Posts Tagged ‘denis macshane’
Cameron Gets Tough With a Pick-Up Artist, But Not Putin’s Put-to-Death Artists
In a show of strength and leadership British Ministers have taken tough action against someone who is clearly a major threat to British national interests. The government has imposed a ban on entering into Britain of an American called Julien Blanc. But as he gets tough with a fellow citizen of President Obama, David Cameron remains resolutely aligned with President Putin’s view that his fellow citizens should not face similar sanctions to that imposed on Julien Blanc.
Blanc is an absurd sexist self-publicist who describes himself as a ‘pick-up artist.’ Britain is probably better off without his presence but in the same week, MPs of all parties gathered to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the killing of a British employed tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. He died in agony on a Moscow prison floor five years after 12 months of being brutally treated by state officials working for President Putin.
The MPs are still waiting for David Cameron to take any action against those named as linked to his death.
Magnitsky was employed by a British firm, Hermitage Capital, to investigate the disappearance of $230 million which Hermitage paid in tax to the Russian equivalent of HMRC. He found the money had been diverted into the accounts of Putin’s tax police who are at the heart of corrupt business-political nexus that enriches politicians and favoured state functionaries.
The young father of two persisted in his demands that the money be accounted for. He was arrested, thrown into prison, and tortured to try and persuade him to drop the case. He refused and was then he was so badly treated he died.
Magnitsky’s employer, Bill Browder, an American born British citizen was so outraged he used his firm’s considerable resources to track down those responsible for his employee’s death and find out where they had bank accounts or assets overseas.
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Why Need a New Bulgakov
Where are you Mikhail Bulgakov when we need you? The Russian surrealist writer had to wait in 25 years in his grave before his masterpiece satire on Stalin’s Russia, The Master and Margarita was published. Stalin’s body was a decade into his embalmed state before Bulgakov’s book came out.
Will the world have to wait that long before a modern Russian artist describes in a novel, film or play the surreal destruction of justice and democracy on display in today’s Moscow.
Alexei Navalny, the witty, rumbustious, street-smart Russian opposition leader was jailed last week on faked up charges of fraud. He was carted off to begin his five years in prison when suddenly, like one of Bulgakov’s apparitions, three wise men, Russian ‘judges’, appeared, and decided he could be freed on bail.
Both this first verdict and the new release are Kremlin orchestrated operetta. Navalny now faces the political prisoner’s dilemma. Does he stay in Moscow and run for political office as Mayor and face certain defeat at the hands of the Putin election fixing unit in the Kremlin followed by a return to prison? Or does he skip to a democratic country and have his moment of fame and freedom before relapsing into the miserable life of a political exile?
Meanwhile in another surreal moment, the G20 finance ministers met in Moscow to discuss tax evasion and cleaning up the world’s lax tax régimes. In Moscow? The home of the greatest group of state-sanctioned tax dodgers seen in world history?
The irony is just too delicious. At a meeting of Russian oligarchs in 2003 which was filmed and shown in Norma Percy’s remarkable BBC documentary series on Putin, the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khordokovsky is seen telling Putin that he and fellow oligarchs can no longer recruit the best minds from Moscow’s elite universities. Instead the brilliant young men wanted to become tax police officials because that was where the real money was to be made.
Their zeal was not to obtain a fair share of new Russian wealth for the people and state but to help the new pol-biz elites avoid tax with the help of accountants and lawyers in London amongst other world centres of tax avoidance.
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How to Deal With Russia?
How should Europe deal with Russia, Judy Dempsey, senior associate at Carnegie Europe, asks. The answer is simple, Marcel de Haas, senior research associate at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, contends: Europe needs to take a united stance.
Moscow’s policy toward Europe has been “divide and rule,” Mr de Haas noted. Referring to Gazprom’s deals with European gas distributors, he said Russia was playing EU member states off against each other. Gazprom’s tactic was part of a broader energy war between Russia and the EU.
Russia’s Nord Stream and South Stream gas pipeline projects were an attempt to blackmail Ukraine into joining Moscow’s Eurasian Union, Mr de Haas said. Instead of a joint energy policy toward Russia, EU member states were making their own bilateral deals with Moscow, he lamented.
Europe should join the United States and pass its own Magnitsky Act, Denis MacShane, Britain’s former Minister for Europe, argued. The measure would show Russian officials and the government that corruption and harassment of political opponents carried a price, Mr MacShane said.
Moscow wanted to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States, and between European nation states and the EU, Mr MacShane warned. A European Magnitsky Act would show that this tactic did not work, he said. Moscow has exerted heavy pressure on EU member states on the issue. займы на карту онлайн займы https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php быстрые займы онлайн
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What is Vladimir Putin up to?
Vladimir Putin’s contempt for the useless fools of the West who fawn upon him has again been revealed by the sentence given to three members of Pussy Riot last week. An appropriate and proportionate response might be to suspend Russia from the Council of Europe until they are free. This won’t happen, as Tory MPs sit with Putin stooge MPs at the Council of Europe and despite hand wringing from a junior minister on the sentence, Cameron and Hague are refusing to criticise Putin.
In 2008, Cameron flew to Tbilisi from his Aegean holiday to show solidarity with the people of Georgia after the Russian invasion and dismemberment of their country. Last week Putin admitted it was a pre-planned and pre-meditated military assault. At a press conference, Russian reporters were astonished to learn: “There was a plan, it’s not a secret”.
Putin made the remarks in response to a TV documentary, The Day That Was Lost, in which Russian generals made outspoken and unprecedented criticisms of the then President, Dmitri Medvedev. The military men accused Medvedev, who was then commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces, of failing to act decisively in the crucial first few hours of the August 2008 conflict – a “tragic delay that cost so many lives” in their view. Putin, who was then prime minister, is portrayed in the film as the saviour of the situation – the man who “provided personal leadership” during the military operation. The then Chief of the General Staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, said that that until Putin “delivered a kick, everyone was afraid of something”.
Now back as president and commander-in-chief Putin was not going to disavow his generals. “There was a plan, and within the framework of this plan that Russia acted. It was prepared by the General Staff at the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007. It was approved by me, agreed with me.”
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Police ‘risking lives’ by passing data to Russia
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has been accused of endangering the lives of British residents by passing confidential details to Russian investigators implicated in the death of the whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
British businessman Bill Browder and employees of his hedge fund Hermitage Capital have been pursued by Russian investigators ever since they went public about a £144m tax scam orchestrated by a corrupt network of police, judges and interior ministry officials.
Mr Magnitsky was hired by Hermitage’s Moscow branch to investigate the scam – the largest in Russian history. He named a network of corrupt officials but was promptly arrested by the same men he had accused. He died nine months later in custody having been beaten and denied vital medicine.
The case has become something of a cause célèbre in Russia, illustrating the often murky connections between the country’s powerful security services and organised crime syndicates. The UN, EU and the US government have spoken out against Mr Magnitsky’s death whilst the Kremlin’s human rights council claims he was tortured and probably beaten to death.
Despite grave concerns about the investigation it has emerged that Soca forwarded confidential details, including the home address of London-based Hermitage employee Ivan Cherkasov, to Russian officials implicated in the case.
Letters unearthed by a court in Moscow reveal that Soca handed the data to Russia’s interior ministry following a request made through Interpol. The move came as a surprise to Hermitage, who say they were told by Soca in 2009 that the Russian requests for information might contravene clauses which forbid the Interpol system from being used for political purposes.
Speaking to The Independent yesterday, Mr Browder accused Soca of endangering his employees’ safety. “The Russian interior ministry murdered my lawyer and is now publicly threatening my colleagues in the UK,” he said. “I would have expected the British authorities to do everything possible to protect us. Instead they are passing on crucial information to the Russians to carry out their plans. This is either evil or gross incompetence.”
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How do we deal with Russia?
1. Russia is a business, not a functioning constitutional, let alone democratic nation-state. There is no distinction between political and business life, between state employees and those who run enterprises of any shape. From the collapse of communism onwards, politics has been paid for by the parastatal and private sector enterprises principally based on energy, raw materials and construction. The deals are written by lawyers, many of them working for big City firms with some experts reckoning that as much as a quarter of the City’s income comes from Russian related dealing.
2. The old communist nomenklatura have converted themselves into Russian Plc, a kind of giant John Lewis where everyone expects a share. Appeals to Russia to conform to European norms or deal with the west as a responsible geopolitical partner are talking to an empty room. If there are material advantages for Russia from Putin down to junior elected officials, then a deal is possible. Asking Russia, for example, to hand over Syria, one of its favoured arms clients, to Saudi-controlled Wahhabi Sunnis spells an instant loss for one of Russian most important export markets.
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MP Denis MacShane warns against investing in Russia
A former minister for Europe has urged the Government to attach “health and safety” warnings to promotional material that encourages businesses to invest in Russia.
Denis MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham, has written to Lord Green, the trade minister, in protest at a conference scheduled for today and sponsored by UK Trade & Investment that will promote Skolkovo, billed as Russia’s Silicon Valley.
Citing the damage caused to companies by “corrupt officials in Russia”, he wrote: “It seems irresponsible for British companies to be putting themselves in harm’s way without full disclosure about the tragedies that could befall them in Russia.
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Cameron Council of Europe Visit a Waste of Air Miles
The Prime Minister’s flying visit to the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly today is mission undeliverable, even if many may feel Cameron has a good case. But the way he has pandered to the worst atavistic elements of the Europhobe right and the clamour of the off-shore press for retributionist punishment of prisoners means he will hardly get a hearing.
A simple solution to the issue of prisoners voting rights, for example, would be to do what the French do which is to empower judges to add an additional sentence of loss of civic rights for those imprisoned for serious crimes. This is in conformity with ECHR judgements. Switzerland, the dream nation for anti-EU Tories, has allowed its prisoners to vote for 40 years as have all the more civilised European nations.
Britain has eight, just 8, cases before the ECHR but the real problem is the 100,000 plus cases from Russia. One answer may be to suspend Russia as it was clearly an error to let Russia join the Council of Europe in 1996 when the country had made no effort and still makes no effort to introduce rule of law. The death of Sergei Magnitksy, lawyer of a British firm, in gruesome circumstances in a Russian prison highlights the contempt Russia’s kleptocratic rulers have for legal norms.
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Russia launches attack on Labour MP Denis MacShane
Russia has launched a highly unusual personal attack on Labour MP Denis MacShane, accusing him of deliberately trying to sabotage UK-Russia relations.
The Kremlin lashed out after the former Foreign Office minister organised a debate in the House of Commons on human rights in Russia during which he suggested that Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, should not be made welcome at the London Olympics this summer.
His stance angered the Russian embassy which issued a furious statement.
“The irresponsible attempts of certain parliamentarians to damage our bilateral relationship by taking advantage of real problems cannot but give grounds for serious concern,” the embassy said.
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