Posts Tagged ‘Hermitage’
Mystery death of Russian businessman now examined by Major Crimes Unit
An investigation into the sudden death of a Russian supergrass in Surrey is now being reviewed by specialist detectives amid mounting concern that he could have been murdered.
Alexander Perepilichnyy’s, 44, who moved to Britain three years ago after falling out with a Moscow crime syndicate, was found dead outside his mansion on an exclusive private estate near Weybridge last month.
His death has so far been described as “unexplained” and Surrey police initially stated that it was not being treated as suspicious.
But after it emerged that Mr Perepilichnyy’s was co-operating with the Swiss authorities in a major corruption investigation linked to a string of other deaths, police chiefs ordered that the case be passed to force’s Major Crimes Unit.
Police sources said the unit, which investigates complex murder cases, would be now taking a fresh look at the circumstances of Mr Perepilichnyy’s death.
Detectives will speak to his friends and business associates in a renewed effort to establish how a 44-year-old man, who was apparently in good health, came to suddenly collapse and die.
One theory being explored is that he could have been poisoned in a similar fashion to Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent who died in London in 2006 after being contaminated with radioactive Polonium 210.
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Magnitsky, the Accidental Symbol of Global Injustice
Magnitsky’s life reveals a man who was in many ways ordinary and felt compelled to fight a state machine he had trusted his whole career.
When a childhood friend said he was thinking of not returning to Russia after a concert tour abroad in 2000, Sergei Magnitsky gave him a copy of “Brat 2,” a popular movie released earlier that year, in the hope of dissuading him from emigrating.
“Brat 2” tells the story of a justice-seeking rebel, played by the actor Sergei Bodrov Jr., who goes to the United States to rescue his brother from gangsters. He quickly becomes disillusioned with the country, where he thinks people “seek truth in money” and, after helping his brother, returns home to Russia.
Described as “a very Russian man” by friends, Magnitsky also was not impressed by London’s narrow streets when there on business, and he enjoyed traveling around Russia. He once made a trip to Odessa, where he was born.
“The word ‘patriot’ might sound vulgar, but he loved Russia,” said Tatyana Rudenko, Magnitsky’s aunt, who was close to her nephew throughout his life.
Magnitsky, a senior auditor and tax attorney for the Moscow-based law firm Firestone Duncan, died on Nov. 16, 2009, in a Moscow prison, where, according to a Kremlin human rights council investigation, he was badly beaten by guards shortly before he died.
A criminal investigation was carried out, but no senior prison or police officials have been prosecuted in connection with his death.
On Nov. 16 of this year, the third anniversary of Magnitsky’s death, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which seeks to punish Russian officials implicated in his death as well as other Russian officials linked to human rights abuses.
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Russian supergrass dies in mysterious circumstances
A Russian supergrass said to be assisting a Swiss probe into a multi-million pound money laundering scheme involving corrupt Russian officials has died mysteriously outside his home in Surrey, it was reported last night.
Alexander Perepilichnyy, a businessman who had sought refuge in Britain three years ago after falling out with organised criminals, collapsed outside his mansion near Weybridge earlier this month.
The 44-year-old had apparently been in good health. Surrey Police said a post mortem examination has proved “inconclusive” and that further tests had been carried out to try to establish a cause of death.
He was discovered when officers were called to his home on a luxury private estate shared with seven multi-million pound properties shortly after 5pm on a Saturday two weeks ago, and declared dead half an hour later.
Suggestions that he had been out running were not confirmed by Surrey Police. Police said they had been made aware of Mr Perepilichnyy’s link to the Swiss investigation and it “forms part of the inquiry”. The death was being treated as “unexplained”.
Mr Perepilichnyy was a key witness against a network of corrupt Russian officials and crime figures known as the “Kluyev Group”, according to a newspaper.
The network is said to be implicated in a series of multi-million pound tax frauds as well as the death in custody of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blowing Moscow lawyer, The Independent reported.
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Timeline of the Magnitsky scandal: The fraud that cost two lives
June 2007 – Russian police raid the offices of Hermitage Capital Management, officially to look for information on one of their investors. During the raid seals and corporate certificates are taken into evidence.
October 2007 – Using the seals and certificates, corrupt officials and criminal groups transfer ownership of a number of Hermitage’s Russian subsidiaries. The companies are involved in a string of litigation proceedings in a court in Tartarstan, 500-miles east of Moscow.
December 2007 – Fearing that companies have been stolen from them, Hermitage hires Moscow lawyer Sergei Magnitisky to investigate. That same month, the fraudulent owners of the Hermitage subsidiaries apply for and receive a $230m tax refund. Moscow tax offices 24 and 28 sign off on the deal.
July 2008 – After months of painstaking investigation, Magnitsky files a detailed criminal complaint with seven government agencies, naming a string of Russian government officials and criminal figures involved in the scam.
October 2008 – Magnitsky testifies to Russian prosecutors and gives an interview to Businessweek magazine. He is arrested days later and delivered to the very police officers and investigators he accused of carrying out the scam.
November 2009 – After months of interrogation, coercion and deliberately withdrawn medication in prison, Sergei Magnitsky dies.
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Those who let Magnitsky die were hoping the case would die with him. They were wrong
When Sergei Magnitsky lay close to death in Moscow’s Butyrka Prison in 2009, his worsening illness left untreated and exacerbated by beatings, few people heard his cries of pain. A man who had uncovered something dangerous, he was left to meet a horrible end, and none of the people who let it happen imagined that years later his demise would become an international cause célèbre and one of the most poignant reminders of the dangers of doing business in post-Communist Russia.
Three years after Mr Magnitsky’s death, the US looks ready to respond with the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability act, pushed by Senator John McCain, which will ban anyone implicated in his detention, abuse or death from travelling to the US, owning property there or holding a US bank account. If the Senate passes the law and Barack Obama signs it, it will be the culmination of a long battle by Mr Magnitsky’s former colleagues, led by the American-born British citizen Bill Browder.
Mr Browder’s dealings with Russia have taken a strange trajectory. He was once one of Vladimir Putin’s biggest cheerleaders, until his multi-billion-dollar Hermitage fund ran into problems. Even after he was banned from entering Russia in 2005, at the beginning of the problems which Mr Magnitsky would be tasked with investigating, Mr Browder was still upbeat about the prospects for investors in the country. Top Kremlin officials also expressed bemusement at the ban and said they were sure it would soon be rescinded. It never was, a sign perhaps that Hermitage had come up against powerful foes.
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A $230 million fraud – and a trail of death that just keeps growing
With its sweeping vistas of the Persian Gulf and central location in the Middle East’s glitziest city, Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah is one of the most exclusive patches of real estate in the world. Created in the shape of a palm tree, the artificial archipelago is home to the cream of a city already bulging with the super wealthy. It’s not the kind of place you might expect a lowly Moscow tax official with a declared family annual income of $38,000 to own a $3 million beach front villa. How could someone with a comparatively low-level civil service job become so wealthy?
That is the question Swiss prosecutors are currently probing as part of a complicated investigation into an alleged Russian money laundering scheme through Swiss bank accounts that began when a whistle blower handed them a damning dossier of evidence at the start of this year. The whistle blower, Alexander Perepilichnyy, died two weeks ago suddenly at the age of 44. But the investigation continues.
The origins of this tale, which sounds like a KGB era thriller but is in fact a depressingly real indictment of modern day Russia, can be traced back to a cold jail cell in Burtyrka Prison in November 2009 where Sergei Magnitsky, a pioneering Moscow lawyer lay dying.
Magnitsky, a charismatic and forensically bright father of two, had been hired by the British based investment fund Hermitage Capital Management to investigate a monumental tax fraud which had been carried out against them. Nine months earlier he pointed the finger of blame at a network of Interior Ministry officials and Russian underworld figures expecting his revelation to be the start of a sustained police investigation into how $230million in Russian taxpayers’ money was squirrelled away in one of Russia’s largest declared frauds.
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Fund file: Bullish on Russia?
Investors should look before they leap into investing in Russia, according to a report in Monday’s FTfm, but it is very unlikely that many will do so.
On the face of it, huge strides that have been made in the last year or so will make Russia a more friendly place for overseas investors.
“Right now we’re going through a period of moderate liberalisation,” says Jan Dehn, chief strategist with Ashmore, an emerging markets specialist.
He can see evidence of this in recent measures to allow greater flexibility of the rouble and in moves to encourage foreign ownership of local currency bonds. Until recently, he explains, foreign ownership of rouble-denominated Russian sovereign debt was about 3 per cent. It is now 5.4 per cent and Dehn expects the proportion to rise to something closer to the emerging market average, which is 20 per cent.
There is also a ministry of finance proposal that will require any listed company with majority state ownership to pay out 25 per cent of its profits in dividends to shareholders from next year. By next year, also, Russian companies will have to follow IFRS international accounting standards.
Small wonder that Dehn, along with many other emerging market fund managers, reports being overweight Russia.
Bill Browder, founder and chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, thinks they have either foolish optimism or very short memories, or both.
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Fight For Justice Continues For Murdered Russian Lawyer
Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer investigating state corruption when he was imprisoned on fabricated charges by the ‘gangster regime’ of Vladimir Putin. Magnitsky suffered torturous treatment while in the custody of the Russian government who were attempting to force him into signing a false confession.
After 358 days of pre-trial incarceration, he died from a beating by prison guards on November 16, 2009, at the age of 37.
Since then his former employer, William Browder, has been on a mission to reveal to the world the truth about the imprisonment and death of Magnitsky and bring to justice those responsible for his murder. The quest has brought to light the deeply corrupt state of Russian politics and its ties with organised crime.
Browder is a co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, a London-based investment firm which began trading in the Russian stock market during the 1990’s. Browder moved to Moscow during this time and was at first an advocate for Putin and his efforts to seemingly curb the plundering influence of oligarchs in the country.
However, Browder soon became aware that the Russian government under Putin was actually building its own criminal enterprise and merely channelling the former wealth of oligarchs into the private bank accounts of high-ranking officials.
Browder was publicly vocal in criticising these practices and began investigating the corrupt management of firms such as Gazprom, a state-controlled gas giant, and Surgutneftegaz, a secretive oil producer.
This quickly earned the ire of the Kremlin who launched a ruthless vendetta against Browder and Hermitage Capital.
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Police raid on Moscow love nest splits Putin’s inner circle
A dawn police raid at the luxury Moscow flat of the blonde director of a defence procurement agency at first seemed merely the latest in a long line of corruption scandals to hit the Russian government.
But when news broke that a bleary-eyed Anatoly Serdyukov, the defence minister, had opened the young woman’s front door when police came knocking, it became clear that this was altogether bigger news.
The titillating detail seemed to break the Russian media’s traditional refusal to delve into the private lives of politicians.
It appears that the scandal became public because Serdyukov, 50, is married to Yulia, the daughter of Viktor Zubkov, 71, a deputy prime minister, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and one of the most powerful men in Russia.
Serdyukov, who is reported to owe his meteoric rise from furniture salesman to minister to the influence of his father-in-law, incurred Zubkov’s wrath by allegedly having an affair with Yevgenia Vasilyeva — the official whose flat was raided — and in the process humiliating his daughter.
The case is mushrooming into an embarrassing scandal that may lift the veil on corruption, nepotism, selective justice and bitter Kremlin infighting under Putin’s rule.
Prosecutors searched Vasilyeva’s flat for several hours as part of a £60m fraud investigation into Oboronservis, a state-owned company that manages supplies to the armed forces. Vasilyeva, 33, who was until recently the head of the defence ministry’s vast property portfolio, is one of the company’s directors.
Officers from the prosecutor’s investigative committee said they had seized documents at her flat and confiscated more than £60,000 in cash plus antiques, paintings and hundreds of items of jewellery, including many diamonds. They also searched Oboronservis’s offices and have charged five people who, they allege, skimmed off large personal profits by using the company to sell state assets at far below their market value.
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