Posts Tagged ‘daily telegraph’
Magnitsky case: Russian authorities ‘brutally silenced’ critics
Russian authorities have been accused of allowing corrupt officials to “plunder” the state while “brutally silencing” their critics in a damning report by the Council of Europe.
Andreas Gross, a Swiss MP and chair of the Socialist Group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, made the accusations in an official report into death of the campaigning anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky four years ago.
The findings, in which Mr Gross claims “high level” state officials orchestrated a “cover up”, will inflame the diplomatic row over Russia’s handling of Mr Magnitsky’s death. The scandal has become a national embarrassment, damaging business investment and trade relations.
The US has already imposed visa bans and frozen the assets of 60 Russians linked to the alleged crime. In response, Moscow has barred US citizens from adopting Russian children.
Mr Magnitsky was working for UK hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management when he uncovered an alleged $230m fraud against the Russian taxpayer. After publicly naming the police involved, the same officers arrested him and threw him in jail on tax evasion charges. He was held for a year, dying after developing pancreatitis, being denied medical attention, and being beaten with “rubber truncheons”.
The Parliamentary Assembly was “appalled that Mr Magnitsky died in pre-trial detention and none of the persons responsible for his death have yet been held to account”, the report said.
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Russia wants Bill Browder on Interpol list
Last month, Moscow issued an arrest warrant against the founder of Hermitage Capital management on charges that he stole shares in gas giant Gazprom 15 years ago.
Mr Browder said the action was a “politically-motivated” response to his campaign to expose a criminal network linked to the death in detention four years ago of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered an alleged $230m (£150m) fraud against the Russian state.
The request will be considered by Interpol’s commission this Thursday and Friday. A so-called “blue notice” would require all 190 member countries “to provide information about an individual’s location and activities” and could be used for arrest and extradition.
Mr Browder was a prominent Russian investor before being barred entry in 2006. The following year, Mr Magnitsky unearthed evidence of a huge alleged tax fraud by a criminal group that included officials in the police and tax authorities, and went public.
He was later jailed on disputed tax evasion charges and died in prison in November 2009 after being denied medical help. Mr Browder has since campaigned for justice and sparked a major diplomatic incident after succeeding in having 60 Russians – including senior state officials – barred from the US. Russia responded by banning US adoptions of Russian children and launching a controversial posthumous trial of Mr Magnitsky.
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The yoga guru and the British firms at the heart of Sergei Magnitsky’s death
To her students Lana Zamba is simply an experienced yoga teacher, expert in a 500-year-old form of the mystic Eastern discipline. But Mrs Zamba is equally pliable, it appears, when it comes to choosing business directorships.
The yoga instructor, who lives in Limassol in Cyprus, has been a director of no fewer than 24 British-based companies including one at the centre of an alleged multi-million-pound fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the Moscow lawyer whose death in a Russian jail became an international cause célèbre.
Quite why a yoga instructor, who describes herself on the internet as “the leading teacher and representative of the Patanjali International Yoga Foundation”, should head so many different businesses is unclear.
But Mrs Zamba, 47, is named in a series of letters sent to authorities demanding a criminal investigation in Britain into a fraud that led to Mr Magnitsky’s death.
Mr Magnitsky, 37, who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a British-based hedge fund, had uncovered evidence of a £150 million fraud committed by Russian tax officials and an organised crime syndicate.
He was then arrested on tax evasion charges and held in the notorious Butyrka prison for 358 days before his death in 2009, developing pancreatitis for which he did not receive proper medical treatment. He was also beaten in jail.
Despite being dead for four years – and to the anger of the outside world – Mr Magnitsky is being tried posthumously in Moscow for tax evasion.
Hermitage’s investigations into the fraud suggest as much as £35 million was laundered through 10 British companies. One of those companies – Nomirex Trading Ltd, based in an office block in Birmingham – lists only two directors: Mrs Zamba and a company based in Cyprus.
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UK companies accused of money laundering in Magnitsky probe
British companies laundered millions of pounds stolen from the Russian Treasury in a $230m (£150m) tax fraud that has triggered a major diplomatic battle between the Kremlin and the US, it has been alleged.
At least £35m passed through the foreign bank accounts of about 10 UK registered front companies to “clean” the money, an investigation has found. The alleged 2007 fraud at the heart of the case has been linked with five deaths, including that of Russian anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose story has been turned into a play and documentary.
Evidence that the UK system has been abused prompted one MP to demand the Government follow the US’s lead and ban the 60 Russians implicated in the fraud and Mr Magnitsky’s death, including a number of state officials, from entering the country.
Dominic Raab MP said: “We don’t want Britain to become a playground for these gangsters, let alone a battleground for the violence that tends to follow.”
Among the UK companies named is Nomirex, a shell company owned in Cyprus than names a Cypriot yoga teacher as its director. Between 2007 and 2009, its accounts stated it was “inactive”. However, an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama found that $365m was transferred through its Latvian bank account in that time.
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Russia puts Hermitage boss Bill Browder on wanted list
The Russian Interior Ministry is seeking an arrest warrant for the British hedge fund boss Bill Browder in a move that will escalate tension between Moscow and America and the UK.
Mr Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, said it had received notice that a Moscow court had been asked to issue a warrant for his arrest “in absentia” for tax evasion. The fund manager is accused of “stealing” shares in Gazprom more than a decade ago and “interfering” with the energy giant’s strategic policies.
However, in an embarrassing twist, the Moscow court judged refused to issue the warrant saying Mr Browder had not been given enough warning. Hermitage said the court will review the request again in a week’s time. It is only the second time Moscow has sought to put a westerner on the international wanted list; the first was a Spanish national embroiled in the Yukos case.
The latest development, which will be seen as an aggressive attack of the Russian state on business, has been condemned as “politically-directed abuse of justice” by Hermitage.
The claim against Mr Browder has been separated from the Interior Ministry’s case against his former employee, Sergei Magnitsky who is currently the subject of the first ever posthumous trial in Russian history.
In a statement today, Hermitage, which was one of the biggest investors in Russia, said that the warrant “follows a coordinated Russian state propaganda campaign in the last three months, where all Kremlin-controlled TV channels, including NTV, Rossiya, and 1TV ran slanderous programs accusing Mr Browder of murders, stealing IMF money in 1998, causing the Russian default, stealing Gazprom shares, and being a UK spy.”
A Hermitage spokesman added: “President Putin treats the law and the truth like a child in a sandbox. There are no rules. There is no law, and he thinks he can do whatever he wants. This may be true in Russia, but it is not true elsewhere in the world.”
Mr Browder, an American-born British citizen, has campaigned for justice for Mr Magnitsky who died in prison where he was detained on controversial charges for a year. The fund manager has been accused of illegally buying shares in Gazprom in contravention of a presidential decree in 1997 which imposed restrictions on foreigners owning the shares.
Hermitage maintains that “the case itself has no legal prospect because there were never any criminal sanctions for owning Gazprom shares.”
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Sergei Magnitsky trial: ‘it’s not illegal to try a dead man’, says judge
A Moscow judge has refused calls to halt the posthumous prosecution of Sergei Magnitsky, ruling on the first day of the trial that it was not illegal to try a dead defendant.
Mr Magnitsky, a lawyer whose case became an international cause célèbre, died in a pretrial detention centre in the city in 2009 aged 37 after being arrested by senior Russian police officers whom he had accused of colluding with tax officials in a £140m fraud. He was denied vital medical treatment and beaten in custody.
In November 2012, prosecutors charged the dead man himself with tax evasion, citing a recent Russian Constitutional Court decision that suggested a deceased defendant could be tried if his family requests it in order to clear his or her name.
Mr Magnitsky’s widow, Natalya Zharikova, 40, said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph this week that she and his mother had repeatedly informed authorities that they did not want such a trial, making it illegal.
That view was supported on Friday by the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association, a lawyers group, which issued a statement saying the posthumous trial was “unlawful and breaching both domestic and international covenants”.
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Sergei Magnitsky’s widow wants abusers banned from entering Britain
The widow of whistle-blowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has called on the British Government to adopt a US-style law to publicly ban his abusers from entering the UK.
Speaking as a Moscow court on Friday begins a “Kafkaesque” trial of her dead husband, Natalya Zharikova, 40, in her first ever media interview, urged Britain to adopt a similar law to the Magnitsky Act approved by the United States in December.
The Act, which introduced US visa bans and asset freezes for Russian officials allegedly involved in Mr Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow jail in 2009, prompted fury from the Kremlin, which approved a controversial ban on American parents adopting Russian children as a “symmetrical response”.
“I would like the UK Government to introduce a similar law to the US Magnitsky Act,” Ms Zharikova told The Daily Telegraph. “Many people in the UK clearly understand the matter and sympathise with us. If it’s not possible to get justice in Russia then it should be found elsewhere.”
Mr Magnitsky died in agony in a pre-trial detention centre aged 37 after being beaten and denied essential medical treatment for pancreatitis. He had been jailed a year earlier by senior Russian police officers whom he accused of organising a £140m fraud in league with tax officials.
No one has been convicted over his death, which provoked outrage worldwide and has become a symbol of corruption and ruthlessness under President Vladimir Putin.
britain and Russia embarked on a mini-thaw last week, when William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, and Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, welcomed their Russian counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu, to London for a rare bilateral meeting. Relations remain fraught however over the poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in Britain in 2006. Any move to ban Russian officials from entering the UK is likely to incense Moscow.
Mr Hague said before his meeting with Mr Lavrov that foreign human rights violators could be anonymously denied visas to Britain, but there is now growing pressure for the Government to “name and shame” Mr Magnitsky’s abusers and publicly block their entry.
Three former Foreign Secretaries – Sir Malcolm Rifkind, David Miliband and Jack Straw – have expressed their support for an explicit entry ban on Mr Magnitsky’s alleged tormentors, who include state officials, judges and police. Other backbench MPs are also lobbying for such a measure.
Moscow’s Tverskoy Court will today [[Friday]] begin a posthumous trial of Magnitsky on fraud charges with an empty defendant’s cage in the room, guarded by bailiffs. The lawyer is accused of the same tax avoidance scam he exposed in what his supporters say is a Kafkaesque attempt to blacken his name beyond the grave.
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William Hague criticises Russia over Sergei Magnitsky case
Foreign Secretary William Hague has criticised Russia’s handling of the death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, saying the case was “of utmost concern” to the Government.
Speaking ahead of talks in London with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday, Mr Hague said the Magnitsky affair was “one of the highest profile examples of failings in Russia’s judicial and prison systems”.
“Mr Magnitsky died more than three years ago in pretrial detention, and to date there has been no meaningful progress towards establishing the circumstances surrounding his death,” the Foreign Secretary told Russian news agency Interfax. “I have urged my Russian counterpart to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice without further delay, and measures are put in place to prevent such cases from happening again.”
Mr Magnitsky, a lawyer, died of heart failure at the age of 37 in a Moscow jail in 2009 after being denied vital medical treatment for pancreatitis. He had earlier exposed a £140m tax fraud involving senior state officials and policemen, but was jailed by the same officers whom he accused.
No one was convicted over his death and Kremlin critics say a trial of the dead man for fraud – due to begin in Moscow next week – is a Kafkaesque attempt to blacken his name and dampen dissent.
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Justice is put to the sword by Moscow’s greed and corruption
Today, in Moscow, there begins the trial of a 37-year-old accountant by the name of Sergei Magnitsky. Mr Magnitsky is accused of tax offences dating back perhaps 10 years.
What is astounding about this case is that Magnitsky is not only innocent of all charges. He is also dead. He died in prison in November 2009, after almost a year in which he was kept in squalor, denied family contact and deprived of medical treatment — detention that culminated in a savage and fatal beating by his captors.
It says something about the Russian state that it should now put this ghost on trial, in what must be the most grotesque parody of legal proceedings since the animal trials of the Middle Ages. It says something about Russian justice that Magnitsky — and his family — are now being persecuted by the very legal establishment whose corruption he exposed. And that message is that there are no lengths to which the Russian kleptocrats will not go to protect themselves and their ill-gotten loot, and to grind the faces of their enemies.
Magnitsky was a whistleblower. He uncovered a scam, a gigantic criminal conspiracy by which the Russian police and tax officials colluded with the judiciary and mafia to steal millions from the Russian state. When he refused to change his evidence and give in to his interrogators, they killed him – only eight days before they would have been legally obliged to bring him to trial or let him go.
Magnitsky’s tragedy was to be hired by a US-born British citizen called Bill Browder, who runs Hermitage Capital Management — a fund that used to be one of the biggest investors in Russia. Bill Browder’s misfortune was to fall out with Vladimir Putin, and in a big way. To understand the Magnitsky affair, you have to go back to the collapse of communism and the decision of a semi-inebriated Boris Yeltsin to allow the assets of the Russian people, and incalculable wealth, to fall into the hands of about two dozen more or less cunning and opportunistic businessmen — the oligarchs.
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