Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Investor doubts hold back Russian oil powerhouse
The Russian oil company Surgutneftegaz owns refineries and gas stations, sells a valuable product and makes a profit. But it sometimes fails another test of the capitalist world.
The company is valued by the Russian stock market at even less than its cash and easily sold assets. That astonishing fact suggests that investors see no real value in the business.
Surgut, as it is known for short, is Russia’s fourth-largest oil company after Rosneft, Lukoil and TNK-BP. Its sprawling oil fields, pipelines and drilling rigs should be highly valued in the investment arena. It pumps 1.1 million barrels of oil a day. So the struggle to raise its stock value in the eyes of portfolio managers, while more extreme than many of its Russian peers, is emblematic of investors’ broad lack of confidence in the country’s economy. Outsiders view Russia’s companies, however cash-rich, with an incredible degree of skepticism.
Shares in Surgut have fallen in recent weeks to a level where the market value of about $28.5 billion (U.S.) for its common shares on the Russian Micex stock exchange is now lower than the $31.4 billion in cash and liquid assets on its balance sheet, according to Troika Dialog bank in Moscow.
“It’s an illogical valuation,” Chris Weafer, the chief strategist at Troika Dialog brokerage in Moscow, wrote in a research note last week about the company.
The Russian market this spring fell faster than others of the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China and since mid-March is down 18.8 per cent. Global oil prices have slumped, reducing expected earnings.
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In This Russian Trial, The Defendant Is A Dead Man
The Russian government is about to put a dead man on trial.
Sergei Magnitsky was a tax lawyer for the investment fund Hermitage Capital, at one time the largest foreign investment firm in Russia.
In 2007, Hermitage Capital was seized by the Russian tax police, and through a number of shady maneuvers, they extracted more than $230 million in illegal tax refunds for themselves.
Magnitsky decided to investigate, angering those who had stolen the company. They had him arrested, and he died in prison in 2009.
But the case didn’t die with him — far from it. Now, it seems those who perpetrated the fraud have found it beneficial to reopen his case and bring him to trial, says Elena Panfilova, the director of the human rights organization Transparency International in Russia.
“They need to protect themselves or somebody they know,” she says. “Not maybe necessarily themselves, like physically, but maybe they need to protect their own institution from being blamed for doing something wrong.”
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Turning the Tables on Russia
The New York Times. The Opinion Pages
By JOE NOCERA
Published: April 16, 2012
Who knew that what corrupt Russian officials care about, more than just about anything, is getting their assets — and themselves — out of their own country? They own homes in St. Tropez, fly to Miami for vacation and set up bank accounts in Switzerland. They understand the importance of stashing their money someplace where the rule of law matters, which is most certainly not Russia. Besides, getting out of Russia is one of the pleasures of being a corrupt Russian official.
As it turns out, a man named William Browder knows this. As does Senator Benjamin Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. As do plenty of other senators, on both sides of the aisle.
As a result, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will likely report out a bill in the next few weeks that would force the State Department to deny visas, and freeze the assets, of Russian officials who are labeled “gross human rights abusers.” After that, it will be attached to an important trade bill that the Democratic-led Senate and the Republican-controlled House need to pass later this summer. Which would make it a rare and welcome moment of bipartisanship in this rancorous political season.
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Russia drops charges against doctor in Magnitsky case
Russia said Monday it had dropped charges against a doctor implicated in the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, sparking accusations that the authorities had no interest in seeking justice in the case.
Larisa Litvinova was one of only two people, both prison doctors, to be charged after a long-running and high-profile investigation into what activists see as one of Russia’s most outrageous post-Soviet rights violations.
Magnitsky died in 2009 at the age of 37 from untreated medical conditions including acute pancreatis after being held in a notoriously squalid prison during a fraud probe against his client, US investment firm Hermitage Capital.
“The Investigative Committee has decided to drop the criminal case against doctor and laboratory assistant at the pre-trial detention centre, Larisa Litvinova,” investigators said in a statement said.
It cited “the elapsing of the statute of limitations,” saying a new law had come into force since the probe began, meaning that investigators had to bring a case to trial within two years.
Litvinova was charged last August with causing death by negligence, while her boss, the detention centre’s deputy medical chief Dmitry Kratov, was charged with negligence.
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Russia drops charges against jail doctor over death of anti-corruption lawyer
As relatives of Sergei Magnitsky commemorated what would have been the Russian lawyer’s 40th birthday on Sunday, it emerged that authorities had dropped a negligence case against one of the doctors who treated him in prison.
Mr Magnitsky, a lawyer for the investment fund Hermitage Capital, died in a Russian jail in 2009 after he was accused of perpetrating a fraud he claimed to have uncovered. He died after being refused proper treatment for a pancreas condition. An official report suggested he was beaten before he died. But only two medical staff have been charged with any crimes and the Russian authorities have even begun a posthumous prosecution of Mr Magnitsky.
His lawyers say Larisa Litvinova, the doctor in charge of Mr Magnitsky at the Butyrka prison hospital, refused him basic tests and treatment that could have saved his life. She had been charged with negligence, but the case has been dropped, leaving one other prison doctor as the only person facing charges in the case. “Over two years after he died, not a single person has been prosecuted for torture, murder, or the fraud that he uncovered,” William Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital, said.
Mr Browder is pushing for the US and other countries to adopt the Magnitsky Act, which would impose financial sanctions and deny visas to 60 Russian officials believed to be complicit in the case.
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Government under pressure to publish names of Russians suspected of links to assassinations
The Government is under pressure to publish the names of Russians suspected of being linked to targeted assassinations amid increasing concerns that London is turning into a playground for mobsters and hit squads.
The calls come following the recent attempted murder of a prominent Russian banker who was due to testify in an upcoming murder trial and reports that a hit man sent to assassinate a prominent Chechen dissident leader has successfully fought off a deportation bid.
Former Europe minister Dennis MacShane believes the situation has become so critical that publicly outing the names of known Russians linked to political killings would send a powerful signal that such violence will not be tolerated on British streets.
“It is only by naming publicly the Russian security apparatus officials, in office or retired and working in the para-security services that Britain can send a message ahead of the Olympic Games that our main city is not ‘Londongrad’ and Russian killers should stay away and stop harassing British businesses,” the MP told The Independent. “Every Russian I meet tells me that private protests have no impact on the Kremlin. Britain has to take a lead and go public with naming names as that is one message the Russian security-business state which likes owning property here, likes sending its children to private schools, and needs City of London lawyers to write contracts actually understands.”
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“Londongrad” on edge after attack on Russian banker
A failed hit on a former Russian banker in London has sent a chill through Russian immigrant circles and shone an unwelcome spotlight on a hidden criminal underworld encroaching on the British capital.
The shooting also raised concerns Britain might be turning into a playground for Russian mobsters as gangland violence appears to spill over Russian borders into European capitals.
London is the chosen home for many Russians seeking a haven from the cut-throat world of their homeland where, 20 years after the Soviet collapse, they have little faith in the rule of law.
Now, some exiles say, few are safe in a city known affectionately as “Londongrad” to many of its Russian inhabitants.
“Everybody is trying to figure out who their enemies might be,” said Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a business tycoon who fled to London in 2008 after falling out with the government.
“You know, if they want to kill me, they’ll kill me,” added Chichvarkin, whose mother died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow in 2010.
To some, it was like a classic tale of gangland thuggery, with echoes of the plot from some mafia thriller.
German Gorbuntsov, 45, was shot five times with a pistol by a lone gunman as he entered a block of serviced apartments in east London on March 20, the Canary Wharf financial district’s cluster of skyscrapers towering high above the quiet back street.
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Putin, corruption and the Magnitsky case
It’s not easy to hear of how Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed.
“you need to be sitting down for this story” said chair, Edward Lucas, foreign correspondent with the Economist. “…could those people at the back find a space?”
William Browder was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia with the Hermitage fund before he was thrown out of the country in 2005.
Sergei Magnitsky
“25 police officers raided my office in Moscow” he says, “and 25 more police officers raided the office of my American law firm… One of the lawyers protested at the seizure of these documents and he was beaten so badly he was hospitalised for three weeks.”
Browder hired seven lawyers to find out more about the mess, one of them was a 36-year-old Sergei Magnitsky. They started an investigation that unearthed a high-level attempt to siphon a high-volume of funds. It was a complicated scheme that lead to a false tax refund of $230m that came – not fromBrowder’s company but from the Russian taxpayer.
Six out of seven of Browder’s lawyers left Russia for safety. Sergei Magnitsky decided to stay.
“He testified against the police officers who did the raid used to get the documents… and one month later the same police officers came to his home… and arrested him and put him in pre-trial detention and then began to torture him.”
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Russia’s Steve Biko; What Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death tells us about the Kremlin’s leadership
In 1977, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was arrested by South African police, clubbed to within an inch of his life, chained, stripped, manacled, denied care and ultimately left to die in a car. More appalling was the apartheid regime’s response to his murder: denial, followed by coverup, followed by professions of indifference to Biko’s suffering.
For the generation of Westerners that came politically of age in anti-apartheid rallies—Barack Obama’s generation—Biko’s name became a byword for everything they were fighting against. So it is with most revolutionary movements. It’s not sufficient to have the example of great heroes in the mold of a Walesa or Suu Kyi or Mandela. They also require great victims: Men and women who, in the manner of their dying, demonstrate why it is their victimizers who must perish instead.
Last year, the Arab world found its Biko in Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Now Russia may find its own Biko in the memory of Sergei Magnitsky, a mild-mannered, middle-class tax attorney from Moscow who spent the last of his 37 years in a filthy Russian prison before dying in November 2009 of medical neglect and physical torture.
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