Posts Tagged ‘firestone’
Booted U.S. Lawyer Backed Magnitsky
The lack of an official explanation for the abrupt expulsion from Russia of U.S. lawyer and former Justice Department official Thomas Firestone earlier this month has led to a flurry of speculation about what may have prompted it.
Firestone, an expert on corruption in Russian law enforcement agencies who worked as a lawyer for the Moscow office of the Baker & McKenzie law firm, was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport on May 5 when returning from a trip abroad. Officers kept him in the airport for some 15 hours before ultimately sending him to the U.S.
The expulsion follows an exchange of insults between the U.S. and Russia last month, when the U.S. released a blacklist of 18 Russian officials allegedly implicated in human rights violations who were banned from entering the U.S., and Russia responded with a similar blacklist of 18 U.S. officials.
“I don’t know what the reason for Firestone’s expulsion was, but [it’s true that] he was very active in advocating for the release of Sergei Magnitsky in 2009 and that he made a number of requests to Russian officials asking them for his release,” Hermitage Capital head William Browder said by phone Tuesday.
If it’s true that Firestone was expelled over the U.S. Magnitsky Act, he wouldn’t be the first American citizen to face repercussions from the so-called Anti-Magnitsky list.
Chris Smith, a top U.S. lawmaker, was refused a Russian visa earlier this year and blamed it on his vocal backing of the U.S. Magnitsky Act.
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US lawyer expelled from Russia over fresh spy allegations
A US lawyer and former Justice Department official was expelled from Russia earlier this month after he apparently refused to co-operate with Russia’s domestic spy agency, it has emerged.
Thomas Firestone was posted to the US embassy in Moscow by the Justice Department but had left the US government to work at private law firm Baker & Mackenzie. On May 5, according to an acquaintance who requested anonymity, he was returning to Russia from a trip abroad when he was detained and interrogated at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for 15 hours and then declared persona non grata.
The acquaintance of Mr Firestone said he had been the target of a recruitment attempt by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, in March, but had refused to co-operate, and the person speculated that Mr Firestone’s expulsion was a consequence of that encounter.
Russian officials declined to comment, saying they had no information on the matter.
The case comes amid a shadowy struggle between US and Russian spy agencies that spilled over into the press this month following the arrest and expulsion of Ryan Fogle, a third political secretary at the US embassy whom the FSB detained and accused of having tried to recruit a senior Russian counterintelligence official. Mr Fogle was apparently arrested wearing a blond wig and carrying a street atlas and a compass; a videotape of his detention was broadcast on Russian television.
Russian officials told state television that they had been monitoring an increase in spy recruitments by the US over the past two years, and had previously complained to the CIA station chief in Moscow about tactics that they said “went beyond the ethical lines that exist within the security service”. They also said they had quietly expelled another US diplomat in January after a similar failed attempt to recruit a spy.
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Russia Expels Former American Embassy Official
A former senior Justice Department official at the American Embassy here was declared “persona non grata” and barred from Russia this month, according to people familiar with the case, possibly because he had rebuffed an effort by the Russian Federal Security Service to recruit him as a spy.
The former official, Thomas Firestone, had been living and working in Moscow as a lawyer for an American law firm, and had extensive contacts in the Russian government. He was detained at Sheremetyevo airport outside Moscow on May 5 while trying to return to Russia from a trip abroad; the authorities held him for 16 hours and then put him on a flight to the United States.
Mr. Firestone was contacted in March by Russian intelligence operatives who sought to enlist him to spy for the Russians, according to one person who is familiar with the case. Mr. Firestone turned them down, the person said. It was not clear whether the episode was the cause of his ejection from Russia.
The Obama administration has raised the matter of Mr. Firestone’s expulsion with the Russian government, according to one American government official. Spokesmen for the White House, the State Department, and the American Embassy in Moscow all declined to comment.
Details of Mr. Firestone’s case emerged on Sunday as Ryan C. Fogle, an American Embassy official who was arrested in Moscow last week in an embarrassing spy scandal, finally left Russia, as the Russian Foreign Ministry had demanded. Mr. Fogle, whose official title at the embassy in Moscow was third secretary of the political desk, was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service, and was accused of trying to recruit a Russian counterterrorism officer to spy for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Senior political leaders, including Secretary of State John Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, have made clear that they do not intend to let the Russian-American spy games disrupt their cooperation on larger issues of international security, in particular a conference in Geneva aimed at resolving the civil war in Syria.
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Canadian’s firm used in huge Russian tax scandal
It’s a tale with the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of a Hollywood thriller: a $230-million heist, corrupt Russian police and government officials, prison beatings, a dead lawyer, Kafkaesque trials and a diplomatic spat between international superpowers.
And now, for the first time, secret files reveal how a Canadian-run offshore company in the Caribbean enabled the transfer of some of that money into a labyrinth of shell corporations around the world in a scandal known as the Magnitsky affair.
The company, Commonwealth Trust Limited or CTL, operated out of the British Virgin Islands, one of the most secretive jurisdictions in the shadowy world of offshore finance. Founded by Toronto millionaire Tom Ward, CTL’s business was registering and administering new BVI corporations for a global clientele.
While there’s no evidence CTL or Ward actively participated in schemes to rob the Russian treasury, documents found amid a massive leak of financial records indicate that the company often failed to check who its real clients were and what they were up to — a practice that allowed the colossal fraud at the heart of the Magnitsky case to unfurl.
“In a sense, CTL became a really good tool in the toolkit of organized criminals,” said Jamison Firestone, a lawyer who represented the company victimized in the Russian heist.
“Organized criminals figure out, ‘Who can we contact to help us move money? Who can we contact to set up offshore companies and help us open bank accounts abroad?’ It’s because firms like CTL exist that this stuff can go on.”
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Investigators Close Case Into Magnitsky’s Death
Investigators said Tuesday that they had closed the case into the 2009 death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose name is attached to a U.S. law that has caused tension in U.S.-Russian relations by seeking to punish Russians implicated in human rights violations.
An inquiry into Magnitsky’s treatment and death in a Moscow jail, where he was awaiting trial on tax evasion charges brought after he accused government officials of a fraudulent $230 million tax rebate scheme, revealed no evidence of wrongdoing, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The committee’s findings contradict a 2011 investigation by the Kremlin human rights council, which said Magnitsky was pressured by prison authorities over his testimony in the tax fraud case and was left to die of pancreatitis in an isolation cell. The council’s investigation also found that Magnitsky had been beaten in prison and that there was insufficient evidence to jail him.
William Browder, head of Magnitsky’s former employer Hermitage Capital, said that the Investigative Committee’s action was not a surprise to him and that it was “a result of basically politically motivated intervention by [President Vladimir] Putin to change the narrative of what really happened to Sergei,” Radio Free Europe reported.
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Sergei Magnitsky’s Russian trial condemned as ‘absurd’
A Moscow trial to prosecute the dead whistle-blowing lawyer who exposed huge tax fraud among Russian officials has been labelled a “Stalin show trial” and an “absurd” attempt to discredit him.
Sergei Magnitsky died in custody in November 2009 at the age of 37 after being abused and denied essential medical treatment by prison officials.
The lawyer had been jailed after being accused of the very same crime that he revealed, which involved senior policemen and tax officials.
The case against him was closed a fortnight after his death but was later restarted and Moscow’s Tverskoy Court is to hold an initial hearing in the unprecedented posthumous trial starting on Monday.
William Browder, the head of the UK-based investment fund that Mr Magnitsky worked for, is also to be tried, albeit in absentia.
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Magnitsky, the Accidental Symbol of Global Injustice
Magnitsky’s life reveals a man who was in many ways ordinary and felt compelled to fight a state machine he had trusted his whole career.
When a childhood friend said he was thinking of not returning to Russia after a concert tour abroad in 2000, Sergei Magnitsky gave him a copy of “Brat 2,” a popular movie released earlier that year, in the hope of dissuading him from emigrating.
“Brat 2” tells the story of a justice-seeking rebel, played by the actor Sergei Bodrov Jr., who goes to the United States to rescue his brother from gangsters. He quickly becomes disillusioned with the country, where he thinks people “seek truth in money” and, after helping his brother, returns home to Russia.
Described as “a very Russian man” by friends, Magnitsky also was not impressed by London’s narrow streets when there on business, and he enjoyed traveling around Russia. He once made a trip to Odessa, where he was born.
“The word ‘patriot’ might sound vulgar, but he loved Russia,” said Tatyana Rudenko, Magnitsky’s aunt, who was close to her nephew throughout his life.
Magnitsky, a senior auditor and tax attorney for the Moscow-based law firm Firestone Duncan, died on Nov. 16, 2009, in a Moscow prison, where, according to a Kremlin human rights council investigation, he was badly beaten by guards shortly before he died.
A criminal investigation was carried out, but no senior prison or police officials have been prosecuted in connection with his death.
On Nov. 16 of this year, the third anniversary of Magnitsky’s death, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which seeks to punish Russian officials implicated in his death as well as other Russian officials linked to human rights abuses.
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Honesty Without Fear – Jamison Firestone
Steve Kohn talks with Jamison Firestone, the law partner and friend of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who was arrested, tortured, and eventually killed for uncovering a $230 million tax fraud scheme involving the collaboration of Russian government officials and convicted criminals. Tune in to hear about the devastating response
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Investigator Removed From Hermitage Tax Case
Police have sacked the lead investigator in a high-profile tax-evasion case against Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder and the company’s late lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
Investigator Mikhail Shupolovsky will take over from Boris Kibis, who has been reassigned in a “redelegation of tasks,” city police said, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Browder and Magnitsky are accused of lowballing Hermitage Capital’s 2001 tax bill by about 500 million rubles ($15 million).
Browder and supporters say both the case and Magnitsky’s 2009 death in pretrial detention are punishment for accusations Magnitsky made against a group of tax and police officials whom he said embezzled a $230 million tax refund.
The case has attracted international condemnation, and U.S. lawmakers have attached Magnitsky’s name to a bill that would impose sanctions on human rights abusers worldwide.
“It will be interesting to see how this new investigator will compromise himself and the Russian state,” a Hermitage Capital representative said in e-mailed comments.
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