Posts Tagged ‘germany’
Browder Refused Safe Passage to Germany for Magnitsky Event
The European Magnitsky Law event has been canceled after German authorities refused to grant safe passage to William Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital, who was due to speak at the event in Berlin on May 27.
Germany’s refusal to grant Browder safe passage comes after Russian authorities filed a request with Interpol to monitor the investor’s international movements. Browder is wanted in Russia on charges of tax evasion.
Browder has denied the charges and tied them to his work with late lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested in 2008 after reporting the embezzlement of $230 million by tax authorities.
Magnitsky later died in a pre-trial detention center after being refused treatment for a medical problem. The Kremlin human rights council also ruled that the lawyer had been beaten before his death.
In April this year, the U.S. imposed sanctions on a number of Russian officials implicated in the Magnitsky case. Browder, who has campaigned for the adoption of a similar law in Europe, was due to speak at the Magnitsky Law event next Monday.
Germany’s refusal to protect Browder at the event has drawn the ire of the Hermitage group, who released a statement saying “the German authorities are … becoming an accessory to the Russian cover-up of Magnitsky’s killers.” unshaven girl займы онлайн на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php займы онлайн на карту срочно
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UK fund boss warned Germany about Russian money in Cyprus
UK fund manager Bill Browder, one of the Kremlin’s harshest critics, briefed German officials on Russian money laundering in Cyprus just before the European Union set tough terms for the island’s bailout.
He said at least $31 million was laundered through Cyprus bank accounts, funds that were part of a $230 million fraud his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky discovered before his death in a Moscow prison in 2009.
Browder said the Mediterranean island, one of the most important conduits for Russian money transfers, opened an investigation in December into the allegations the businessman first made in 2008.
Once the largest fund manager in Russia through his $4 billion Hermitage fund, Britain-based Browder is currently on trial in absentia in Russia on fraud charges. He denies any wrongdoing and says the charges are politically motivated.
“When Cyprus started to ask the Europeans for a 17 billion euro bailout, it seemed to me absurd that we should be bailing out Cyprus if they are unwilling to investigate the most well documented money laundering cases,” Browder said.
Browder spoke with Levin Holle, director general of financial markets policy at Germany’s ministry of finance, at a meeting last month confirmed by the ministry.
“There was a German team of people at a fairly senior level that were involved in structuring the Cyprus bailout. And they were very interested in what we had to say about this,” Browder said.
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Russian mob money ‘bolsters Cyprus’
YOU can buy a mink coat or rent a Ferrari at the click of a finger. Many of the street signs are in Russian and so are some of the radio stations. Welcome to “Limassolgrad”, as the locals have taken to calling their town on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
It may be the southernmost town in the EU, but Limassol’s popularity among Russians puts it high on the agenda for finance ministers meeting in Brussels tomorrow to work out how to prop up Cyprus’s rickety banking system with the latest eurozone bailout.
With only 1m inhabitants, tiny Cyprus poses a giant dilemma for the overlords of the EU: Russian mobsters are believed to have deposited so much money in its banks that suspected money launderers might become big beneficiaries of the bailout.
Yet asking depositors to carry some of the burden, an idea being promoted by the Germans and Finns, could trigger a run on the banks and rekindle the sovereign debt crisis by undermining trust in the euro.
Underwriting a suspected money-laundering hub could prove just as disastrous for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. The last thing she needs is accusations of rescuing the Russian mob as she prepares her campaign for re-election later this year.
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Berlin Exhibit Explores Magnitsky Case
A permanent exhibition at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (Friedrichstrasse 43-45; mauermuseum.de) in Berlin exposes a modern-day saga of governmental corruption, coercion and torture. The Sergei Magnitsky case revealed egregious abuses of power that continue to plague Putin’s Russia and which ultimately led to the tragic demise of the 37-year-old tax attorney Magnitsky, while he was held captive in a maximum security Russian prison.
His crime? Uncovering a vast conspiracy that sought to rob the Russian state and its citizens of millions of dollars in fraudulent tax refunds, allegedly executed by police officers and governmental officials.
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Checkpoint Charlie Museum: One man’s heroic determination to fight tyranny with truth
While there are hundreds of military museums around the world, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, or the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, is one of few memorials that expressly document the tyrannical force of dictatorship — in this instance, the Communist cruelty that operated with an iron fist thanks to a methodically conceived Iron Curtain. The museum ranks with far wealthier museums that document the horrors of fascist tyranny, such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The story of the Berlin Wall begins on Saturday, Aug. 12, 1961, a seemingly lackluster summer day in Berlin. Residents from the eastern and western parts of town traveled to their favorite summer spots, to luxuriate in the last summer rays of the sun. Little did they know that something strange was unfolding, and by the end of the night, casually traversing to the opposite end of the city would become impossible. It would be a day Berliners would never be able to forget, and a day Rainer Hildebrandt’s Checkpoint Charlie Museum will try to make sure the world too never forgets.
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Death in a Russian prison cell: Britain’s shameful silence
One minute Sergei Magnitsky was investigating tax fraud. The next he was dead. A coincidence? No, the businessman campaigning for the truth tells Jerome Taylor
Two years ago today the body of a father of two from Moscow was found face down in a prison isolation cell where he had languished in squalid conditions for more than 11 months. Every year hundreds of people die inside Russian prisons and most go unreported.
But the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer hired by a British firm to investigate a multimillion-dollar tax scam, lit a fire that has rallied those seeking to end the culture of corruption and impunity among Russian government officials and has caused diplomatic rifts that have reverberated around the world.
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Second anniversary of Magnitsky death to be marked abroad
A series of events to mark the second anniversary of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death at a Moscow detention center, will be held in the United States and Europe, the Hermitage Capital’s press service has reported.
In memory of Sergei Magnitsky’s heroic resistance to corruption and bureaucratic tyranny, politicians, rights campaigners and cultural figures will hold a series of important events in the capitals of the United States, Britain and Germany, a Hermitage Capital spokesman told Interfax.
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Germany considering EU visa ban on Russian officials
The German government is considering the merits of an EU visa ban on Russian officials implicated in the murder of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Markus Loning, the German foreign ministry’s commissioner for human rights, told EUobserver on the margins of a conference on Russia in Helsinki on Thursday (10 November): “We’re discussing it. It is an option that my office is bringing to the table, into the debate. I can’t say I have completely convinced the rest of the government, but it is something I am putting on the table again and again.”
One option is to seek agreement by all 27 EU countries to blacklist the officials. Germany could also unilaterally red-flag the names in the passport-free Schengen system, forcing all 25 Schengen members to keep them out.
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Checkpoint Charlie Museum – One man’s heroic determination to fight tyranny with truth
While there are hundreds of military museums around the world, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, or the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, is one of few memorials that expressly document the tyrannical force of dictatorship — in this instance, the Communist cruelty that operated with an iron fist thanks to a methodically conceived Iron Curtain. The museum ranks with far wealthier museums that document the horrors of fascist tyranny, such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
The story of the Berlin Wall begins on Saturday, Aug. 12, 1961, a seemingly lackluster summer day in Berlin. Residents from the eastern and western parts of town traveled to their favorite summer spots, to luxuriate in the last summer rays of the sun. Little did they know that something strange was unfolding, and by the end of the night, casually traversing to the opposite end of the city would become impossible. It would be a day Berliners would never be able to forget, and a day Rainer Hildebrandt’s Checkpoint Charlie Museum will try to make sure the world too never forgets.
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