Posts Tagged ‘Hermitage’
Does the Trail to Magnitsky’s Killers Lead All the Way to the Top?
An interesting bit of news from a Financial Times blog with Davos gossip:
The most gripping exchange came right at the end when Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital – once the biggest foreign investors in Russia and now a bitter critic – asked the panel about the notorious death in police custody of Sergei Magnitsky, his lawyer and auditor.
The response of Igor Shuvalov, the deputy prime minister was – I think – meant to sound reasonable and reassuring. He described the case as “horrendous” and said that some people had already lost their jobs and been charged over it. But it was very difficult to get to the bottom of the case, because the “system” was protecting some guilty people.
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Russia, Davos and the rule of law
Financial Times
Planning to invest in Russia? Here’s a reason to think again, courtesy of our colleague Gideon Rachman, blogging from the World Economic Forum in Davos. Even Igor Shuvalov, Russia’s deputy prime minister (pictured), was unable to give potential investors the assurances they wanted when speaking about the notorious death in custody of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Shuvalov, himself a lawyer, acknowledged that the case was “horrendous”, but blamed “the system”.
Rachman wrote on Friday in this FT’s Davos liveblog:
The question of what is, or is not, “on the record” at Davos remains a tricky one. Yesterday, I attended a Russia session that I was advertised as “off”. However, there were scores of people in the room, and I later discovered that several had tweeted or blogged about it. Now newspaper accounts are emerging. So let me belatedly join the party.
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Davos rolling blog: day 3
09.15: What happens in Davos stays in Davos… or not? Gideon Rachman attended a session yesterday on Russia, and part of the conversation there – while ostensibly “off the record” – is reverberating outside the meeting room:
The question of what is, or is not, “on the record” at Davos remains a tricky one. Yesterday, I attended a Russia session that I was advertised as “off”. However, there were scores of people in the room, and I later discovered that several had tweeted or blogged about it. Now newspaper accounts are emerging. So let me belatedly join the party.
The most gripping exchange came right at the end when Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital – once the biggest foreign investors in Russia and now a bitter critic – asked the panel about the notorious death in police custody of Sergei Magnitsky, his lawyer and auditor.
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Magnitsky’s family skeptical about new forensic study into his death
The defense team of the family of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for the investment foundation Hermitage Capital, who died in detention in 2009, is skeptical about an expert examination ordered by the investigation to find out whether Magnitsky had been subjected to torture.
“Three forensic medical examinations have already been carried out. However strange as it may seem, none of them concluded that he had really been subjected to violence, although they found obvious things, like marks on his hands, for instance,” Yelena Oreshnikova, a lawyer for Magnitsky’s widow, told Interfax on Tuesday.
It is strange that such an examination has been ordered so long after Magnitsky’s death, she said.
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Russian activists urge US senator to back bill to help jailed tycoons
Ekho Moskvy
Text of report by Gazprom-owned, editorially independent Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy on 20 January
[Presenter] A group of Russian human rights activists, writers, actors, politicians and journalists have appealed for help to US Senator John Kerry, asking him to support a bill which they think can help free Mikhail Khodorkovskiy and Platon Lebedev, who used to run Yukos.
The bill, named after Sergey Magnitskiy [a Hermitage Capital lawyer who died in pre-trial detention] is now under consideration in the [US] Senate. The bill not only provides for sanctions in the Magnitskiy case but also encompasses the whole spectrum of human rights violations. According to rights campaigners, the list of people involved in breaching human rights should also include civil servants responsible for the politically motivated persecution of Khodorkovskiy and Lebedev.
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Biziness and justice, Russian style: The cost to our society could be far worse than the wealth these men bring
William Browder is head of Hermitage Capital in London’s Golden Square. He is a naturalized British citizen, the grandson, as it happens, of Earl Browder, the head of the US Communist Party in the 1940s. That link did neither him nor his mathematician father no favours in life.
In the last year he has received 11 death threats – a text message quoted the Godfather about history showing that ‘there is no one so powerful they cannot be killed’. The calls were traced back to Russia. They probably did not come from gangsters, but from the senior figures in the Russian police, or more worryingly the FSB secret police. They are the ones who poisoned the late Mr Litvinienko with polonium in the middle of London.
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(In Italian) Settimana Internazionale – Il caso Magnitsky
Bill Browder, CEO Hermuitaghe Caital, speaking on Italian Radio Radicale about the Sergei Magnitsky case. (With footage). Also interviewed were Italian MP Matteo Meccacci and journalists Fabrizio Dargosei and Claudio Salvalaggio
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Buy Russia When Oil is Cheap
If you wonder why I recommend a shower after investing in Russia, Bill Browder will give you the reasons at length on his YouTube video. Bill is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, one of the firms that pioneered equity investment in the former Soviet Union in the nineties.
After a decade of pursing a campaign of activist investing that brought major changes in corporate governance in big companies like Gazprom (OGZPF.PK) and Sberbank (SBRPF.PK), a mafia connected government struck back with a vengeance. It deported Browder in 2005, arrested his lawyer, and pressured him to provide false testimony against his boss, which he refused. A year later, the man died in prison from “natural causes.”
The Russian government then seized Browder’s operating companies, but fortunately for investors, not before he was able to sell off $4.5 billion in holdings and spirit the funds out of the country.
Browder, who is of Russian descent, and whose grandfather was chairman of the American Communist Party, says his case is but the tip of the iceberg. Major multinationals like Shell, BP, and Ikea have also been the victims of corruption and faced arbitrary seizure of assets by the well connected. This lawlessness is the reason why Russian companies perennially trade at single digit multiples. They are cheap on paper, but carry hidden, unquantifiable risks.
Despite all of the above, mega hedge fund Traxis Partners founder, Barton Biggs, says there is still a case to make for investment in Russia. It is the classic emerging middle class story. Russians have no credit card debt, no home mortgages, and terrible housing, but the resource wealth to buy what they need. Barton sees Russia eventually becoming a basic, functioning European country, but will first have to engineer a growth spurt to get there. That is the play. The principal vehicle for most foreigners to get into the land of Lenin and Red Square is to buy the ETF, (RSX), which was up 300% in 2009.
No doubt that investing in Russia is a double edged sword. It offers enormous oil reserves and natural resources, with GDP flipping from a -7.9% rate in 2009 to an expected 3.2% this year. But you run the risk of a knock on the door in the middle of the night. займы на карту срочно онлайн займы www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php срочный займ на карту онлайн
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Magnitsky family to ask human rights council for protection from police
Family and relatives of Sergey Magnitsky, the lawyer of the London-based investment fund Hermitage Capital who died in custody two years ago, are addressing the presidential human rights council after being pressured by the Interior Ministry, the fund’s press-release obtained by Gazeta.ru said.
“The Interior Ministry has for the fifth time sent a summons to Magnitsky’s relatives to participate in the investigation, refusing all their complaints about illegitimacy of the posthumous prosecution of Magnitsky,” the press-release said.
“I do not find it possible to take part in investigation procedures in the status which is not prescribed by the law and was given to me without my approval. I refuse to take part in the patently unlawful actions of this case, in the framework of which and on the basis of fabricated proof, my son was repressed,” Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya Magnitsky, said in a statement to the prosecutor general, Viktor Tchaika.
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