Posts Tagged ‘Hermitage’
Putin’s effort to block US sanctions serves corrupt officials – Hermitage Capital
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy goal of stopping U.S. sanctions against Russian individuals and companies shows that his government is “working in the interests of corrupt officials”, UK-based investment fund Hermitage Capital said on Wednesday.
Hermitage Capital has campaigned in the United States and Europe for sanctions to be imposed on more than 60 Russian officials who the company says were complicit in the death of its tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, or a cover-up of how it occurred.
Magnitsky died in a Russian prison almost a year after he was arrested on tax evasion charges. He had previously claimed that Moscow tax and police officials had embezzled $230 million in tax levied on Hermitage Capital profits.
“Putin’s executive order (to prevent sanctions) shows clearly that the entire Russian government is now working in the interests of corrupt officials who have committed grave crimes,” an unnamed representative of Hermitage Capital said in a statement.
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Russian spy agency linked to dead lawyer
JEROME TAYLOR SATURDAY 14 APRIL 2012
Russia’s spy agency authorised a raid on a British investment firm in Moscow that led to a massive tax scam by allegedly corrupt officials and the death of a lawyer who tried to expose the fraud, new papers show. Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow-based lawyer, died in November 2009 during pre-trial detention after he was arrested by a group of officials who were being investigated for tax fraud. No one has been imprisoned for his death.
Instead prosecutors have begun a posthumous investigation against Mr Magnitsky and Bill Browder, the British founder of the London-based hedge fund Hermitage Capital, which has campaigned to bring to justice those responsible for the lawyer’s death. Mr Browder said the government’s investigation against him for an alleged 2001 tax evasion, which he denies, has resulted in a series of previously undisclosed criminal case files being released to the public for the first time.
Among the 70 evidence files that have been handed to his lawyers are at least three bundles containing memos from the FSB, Russia’s spy agency. Mr Browder says the files show how the agency’s anti-fraud department – known as Department K – played a key role in beginning the investigation into Hermitage, as a result of which the company became the victim of a $230m tax fraud.
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Tax scam points to complicity of top Russian officials
Two Moscow tax departments at the centre of a tax rebate scam worth hundreds of millions of dollars continued to disburse huge sums long after similar schemes were uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the whistle-blowing lawyer who died in jail after making his allegations.
Revelations that the tax rebate scams continued well after Magnitsky’s death raise questions about the level of official protection the fraudulent rebate operations enjoyed. In total, the fraud looks to have cost the Russian treasury more than $800m from 2006 to 2010.
Magnitsky was jailed on separate tax fraud charges in 2008 soon after he alleged a circle of interior and tax ministry officials had conspired to defraud the Russian government via a $230m rebate involving company seals and charters belonging to his former employer, Hermitage Capital, that were seized in a police raid. His death a year later – he would have turned 40 last Sunday – spurred international outrage, causing the US government to draw up a visa blacklist for officials involved in his detention.
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Russia drops charges against doctor in Magnitsky case
Russia said Monday it had dropped charges against a doctor implicated in the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, sparking accusations that the authorities had no interest in seeking justice in the case.
Larisa Litvinova was one of only two people, both prison doctors, to be charged after a long-running and high-profile investigation into what activists see as one of Russia’s most outrageous post-Soviet rights violations.
Magnitsky died in 2009 at the age of 37 from untreated medical conditions including acute pancreatis after being held in a notoriously squalid prison during a fraud probe against his client, US investment firm Hermitage Capital.
“The Investigative Committee has decided to drop the criminal case against doctor and laboratory assistant at the pre-trial detention centre, Larisa Litvinova,” investigators said in a statement said.
It cited “the elapsing of the statute of limitations,” saying a new law had come into force since the probe began, meaning that investigators had to bring a case to trial within two years.
Litvinova was charged last August with causing death by negligence, while her boss, the detention centre’s deputy medical chief Dmitry Kratov, was charged with negligence.
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UK Businessman Fears Danger From Russia after ‘Police Leak’
A senior executive from Hermitage Capital fears his life may be in danger after his home address in London was leaked to officials involved in the pre-trial detention death of Hermitage lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Newly released court documents suggest Soca, the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency, passed the information to the Interior Ministry, who forwarded it to an official accused of blocking Magnitsky’s lawyers from visiting their client before his death, the Guardian reported Saturday.
The official is on the list of 60 people who would be banned from entering the US under proposed legislation to punish those involved in the 37-year-old lawyer’s death.
Magnitsky died in a detention center in 2009 after being refused medical treatment. He had been jailed on charges of tax evasion after accusing Russian officials of a $230 million tax fraud.
The executive whose address was revealed, Ivan Cherkasov, has been the subject of death threats from Russia, and he is also facing criminal accusations and an arrest warrant from an Interior Ministry official implicated in the tax fraud. Cherkasov says he and his family are now in danger of retaliation.
Senior Hermitage staff have received numerous death threats since Magnitsky’s death, and Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism unit has offered protection against potential Russian hit men.
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Financier fears for life over ‘UK police leak’ to Russia
British police face questions over the apparent leaking of a businessman’s London home address to Russian officials implicated in the suspected murder of a prominent lawyer.
Newly disclosed court documents suggest the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) passed confidential information to staff at Russia’s interior ministry, who are accused of being involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky, 37, was working for a British-based investment fund, Hermitage Capital Management, when he exposed a tax fraud worth £144m, the biggest in Russian history. After accusing interior ministry officials of fraud, he was detained in Moscow’s Butyrskaya prison, where he died in November 2009 after having had his medication withdrawn. The Kremlin’s human rights council claims he was tortured and probably beaten to death.
Now a senior employee of Hermitage – who has already received a number of death threats from Russia – claims his family has been placed in danger by the apparent collusion between UK police and Russian interior ministry officials.
In the two years since Magnitsky’s death, senior Hermitage staff have received death threats that prompted them to contact Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism unit, SO15, who offered security in case they were targeted by Russian hitmen operating in London.
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Russia’s Steve Biko; What Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death tells us about the Kremlin’s leadership
In 1977, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was arrested by South African police, clubbed to within an inch of his life, chained, stripped, manacled, denied care and ultimately left to die in a car. More appalling was the apartheid regime’s response to his murder: denial, followed by coverup, followed by professions of indifference to Biko’s suffering.
For the generation of Westerners that came politically of age in anti-apartheid rallies—Barack Obama’s generation—Biko’s name became a byword for everything they were fighting against. So it is with most revolutionary movements. It’s not sufficient to have the example of great heroes in the mold of a Walesa or Suu Kyi or Mandela. They also require great victims: Men and women who, in the manner of their dying, demonstrate why it is their victimizers who must perish instead.
Last year, the Arab world found its Biko in Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Now Russia may find its own Biko in the memory of Sergei Magnitsky, a mild-mannered, middle-class tax attorney from Moscow who spent the last of his 37 years in a filthy Russian prison before dying in November 2009 of medical neglect and physical torture.
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Russia to Try Browder With Dead Hermitage Lawyer for Tax Evasion
Russia plans to try William Browder, head of London-based Hermitage Capital Management Ltd., for tax evasion, along with Sergei Magnitsky, the fund’s lawyer who died in custody in 2009, RIA Novosti said.
“Magnitsky and Browder are both accused of severe crimes, which deprived the state of several hundred million rubles,” Alexander Yagodin, a senior Interior Ministry official, said in an interview with RIA Novosti, published today on the state- controlled news service’s website. Calls by Bloomberg to the ministry’s investigative branch weren’t answered today.
Yagodin denied that Magnitsky, who President Dmitry Medvedev’s human rights commission said was facing fabricated charges when he was beaten to death, had uncovered corruption by Interior Ministry officials. The Hermitage lawyer said he was abused and denied medical care in an effort to force him to drop fraud allegations against officials before his death in November 2009 after almost a year in pre-trial detention.
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West needs to engage with ordinary Russians
Vladimir Putin, after a campaign dripping with anti-western vitriol, has won a presidential election that monitors and Russia’s newly-emboldened opposition say was deeply flawed. How should the west respond?
US and European Union leaders are already being criticised – including by Russian pro-democracy groups – for tepid criticism of the alleged voting fraud. One European parliamentarian has said there should be “no business as usual” with Mr Putin’s regime.
But many in Russian civil society and the intelligentsia say it is crucial for the west not to isolate Russia at the very moment that its middle-class political consciousness is flowering.
Doing so could provide cover for a Kremlin clampdown on the nascent opposition. It would make it harder, too, to counter official propaganda that the financial crisis and eurozone problems prove western-style market democracy is not a shining model for Russia.
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