Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Putin, corruption and the Magnitsky case

Frontline

It’s not easy to hear of how Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed.

“you need to be sitting down for this story” said chair, Edward Lucas, foreign correspondent with the Economist. “…could those people at the back find a space?”

William Browder was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia with the Hermitage fund before he was thrown out of the country in 2005.

Sergei Magnitsky

“25 police officers raided my office in Moscow” he says, “and 25 more police officers raided the office of my American law firm… One of the lawyers protested at the seizure of these documents and he was beaten so badly he was hospitalised for three weeks.”

Browder hired seven lawyers to find out more about the mess, one of them was a 36-year-old Sergei Magnitsky. They started an investigation that unearthed a high-level attempt to siphon a high-volume of funds. It was a complicated scheme that lead to a false tax refund of $230m that came – not fromBrowder’s company but from the Russian taxpayer.

Six out of seven of Browder’s lawyers left Russia for safety. Sergei Magnitsky decided to stay.

“He testified against the police officers who did the raid used to get the documents… and one month later the same police officers came to his home… and arrested him and put him in pre-trial detention and then began to torture him.”