Posts Tagged ‘forbes’
Edward Snowden Was Blatantly Used By Vladimir Putin Trying To Whitewash Past Human Rights Abuses
Edward Snowden’s press conference last Friday may have generated sympathy for the youthful-looking 30 year old without a country, but Snowden was merely a prop. The purpose of the press conference was not to humanize him, but to humanize Vladimir Putin’s government as a haven for human rights activists fleeing governments that abuse human rights (read, United States).
But haunting the transit lounge was the ghost of a real whistleblower, Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who in 2008 uncovered a $230 million tax fraud scheme by Russian interior ministry and tax officials. In Kafkaesque fashion, prosecutors charged Magnitsky with the crimes he had exposed and sent him to one of Russia’s most notorious pre-trial detention centers. He was then tortured, denied medical care, and, in 2009, died an excruciating death at age 37. Nonetheless, Russian officials tried the dead man in Tverskoy District Court and, the day before Snowden’s press conference, convicted the corpse of masterminding the tax evasion scheme.
The verdict was retaliation against the United States government for adopting the “Magnitsky list,” banning officials involved in the tax fraud from entering the United States or maintaining bank accounts here (Moscow had also retaliated by banning Americans from adopting Russian children). The Putin government followed up the dead man’s guilty verdict with the Snowden press conference.
The Magnitsky-Snowden events are hardly without precedent in Russia. Together, they echo the 1930s Soviet show trials, where surviving Old Bolsheviks, supporters of exiled communist Leon Trotsky, and senior Red Army commanders, were convicted in highly publicized “trials,” often with the aid of confessions obtained by torture (thousands were executed or sent to the gulag). The purpose was to purge Stalin’s enemies and terrorize potential opponents, while presenting the trials as fair and just proceedings.
Recently, Nina Khruscheva, the great grand-daughter of Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev, whose famous 1956 speech to the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress exposed Stalin’s brutality, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine that “Russia’s legal institutions are still run along the lines of Stalin’s ‘show trials.’” These legal proceedings include the prosecutions of anti-corruption lawyer, opposition activist, and blogger, Alexey Navalny; former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky; and the punk band Pussy Riot. Some human rights activists were simply murdered, including Chechen Natalia Estemirova in 2009 and Dagestan publisher Gadzhimurat Kamalov in 2011. And, in no small irony, Leonid Razvozzhayev, a political activist, was abducted in Kiev last year while seeking advice on political asylum from the UN High Commissioner on Refugees.
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Billion Dollar Hedge Fund Mgr Goes After Putin And Russia, This Time In Europe
Bill Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management in London, is doing his best to embarrass Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Russian government once again.
After successfully and single-handedly lobbying for the passing of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. Senate in November, Browder seems to have convinced European governments to go after alleged Russian criminals in the same way: by banning travel and access to bank accounts in their respective countries.
Browder’s colleague and friend, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer with the Moscow-based law firm Firestone Duncan, was arrested in 2009 for tax fraud affiliated with Hermitage. The billion dollar hedge fund was subsequently kicked out of Russia, and Magnitsky died in prison, a victim, it is widely believed, of poor treatment.
Late last year, Congress passed two laws that make life increasingly difficult for Russians currently on a “black list” at the U.S. State Department for their involvement in Magnitsky’s death. Under the so-called Magnitsky Act, both houses of Congress now have access to that list of Russians the State House had been inclined to keep under wraps out of concern of embarrassing The Kremlin.
Washington and Moscow are going through a revamp, or a reset, of bilateral relations and the current human rights scandals had put a strain in that relationship. Under the new law, Congress now knows which Russians to ban from traveling or having any type of financial business in the United States.
Immediately after its passing, Pavel Khodorkovsky, director of the Khodorkovsky Center in New York, told me that the idea was for some countries in Europe to pass similar legislation.
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As Assad Regime Totters, The Kremlin And Beijing Shudder
The forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad shell rebel-occupied neighborhoods of Damascus. Four young female members of a punk rock band begin their fifth month in a Moscow jail. Somewhere in China a local party boss meets with disaffected factory workers. In Washington, the full house prepares to vote on the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which calls for visa restrictions for Russian officials for human rights abuses. These disparate events are part of a larger mosaic, which begins in Syria.
Bashar al-Assad, like his father before him, symbolizes unconstrained dictators prepared to do anything, no matter how odious, to stay in power. Unconstrained dictators use their secret police, militias, and armies to arrest, torture, and kill opponents. They raze whole towns. They kill innocent women and children to send a message. They are indifferent to world outrage. If Assad falls, it will not be for lack of brutality and atrocity. He may resort to chemical weapons as a last resort.
Constrained dictators, such as Mubarak, Pinochet, and the Shah, face limits imposed by moral qualms or the international community. Small protests swell, and momentum for regime change builds. Failure to use overwhelming force and efforts to compromise only embolden protesters, and eventually the constrained dictator resigns either to flee the country or to face local justice.
Two other constrained dictatorships, Russia and China, want to keep Assad in power. Both shudder at a fellow totalitarian regime falling to a disorganized opposition. They will abandon him (with great fanfare) only when it is clear that he has lost. China and Russia have their own disaffected minorities, disgruntled workers, and ideological opponents. Their one-party states lack legitimacy, and they know it. They consider themselves under constant threat, fearing the single spark that brings millions to the streets. They must snuff out any spark — a lone barefoot lawyer or an 18 year old girl throwing a rock at security forces – that could conceivably ignite a Tahrir Square.
Russia and China’s one-party dictatorships face different threats. China’s Communist Party (CPC) must firefight grievance demonstrations. Putin, on the other hand, must confront direct challenges to his legitimacy.
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A Blogger Could Start Russia’s Arab Spring
The new face of the Russian opposition is a young whistle-blowing, shareholder activist, muckraking blogger by the name of Alexei Navalny. At 2:15 p.m. on Monday, he called his huge internet following to a 7 p.m. demonstration at the Chistye Prudy park to protest “the rotten total fabrication of Moscow election results.” He wondered why some Moscow districts reported 20 percent while identical districts next door reported 70 percent votes for United Russia.
Thousands showed up (the police claim 400). The protest was broken up violently and Navalny arrested.
The internet reacted immediately: Navalny’s wife posted the police station address and telephone number where he was being held. Navalny was quickly transferred to another location, which she duly reported to Navalny’s followers.
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Moscow tax official’s $39 million fortune revealed
A Moscow tax official who approved a fraudulent $230 million tax return in 2007 has bought luxury real estate in Moscow, Dubai and Montenegro and wired money through her husband’s bank accounts worth $39 million, a U.S. investor said Monday.
All that was done with an average annual household income equivalent to $38,000, according to documents released by William Browder, an American-born investor barred from Russia.
Browder has been campaigning against Russian corruption since 2009 when his lawyer died a year after being sent to prison. Authorities have not explained why Browder was himself expelled as a security risk in 2005 in the first place.
Browder, who used to head up Hermitage Capital Management in Moscow, a multibillion-dollar fund, is seeking to get justice for lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, who discovered the alleged fraud involving the Interior Ministry.
Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009 after being charged with tax evasion linked to his defense of Hermitage, had discovered that officers at the Interior Ministry had seized ownership documents for three of the fund’s subsidiaries, then used those documents to register their own people as owners and directors.
They then reportedly filed a tax claim, saying they made a much smaller profit than originally described and asked for a tax return, according to Hermitage.
The $230 million refund was made in one day.
Magnitsky’s former employers, including Browder and Jamison Firestone, the head of the law firm where Magnitsky worked, revealed an array of documents Monday, which they said described the wealth of the tax official allegedly involved in the fraud.
The two are working together to expose the officials they believe are responsible for Magnitsky’s death and the tax fraud. More than a year later, Magnitsky’s death remains uninvestigated.
Browder and Firestone said the family of Olga Stepanova, who headed Moscow’s district tax office No. 28 until January this year, had incurred $39 million in expenses in the past few years.
Copies of bank account statements and property registration papers show Stepanova’s husband, an employee of a small construction firm, wire money through Switzerland’s Credit Suisse ( CS – news – people ) to build a $8 million luxury house west of Moscow and buy a vacation home in Montenegro and multi-million dollar properties on the Palm Jumeriah in Dubai in the name of his 85-year-old mother.
These transactions were allegedly made several weeks after Stepanova’s tax office authorized the $230 million tax refund.
Firestone on Monday sent the documents to Russia’s chief investigator and petitioned him to open a criminal probe against Stepanova and her colleagues.
Meanwhile, Browder said in a letter to Switzerland’s attorney general that criminal proceeds from the tax fraud may be held on various accounts in Credit Suisse.
The Interior Ministry has acknowledged the fraud but said it has been unable to locate the funds. The ministry said its officials had no part in the fraud and insisted the tax authorities were also innocent and had simply been deceived by the criminals.
Over the past year, authorities have turned down scores of petitions by Magnitsky’s former employers and human rights groups to investigate the Interior Ministry officials that Magnitsky believed were involved in the tax fraud.
Magnitsky posthumously received a prestigious anti-corruption award from Transparency International, an international anti-corruption watchdog.
Browder told the Associated Press on Monday that the documents came from a person who worked with Stepanova and her partners. Browder would not identify the person.
“This information is so complete and so damning that the Russian government will lose any legitimacy it has left in bilateral relations with the West if it doesn’t act and prosecute the officials who killed Sergei Magnitsky and stole $230 million from their own people,” Browder said. займ на карту займы онлайн на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php hairy women
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