Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Sergei Magnitsky’s Russian trial condemned as ‘absurd’
A Moscow trial to prosecute the dead whistle-blowing lawyer who exposed huge tax fraud among Russian officials has been labelled a “Stalin show trial” and an “absurd” attempt to discredit him.
Sergei Magnitsky died in custody in November 2009 at the age of 37 after being abused and denied essential medical treatment by prison officials.
The lawyer had been jailed after being accused of the very same crime that he revealed, which involved senior policemen and tax officials.
The case against him was closed a fortnight after his death but was later restarted and Moscow’s Tverskoy Court is to hold an initial hearing in the unprecedented posthumous trial starting on Monday.
William Browder, the head of the UK-based investment fund that Mr Magnitsky worked for, is also to be tried, albeit in absentia.
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Shadow of Magnitsky case reaches Switzerland
The case of Sergei Magnitsky, the anti-corruption lawyer who died a lonely and agonising death in a Moscow prison cell, has become an international cause celebre. Campaigners for justice have followed part of the money trail to Switzerland.
While working for an American law firm in Moscow in 2007, Magnitsky uncovered the largest tax refund fraud in Russian history, involving the theft of companies belonging to his client Bill Browder, formerly one of the most successful foreign investors in Russia through his firm Hermitage Capital Management.
For his efforts the 37-year-old lawyer was falsely arrested and held in pre-trial detention for 11 months, where he suffered torture and medical neglect resulting in his death in November 2009.
This version of events, accepted by the United States, the European Parliament, Amnesty International and the Russian opposition movement, is still disputed by the Russian authorities, who are pressing ahead with a posthumous prosecution of Magnitsky. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for January 28.
Earlier this month, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office announced it was freezing additional accounts in connection with its money laundering investigation into “persons unknown” in the Magnitsky case. This is the first public move since prosecutors blocked related accounts in March 2011.
The office declined to give details of the investigation other than to say that it was “continually turning up new findings that require additional examination”. The Russian government has not commented officially on the Swiss prosecutors’ move.
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Investor seeks justice at Davos for attorney killed in Russian prison
Each year, the Russian presence at the World Economic Forum seems to grow, with government and business delegations courting investment, as well as the press.
And each year, Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital, comes to Davos to, among other things, seek justice for his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who he claims was killed in a Russian prison while investigating tax fraud.
Browder, who with the late Edmund Safra founded founded the investment firm which specializes in Russian markets, does not mince words.
“The Russian government plays this silly game,” Browder said. “They wash up, dress up, come to Davos and pretend they are normal, Western business people looking to attract investment, and in my opinion, they shouldn’t be allowed to behave like criminals at home and then dine at our tables with white tablecloths when they come to Davos.”
Browder claims Magnitsky, who was 37, when he died in 2007, was tortured, and ultimately denied medical care in jail. Browder, who had been the biggest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, claims $230 million he paid in taxes to the Russian government was stolen by people with ties to the government. Magnitsky had been looking for the money.
The Russians are defiant about the case, and have not convicted anyone.
But Browder has succeeded in lobbying Washington to pass legislation that places asset freezes and visa bans on the 60-some people he says were in some way involved or complicit in Magnitsky’s death. The law, which carries various sanctions for human rights abusers, is believed to have prompted Russia to ban adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans in retaliation, according to reports.
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A Bizarre Trial Stirs Western Concerns About Russia
The government of Russia will underscore its place as one of the world’s most bizarre when it begins Monday the trial of Sergei Magnitsky.
It is not bizarre by Russian standards that Mr. Magnitsky was an attorney imprisoned essentially for defending his client, American investor Bill Browder.
It is not even the most bizarre part of the case that the 37-year-old Magnitsky was allegedly tortured in prison and Russia appears to know who did it and has refused to prosecute. This has led the U.S. to pass a law banning travel of corrupt Russian officials to America and a strange response from Russia banning U.S. adoptions of Russian babies.
What is truly bizarre about the trial is that Mr. Magnitsky is dead, and has been dead since 2009, the result of wounds sustained in prison, human rights groups say. The trial would be the first posthumous trial in the history of Russia — there is no record of even one of the famous Stalin show trials being prosecuted against a dead man.
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William Browder of Hemitage Capital Management – Hub Culture Interview
William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, speaks with Hub Culture Executive Editor Edie Lush at the Hub Culture Davos Pavilion during the 2013 World Economic Forum.
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Exclusive: Briton who took on Sergei Magnitsky network faces libel case in UK
A former Moscow police officer is suing a British businessman who exposed how a network of corrupt officials and shadowy criminal underworld figures were behind the largest tax fraud in Russian history.
Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Karpov has launched libel and defamation proceedings in the High Court against William Browder, a millionaire hedge-fund magnate who has campaigned against corruption within the Russian government after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was tortured and died in police custody.
The 35-year-old officer, who was until recently a Moscow and Interior Ministry investigator, is one of more than 60 Russian officials who Mr Browder has publicly accused of being behind a scam that led to the theft of $230million from the Russian tax payer. Mr Browder has also accused him of being among a group of police officers who arranged for the arrest and torture of Mr Magnitsky when he uncovered the scam and went public with his allegations.
If the case ends up in the High Court, it will shed a spotlight on a scandal that has become a source of major international embarrassment to the Kremlin because of the mounting evidence that prominent officials within the Interior Ministry, tax offices and the judiciary aided the scam.
Mr Karpov insists he had nothing to do with the fraud or the subsequent cover up – or the arrest, torture and death of Mr M. In court documents obtained by The Independent Lawyers from Olswang, the major London law-firm which represents the former detective, say the allegations made by Mr Browder have caused “serious hurt, embarrassment and distress.”
They insist that while Mr Browder’s quest to pursue those who killed Mr Magnitsky might be legitimate, his campaign has wrongfully made false and highly defamatory claims against their client including that he is complicit in fraud, torture, kidnapping and murder.
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Europe’s Mounting Reluctance to Bail Out Cyprus
There is growing resistance in Europe to the planned aid program for Cyprus, because it would also benefit illegal Russian money parked in bank accounts in Cyprus. The government in Nicosia is willing to make concessions, but Brussels is demanding more reforms.
It was a long way to go to deliver a short message. German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew almost four hours last Friday to Cyprus, where she spent a few minutes campaigning for the conservative presidential candidate in the February 17 election, Nikos Anastasiades. Speaking in the city of Limassol, Merkel praised Anastasiades, saying that she had known him for a long time and valued his openness to change, and that the country urgently needed “structural reforms.”
After smiling for the cameras, Merkel returned to wintry Berlin.
Her destination in the eastern Mediterranean has a smaller population than the little German state of Saarland, but that hasn’t stopped it becoming one of the biggest trouble spots in global politics at the moment. The question of whether the government in Nicosia should be allowed to bolster its ailing banks with more than €17 billion ($22.7 billion) from Europe’s bailout funds is dividing the euro zone, causing uncertainty in international markets and adding to the woes of the coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, made up of her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP). Now that the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party have announced their opposition to the plan, Merkel’s coalition could for the first time fail to muster a parliamentary majority on an important decision relating to the euro crisis.
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Bill Browder: The Man Behind Russia’s Adoption Ban
Last month, when Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American citizens from adopting Russian children, it was widely seen as the latest indication that U.S.-Russian relations were spiraling downward. So who caused this turn of events? The obvious political figures certainly played their roles. But perhaps no one was more central to the unfolding drama than a businessman turned unlikely human-rights crusader named Bill Browder.
Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, had been general secretary of the American Communist Party, but his grandson spent most of his career in a very different pursuit: making money. Bill graduated from Stanford Business School the same year the Berlin Wall fell. “My grandfather was the biggest communist in America,” Browder recalls thinking at the time. “Now that the Berlin Wall has come down, I am going to be the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.”
In 1996 Browder moved to Moscow and founded the Hermitage Fund, investing fortunes from America in newly privatized Russian companies like Gazprom. (Two years later he renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Britain.) At its peak, Hermitage was worth $4.5 billion. But Browder earned a reputation in this period as a “shareholder activist,” launching his own investigations into the shady dealings of Gazprom and other Russian companies—and angering the Kremlin in the process. He was expelled from Russia in 2005 and declared a threat to national security.
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Are our lawyers being used by the Kremlin kleptocracy?
Bill Browder’s successful campaign against the Russian authorities who stole his company and contributed to his lawyer’s death has landed him in an English libel court.
One of the main aims of Russian foreign policy is to stop Bill Browder. The pugnacious financier has developed a devastating way of parting Putin’s gangsters from their money. I cannot tell you how much they hate him for it.
At the instigation of Browder’s researchers in London, parliaments are passing “Magnitsky laws”, named after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after revealing how criminals had taken $230m (£143m) from the Russian taxpayer. The US, Britain and other EU countries are considering or have already implemented a ban on entry to, and the freezing of the assets of those responsible for his detention and death, those who benefited from the conspiracy Magnitsky uncovered.
The Kremlin crime gang fears revolution. Maybe there will be a democratic uprising. Maybe a new bunch of thieves will replace the old bunch of thieves. In either event, they would want to flee abroad and enjoy their loot. Now, thanks to a novel human rights campaign, they may not be able to enjoy uncontested possession of stolen goods.
What would you do in their position? Ideally, you would want outwardly respectable people and institutions to discredit the campaign against you; to make it seem as if you were the victim of unwarranted smears. The willingness of the English law to help on these occasions has led to organisations as varied as the United Nations and the Obama White House to treat England as a global threat to freedom of speech.
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