Posts Tagged ‘henry meyer’
Dead Russian Lawyer Magnitsky’s Trial Political, Family Says
A Russian court delayed by two weeks the start of the posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management Ltd. who died in prison, as his family said the case is “politically motivated” and boycotted the beginning of court hearings.
Magnitsky’s prosecution violates his constitutional rights and the family refuses to take part in the proceedings, their lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov, said in a statement read out to reporters today outside the Moscow court holding the trial.
The Tverskoi District Court delayed the first hearing on March 4, the tribunal’s press service said. The trial had been set to open today with court-appointed lawyers for Magnitsky because his family has refused to mount a legal defense.
Magnitsky died in November 2009 at the age of 37 while in pre-trial detention after alleging the biggest known tax fraud in Russia, a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case sparked a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of playing a role in Magnitsky’s death and Moscow retaliating by barring American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who as president in 2008-2012 made the fight against corruption a priority, last month defended Magnitsky’s prosecution for tax evasion.
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Russia Threatens HSBC in Police Inquiry, Hermitage Says
Russian police are threatening to seize documents unless HSBC Holdings Plc hands over information required for a criminal investigation into Hermitage Capital Management Ltd., the investment fund said.
Under a new criminal case alleging “fraudulent actions,” Russia’s Interior Ministry is demanding that HSBC’s Moscow unit provide financial and banking information about the fund’s companies dating back to 1996, Hermitage said in an e-mailed statement today. Otherwise, the documents can be taken by force, it said, citing a request from the ministry to HSBC.
Andrei Pilipchuk, a ministry spokesman, declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg. Evgenia Efimova, a spokeswoman for HSBC in Moscow, said she couldn’t comment immediately.
Russia is prosecuting on tax-evasion charges London-based Hermitage head William Browder and a lawyer who worked for the fund, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in November 2009. The trial opened last month.
Magnitsky died at age 37 while in pretrial detention after alleging the biggest known tax fraud in Russia, a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case sparked a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of playing a role in Magnitsky’s death and Russia’s government retaliating by barring American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.
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Moldova Joins Campaign to Probe Russian Money Laundering
Moldova said it’s investigating Russian money laundering, becoming the fifth country to announce an inquiry into bank transfers stemming from the biggest tax fraud in Russian history.
Moldovan authorities opened a criminal investigation into suspected money laundering on Dec. 28, Anzhela Starinschi, a spokeswoman for the National Anti-Corruption Center in Chisinau, said by phone today.
The probe concerns funds transferred in 2008 to Moldova’s state-controlled Banca de Economii, according to a letter sent by Prime Minister Vladimir Filat last week to the anti- corruption center, the general prosecutor’s office and Interior Ministry. Banca de Economii declined to comment by phone and asked for an e-mailed request, to which it hasn’t repsonded.
Switzerland, Cyprus, Latvia and Lithuania are also investigating money laundering connected to a $230 million tax fraud uncovered by Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in 2009 in a Moscow prison. His case sparked a diplomatic dispute between the U.S. and Russia, after American sanctions imposed in December on Russian officials accused of having a role in his death prompted Moscow to bar U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
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Medvedev Seen Clinging to Job as Putin Frets About Economy
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is clinging to his job as President Vladimir Putin grows increasingly frustrated with his protege’s inability to boost growth, three current and former Kremlin advisers said.
Putin criticized Medvedev’s government last week for failing to adapt to a “post-crisis” economic model. That followed what Izvestia, a newspaper owned by Putin ally Yury Kovalchuk, said Jan. 15 was a leaked Kremlin scorecard giving most ministers either average or “underperforming” marks. Medvedev said the scores were “plucked out of thin air.”
Medvedev, 47, is in a “very precarious position,” Sergei Markov, a political adviser to Putin’s staff and vice rector of the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, said in an interview in Moscow. “He has a promise from Putin about his role as prime minister, but there are some very powerful forces that see him as a threat.”
Putin, 60, was forced by the constitution to cede the presidency after his second-straight term ended in 2008. Medvedev, the prime minister at the time, became president and appointed Putin his premier. The two swapped jobs again last May after elections that sparked the biggest protests of Putin’s political career.
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Medvedev Courts Davos Skeptics With Better-Than-China Pitch
Russia has a $10 billion sales pitch for investors at this year’s World Economic Forum: give us your money and we’ll worry about corruption for you.
That was the line from First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week and that’s what Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will try to convince skeptical investors of tomorrow with his keynote address at the conference in Davos, Switzerland, the third by a Russian leader in five years.
Russia plans to raise a record $10 billion from asset sales this year as it seeks to stem capital flight and reverse the state’s creeping hold over the economy, Shuvalov said. The government failed to reach a similar goal last year, when it retained its ranking as the most corrupt country in the Group of 20, an organization it leads this year.
“Russia, regardless of what people are saying, is a place that people can invest, can earn,” Shuvalov said on a Jan. 18 train ride to Moscow from Kaluga, a region that has attracted investment from companies including Volkswagen AG (VOW) and AstraZeneca Plc. (AZN) “If you talk with investors, they say they invest maybe less than in China, but lose less than in China. They say people don’t know Russia.”
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A Russian Lawyer’s Death Triggers a Global Money Hunt
In 2009, a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow jail after uncovering the biggest known tax fraud in Russian history—a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case has touched off a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of having a role in Magnitsky’s death and Moscow retaliating on Dec. 28 by barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans.
Now about that $230 million. Russian authorities said it couldn’t be found because essential records were destroyed in a truck crash. A sawmill worker and a convicted burglar pleaded guilty to masterminding the heist, which involved filing bogus tax-refund claims. Both got five-year sentences.
Magnitsky’s associates, though, keep looking for the cash. An investigation spearheaded by his former client, Hermitage Capital Management, a London-based investment fund, has traced $134 million through bank accounts and shell companies in at least 17 countries. Banking records obtained by Hermitage and reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that millions wound up in offshore accounts and real estate owned by Russian officials, their relatives, and the former owner of a Russian bank. Authorities in four of these countries confirm that they have opened money-laundering investigations.
In the Magnitsky case, Hermitage accuses government officials of stealing from taxpayers, and the Kremlin has made no apparent effort to recover the money. “That’s the most awful thing—it is our money,” says Roman Anin, a reporter at the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta who has worked with Hermitage on its investigation. Russia’s Interior Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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Russia Bans 11 U.S. Officials Over Guantanamo And Abu Ghraib
Russia barred 11 serving and former U.S. administration officials for human rights abuses at facilities including Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The ban on entry to Russia was enacted last year in retaliation for a U.S. visa ban for 11 Russian officials accused of playing a role in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, President Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said in an e-mailed statement.
“These people are linked to high-profile human rights abuses, including torture and abuse of detainees in special prisons set up by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency in Guantanamo, Bagram in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq,” Ushakov said. Russia hadn’t previously made public the exact nature of its response to the U.S. visa ban, which was announced in July last year.
Russia is warning of further steps if Congress passes a law that would impose U.S. travel and financial curbs on any official abusing human rights in Russia, including all 60 people suspected of involvement in Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow jail in 2009. Ushakov criticized what he termed as an “anti- Russian” step that would complicate ties as Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama prepare to meet on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Mexico.
The U.S. Supreme Court in December 2009 refused to revive a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other military leaders by four British men who said they were tortured while imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, a detention center at the U.S. military base in Cuba. Abu Ghraib photographs showing U.S. guards mistreating inmates surfaced in 2004.
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U.S. Won’t Oppose Russia Sanctions That Risk Putin Reprisal
The U.S. administration will no longer seek to prevent Congress from passing a bill targeting human-rights offenders in Russia, a step that President Vladimir Putin has warned would spark retaliation and damage ties.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee will today consider legislation that would impose U.S. travel and financial curbs on any official abusing human rights in Russia, including 60 people suspected of involvement in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail in 2009. This will be followed at a later date by a vote in Congress on the measure.
“You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would bet against Congress expressing their concerns on the Magnitsky matter in some way,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said today in Moscow. “It’s important to work with Congress on an appropriate mandatory response to that.”
President Barack Obama’s administration is seeking to repeal trade restrictions with Russia to prevent U.S. companies from being penalized once Russian membership of the World Trade Organization takes effect later this year. A bipartisan group of senators has made a repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment conditional on imposing sanctions on Russian officials for human-rights violations.
Such a law would be “a gross interference in Russian internal affairs and, of course, it won’t have any positive effect on U.S.-Russian ties, to put it mildly,” Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s human-rights representative, told reporters in Moscow on May 15. Russia in April warned it would retaliate with unspecified measures against the law.
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Russia Says U.S. Human-Rights Sanctions Bill to Harm Ties
Russia warned that a U.S. bill imposing sanctions against Russian officials suspected of human- rights abuses will harm relations between the two countries.
Such a law would be “a gross interference in Russian internal affairs and, of course, it won’t have any positive effect on U.S.-Russian ties, to put it mildly,” Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s human-rights representative, told reporters in Moscow today.
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has proposed legislation that would impose travel and financial restrictions on any official abusing human rights in Russia, including 60 people suspected of involvement in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail in 2009.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry last month warned it would retaliate with unspecified measures against the law. The State Department has said there is “a desire and an interest to make this a matter of law” in Congress and that the Obama administration is discussing the issue as it seeks lawmakers’ support to repeal a 1974 law that restricted trade with the former Soviet Union.
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