Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Is Russia trying a dead whistle-blower because of a US law?
The US recently enacted legislation targeting those Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, spurring an angry reaction from the Kremlin.
At the center of the stormiest US-Russia diplomatic crisis since the cold war stands the enigmatic figure of Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the US Senate has named a punitive new law that imposes harsh visa and economic sanctions against scores of Russian officials who are deemed to have committed serious human rights violations.
The tale of Mr. Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer who blew the whistle on a vast corruption scheme, was arrested by the same officials he had implicated, and was allegedly beaten to death in prison over three years ago, appears to validate all the worst suspicions held in the West about the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last month, is a controversial new breed of legislation that aims to compensate for the perceived failures of Russia’s justice system by meting out punishment to about 60 Russian officials deemed to have been involved in the wrongful prosecution and alleged murder of Magnitsky.
The Kremlin’s incandescent response makes it likely that the mutual acrimony will expand in weeks to come. Mr. Putin called the Magnitsky Act a “purely political, unfriendly act” that demanded a stern riposte. Last week he signed the retaliatory Dima Yakovlev Act, whose key provision is a ban on all adoptions of Russian children by US citizens.
But in an apparent effort to overturn the widely-held Western narrative, which sees Magnitsky as the victim of corrupt officials and a lawless state, Russian prosecutors have announced they will put the deceased Magnitsky on trial later this month, seeking to prove that he and his former boss, Bill Browder, head of the London-based Hermitage Capital, were the real criminals.
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Bill Browder: “The Impunity Bubble Is Broken”
After the Magnitsky Act was passed by the U.S. Senate, Bill Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital and one of the bill’s most active proponents, spoke at Columbia University Law School. He told the story of Sergei Magnitsky, who exposed the largest embezzlement scheme in Russian history, was jailed and died in Moscow prison. Ian Hague, co-founder of Firestone Management, and Kimberly Marten, acting director of the Harriman Institute, also shared their views on the issue.
It so happened that the event entitled “Failed Mafia State” at Columbia University Law School was held on December 6th, the same day the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act was passed by the U.S. Senate. On December 14th, the bill was signed by President Obama and came into full effect. The new law imposes a visa ban and asset freeze on individuals involved in the imprisonment and death of Sergei Magnitsky, as well as on those responsible for other gross human rights violations in Russia.
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Sergei Magnitsky: Quest for justice in Russian lawyer’s death begins to yield results
On the night of Nov. 16, 2009, a battered body was carried from an isolation cell in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison. It was that of 37-year-old Sergei Magnitsky.
The young, upcoming tax lawyer had been held in some of Russia’s roughest prisons for a year, and according to records, tortured, locked up in inhuman conditions and denied medical aid when he suffered an agonizing pancreatic ailment.
“He was an idealist,” says his former employer William Browder. “He could have left the country, but he believed that Russian law would protect him. But there is no rule of law in Russia.”
Magnitsky’s “crime” was to blow the whistle on the largest tax fraud ever perpetrated in Russia, and he paid with his life.
Now Browder, once Russia’s biggest foreign investor, devotes his time and resources to seeking justice for Magnitsky. The quest has led to an international confrontation, landmark legislation on human rights, and an awareness that officials at the highest levels can be held accountable.
The U.S. Congress has just passed a Magnitsky Act that freezes the assets of 60 Russians linked with his death and bars them from entering the country: it spreads the net wider, to all those responsible for gross violations of human rights in Russia.
In Canada, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler is introducing a similar private member’s bill. Browder met this week with Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. Other Western countries are watching closely.
Russia has retaliated furiously, passing a tit-for-tat bill to sanction Americans who commit human rights violations against Russians. It’s shaping up as the biggest chill in relations since the Cold War.
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Bar Russian Murder Suspects, says Cotler
Tax attorneys make unlikely heroes, but Sergei Magnitsky died a horrible death at the age of 37, refusing to recant his assertion of a massive fraud in Russia.
Magnitsky spent his final days at the same prison that once held Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish hero credited with rescuing as many as 100,000 Jews from the Nazis only to be imprisoned by the Soviets on suspicion of espionage.
Like Wallenberg, Magnitsky is being remembered as a man of principle who stood by his sense of right and wrong at great personal cost.
Several years ago, Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, and his associates discovered that Russian companies they had invested in had bilked the Russian government for $230 million in taxes paid by Hermitage.
Exposing the fraud got Browder barred from Russia, but his lawyer, Magnitsky, paid a higher price. He was jailed, mistreated, and killed in November 2009. He was denied medical treatment for a severe pancreatic condition he developed while held in the infamous Butyrka prison.
Like Wallenberg, Magnitsky is being remembered as a man of principle who stood by his sense of right and wrong at great personal risk.
Browder said the fact that the Russian government would attack people for exposing tax fraud shows that corruption had reached the highest levels of the government.
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Why This Russian Criminal Case Matters to Canada
On Tuesday, the Canadian Parliament will hear testimony concerning the torture and tragic death in detention of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered the largest corporate tax fraud in Russian history, identified the senior Russian perpetrators, and paid for it with his life. His story is one of great moral courage and heroism, and his saga shines a spotlight on the pervasive culture of repression, corruption and impunity implicating senior government officials in Russia today.
Working as a tax attorney for Hermitage Capital Management in Moscow, an international investment fund founded by CEO William Browder — who will be the main witness at Parliamentary hearings today — Magnitsky blew the whistle on widespread Russian government corruption, involving officials from six senior Russian ministries.
The officials he testified against then arranged for his arrest and detention — and for the subsequent cover-up of their criminality — beginning a nightmare in which he was thrown into a prison cell without bail or trial, and systematically tortured for one year in an attempt to force him to retract his testimony.
Despite the intense physical and psychological pain Sergei Magnitsky endured at the hands of his captors, he refused to perjure himself, even as his health deteriorated. Denied medical care for the last six months of his detention, he died in excruciating circumstances at the age of 37, having developed a severe pancreatic condition while being held in the Butyrka prison, a notorious Czarist-era jail that also that also held Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Raoul Wallenberg.
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US starts a new ‘cold war’ over Magnitsky affair: Furious Russia vows to list Americans blocked from entering country, after US votes to name and shame corrupt officials
The Independent. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs described ‘biased approach’ as ‘nothing but a vindictive desire to counter Russia in world affairs’
SHAUN WALKER, JEROME TAYLOR MOSCOW FRIDAY 07 DECEMBER 2012
One of Russia’s top foreign policy officials responded furiously and promised that Russia would indeed answer with its own list of Americans to be banned from entry to Russia.
“The reciprocal list will be fairly significant, if we name those behind Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib, and the CIA secret jails, Mikhail Margelov, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia’s Federation Council.
“The list will include those who have violated human rights [in the Middle East], and that would be according to global opinion, and not just the opinion of this Mr Browder, who some experts feel is simply using the Magnitsky List as a diversion.”
However, according to a poll by the Levada Centre, an independent Russian polling agency, 39 percent of Russians who had heard about the Magnitsky Act approved of it, rising to 45% among Muscovites.
Yesterday the US Senate voted to name and shame Russian officials involved in corruption and to forbid them from travelling to America or investing there.
The overwhelming vote in favour of the new law prompted a furious response from Moscow – as well as demands from two former British Foreign Secretaries, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and David Miliband, for a similar ban to be introduced by the UK.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs hit back, describing the “biased approach” as “nothing but a vindictive desire to counter Russia in world affairs”.
The Ministry published a series of furious remarks on its official Twitter feed: “It is perplexing and preposterous to hear human rights complaints from the US, where torture and kidnapping are legal in the 21st century. Apparently, Washington has forgotten what year this is and still thinks the Cold War is going on.
“The US decision to impose visa and financial sanctions on certain Russian citizens is like something out of the theatre of the absurd. Obviously, US passage of the ‘Magnitsky Law’ will adversely affect the prospects of bilateral cooperation.”
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Magnitsky fund boss says staff received death threats
Agence France Presse
The head of the investment fund at the centre of the Magnitsky fraud scandal said Friday staff had received death threats, as British police probed the unexplained death of a Russian involved in the case.
The chief executive of investment fund Hermitage Capital, William Browder, would not say whether he believed that Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, who died on November 10 near his home in Surrey outside London, had been murdered.
But he confirmed the Russian businessman had since 2010 been passing evidence to Hermitage of the involvement of Russian officials in a scheme to embezzle $230 million (177 million euros) by obtaining false tax returns on payments made by the fund.
Hermitage’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian jail in 2009 after he went public with allegations about the conspiracy and was in turn taken into custody accused of tax violations.
Browder said Perepilichnyy was the fourth person linked to the Magnitsky affair to have died in unexplained circumstances.
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Russia Vows Retaliation If Magnitsky Bill Passes
The Foreign Ministry on Thursday responded to the advancement of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. House of Representatives by issuing a warning of retaliation.
The bill, which seeks to punish Russian officials involved in the jail death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, is expected to come up for vote in the House on Friday.
Russia will get back at the United States if the bill becomes law, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.
“We will have to react, and it will be a tough reaction,” he said, Interfax reported.
He did not specify what the government had in mind, saying only that Russia’s response would depend on the final content of the “unfriendly and provocative” legislation and cover the complete range of bilateral ties.
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Fund file: Bullish on Russia?
Investors should look before they leap into investing in Russia, according to a report in Monday’s FTfm, but it is very unlikely that many will do so.
On the face of it, huge strides that have been made in the last year or so will make Russia a more friendly place for overseas investors.
“Right now we’re going through a period of moderate liberalisation,” says Jan Dehn, chief strategist with Ashmore, an emerging markets specialist.
He can see evidence of this in recent measures to allow greater flexibility of the rouble and in moves to encourage foreign ownership of local currency bonds. Until recently, he explains, foreign ownership of rouble-denominated Russian sovereign debt was about 3 per cent. It is now 5.4 per cent and Dehn expects the proportion to rise to something closer to the emerging market average, which is 20 per cent.
There is also a ministry of finance proposal that will require any listed company with majority state ownership to pay out 25 per cent of its profits in dividends to shareholders from next year. By next year, also, Russian companies will have to follow IFRS international accounting standards.
Small wonder that Dehn, along with many other emerging market fund managers, reports being overweight Russia.
Bill Browder, founder and chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, thinks they have either foolish optimism or very short memories, or both.
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