Posts Tagged ‘corruption’
Russia’s Perversion of Justice
From the gulags to the “doctor’s plot,” Russian history is replete with politically orchestrated show trials. But an upcoming case may achieve the unlikely feat of raising the bar for legal and political corruption. That is because the defendant in the case, attorney Sergei Magnitsky, has been dead for two years. What’s more, his trial is being sought by the very government and police officials who may have been complicit in his death.
Earlier this month, officials with the Russian Interior Ministry announced their plan to resubmit a tax evasion case that would see Magnitsky go on trial posthumously. Magnitsky first incurred these officials’ ire in 2007, when he was an attorney with of the Moscow-based American law firm Firestone Duncan and an outside counsel for the investment fund Hermitage Capital. In June 2007, police from the ministry raided both Firestone Duncan and Hermitage Capital’s Moscow offices on the pretext of tax evasion charges. In the course of the raid, they took away the official documents and seals of the fund’s Russian investment companies – despite the fact these documents were outside the scope of their search warrant.
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What the Market Will Bear
A new survey by a Russian small and midsized business interest group claims that pressure from government officials seeking bribes has risen dramatically in the last several years. While corruption in Russian businesses gained the spotlight in recent years after the Hermitage affair and the death of Firestone Duncan lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in police custody, business owners claimed that corruption is a systemic problem that is particularly targeting small business in Russia today. In the past half-decade, the number of those who say that they regularly face extralegal government pressure has nearly quadrupled.
According to the research, which is conducted yearly by the Russian Union of Manufacturers and Entrepreneurs, the number of business owners who “regularly experience pressure from state establishments” has climbed to 36 percent of all the business owners polled in the anonymous survey. Those who have faced “at least one case” of pressure for bribes from the government stood at 36 percent, while those who responded that they had never encountered government interference dropped just below 50 percent. Those numbers show a significant jump from the first survey put out by the organization in 2006, with just 19 percent saying they faced regular pressure from government and 61 percent responding that they had never been targeted by corrupt officials.
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Fighting corruption in Russia: No cause for celebration
On December 9, the world marked International Anti-Corruption Day. For Russia, this is something of a professional holiday, as it has found itself in an unenviable position in numerous anti-corruption ratings in the past few years.
Yelena Panfilova, General Director of the Center for Anti-Corruption Research and Initiative of Transparency International Russia and a member of the Presidential Council for Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights
Over the past three to four years, the Russian government has focused attention on fighting bribery. The government should use International Anti-Corruption Day as an opportunity to talk about its successful anti-graft measures and highlight its achievements. At the very least, it should mark, if not celebrate, this day.
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In Russia, Prisons for Police Thrive
New York Times
NIZHNY TAIGIL, Russia — Like a scene from a felon’s daydream, all the inmates at a prison compound here in western Russia — some 2,000 of them — are former policemen, prosecutors, tax inspectors, customs agents and judges.
Most of the day, they mill about, glum-faced, dressed in prison clothes. The only visible hints of the policemen’s former employment are the occasional buzz cuts.
Russian penitentiary authorities offered a rare tour of this specialized penal colony recently with an eye to demonstrating that these inmates receive no privileges.
In some ways, the officials proved their point. At least as far as accommodations go, the prison is as grim as most. Inside the walls of unpainted concrete slabs, barbed wire slashes the prison yards into zones for those doing hard time and minor offenders. And like the men and women they put behind bars, former police officers here live in rough-hewn brick barracks, toil in a workshop and eat boiled buckwheat and cabbage.
But the tour of the prison, Correctional Colony 13, also underscored a point that the authorities might not have intended to highlight: most of the inmates are here for work-related infractions, from accepting bribes to attacking suspects.
As Andrei V. Shumilov, a former detective, said of his conviction for beating a suspect with his fists during questioning: “I was investigating a crime, and I committed a crime myself.” By way of justification, he mumbled that the man had suffered only “damage to soft tissue.”
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Net Impact – One man’s cyber crusade against Russian Corruption
Late on a snowy evening, Alexey Navalny, a lawyer and blogger known for his crusade against the corruption that pervades Russian business and government, sat in a radio studio in Moscow. Tall and blond, Navalny, who is thirty-four years old, cuts a striking figure, and in the past three years he has established himself as a kind of Russian Julian Assange or Lincoln Steffens. On his blog, he has uncovered criminal self-dealing in major Russian oil companies, banks, and government ministries, an activity he calls “poking them with a sharp stick.” Three months ago, he launched another site, RosPil, dedicated to exposing state corruption, where he invites readers to scrutinize public documents for evidence of malfeasance and post their findings. Since the site went up, government contracts worth nearly seven million dollars have been annulled after being found suspect by Navalny and his army. Most remarkably, Navalny has undertaken all this in a country where a number of reporters and lawyers investigating such matters have been beaten or murdered.
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Russian Journalists Need Help in Exposing Corruption
Exposing corruption in countries where the rule of law has not been established is always a heavily one-sided affair. Independent media and the Internet are the tools that citizens have to fight against it while the ruling elite retains the power of the state’s resources and commands the loyalty of those who enforce punishment on those who interfere. Today in Russia journalists need help in their fight against corruption. We don’t want intrusive assistance, but rather moral and professional support from our international colleagues (journalists and bloggers) along with attentiveness on the part of international investors.
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Russia acknowledges it has an image problem
Russia has an image problem due to cases such as the death in jail of a whistleblower and the trials of an ex-tycoon, a senior official has said.
But the president’s chief economic adviser added that Russia was working hard to improve the investment climate. “We are doing our best to punish those people who are not following the rule of law,” said Arkady Dvorkovich.
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