Posts Tagged ‘daily telegraph’
Cyprus bail-out doubts over Russian money laundering
Politicians across Europe are urging their governments to demand a crackdown on alleged Russian money-laundering in Cyprus as a condition of any bail-out for the troubled eurozone member.
Cyprus is close to securing a €17bn (£14bn) rescue package but MPs in the UK, Finland and the Netherlands want tough questions to be asked of the country’s banks before a deal is signed and any funds are released. German politicians are believed to be looking at making similar demands.
The moves follow revelations that the Cypriot authorities refused to investigate claims that criminals linked to a $230m (£145m) alleged Russian tax fraud laundered $30m through the country’s banks. The case has been linked to a number of suspicious deaths, including that of Alexander Perepelichny, the 44-year-old whistleblower living in Surrey who died while out jogging last month.
The supposed criminal conspiracy involving police and tax officials was uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer working for UK-based hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management, who died in 2009 after a year in pre-trial detention on unproven charges of tax evasion. The US has since banned entry to 60 Russians linked to the fraud and death.
In July, Hermitage wrote to Cyprus’s attorney-general, Petros Clerides with evidence that banks had received stolen money. Mr Clerides said he could not investigate without a request from the Russian authorities, even though similar allegations are being looked at by Switzerland, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Estonia.
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Murder or mishap? The mysterious death of Russian businessman Alexander Perepelichny
In any other circumstances, it might not have raised suspicion. But when Alexander Perepelichny, a reclusive Russian businessman, collapsed and died after jogging near his luxury Surrey home three weeks ago, police soon realised that they could not jump to conclusions.
Was it, as it seeemed, just a tragically early heart attack or stroke, brought on by a vigorous bout of exercise? Or, given his role as a witness to one of Russia’s most politically sensitive corruption scandal, was it a case of yet another awkward Russian being silenced on British soil?
Last week, 1,500 miles away inside Room 33 of the Tverskoy district court in northern Moscow, Natalya Magnitskaya was pondering that very question. Not, though, just in relation to Mr Perepelichny, but over her own son Sergei, who died a lingering, agonising death three years ago in a Moscow jail cell.
What links the two men’s deaths is that they both attempted to lift the lid on the so-called Hermitage Capital scandal, in which Russian tax officials defrauded a British-based investment company of some £140 million back in 2007.
The Hermitage case was just one of many examples of state gangsterism in Russia in recent times, with one important difference: namely, that the fraud’s victims fought back.
Mr Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage, compiled a detailed dossier identifying the alleged culprits, only to be thrown in jail himself, where he died through a combination of brutal beatings and deliberate neglect of his medical needs.
And there the affair might have ended, were it not for Hermitage continuing the fight on his behalf – aided, it now seems, by Mr Perepelichny, a former business associate of some of the accused, who recently turned “supergrass” on Hermitage’s behalf.
Mr Perepelichny, who fled Moscow three years earlier after falling out with a crime syndicate, passed documents to prosecutors in Switzerland, corroborating how officials first fingered by Magnitsky transferred huge tranches of cash to Credit Suisse accounts. It would mean there are plenty of people who might wish him ill.
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Russian supergrass dies in mysterious circumstances
A Russian supergrass said to be assisting a Swiss probe into a multi-million pound money laundering scheme involving corrupt Russian officials has died mysteriously outside his home in Surrey, it was reported last night.
Alexander Perepilichnyy, a businessman who had sought refuge in Britain three years ago after falling out with organised criminals, collapsed outside his mansion near Weybridge earlier this month.
The 44-year-old had apparently been in good health. Surrey Police said a post mortem examination has proved “inconclusive” and that further tests had been carried out to try to establish a cause of death.
He was discovered when officers were called to his home on a luxury private estate shared with seven multi-million pound properties shortly after 5pm on a Saturday two weeks ago, and declared dead half an hour later.
Suggestions that he had been out running were not confirmed by Surrey Police. Police said they had been made aware of Mr Perepilichnyy’s link to the Swiss investigation and it “forms part of the inquiry”. The death was being treated as “unexplained”.
Mr Perepilichnyy was a key witness against a network of corrupt Russian officials and crime figures known as the “Kluyev Group”, according to a newspaper.
The network is said to be implicated in a series of multi-million pound tax frauds as well as the death in custody of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing Moscow lawyer, The Independent reported.
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One Hour Eighteen Minutes, New Diorama, review
In the UK, we’re familiar with the name of Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist and outspoken critic of the Putin regime gunned down outside her flat in Moscow in 2006.
Despite much thorough and expert reporting by the Telegraph’s economics editor Philip Aldrick, I suspect readers may be far less aware of the perturbing case of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in November 2009 at the age of 37 as a consequence of appalling neglect – and probably abuse – by the authorities. He had been detained in increasingly squalid conditions for 358 days without trial.
Held on charges of tax evasion, his offence appears to have been that he uncovered a huge trail of fraud and corruption while working for the UK-based hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management – centring on the criminal hijacking of sundry legitimate Hermitage companies in order to reclaim $230m in tax from the Russian state.
Partly because this embezzlement was a complex business, Magnitsky – who is currently being tried posthumously, in a new low for Russian law – is not an easy name to conjure with but he has still become a cause celebre in the West and quite possibly a catalyst for significant change.
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President Vladimir Putin’s cruel tyranny is driven by paranoia
Apologists for the Kremlin are struggling. The Russian regime’s dogged defence of the blood-drenched Syrian dictatorship, and its persecution of the Pussy Riot musicians for their stunt in Moscow’s main cathedral, display its nastiest hallmark: support for repression at home and abroad.
Mr Putin’s return to power has eclipsed the liberal-sounding talk of his predecessor as president, Dmitry Medvedev. Russia’s leader has in recent weeks signed laws that criminalise defamation, introduce £6,000 fines for participants in unauthorised demonstrations, require non-profit outfits financed by grants from abroad to label themselves as “foreign agents”, and create a new blacklist of “harmful” internet sites.
Now comes the prosecution of Pussy Riot, a bunch of feminist performance artists made famous by their imprisonment and show trial. Their “crime” was to record a brief mime show at the altar of the cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They then added anti-Putin “music” (featuring scatological and blasphemous slogans) to suggest that they had actually held a concert there.
Many might find that in bad taste and would accept that police can arrest those using a holy place for political protest. But the three women on trial (who all deny involvement) have been in custody since March. They face up to seven years in prison on a charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or hostility”. It all smacks of a grotesque official over-reaction and the growing and sinister influence of the Orthodox hierarchy.
Also a distant memory is Russia’s “reset” with America, which was supposed to herald a new era of cooperation. Since Mr Putin’s return, Russia’s foreign-policy rhetoric has been venomously anti-Western. It recently warned Finland, with startling bluntness, to stop working with Nato. The hostility is still largely a one-way street. Western companies grovel before Mr Putin (he recently kept oil-industry chiefs waiting for hours in an airless room with no chairs; they uttered not a squeak of complaint).
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Magnitsky-linked criminal at debate
Russian delegates at a debate, calling for action against individuals linked to Sergei Magnitsky’s death, handed their passes to a convicted criminal connected to the crime.
Russian delegates at a cross-border parliamentary debate, calling for action against individuals linked to the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, handed their passes for the event to a convicted criminal connected to the crime.
Dmitry Klyuev, who served a two-year suspended sentence for attempted fraud and has been accused of laundering money for a fraud uncovered by Mr Magnitsky, was pictured at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) assembly in Monaco over the weekend, wearing a delegation badge. He was accompanied by his lawyer, who also appeared to have been given one of the Russian officials’ access passes.
US Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain accused Mr Klyuev of running a “transnational criminal organisation”.
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Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West by Edward Lucas: review
Daily Telegraph
The risks involved in probing the seamy underside of Russian life are shown by the fate of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Flung into jail for 11 months, he was eventually forced into a straitjacket and beaten to death on the floor of his cell.
His crime? Magnitsky was representing Hermitage Capital Management, a British-based fund manager, in a long-standing dispute with the Russian authorities over trumped-up charges of tax evasion. In the process, he had discovered how powerful Russians had stolen $230 million from their own government by fraudulently securing the biggest tax rebate in the country’s history.
His ordeal says much about the harsh realities of power in today’s Russia, according to Edward Lucas, a senior journalist at The Economist. In his book Deception, he sets out to show how a venal and amoral state is cynically exploiting the openness of Western free societies to spread tentacles of influence and corruption.
Espionage is the chosen tool of the hard men in the Kremlin and Russian spies are doing their utmost to penetrate our institutions, distort our decision-making and make off with our secrets. Thus Anna Chapman, the agent who resembled a Playboy playmate, lived undercover for years in Britain and the US before being unmasked. Lucas wants to alert us to the scale of the peril: he thinks we do not grasp how ambitious this espionage campaign has become, nor the inherent vulnerability of free societies.
He goes so far as to argue that the West risks becoming as rotten as Russia if the Kremlin’s agents are allowed to continue their work. Instead of Russia slowly normalising and becoming more like us, Lucas thinks we could end up becoming more like them.
Thus he approvingly quotes an observer who writes: “Those who keep calling for an engagement that will eventually transform Russia cannot see that it is the West, not Russia, that is being transformed.” Lucas adds: “I hope this book can help the West to avoid that fate.”
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President Obama must stand up for Russia’s dissidents
A network of student presidents from universities around the world, College-100 (or C-100), has done a sterling job of exposing corruption in Russia, producing the video below about the case of Sergei Magnitsky.
To get you up to speed, Mr Magnitsky was a Russian tax attorney who uncovered a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by corrupt bureaucrats working in league with the FSB (the KGB’s successor agency). Instead of thanking him for his spadework, which might have recompensed the Russian taxpayer, the state allowed the very criminals Mr Magnitsky had exposed to arrest and torture him to death in a gruesome year-long pre-trial detention. Russia is now trying Mr Magnitsky posthumously for the crime no one -not even his jailers – believe he committed.
European parliaments, the House of Commons, the European Union and the United States Congress are all mulling separate forms of legislation to issue travel bans and asset freezes to the 60 known conspirators in Mr Magnitsky’s persecution (the logic being that criminals in Russia like to go abroad to spend their stolen fortunes).
The US Senate bill, sponsored by two-thirds of the Senate, actually threatens to impose sanctions and visa restrictions against anyone from any foreign country credibly accused of “gross human rights violations.” In other words, it’s a universal proscription that might come in handy the next time a lawyer tries to do his job – or smuggles himself into a US embassy.
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British aristocrat linked to Sergei Magnitsky case
A British aristocrat has been linked to the suspected laundering of the fraudulent gains of Russian criminals involved in the death of anti-corruption campaigner, Sergei Magnitsky.
Andrew Moray Stuart, heir to the Viscountcy of Stuart of Findhorn, has been named alongside other Britons in a legal complaint filed with the City of London police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
Lawyers for Hermitage Capital Management, the UK hedge fund whose Moscow lawyer – Mr Magnitsky – uncovered the alleged $230m (£140m) fraud, have called for a formal investigation by the economic crimes department into alleged money laundering.
Mr Stuart, who lives in Mauritius and Dubai but is named as a director of more than 500 UK companies, is alleged to have transferred about $1.4m through a British Virgin Islands’ shell operation on behalf of Vladlen Stepanov, the husband of a senior tax official at the centre of the alleged fraud.
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