Posts Tagged ‘Canada’
Russian Bloggers Expose Corruption, One Top Official at a Time
Can a businessman who is connected with organized crime, banned on these grounds from entering a country where his business is located, and has foreign citizenship be a senator? In Russia, the answer is yes. At least, this is the result of an investigation made by the country’s No. 1 blogger, Alexei Navalny. On March 14, he published documents that prove that Senator Vitaly Malkin not only runs business in Canada (which is against the law in Russia), but he has been denied a visa to that country because Canadian authorities suspect him of links with money laundering networks. Moreover, Malkin has (or had) a double Israeli citizenship, which is prohibited for members of either house of the Russian Parliament. Besides, Malkin was a member of a delegation of Russian parliamentarians last year who toured Washington, D.C., attempting to prevent passing of the Magnitsky Act. The blogger demanded that Malkin’s appointment be invalidated. The senator’s spokesperson denied the accusations but failed to comment on the documents.
In recent months, similar reports of corruption in the highest ranks of the government have become almost a daily routine. Last week, the Chairperson of Duma Anti-Corruption Committee Irina Yarovaya was accused by Navalny of living in an undeclared $2,900,000 flat in downtown Moscow. The week before, the blogger found that the Governor of Pskov Andrey Turchak owned a luxury house worth 1,270,000 Euro in Nice, France. And it’s not just Navalny; other bloggers are also discovering transgressions of members of Parliament, governors and other top officials. Most investigations deal with undeclared property or illegally acquired academic titles.
Bloggers even coined a humorous term for this activity — pekhting — after a veteran MP, Chairman of Duma Ethics Committee and Putin loyalist Vladimir Pekhtin. Earlier this year Navalny published documents indicating that the deputy owns two expensive apartments in Miami. After initially denying the accusations, Pekhtin eventually had to resign from the Parliament. His act sent shockwaves through the ranks of bureaucrats who had become used to impunity in exchange for loyalty.
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Russian businessman’s 20-year bid to enter Canada spawned top secret spy agency probes, but never citizenship
One evening last fall in the Parliament Hill office of a Canadian senator, a group of influential Canadians met with a controversial Russian oligarch bearing an intriguing offer: to help reveal the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat hailed as a hero for saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, before he disappeared in Soviet custody.
Two bodyguards stood outside Conservative Senator Linda Frum’s office watching over Vitaly Malkin, founder of a private national bank, once listed as one of the world’s wealthiest people and a member of the Russian senate.
Inside, Mr. Malkin and Ms. Frum were joined by Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler, who brought with him Mr. Wallenberg’s niece, Louise von Dardel. Charles Wagner, Mr. Malkin’s Toronto lawyer, and Moshe Ronen, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, were also there, all of them looking to Mr. Malkin to pry the Wallenberg secret from KGB archives.
Despite a whiff of Hollywood thriller about the after-hours gathering, it likely seemed entirely normal to Mr. Malkin, whose life is writ against a backdrop of international intrigue, precipitous geopolitics, high-level access and massive financial deals.
For 20 years, Mr. Malkin has eyed Canada, applying to live here and seek citizenship, investing millions in Toronto real estate.
Immigration rejection, RCMP probes, secret notations about him with Canada’s spy agency, accusations of organized crime ties, court battles with the government and lawsuits with former business partners have been his reward.
His November visit can be seen as something of a triumph, as it meant overcoming a 19-year ban on entering Canada for alleged involvement in organized crime, an accusation he steadfastly fought as unfair and baseless. Mr. Malkin, never charged with a crime, says he is a victim of Western prejudice against Russia’s business elites, with an assumption that their wealth comes from mobsters or corruption.
However, Mr. Malkin also found that not everything about his past was forgotten when he again crossed the Canadian border.
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Why Russia’s Patriots Love to Buy U.S. Real Estate
Imagine a newspaper exposé about several members of the U.S. Congress who didn’t declare on their tax forms luxury villas on the Iranian Persian Gulf coast. This would be a scandal of Watergate proportions and most likely produce a couple of best-sellers and a made-for-TV movie. Now imagine an analogous situation in Russia. What happens? Almost nothing. There is no scandal, no movie, only a lot of talk on the Internet.
The story began when a group of Russian senators went to the U.S. last summer to persuade their U.S. counterparts to vote against the Magnitsky Act. One of the most vocal opponents of the act was Senator Vitaly Malkin, who said Magnitsky had died in prison from consequences of alcoholism. The senators’ “anti-Magnitsky road show” in Washington raised suspicions that their actions not only were not just political but also that their personal interests might have been threatened by the act’s ban on visas and asset holdings for some Russian officials.
Journalist Andrei Malgin decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. Using just his computer and the Internet, he dug up some very interesting facts. It turned out that Malkin has real estate in North America. Furthermore, since 1994 he has been trying to get a residence permit in Canada, justifying his request by his business interests. In his application, he openly declared that he owns 111 — yes, 111 — apartments in Toronto. The Canadian authorities turned down his request, and Malkin even tried to take them to court. Unfortunately for him, the court refused to hear his suit.
But as Malgin discovered, those aren’t the only properties in the Western Hemisphere belonging to Malkin, who is from far-away Buryatia. Public documents show that Malkin’s company, which has the mysterious name 25 СС ST74B LLC, owns a duplex worth $15.6 million in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Malkin’s lawyers denied that he is the owner, but public documents from a suit the company brought against its construction manager show that Malkin owns the apartment. They also solved the mystery of his company name, which is an abbreviation of the address: 25 Columbus Circle, apartment 74B.
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Russia faces questions over acquittal at troubling trial; Charges quashed after Putin denied torture of whistleblower
Russia entered the New Year with new questions hanging over its human rights record, as a judge acquitted the only person charged in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing Moscow tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
It followed months of worsening relations with Washington, which has slapped sanctions against 60 people said to have played roles in Magnitsky’s death. The Russian parliament hit back with a bill forbidding Americans to adopt Russian orphans.
Last week negligence charges were quashed against Dmitry Kratov, who was responsible for medical care in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, at the time the severely ailing Magnitsky, 37, died on the floor of a jail cell with marks of a savage beating.
Magnitsky had been detained and allegedly tortured after uncovering evidence that pointed to senior officials he believed were implicated in the biggest tax fraud scheme in Russian history.
But turning the tables, Russian prosecutors now plan to try Magnitsky posthumously on charges of criminal fraud, along with his former boss, William Browder, who heads the London-based firm Hermitage Capital Management. They allege that the pair conspired in the tax-theft scheme.
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Canada urged to take a stand in U.S.-Russia spat over corruption, adoptions
Ottawa is studying a list of 60 Russian officials who have allegedly gone unpunished over a major corruption and murder case in their home country, and now has to decide whether to ban them from Canada.
The situation places the Canadian government in the middle of a diplomatic spat between the United States and Russia that has grown to engulf the emotional issue of international adoptions. Last month, Washington moved to freeze the assets and deny visas to Russian officials who have been linked to the 2009 death of a tax-lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky. Moscow quickly retaliated, blocking all adoptions in the country involving American couples last week.
Human-rights advocates are now calling on the Harper government to follow in the footsteps of the Obama administration and bring about a form of justice for Mr. Magnitsky. He died in a Russian jail of alleged mistreatment and torture after testifying against officials in a massive tax fraud, in a case that has sparked concerns of a cover-up after no one was held to account for his death.
Liberal MP Irwin Cotler said that Ottawa should either pass legislation that mirrors the American law, or use existing powers to go after the Russian officials by denying them entry into Canada.
“We share the hopes of the Russian people for a country that is governed by the rule of law, that combats the culture of repression, impunity and corruption that the Magnitsky case highlighted,” Mr. Cotler said in an interview on Monday.
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The Magnitsky Sanctions in Canada
The passage of the Magnitsky Act in the United States was not the end, but the beginning of the global campaign to ban human rights abusers from traveling to the West and using its financial systems. This week, the Canadian Parliament turned its attention to this issue, hearing the testimony from IMR Senior Advisor Vladimir Kara-Murza and Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder.
Less than a week after the U.S. Senate passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which imposes a targeted visa ban and asset freeze on Russian human rights abusers, the same subject was brought up for discussion at the Canadian Parliament. On December 11, the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights held a hearing on Magnitsky’s case in the context of the human rights situation in Russia. Testifying at the hearing were Vladimir Kara-Murza, a member of the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition and a senior policy advisor at the Institute of Modern Russia; and William Browder, the CEO at Hermitage Capital Management, the investment fund Sergei Magnitsky represented. The hearing was held with a full turnout of Subcommittee members.
“The tragic story of Sergei Magnitsky, whose only ‘crime’ was to stand against corruption, is symptomatic of the general situation in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where state-sanctioned theft and extortion, politically motivated prosecutions, wrongful imprisonment, police abuse, media censorship, suppression of peaceful assembly, and election fraud have become norm,” Kara-Murza said at the hearing, pointing to the recent repressive laws on public rallies, NGOs and high treason, as well as to criminal cases against opposition activists as evidence that ,“if that is possible, the situation is growing worse.”
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Hitting Russia’s “crooks and abusers” where it hurts — in Canada
“It is only our task to bring democratic change to Russia,” says Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. “It’s for the democratic opposition. We don’t want or need outside actors to come in and do anything.”
But, says Kara-Murza, there is much that Western democracies such as Canada can do to help Russian democracy by passing legislation in their own countries.
Russia’s political elite routinely plunders the country of billions of dollars. They operate like organized criminals: protecting their own and murderously silencing those who expose them. They rule in the style of Zimbabwe or Belarus, says Kara-Murza, but prefer the West as a safe place to store their money, buy second homes, and send their children to school. And it is in the West where they are most vulnerable.
Kara-Murza was in Ottawa this week to urge Canada to pass a private member’s bill introduced by Liberal Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler. The proposed legislation would render inadmissible to Canada Russians who played a role in a particularly egregious example of Russian state pillage and brutality.
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, uncovered a $230 million tax fraud while working for Bill Browder, the American-born co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management. For the crime of exposing this theft and the Russian officials involved, Magnitsky was arrested, beaten, denied medical treatment, and died in police custody without ever facing trial. A Russian prison doctor was charged with negligence. But no senior officials have been punished. Russia isn’t ignoring the matter, though. It’s putting Magnitsky on trial posthumously.
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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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