Posts Tagged ‘Hermitage’
Investigator in Magnitsky Case Asks for New Hermitage Arrest
An investigator implicated in the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has requested the arrest of another Hermitage employee, the investment fund said Tuesday.
Oleg Silchenko of the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee has asked Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court to authorize the arrest of London-based Ivan Cherkasov, 42, in connection with the same tax evasion case that led to Magnitsky’s arrest in 2008, Hermitage said in an e-mailed statement.
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Sergei Magnitsky and the Rule of Law
In November 2009, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow detention facility, just short of a year after his arrest on alleged tax evasion charges while defending an investment company on tax fraud and evasion complaints brought by the Russian government. Magnitsky publicly implicated certain Russian officials in an embezzlement scheme and misappropriation of funds from the Russian Treasury and assets of his client.
Magnitsky was tortured because he blew the whistle on a massive government-organized conspiracy to steal $230 million that he discovered and in which he testified against the corrupt officials. He was tortured to drop his testimony and sign a false confession stating that he committed the crime that he discovered. His imprisonment for “tax evasion” was a pretense to retaliate on his whistle blowing. His death has generated significant outcry in the international community, with allegations of torture and detention without trial or other procedural rights, and the denial of critical medical treatment that led to his death.
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Magnitsky case police officials seek London arrest
Russian police officials accused of running an extortion racket want to arrest a London-based businessman on tax evasion charges.
Hermitage Capital, a British investment fund which used to be the largest portfolio investor in Russia until it was hit by a major tax scam, said today that Interior Ministry officials in Moscow were seeking an arrest warrant for Ivan Cherkasov, 41, a senior executive at the company’s UK offices.
Similar charges were brought against Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing Moscow lawyer who was hired by Hermitage Capital to investigate corrupt state officials. He ended up dying in custody in a case that has become an international cause celebre for those campaigning against official corruption inside Russia.
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Magnitsky’s Colleagues: He exposed a fraud and paid for it with his life
WPS: What the Papers Say
Once they recovered from the shock caused by the news of Sergei Magnitsky’s death behind the bars, his colleagues initiated an investigation of their own. They are convinced that Magnitsky was murdered because he had exposed a fraud costing the Russian treasury 5.4 billion rubles and because he was prepared to testify in an open trial. Hermitage Foundation is still following the trail of the vast sums gone from the treasury in the hope to unearth a connection with people on the so called Cardin’s List. A video appeared in the Internet last week, focused on the colossal sums to be found on foreign bank accounts of Vladlen Stepanov, the husband of the former chief of Moscow Tax Inspectorate No 28 Olga Stepanova. It had been Stepanova who authorized return of the billions of rubles from the budget on December 24, 2007.
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Russian police accused over dead lawyer
A commission appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev has found that Russian police fabricated charges against an anti-corruption lawyer, whose death in prison in 2009 has come to symbolise pervasive corruption in Russian law enforcement.
Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer working for Hermitage Capital, formerly the largest portfolio investor in Russia, was imprisoned in 2008 after he reported a $230m tax fraud to Russian authorities, accusing police of carrying it out.
He died after almost a year in progressively worse conditions and was denied urgent medical care in an effort to coerce him to change his testimony, according to human rights groups. The federal prison service has admitted it was partly responsible for the death in custody.
The case has become one of the biggest headaches faced by Russia’s government which has yet to charge anyone. No one has yet been charged over the death, despite overwhelming evidence that Magnitsky was forcibly silenced by corrupt police officers.
An investigation by the Russian prosecutor’s office, ordered by Mr Medvedev in December 2009, has still not been completed.
One key figure, Oleg Silchenko, the interior ministry officer who signed the orders detaining Mr Magnitsky without trial for nearly a year until his death, was even promoted last July to Lt Col.
On Tuesday, Russian law enforcement suffered yet another blow when Mr Medvedev’s own human rights commission, staffed by independent lawyers, said the charges against Mr Magnitsky in 2008 had been “fabricated” by the police officers who arrested him, and had no legal basis.
At least one of these officers, Lt Col Artyom Kuznetsov, was among the men Mr Magnitsky had accused of participating in the $230m fraud. Mr Kuznetsov has refused to comment on the case.
The denial of medical care in prison was intended to coerce Mr Magnitsky to change his testimony against interior ministry officials, according to a December 2009 report by the Moscow Public Oversight Commission, created by Mr Medvedev to oversee human rights in jails.
The report shown to journalists on Tuesday was commissioned by Mr Medvedev at a meeting on human rights in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg on February 1, in which he asked his human rights council to examine the legal bases for the arrests of Mr Magnitsky. “The accusations against Magnitsky were fabricated by employees of the MVD [Interior Ministry] and FSB [Federal Security Service]” said the report.
Police had arrested Mr Magnitsky in 2008 on charges of evading taxes in 2001 which the council’s report ruled was baseless because he had been since cleared of any wrongdoing by the Russian Tax Service. In any event the time limit on such charges would have expired in 2004, according to the report.
William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, said he welcomed the report, but added: “Everybody knows that Sergei Magnitsky was falsely accused, arrested, and killed by the interior ministry. The real question is why Mr Medvedev and the Russian government are unable or unwilling to do anything to punish his murderers.”
The Russian Interior Ministry has said that it is awaiting the results of the formal investigation currently being conducted by the prosecutor’s office, which was begun on Mr Medvedev’s order in December 2009.
“There are supervisory bodies, in this case the prosecutor’s office, and it is in their competency to make such judgements. We will leave this announcement with commentary”, the interior ministry said on Tuesday. hairy girl hairy woman https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php займ на карту
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Marital murmurings in Magnitsky case
Embezzlement charges against tax official Olga Stepanova are now washing around her marriage and her relationship with her husband.
Stepanova and a $230 million fraud are at the centre of a media storm, with supporters of the late lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison, say ended up in Stepanova’s husband’s offshore bank accounts.
Stepanova’s lawyer says that this in no way implicates her client, as the two have been separated for almost 20 years.
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Moscow tax official’s $39 million fortune revealed
A Moscow tax official who approved a fraudulent $230 million tax return in 2007 has bought luxury real estate in Moscow, Dubai and Montenegro and wired money through her husband’s bank accounts worth $39 million, a U.S. investor said Monday.
All that was done with an average annual household income equivalent to $38,000, according to documents released by William Browder, an American-born investor barred from Russia.
Browder has been campaigning against Russian corruption since 2009 when his lawyer died a year after being sent to prison. Authorities have not explained why Browder was himself expelled as a security risk in 2005 in the first place.
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Tax official blasted over the Magnitsky affair
A sudden boom in the finances of a former tax official has come under the spotlight as part of a campaign to keep up the pressure on those allegedly involved in the incarceration and subsequent death of Sergey Magnitsky.
Olga Stepanova, a former tax official, and her family members became unwilling stars in a new video, part of the “Stop Untouchable!” campaign. Activists want to get justice for Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in pre-trial detention custody in 2009.
Jamison Firestone, Magnitsky’s former colleague at Firestone Duncan, has filed a claim to the Investigative Committee, calling for a criminal case to be opened against Stepanova, the then head of Moscow’s tax inspectorate no. 28.
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Russian Officials Said to Reap Wealth in Tax Case
After accusing government officials here of involvement in large-scale tax fraud three years ago, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer for a major international investment fund, was arrested and jailed for nearly a year until he died mysteriously in detention.
Mr. Magnitsky’s claims have never been fully investigated, and on Monday, a year and a half after his death, his former colleagues unveiled information that they said showed that the officials he implicated had become astonishingly wealthy.
The findings are the latest in a series of independent investigations into Russian officials by Mr. Magnitsky’s supporters, including William F. Browder, the owner of Hermitage Capital Management, the fund that Mr. Magnitsky represented. A $12 million country house outside Moscow and seaside villas in Dubai and Montenegro are some of the purchases made by the officials since Mr. Magnitsky made his accusations against them, according to the investigation.
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