Posts Tagged ‘guardian’
Edward Snowden: Russia offers to consider asylum request
Vladimir Putin’s spokesman says any appeal for asylum from whistleblower who fled US will be looked at ‘according to facts’.
Russia has offered to consider an asylum request from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, in the Kremlin’s latest move to woo critics of the west.
Snowden fled the United States before leaking the details of a top-secret US surveillance programme to the Guardian this month. He is currently believed to be in Hong Kong, but has reportedly changed hotels to keep his location secret.
Fearing US retaliation, Snowden said at the weekend that “my predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values”, citing Iceland as an example. He defended his decision to flee to Hong Kong by citing its relative freedom compared with mainland China.
Snowden is not known to have made any asylum requests, including to Russia. Yet speaking to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said: “If such an appeal is given, it will be considered. We’ll act according to facts.”
Peskov’s comments were widely carried by the Russian media, which have largely ignored Snowden’s revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly empowered with wide-reaching authority to collect information from the US mobile provider Verizon and to snoop on emails and internet communications via a data-mining programme called Prism. Russia’s feared security services are widely believed to maintain similar powers.
Peskov’s comments on potential asylum opened the floodgates on support for Snowden. Robert Shlegel, an influential MP with the ruling United Russia party, said: “That would be a good idea.”
Alexey Pushkov, head of the Duma’s international affairs committee and a vocal US critic, said on Twitter: “By promising asylum to Snowden, Moscow has taken upon itself the protection of those persecuted for political reasons. There will be hysterics in the US. They only recognise this right for themselves.”
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Russia bans 18 Americans from country in answer to US list
Moscow listed 18 Americans who are banned from entering Russia in an announcement Saturday – a tit-for-tat measure that comes a day after Washington imposed similar sanctions. The list, which was released by the Russian Foreign Ministry, includes staffers in the Bush administration and two former commanders of Guantanamo Bay.
On Friday, the US Treasury announced financial sanctions and visa bans on 18 Russian officials, the majority of whom were implicated over the arrest and death of the corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009, after being arrested by the same officers he was investigating over a $230m fraud. He was reportedly beaten and denied medical treatment while behind bars.
The case sparked an outcry in the US and led to the passage of a controversial bill requiring Washington to impose sanctions against those deemed responsible for the Russian whistleblower’s death. The Magnitsky Act, which was signed into law last year, led to immediate counter measures by Moscow, which imposed a ban on US adoption of Russian children.
The Russian and American lists exclude senior figures, but will nonetheless further damage any chance of a “reset” on relations, which President Barack Obama has stated to be his aim.
Among those singled out by Washington for sanction are two police officers, Pavel Karpov and Artyom Kuznetsov, and a former tax official, Olga Stepanova. Magnitsky was arrested after linking the three to a tax fraud scheme. Of the 18 people named by the US Treasury, 16 are connected to the Magnitsky case. The other two were included in relation to the shooting death of a former bodyguard to the Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the murder of a journalist, Paul Klebnikov.
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Poison claim in mysterious Surrey death of Russian supergrass
Alexander Perepilichnyy’s friends question three-week delay in toxicology tests and say he may have been poisoned in Paris.
A Russian supergrass who died in mysterious circumstances outside his Surrey home may have been poisoned in Paris before travelling to England, his associates have claimed.
Alexander Perepilichnyy, a wealthy businessman who sought refuge in Britain after supplying evidence against an alleged crime syndicate in Russia, collapsed while jogging outside his Weybridge home almost five months ago. Toxicology tests on the 44-year-old’s body have failed to reveal a cause of death, although murder squad detectives are investigating whether he was poisoned.
It has now emerged that British police have been working with their French counterparts after establishing that on the day he died, 10 November 2012, Perepilichnyy travelled by Eurostar to London after spending three days in Paris. During his stay, the Russian booked and paid for a room at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, off the Champs-Elysées, where suites can cost more than £4,500 a night, but he did not stay there. Instead, Perepilichnyy chose to stay at a more modest three-star, £145-a-night hotel across the city.
Associates of Perepilichnyy believe it is “highly possible” he met his alleged poisoners in Paris before catching a morning train back to London and from there to Weybridge, where he rented a mansion in the gated St George’s Hill estate. Just after 5pm, the apparently healthy Russian was found dead in the street.
In 2006 Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned after meeting two KGB officers who are accused of serving him a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium at the four-star Millennium hotel in London’s Grosvenor Square.
A spokesperson for Surrey police said that no officers or forensics experts had travelled to Paris, but that they were receiving “advice and support from other agencies”.
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Sergei Magnitsky: Russia can’t sweep his death under the carpet
Well, it’s official. Russia’s investigative committee has gone ahead and announced that the investigation into the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky has been closed. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer and father of two who died in November 2009 while being held in pre-trial detention. Before he went to jail, he had just happened to accuse some very powerful people of some very serious tax fraud. Having worked for the global investment advisory firm Hermitage Capital Management at the time of his imprisonment, he was now accused of the very same fraud he had apparently uncovered.
His death became an international scandal and led to the introduction of the Magnitsky Act in the US, which banned people implicated in his death from obtaining US visas, among other restrictions. Russia retaliated with the introduction of the Dima Yakovlev law, named after a Russian orphan who had died while in the care of his adoptive parents in the States. The law banned all adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans.
According to the investigative committee’s official findings, Magnitsky died because he was a very sick man: he was not tortured or treated differently, he was just in poor health. Whether Magnitsky received adequate medical treatment in detention is not mentioned. Both Magnitsky’s family and the human rights activists that have been involved in bringing this case to wider media attention have alleged that Magnitsky did not receive treatment because he wouldn’t testify against his employers.
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Are Russian killers on the streets of Britain?
A jogger who collapsed and died in leafy Weybridge turns out to have been blowing the whistle on one of Russia’s biggest tax frauds. Mark Townsend reports on a crisis that has pitted the Kremlin against the US Senate and British police.
Shortly after 5.15pm on 10 November 2012, a jogger turned into Granville Road, Weybridge, running along the hedge-lined street of one of Britain’s wealthiest enclaves. Then, 50m from his home, he staggered into the road and died.
In the days that followed, Surrey police believed they were dealing with a natural, if unusual, death. Four months on, the passing of 44-year-old Alexander Perepilichnyy still remains a mystery. Two post-mortems have proved inconclusive, but the outcome of what Surrey police promise is their “full range” of toxicology tests is imminent.
To piece together Perepilichnyy’s final years is to drill down into the core of Russian criminality, according to one account.
What we know of Perepilichnyy is slight. In another age he might have been a rocket scientist. Peers called him a “genius”, a Ukranian whiz-kid with an uncanny knack for numbers. His favourite waste of time was, they say, discussing the theories behind cosmogony and Kondratiev waves – the long-term cycles of capitalism. However by the time Perepilichnyy arrived to study at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – famous for supplying the brains behind the Soviet space race – Russia’s lunar ambitions had curdled with the collapse of communism. Instead Perepilichnyy applied his talents to the world of finance and was, until 2008, a star talent at an asset management firm in Moscow.
That year, on the other side of Moscow, across Red Square and the brown Moskva river, a rival investment fund to Perepilichnyy’s had become engulfed in crisis. Hermitage Capital was under the guidance of a man called Bill Browder, a naturalised Briton based in London who had built the investment firm into the largest foreign investor in Russia. But on Christmas Eve 2007, it had discovered itself to be the victim of a huge and sophisticated scam.
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Russia delays trial of dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky
Judge postpones hearing in controversial case of lawyer who died in detention while awaiting trial over alleged tax evasion.
A Russian court has postponed the trial of the dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in the latest move to drag out the controversial case.
Magnitsky, the first person to be tried posthumously in Russia, stands accused of tax evasion, alongside his former employer, London-based investor William Browder. Magnitsky died in pre-trial detention in 2009.
Browder has been banned from entering Russia. The head of the investment fund Hermitage Capital was accused of tax evasion after falling foul of the Russian government.
Investigating the charges in 2008, Browder’s auditor and lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered that police and tax officials had colluded to steal Hermitage’s tax payments for their own enrichment. The case has come to exemplify Russia’s corrupt justice system.
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Russia puts Sergei Magnitsky on trial – three years after he died in custody
On Monday, for the first time, Russia will put a dead man on trial.
Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer, will face charges of tax fraud that his friends and family say are fabricated. He will not actually face them at all, though: Magnitsky has been dead since 2009.
He was arrested the year before after concluding a multimillion-dollar corruption investigation that pointed the finger at a host of low-level Russian officials. Like thousands of other Russians each year, he never came out.
Unknown to the public when he was alive, Magnitsky’s name has come to symbolise the deep ills that haunt Russia since his death – its Kafkaesque justice system, its torturous prisons and even its vengeful foreign policy.
When the United States passed a bill banning those involved in Magnitsky’s death from entering or even keeping bank accounts in the US, Moscow responded by banning Russian orphans from being adopted by Americans.
Kremlin anger at the Magnitsky bill, now being considered in countries across Europe, has dominated domestic politics since the turn of the year.
“We found their achilles heel,” said William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management and Magnitsky’s former employer, who has launched a global campaign to avenge his death. “Following the money and freezing the money is by far the most effective tool there is when dealing with a kleptocracy.”
Browder, who is based in London, was once Vladimir Putin’s biggest fan, becoming the largest portfolio investor in Russia by the end of Putin’s first term in 2004.
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Dead Russian lawyer to go on trial next month
The trial of the whistleblowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is to begin next month, even though he died in prison three years ago.
A Russian court ruled on Monday that the trial would begin on 4 March. Prosecutors accuse Magnitsky and his former client William Browder, a London-based investor, of evading $16.8m (£10.8m) in taxes.
The trial will be held under procedures allowing for posthumous trials to clear the deceased. Magnitsky’s relatives are boycotting the proceedings.
Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 while investigating an alleged $230m (£148m) tax fraud and died the following year after developing pancreatitis that was left untreated.
The US Congress passed a law sanctioning officials whom Browder accuses of involvement in the fraud. Russia in response banned adoptions by Americans. buy over the counter medicines hairy girl https://zp-pdl.com https://www.zp-pdl.com payday loan
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Russian court clears doctor over Sergei Magnitsky’s death in custody
A Russian court has cleared the only person charged in the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer whose death in custody three years ago has driven a wedge between Russia and the US.
American outcry over the death in 2009 led to US legislation aimed at punishing those responsible. Russia retaliated with a ban on Americans adopting Russian children, which President Vladimir Putin signed into law on Friday morning.
Dmitry Kratov, a doctor in the prison where Magnitsky was held, was the only person charged over the death. Several other officials accused of involvement have been awarded promotions.
On Friday a judge in Moscow found Kratov not guilty of negligence. Fewer than 1% of Russians on trial each year are acquitted.
Magnitsky, a lawyer for the London-based investor William Browder, was arrested in 2008 while investigating state corruption and died in prison the following year after developing pancreatitis that was left untreated. An investigation by the Kremlin’s human rights council also found that he had been severely beaten.
Pointing to the absence of a full investigation in Russia, Browder helped lobby for a new US law that forbids Russians allegedly involved in the death from travelling to or keeping bank accounts in the US, dubbed the Magnitsky Act.
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