Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Dead Before Trial
Two Deaths in Pretrial Detention Show that Little Has Changed Since the Magnitsky Case.
Andrei Kudoyarov, a former principal of a school in Moscow, was facing 12 years in prison for attempting to solicit bribes, when he died of a massive heart attack in a Moscow pretrial detention center last week. With an eye to the drawn-out investigation and international furor over the earlier death of Firestone Duncan lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, investigators responded quickly by opening an inquiry into the death on Tuesday. Yet when a second prisoner in a Russian pretrial detention center died on the same day, rights activists cried foul, claiming that substandard care in detention centers has led to an “epidemic” of prisoner deaths.
Kudoyarov was arrested in May on charges that he had taken a bribe of 240,000 rubles in exchange for giving a student a spot in the first grade at Moscow School 1308. Other parents came forward with similar claims, some voiced as recently as this week, yet Kudoyarov’s lawyers and many at the school continued to claim he had been set up. It all became moot when he died on Saturday in pretrial detention of a fatal heart attack. An article published in Moskovsky Komsolets claimed he waited 43 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene.
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Dead Russian Lawyer’s Colleagues To Continue Seeking Justice
The chief executive of the Hermitage Capital Management fund says he and his colleagues will continue to seek justice for a colleague they say was killed in a Russian jail, RFE/RL’s Russian Service reports.
Sergei Magnitsky, 37, was an attorney for Hermitage who died while in pretrial detention near Moscow in November 2009. Officials said he died of heart failure but rights activists say he died after being beaten and because he was denied medical treatment for an illness he had.
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Dutch MPs want tougher stance against Russia
A majority of Dutch MPs are calling on the government to take measures to punish Russia for alleged human rights abuses in the case of the death in prison in 2009 of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The case was highlighted earlier by Radio Netherlands Worldwide and interviews recorded by RNW have been used by UN investigators examing corruption in Russia.
The failure of punish those involved in the lawyer’s death, is causing concern among many Dutch MPs who this week again demanded action.
US businessman William Browder made a personal appeal to Dutch MPs to pressure the Dutch government to do the same. Sergei Magnitsky was working for Mr Browder’s Hermitage Fund when he was arrested in 2009.
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Russian lawyer denied prison medical leave dies
A former Yukos oil executive whose struggle to win medical treatment for Aids and cancer came to symbolise the harshness of the Russian prison system, has died.
Vasily Aleksanyan, a Harvard-educated lawyer who headed Yukos’s legal department and was briefly vice-president of the firm, was imprisoned in April 2006 as part of the sweep against the oil company.
He was diagnosed with HIV shortly after his arrest, and later with tuberculosis and cancer of the liver, as well as severely limited vision.
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Browder Targets France, Germany After U.K ‘Russian Visa Ban’
Hermitage Capital Management Ltd. founder William Browder is lobbying Germany and France after the U.K. reportedly followed a U.S. ban on Russian officials over the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Browder, whose London-based fund was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, said he believes the U.K. has barred 60 Russian officials linked to Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow prison in 2009.
The British weekly, the Observer, reported yesterday that the U.K. had secretly imposed the visa ban, citing former Europe Minister Christopher Bryant as saying he was informed of the measure by Immigration Minister Damian Green. The Home Office declined to comment on individual cases, adding in an e-mailed statement: “We can refuse a visa when the individual’s character, conduct or associations makes entry to the U.K. undesirable.”
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State-Run Shakedown
Alex Shifrin thought he found a surefire way to profit from Moscow’s new consumers with an old Russian tradition: soup. Russians can’t get enough of the stuff, slurping down an incredible 32 billion bowls each year. But with the city’s emerging middle class increasingly adopting Westernized, on-the-go lifestyles, soup fans have less time to boil it for themselves. Shifrin, an advertising executive, and three partners smelled an opportunity. Why not cook it for them? They pooled their personal savings and in April 2010 launched Soupchik, a chain of takeaway outlets serving up borscht, chicken noodle and other local favorites to upwardly mobile Muscovites.
The investors, however, learned that nothing in Russia is a sure thing, thanks to the unpredictable and predatory government. A steady stream of corrupt tax officials, police officers and other security agents began harassing them for payoffs. Within weeks of Soupchik’s opening, two tax inspectors claimed the start-up was violating an obscure retailing regulation. Shifrin protested, and amid the negotiations, a tax administrator suggested that some $1,000 in cash would resolve the matter. (Shifrin refused to ante up, and the tax office eventually dropped its case.)
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One More Reason Not to Invest in Russia
In the 1990s, Anatoly Chubais was guilty for all the country’s economic woes, as the popular phrase goes. Now Regional Development Minister Viktor Basargin has found a new source of Russia’s economic problems — foreign investors.
At the Baikal International Economic Forum on Monday in Irkutsk, Basargin criticized foreign investors, calling them “vacuum cleaners” that “suck up Russia’s natural resources and export them out of the country.”
“Vacuum cleaners” is nothing compared with what Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was called. Although Hermitage was the largest portfolio investor in Russia in the mid-2000s — with more than $4 billion in investments in the country — the Russian government labeled him “a threat to national security” in 2006 and denied him entry into the country. Browder was blacklisted after he spent years fighting against corruption and abuse of shareholder rights in Gazprom and other large companies that Hermitage invested in.
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Lebedev targets Russian secret police for damages
Russia’s secret police have long been immune to the law that they supposedly uphold, a state within a state that acts with virtual impunity in the tradition of its KGB forebears. But now, a disgruntled banker has decided to test just how aloof they are from the law, with a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Moscow court.
Alexander Lebedev, the billionaire owner of The Independent and Evening Standard newspapers in London, launched the lawsuit claiming damages of 350m roubles ($11.6m) to his business reputation following a raid by masked special forces on his National Reserve Bank in November.
The lawsuit is the first of its kind in Russia to target the FSB, according to Mr Lebedev. “It’s the first time to my knowledge that any one has tried this,” he said.
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The Murky World Of Russian Business Deals
No-one knows the challenges of operating a business in Russia better than Bob Dudley – the CEO of BP who is travelling there alongside David Cameron.
Mr Dudley was kicked out of the country in 2008 after claiming he had been harassed by the Russian government. BP say their Moscow offices were raided illegally only last week.
In his speech at Moscow University, David Cameron said British companies “need to have faith that the State, the judiciary and the police will protect their hard work and not put the obstacles of bureaucracy, regulation and corruption in their way”.
Corruption is endemic in Russian business – so says Bill Browder, of London-based Hermitage Capital.
He says his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died an agonising death in a Moscow jail at the hands of the people who arrested him after he uncovered a state-committed fraud worth millions of pounds.
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