Paris on Monday to push for a French version of the US Magnitsky Act, a December law that blacklisted Russian officials tied to Magnitsky’s prison death.
The law has prompted a crisis in US-Russia ties, with Moscow retaliating by banning US adoptions of Russian orphans.
Ahead of talks with French lawmakers, Browder told AFP he was sure that within a year European capitals would have followed Washington’s lead in imposing sanctions on Russian officials.
“The Russian government tortured and murdered Sergei Magnitsky, our lawyer, after he uncovered a massive corruption scheme,” Browder said.
“The Russian government has taken every step to cover up the involvement of the officials… and then attack the victim. It has become clear to us that we have to get justice outside of Russia.”
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Posthumous trial of Russian lawyer delayed
The trial of Russian lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky officially began yesterday, but has been postponed for several weeks. This was not, as one might expect, because Magnitsky died in prison more than three years ago, but because his defense team has chosen not to participate in the bizarre proceeding:
In Monday’s hearing, it was unclear who or what, exactly, went on trial. Mr. Magnitsky’s co-defendant, William F. Browder, the manager of the Hermitage Capital hedge fund, has been barred from entering Russia since 2005, so he did not appear in court.
The hearing was of a type in Russian practice that indicates that the police consider their work complete, and that the case can go to trial, Aleksandra V. Bereznina, a spokeswoman for Tverskoi Regional Court, said in an interview.
Judge Igor B. Alisov promptly postponed the trial because the defendants did not appear in the courtroom — as expected — but neither did lawyers representing their interests.[…]
The hearing took place in a closed courtroom. The defendants’ chairs were unoccupied, Ms. Bereznina said. Mr. Browder and relatives of Mr. Magnitsky have said they will boycott the proceedings.
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Did Prime Minister Medvedev physically threaten Russia’s most acid billionaire critic?
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev appeared to physically threaten an American billionaire critic of his country in an off-the-record briefing with journalists, the billionaire says.
Because the briefing last week at Davos operated under Chatham House rules, which bar the disclosure of remarks attributed to specific individuals, none of the journalists has written about the session with Medvedev. But Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, says that (video) four journalists who attended the Jan. 24 briefing told him of Medvedev’s remarks.
Browder, once one of Russia’s most enthusiastic Western investors and now one of its most acid critics, accuses Russian officials of murdering his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, after an expose accused them of stealing $230 million in government revenue. Magnitsky died in a Moscow jail in 2009, and the US has passed a law called the Magnitsky Act that bars US entry for Russian officials allegedly complicit in the death. Lithuania has frozen bank accounts allegedly used to secretly get some of the money out of Russia.
The reported remarks are highly unusual not just in their content but their source—Medvedev is typically one of Russia’s most mild-mannered senior leaders, particularly compared with the pugnacious and outspoken president, Vladimir Putin.
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Always the Last to Know
Dmitri Medvedev-prime minister of Russia, at least until Putin needs a sacrificial victim to blame for some failure, that being the main role of a Russian PM-claims that Russian business has not been harmed by the Magnitsky controversy:
Medvedev said the whistleblower’s death in jail, for which no one has been brought to justice, was being used by Kremlin critics to score points but was of no import to business leaders.
. . . .
“It does not interest anyone, except maybe certain citizens who are trying to use it to accumulate political capital,” said Medvedev, who was president from 2008 until Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin last May.
“Not a single businessman raises this issue,” he told state television in an interview focusing on his role in the forum. “But unfortunately it has become a factor in political life.”
Biznessmen have a different story-off the record, which is part of the point:
With international concern spreading after the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, some Russian tycoons are worried their legitimate cross-border money transfers involving anything from industrial investments to luxury properties will get hit by red tape.
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