Posts Tagged ‘Hermitage’
EU-RUSSIA: “MAGNITSKY ACT” RECEIVES SUPPORT!
MEPs gave green light to the initiative of Kristiina Ojuland for visa restrictions and assets freezing to individuals implicated in death of the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Today Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament voted for a recommendation to the EU Council with a score of 63 -2 – “no”, 1 – “abstention”.
On the eve of a vote Ojuland as a special reporter on the case held a debate with the representatives of differentn political groups in the European Parliament on amendments made.
“Hermitage Capital” Bill Browder, Magnitsky’s former employer, as a special guest of the hearing and an expert on the case called for ‘justice for Sergei’.
“We have all the evidence that Sergei had been beaten on the last night of his life, and he had been tortured before. Nevertheless Among 60 individuals implicated in the affair the only one who was prosecuted was a prison doctor, for not treating Sergei from the sicknesses he never had ” – said Browder.
Meanwhile the “Hermitage Capital” conducted its own investigation and the results were so convincing that the 39 million US doll in the accounts of corrupt officials have been frozen in Swiss banks recently.
“They love to travel and buy property in Europe, – observed Browder. – We must deny them this privilege, if we can’t get justice in Russia’. Since Magnitsky’s death the corrupt officials haven’t changed their luxurious lifestyle, acquiring properties and enjoying the European lifestyle. Moreover, the impunity encourages them to continue to insult the memory of the deceived and intimidate the victim’s relatives seeking justice.
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Putin’s Russia Is Becoming a Flawless Dictatorship
The window through which the world currently views Vladimir Putin’s Russia is narrow and can only be opened from the outside — like the feeding door of a cage.
The window is part of the glass enclosure in which the defendants are held during trials in Moscow’s Khamovniki district court. As long as it’s open, it serves as their connection to the outside world. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was Russia’s richest man until 2003 and has been its most famous prisoner since then, used it to deliver a couple of words to the world when he was put on trial here for a second time in 2010.
Last Wednesday, it was the voice of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova that was coming from the cage. Tolokonnikova, a 22-year-old student, together with two other members of the feminist punk bank Pussy Riot, were being charged with “hooliganism.” When the verdict is pronounced on Friday, the women could be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
The charge is documented in videos showing the musicians, wearing ski masks, giving a performance on Feb. 21, 2012, in front of the wall of icons in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. The lyrics included the following: “Mother of God, Virgin Mary, drive Putin away,” “Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit,” and “The patriarch believes in Putin / Bastard, better believe in God.”
In their closing statements to the court, the defendants tried to refute the charge of “hooliganism.” Tolokonnikova, with her neatly plucked eyebrows and perfectly styled hair, unabashedly referred to other people who went to extremes to defend their beliefs: St. Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian church; the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was sentenced to death for his resistance to religious and secular rulers alike; and Gulag chronicler Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who predicted “that words will crush concrete.”
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Investigator Removed From Hermitage Tax Case
Police have sacked the lead investigator in a high-profile tax-evasion case against Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder and the company’s late lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
Investigator Mikhail Shupolovsky will take over from Boris Kibis, who has been reassigned in a “redelegation of tasks,” city police said, Interfax reported Wednesday.
Browder and Magnitsky are accused of lowballing Hermitage Capital’s 2001 tax bill by about 500 million rubles ($15 million).
Browder and supporters say both the case and Magnitsky’s 2009 death in pretrial detention are punishment for accusations Magnitsky made against a group of tax and police officials whom he said embezzled a $230 million tax refund.
The case has attracted international condemnation, and U.S. lawmakers have attached Magnitsky’s name to a bill that would impose sanctions on human rights abusers worldwide.
“It will be interesting to see how this new investigator will compromise himself and the Russian state,” a Hermitage Capital representative said in e-mailed comments.
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Fire fighting
Russia is on the verge of becoming a WTO member, but practitioners with in-depth, first-hand experience of the country’s legal, political and business infrastructure believe it is rotten to the core.
It is Russian Business Week 2010 and students in a crowded lecture hall at the London School of Economics (LSE) are on the edge of their seats as Roger Munnings, chairman of Russia’s Audit Committee Institute, stands up to deliver his keynote speech.
Before he begins he asks any Russian members of the audience to raise their hands: 200 hands shoot straight up. He then asks how many people wish to return to Russia to work after completing their studies: 190 hands quickly disappear.
Munnings carries on with his speech regardless, but when it finally comes to a close, one member of the audience cannot resist standing up and passing comment.
Maybe you weren’t paying attention when you asked for a show of hands,” he says, “but only 10 of 200 Russian LSE students want to return to Russia. These are the best and brightest students that Russia has to offer and they don’t want to go back home. Just what good news and a true picture of Russia are they supposed to be spreading?”
The audience member was none other than Jamison Firestone, managing partner of both Moscow law firm Firestone Duncan and London-based FD Advisory. His probing comment earned him an overwhelming ovation from the student body.
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Mixing Human Rights and Trade Relations: Dealing with Today’s Russia
After trying for some two decades, Russia will join the World Trade Organization, or WTO, later this month. For the Kremlin, it’s a hugely symbolic moment. Russia has joined the club.
Russia’s entry to the WTO should make it easier for nations to trade with them. By some estimates, the US could double its exports to Russia in the next five years.
But there’s a catch: A Cold War law remains on the books, which prevents normal trade relations between the two countries. It’s a law that many US businesses, ranchers and farmers want removed immediately. American Unions want Congress to take a tougher stance with Russia. The World’s Jason Margolis has more.
To understand why US companies won’t be able to trade freely with Russia anytime soon, we need a brief history lesson.
In the 1970’s, Soviet Jews, many of whom faced persecution, were prevented from emigrating from the USSR. Svetlana Boym was one of them. She’s now a professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
BOYM: “I was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. I came to the United States as a refugee. The reason I was able to enter the United States and exit the former Soviet Union was thanks to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.”
The “Jackson-Vanik Amendment” was passed by Congress in 1974. The Amendment denied equal trading rights to countries restricting emigration. It was designed to put pressure on Soviet leaders to open their borders. Many argue it worked. Some 1.5 million Soviet Jews were able to leave.
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U.S. human-rights measure puts Russia on notice
Finally, there is good news for politically disenfranchised liberals in Russia and for U.S.-Russian relations in the long run.
And that’s not because of Russia’s long-coveted admission to the World Trade Organization next month or the expected scrapping of a Cold War-era law restricting Russian trade with the United States.
Under the boot of Russian President Vladimir Putin for most of the past 12 years, Russian liberals looked with hope to the U.S. Congress to approve a new human-rights bill that would replace the old.
A bill that ties up the scrapping of the old provision — the Jackson-Vanik Amendment — with the adoption of the new one — the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act — was approved in a 24-0 vote earlier this month by the Senate Finance Committee, which gives hope that it will sail through the full Congress.
The 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment that denies Russia normal trade relations has been routinely waived by U.S. presidents since 1992, following the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act would deny American visas to corrupt officials and human-rights violators and freeze their U.S. bank accounts. Prompted by a notorious quarter-billion-dollar corruption scandal in Russia, the Magnitsky bill would cover all foreign nations.
A lawyer for Hermitage Capital Management, once the largest foreign investor in Russia, Mr. Magnitsky died in police custody on false charges of tax avoidance after he was arrested for alleging a $230 million state-orchestrated fraud that he had uncovered.
It is critical that the bill is passed despite opposition from the Kremlin and the White House, which is interested in keeping up appearances in this election year.
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The Magnitsky law
After Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death in a Moscow jail for uncovering fraud by Russian authorities, investor Bill Browder devoted himself to publicising the case. As a result, the US is close to passing a dramatic human rights law.
Browder remembers receiving the phone call at his London home at 7am informing him of Magnitsky’s fate. “When I learnt of his death it was like a knife going right into my heart. And I can’t say that I’ve even begun to recover from the shock, trauma and outrage that I felt on that day,” he says. “The only thing that gives me any comfort is spending my days single-mindedly pursuing his killers.”
From that day, Browder has devoted the same near-manic energy he once spent on cheerleading investment opportunities in Russia to exposing the country’s darker side. He has travelled widely in Europe and North America, publicising Magnitsky’s case and lobbying politicians and diplomats to raise the issue with their Russian counterparts. He and a team of five dedicated researchers have published reports forensically describing Magnitsky’s detention and death, financed several films highlighting the links between Russian officials and the criminal underworld, and, with the lawyer’s family and friends, helped set up a website, called Russian Untouchables, which airs the videos and documents corruption.
His campaign may soon result in the US Congress adopting a law naming the 60 Russians identified by Browder as being responsible for the false arrest, torture and death of the 37-year-old lawyer. The act, which has been ferociously resisted by the Kremlin and the US administration and some business interests, would freeze the foreign assets of, and deny visas to, those named individuals.
A decade ago, Bill Browder was flying high as one of the most successful foreign investors in Russia. With $4.5bn under management, Browder had committed his career and a lot of his investors’ money to proving his proposition that the shares of Russia’s newly privatised, resource-rich companies were absurdly cheap.
The cocksure, US-born fund manager aggressively argued to anyone prepared to listen – and to many who weren’t – that President Vladimir Putin had been unfairly maligned in the western press and was intent on bringing prosperity and order to the biggest country in the world, after the rapacious criminality of the 1990s. To the disgust of many, Browder declared himself delighted when Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest and most powerful oligarch, was arrested in 2003 and jailed. “Who’s next?” Browder asked cheerfully.
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Turning the tables on Russia’s power elite — the story behind the Magnitsky Act
The murder of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009 looks likely to trigger legislation in the United States which strikes at the heart of Russia’s corrupt power elite. Bill Browder, founder of the Hermitage Fund, moving spirit behind the impending Magnitsky Act, tells the story.
I have my family history to blame for the fact that I ended up working in Moscow. My grandmother was from Russia and my grandfather was the head of the American Communist Party between 1932 and 1945 (he was subsequently persecuted in the 1950’s). So when I was growing up as a teenager and going through my teenage rebellion, I thought the best way of rebelling against a family of communists was to become a capitalist.
I ended up studying economics at the University of Chicago, probably the most right-wing institution in America, and then I enrolled at the Stanford Business School. I graduated business school the year the Berlin Wall came down and as I started contemplating the next stage of my life, I had a personal epiphany: ‘if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, I should become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe’. So I set off to do just that.
After a spell working on the Russian privatisation programme at Salomon Brothers in London, I moved to Moscow in late 1995 to set up the Hermitage Fund, which focused on investing in the newly privatised shares of Russian companies. Over the next few years, the business grew to become the largest investment firm in the country with $4.5 billion. Success was exciting. But this turned to frustration when I realised that the companies I was investing in were essentially ‘non-profit’ entities. They were ‘non-profit’ not because they were giving money to charity, but because the senior managers were stealing the profits.
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A Hedge Fund Manager’s Crusade against Putin
Financial investor Bill Browder was once a fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But after his lawyer died in prison under suspicious circumstances, he launched a crusade against the Kremlin. The case has gained the attention of the OSCE and the US Senate.
The text message Bill Browder, a London-based hedge fund manager, received on his phone was lifted directly from a mafia thriller. “If history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone,” Michael Corleone says in “The Godfather: Part II.” Browder doesn’t know who sent him the quote.
It wasn’t, however, the only one. The 48-year-old has several such text messages, which he believes to be from Russian intelligence agents. He explains all this in a matter-of-fact, business-like tone, as if this were all still just a question of money and business rather than life and death.
Two and a half years ago, Browder’s tax attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten in Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina detention center. Shortly afterward, Magnitsky was dead. “Sergei was tortured to death,” Browder believes.
The case has turned a spotlight on the Russian government’s harassment of businesses and foreign investors within its borders. The Kremlin’s legal system has thrown over 100,000 businesspeople in jail, with oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky being the most prominent one among them.
But Browder isn’t the type to be easily intimidated. His story reads like a modern-day Damascene conversion, becoming a human rights crusader in addition to a hedge fund manager. It’s also a story of battling Russia’s strongman, Vladimir Putin, who was reinstalled as his country’s president this May and wants to consolidate Russia as an international economic power.
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