Posts Tagged ‘daily mail’
Putin’s torturers: Blowing the whistle on government cronies who stole Russia’s riches
The riches of the former Soviet Union seemed an incredible opportunity for financiers such as Bill Browder, and so it proved when he moved to the ‘Wild East’ and found he needed bodyguards and armoured cars.
But it was when he crossed the henchmen of Russian president Vladimir Putin that the trouble really started, and Browder was thrown into a terrifying world of state-sanctioned criminality. He survived, but his loyal colleague, Sergei Magnitsky, was to suffer an horrific fate at the hands of the Kremlin’s goons, as Browder recalls in this gripping first extract of his extraordinary new book…
The terrifying message arrived on my voicemail shortly after midnight on November 14, 2009. It had been a trying day. My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was being held in a hellish Russian prison on trumped-up tax-evasion charges, and he had endured another tortuous day in court.
Sergei was seriously ill with pancreatitis and gallstones, but the police were unsympathetic and had chained him to a radiator in a corridor at the court building. When he finally entered the courtroom itself, the judge treated him with equal contempt, dismissing every one of his complaints about the mistreatment he’d endured for months.
I was a world away in London, but I was desperately worried. Another Russian lawyer of mine, who was safe with me in the UK, had recently received a series of menacing texts. ‘What’s worse, prison or death?’ one said. Another was a quote from The Godfather: ‘History has taught us that you can kill anyone.’
I’d shared these with officers from Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism unit, who traced the texts to an unregistered number in Russia. This was very disturbing. The only people with access to unregistered Russian numbers were the secret police, the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation), who’d been after me for years. The FSB doesn’t just issue arrest warrants and extradition requests – it dispatches assassins.
But the message I received late that November night was worse than any that had come before. When I listened to that voicemail, I heard a man in the midst of a savage beating. He was screaming and pleading. The recording lasted two minutes and cut off mid-wail. I called everyone I knew. They were all OK. The only person I couldn’t call was Sergei…
Before all these problems in Russia, I was the founder and chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, the largest investment advisory firm in the Russian stock market. I had left a safe job in the City of London and relocated to Moscow in 1996, when Russia was nicknamed the Wild East.
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Blow to libel tourism as court throws out claims of corruption and crime in Eastern Europe because judges believed they had little connection to Britain
The trend for foreigners to have libel disputes settled in Britain could soon be a thing of the past following a landmark High Court decision.
Britain is a popular destination for so-called libel tourism because complainants believe they have more chance of winning a case in our legal system.
But yesterday, two libel cases involving allegations of corruption and crime in Eastern Europe were thrown out by judges because they were deemed to have little connection to Britain.
The decisions were hailed as a victory against libel tourism, which has become an embarrassment to Britain after a number of US states introduced laws enabling their courts to refuse to enforce defamation judgements handed down here.
One of the two cases was brought by a former Moscow policeman against City fund chief William Browder, chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, who said he had covered up a £150million fraud by causing the torture and murder of a prisoner.
But Mr Justice Simon said that the policeman, Paul Karpov, had no established reputation in Britain and so could not have suffered harm from the allegations. ‘The connection with this country is limited to the presence of some of the parties and it being the place where some of the defamatory material was, and continues to be, published,’ he said.
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Thieves of Putin’s gang ‘FSB of Russia’ thriving in London
The Daily Mail reported in two issues (here and on this link) about a gang of Putin’s thieves from the “FSB of Russia”, attempting to buy up Britain. A documentary film about these Russian criminals will be shown on Sept. 25 on channel Fox:
An early evening party is taking place in a trendy Mayfair boutique in London. Champagne flutes are raised as platinum blondes in skin-tight Cavalli coo over sparkly Swarovski clutch bags and shiny Jimmy Choos. Everyone is speaking Russian. For everyone is Russian. Guests, owners, staff, even the drivers hovering outside in their armour-plated Maybachs.
The article’s author writes that he understood the head-master of an elite prep school who refused to take Russians, calling their parents “thugs”.
Indeed, there are so many Putin’s thieves in London that, rather than just outspending everyone at British establishments, they’ve set up their own ultra-bling city within a city. It all started with a few well-known oligarchs who moved to London in order to escape tax or bloody retribution from the regime or their business rivals.
Now, more rich Russian KGB thugs are coming, as the country that boasts the youngest millionaires in the world – with an average age of 46 to our 55 – has decided London is the world’s most fashionable city. There are said to be 300,000 Russians here, though some put the figure nearer 400,000.
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How London turned into Richistan
The city with more super-rich than anywhere else proves Putin had a point when he taunted PM about losing his capital to oligarchs.
It is 3am on a warm Tuesday in Cadogan Square, Belgravia, and a £200,000 orange Maserati screeches to a halt.
The driver revs the engine for several minutes, and the car – with Arab script on its registration plate – roars off into the night. By the time the sleepless residents reach their windows to peer out, the car has long gone.
For the next month the streets of the capital will be dominated by Ferraris and Maybachs in often garish colours, driven by the over-indulged sons of the Emirates aristocracy.
Sometimes the cars come straight from the Park Lane showroom. Sometimes the playboy owners fly their favourite vehicles – heavily customised, from gold-plated interiors to velvet-covered bodywork – more than 3,000 miles for a few weeks of fun in the London traffic.
It is an annual sojourn, delayed this year by Ramadan. With temperatures reaching 110F in Kuwait, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, the ruling families have flocked to the temperate if polluted air of Knightsbridge for shopping and leisure.
And for the younger men – nights of boozing and ostentatiously bad behaviour impossible back home.
Welcome to super-rich London, the city with the highest number of multi-millionaires in the world, according to the respected Wealth Insight analysis – more than 4,000 individuals with more than £20 million per head, placing London ahead of Tokyo, Singapore and New York.
Last week, speaking at the G20 Summit, Vladimir Putin described Britain as ‘a small island’. Nobody, said his spokesman, pays attention to it – except of course the Russian ‘oligarchs who have bought Chelsea’.
To that list he might have added the Khazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Malaysians, Chinese, Indians and even Greeks and Italians who are all scrambling to buy up London in ever greater numbers.
The tide of foreign wealth seems unstoppable. ‘Super-prime’ homes, usually defined as the top 5 per cent of the most valuable properties, are being sold to international buyers at a rate of almost 85 per cent, while 60 per cent of newly built property in London is bought by overseas investors, mainly from the Far East.
Greek and Italian investors are said to be buying £500 million of British property a year.
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The Russians murdered my husband – and I could be next: Widow of Kremlin whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky reveals she fled to London in fear of her life
The contents of the food parcel Natasha Magnitsky packed for husband Sergei were achingly spare: tea, sugar, biscuits and bread, a few carrots and turnips to bolster his prison diet, and some caramel as a treat. But when she attempted to hand them in at the little hatch in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison, a female official snapped: ‘No, he’s gone.’
Terrified that Butyrka’s squalid conditions – raw sewage running through the cells, a shift system for beds – had made him sick, Sergei’s mother Nataliya dashed to Matrosskaya Tishina, a prison in northern Moscow where there was a medical unit, while Natasha went to work.
At the prison, the official at the parcel desk was rather more specific: Sergei, an accountant who’d blown the whistle on a £150 million corruption scandal that stopped at the door of the Kremlin, was dead.
‘We had been a fortress, we two,’ says Natasha, who has since fled to London with the couple’s 12-year-old son. ‘Our marriage, our family was our life. In that moment my world and my belief system disintegrated around me. The fortress crumbled.
‘The last thing he said to me the night he was arrested was, “Don’t worry, I’ll be home tomorrow.” Right to the end he believed innocence could always be proved, but now I understand that nobody is safe. The unimaginable happened to my husband – why couldn’t it also happen to me?’
Traditionally, people are sent to prison because they’ve committed a crime. Sergei, 37, found himself locked away because he uncovered one. He was the auditor who followed an extraordinary paper trail that led from an illegal Interior Ministry raid on the Moscow offices of a London investment company to law enforcers, judiciary, bankers and mobsters.
He was incarcerated for a year without trial and investigated by those with a vested interest in closing down his inquiries. A week before his family were expecting his release he died, officially of heart failure and toxic shock from untreated pancreatitis, but also from brutal beatings. America led world condemnation of the best-documented abuse of human rights to emerge from Russia in the past 25 years. It led to the Magnitsky Act, allowing the US to withhold visas and freeze the financial assets of the Russian officials involved.
Russia retaliated by posthumously prosecuting Sergei for complicity in the tax fraud he revealed. His corpse was found guilty last month and his name has now joined the growing list of other brave citizens, from the late dissident Alexander Litvinenko to the young mothers of the anti-establishment pop group Pussy Riot, who are Russia’s very modern martyrs.
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Libel tourism fiasco of Russian ‘torturer’ using our courts to bring claim against British businessman
A former Russian police officer banned from travelling to America after being accused of torture and murder has been allowed to bring an explosive libel claim against a British businessman in London’s High Court.
The case, which will cost the UK taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds, is likely to be one of the most expensive ever heard in Britain.
It is being brought by Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Karpov, one of the men accused of involvement in the arrest, torture and murder of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in Moscow in 2009.
And it follows a high-profile campaign led by Mr Magnitsky’s former boss, William Browder, who wants more than 60 Russian suspects held to account for the lawyer’s death.
But Mr Karpov has hired top UK lawyers to sue Mr Browder for defamation in a trial that opens on July 24. The case is cited as one of the worst examples of libel tourism – where foreign nationals with little or no connection to the UK use the High Court to settle their disputes.
Last night senior Labour MP Chris Bryant said: ‘It is absolutely ludicrous a man I hope will never set foot in this country except to face criminal proceedings himself is able to abuse British libel law in this way.’
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As a UK newspaper boss faces jail in Russia… A TV punch and the show trial that proves Putin will stop at nothing to silence critics of his gangster state
This has been a week for nostalgia in Moscow, courtesy of that hopeless romantic President Vladimir Putin.
Yesterday, I watched tanks and missiles rumble through Red Square to mark Victory Day. Seventy years have passed since the Battle of Stalingrad.
Many feel they were the dobroye staroye vremia — the ‘good old days’. The streets around were filled with veterans including Alexander, 90, who sported a Tolstoyan beard and Soviet medal awarded for rescuing a wounded comrade while under Nazi fire.
‘We looked after each other then,’ he reminisced to me. ‘The Great Patriotic War was terrible, but the country had a better spirit.
‘Today we are not threatened by external enemies. Our real enemies are within.’ Putin could not have scripted him better, particularly with regard to another Kremlin-orchestrated echo from Russia’s totalitarian past.
At the Ostankinsky district court on Tuesday, the trial began of a man who threw a punch. Nothing more than pride was really hurt in the scuffle, which lasted mere seconds.
Indeed, the incident would barely warrant a paragraph in a local newspaper, let alone the attention of the international media, were it not for two factors.
The first is that the ‘fight’ took place during the filming of a televised debate and therefore was ‘witnessed’ by several million.
Second, but far more important, are the profound implications of this prosecution for the freedom of the Press, not only in Russia, but the wider world.
When he stood before the judge, billionaire industrialist and media tycoon Alexander Lebedev did so as one of the most high-profile critics of the Kremlin regime.
As well as owning four London-based newspapers, including The Independent and the Evening Standard, Mr Lebedev is, along with glasnost pioneer Mikhail Gorbachev, a major shareholder in the leading Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
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Russia’s trial of DEAD man gets go-ahead for next week
Russia’s bid to put a dead man on trial descended into farce today as even a state-appointed lawyer urged that the case against Sergei Magnitsky should be put on hold and sent back to the prosecutor’s office.
But the move was rejected by the judge and now the bizarre posthumous trial will go ahead on 11 March.
The 37-year-old lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner died in a Moscow detention centre after being arrested by senior law enforcement officials he had accused of large-scale $230 million financial corruption.
No-one has been found guilty of his death – and now he will be the first dead defendant in Russian or Soviet history to go on trial.
Magnitsky’s family refused to co-operate with the ‘macabre’ case, with his mother Natalya dubbing the case immoral, illegal and designed to turn her whistleblower son into a criminal.
Lawyer Nikolai Gerasimov appointed by the state against her will to act for her dead son demanded in a closed-doors session that the trial judge Igor Alisov send the case back to prosecutors due to legal inaccuracies. The bid was refused last night.
In a surprise move another lawyer Alexander Molokhov, claiming to represent Magnitsky’s friends, said he was refused permission to take part in the controversial hearing.
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Now Russia puts a DEAD man on trial: Whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in the dock three years after his death
A crusading Russian lawyer who died in custody three years ago is set to go on trial accused of tax evasion.
In what is believed to be the first trial of a dead defendant in Russian or Soviet history, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009, will be accused of tax evasion in a Moscow courtroom.
Today’s pre-trial hearing and subsequent trial will be held under rules designed to allow innocent parties to clear their names posthumously, but experts in the case expect a speedy conviction.
Mr Magnitsky, who was 37 when he died, represented London-based Hermitage Capital Management (HCM) and uncovered what he said was a web of corruption involving Russian tax officials and police officers.
In retaliation for his reporting his findings to authorities, he was arrested on charges of organising tax evasion for company executives. On November 16th 2009, he died of pancreatitis in a Moscow prison after being tortured and denied proper medical treatment.
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