Posts Tagged ‘Hermitage’
A Culture of Corruption Defies Efforts at Reform
Wounded in Afghanistan and an 18-year veteran of the elite Alfa counter-terrorist forces, Sergei Vasilenko considers himself a patriot.
Which is why, when his bosses at the Federal Security Service asked him in 2010 to investigate corruption, he jumped at the chance.
The problem, Vasilenko now says, was that his new chiefs at the Federal Tax Service didn’t want him to do his job properly.
Vasilenko’s experience opens a window into what even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, bidding for a third Kremlin term, calls Russia’s “systemic” corruption. It’s a malaise that Putin’s political opponents say has flourished during the prime minister and former president’s 12 years as the country’s most powerful leader.
Vasilenko says his investigation, into suspected fraud involving tax officials in Moscow, met a wall of silence and he was soon out of a job. The Federal Tax Office said it had investigated Vasilenko’s allegations but declined further comment.
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Investor William Browder on Russian corruption and the elections
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Russia will hold its presidential election this Sunday. Despite massive protests in Moscow, Putin said he is confident of his victory. If elected, Putin would serve 12 years as president, making him the longest-standing Russian leader since Josef Stalin.
William Browder, of Hermitage Capital, invested heavily in Russia until he encountered what he characterizes as massive state corruption. He has since led a campaign against corruption in Russia.
Browder has been banned from Russia since 2005 and relocated his company to London. His associates in Russia have been intimidated and jailed. Sergei Magnitsky, Browder’s lawyer, died in prison and Browder has been working to discover the truth about his death. He is campaigning to have those involved in Magnitsky’s death banned from visiting the West.
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Above and Beyond
When my Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in police custody in November 2009, I thought that there was a good chance of getting justice for him from the Russian legal system for what I believe to be his murder. Unlike in many other human rights abuse cases, there was a mountain of documentary evidence proving exactly who killed him.
Sergei had given official testimony to Russian investigators prior to his arrest describing how the police were involved in stealing our companies as well as the $230 million in taxes we had paid to the Russian budget. Official police documents show that the same police officers who Sergei testified against arrested him. After his arrest, Sergei wrote 450 complaints during his 358 days in detention detailing exactly how his rights were violated and who did what to him at every different moment of his horrible ordeal. His complaints showed how specific state officials and judges refused his desperate requests for medical care, fabricated evidence to keep him locked up, and moved him through dozens of cells.
As Sergei was being tortured in detention, the Russian officials who approved the largest known tax refund fraud in Russian history, and their families, got inexplicably rich. On Nov. 16, 2009, Sergei went into critical condition from the withholding of medical care. Only then did the authorities move him to a prison hospital, but instead of treating him, they put him in an isolation cell and let eight riot guards with rubber batons beat him for one hour and 18 minutes until he was dead. He was 37 years old. There is nothing debatable in this story. It was laid out in great detail by the Moscow Public Oversight Commission on Dec. 28, 2009, and then subsequently by President Dmitry Medvedev’s own Human Rights Council on July 5, 2011.
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INSIGHT-In Russia, a graft-buster’s mission impossible
Wounded in Afghanistan and an 18-year veteran of Russia’s elite Alfa counter-terrorist forces, Sergei Vasilenko considers himself a patriot.
Which is why, when his bosses at the Federal Security Service – successor to the Soviet KGB – asked him in 2010 to investigate corruption, he jumped at the chance.
The problem, Vasilenko now says, was that his new chiefs at the Federal Tax Service didn’t want him to do his job properly. Vasilenko’s experience opens a window into what even Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, bidding for a third Kremlin term, calls Russia’s “systemic” corruption. It’s a malaise that Putin’s political opponents say has flourished during the prime minister and former president’s 12 years as Russia’s most powerful leader.
Vasilenko says his probe, into suspected fraud involving tax officials in Moscow, met a wall of silence and he was soon out of a job. The Federal Tax Office said it had investigated Vasilenko’s allegations but declined further comment.
Now the former soldier works with Analysis and Security, a local anti-corruption campaign group run by former tax officials, security professionals and managers of firms that have been on the wrong end of the kind of shakedowns the group seeks to expose.
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The Fund Manager At The Center Of Russia’s Tragic Hermitage Saga Talks Putin And Corruption
Bill Browder was one of the first Westerners to make a fortune in post-Communism Russia.
After arriving in the country in 1997, his fund Hermitage Capital Management started with $25 million and was at one point thought to have invested $4.5 billion, making it one of the largest foreign investors in the country.
However, in 2005 that all changed. While Browder had initially supported Vladimir Putin, he found himself barred from entry to the country.
When he began to investigate, tragedy struck. In 2008, Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer who was working for Hermitage Capital, was arrested after he reported allegations of a huge tax $230 million fraud to the authorities. He found himself accused of the very crimes he was reporting, and was thrown into prison.
Magnitsky died in prison in 2009. A Russian report later found he had been “tortured, beaten to death”. Despite his death, Magnitsky remains on trial, and no one has been charged with his death.
Browder and Hermitage are now based in London, where they still control $1 billion in assets.
However, Browder remains active in Russian life. Last year he released this video of their corruption allegations, and his pressure was able to get visa sanctions from the US and Canada on the officials involved in the death of Magnitsky.
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Twelve More Years of Vladimir Putin? Nyet!
White is the colour of political protest in Russia: it stands for clean elections and clean government. Vladimir Putin’s ex-KGB regime might in theory be able to provide the first of these, organising a more or less fair contest in the presidential election on March 4. But the second is impossible: theft and deceit are not just problems in the Russian political system — they are the system.
Russian political life has awoken from a 12-year coma. After the upheavals of the 1990s, stability and rising living standards mattered far more than the openness of political procedures or the contestability of official decisions. Now that has changed. Politics, once dismissed with a weary shrug, is the hottest topic in Moscow and other big cities. The internet is humming with parodies, many savagely funny, of Putin and his cronies. One of the best is a Borat-style hymn of praise to the Russian leader by a Tajik crooner, so pitch-perfect in its rendering of the style of official pro-Putin propaganda that many found it hard to work out if it was indeed a spoof, or just a particularly grotesque example of the real thing.
A more brutal take was from some beefy paratrooper veterans, growling: “You’re just like me, a man not a god. I’m just like you, a man not a sod.” That too became an instant hit on YouTube. When the band appeared on stage at the latest big opposition demonstration on February 4, the crowd already knew the words. The song’s success highlights two important trends. One is the interaction between the internet and political protest. That is quite new in Russia, where in previous years people went online to play games, visit dating sites, and follow celebrity gossip. Now cyberspace has become the greenhouse for opposition political culture. The other point, no less sinister for the regime, is that the habits of mockery have spread to parts of society that used to be rock-solid supporters of the regime, such as veterans of elite military units.
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Two tax officials accused of embezzlement by Magnitsky out of Russia – FSB report in court
Two former tax service officials whom Sergei Magnitsky, a Hermitage Capital lawyer, suspected shortly before dying at a Moscow prison of embezzling about 5.4 billion rubles from the budget, have left Russia.
This information became known at a Tuesday session of the Basmanny District Court hearing an appeal by Magnitsky’s colleague, Jamison Firestone, against investigators’ inaction.
Firestone, in particular, complained that law enforcement bodies failed to detain tax service officials Olga Tsaryova and Yelena Anisimova to probe their possible involvement in the embezzlement scheme.
A report presented at the court by the Federal Security Service (FSB) says that Tsaryova and Anisimova had left Russian territory, and therefore an investigator could not present them with summons to take part in a pretrial investigation.
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Putin and his cronies have plundered Russia for a decade, but though he’ll win Sunday’s sham election, his days are numbered
For the past four years, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, and his sidekick Dmitry Medvedev, who has the nominal post of president, have been engaged in a huge propaganda operation to fool Russians and the West.
With much fanfare, they have pretended to reform their benighted land. Mr Medvedev denounced corruption, and they pretended to be friends with the West, particularly through a warming of their relations with the U.S. in 2009.
But this has been a sham to conceal the truth: that Russia is shamefully misruled.
The ruling former KGB regime has squandered tens of billions of pounds and missed a once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernise the country.
It has no real interest in friendship or co-operation with the West, whatever our gullible diplomats and officials may think. It wants to launder money in London, but not to adopt our values of liberty or the rule of law.
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Prosecuting the Dead
In 897 AD in what was called “the Cadaver Synod”, Pope Formosus was tried for various violations of Church laws. He was found guilty, his edicts were annulled, his robes were taken from him, and three fingers on his right hand were severed, before the former Pope was thrown in the Tiber River. Bizarrely, Pope Formosus had died of natural causes several months earlier. They prosecuted a dead man. Fast forward over a thousand years to 2012. Russia is about to put on trial a dead man, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer, who died in prison from the effects of his imprisonment and torture by the Russian Government in November 2009.
Magnitsky’s death has caused universal condemnation by world leaders, international organizations, such as the European Union, as well as human rights groups. His crime was exposing a massive tax fraud scheme by the Russian government and officials within the Medvedev/Putin regime in the amount of over $230 million dollars. Not content to leave Magnitsky in peace, the Russian government has hounded his family and harassed his mother, Natalia Magnitskaya. They are even going to bring charges in absentia against Magnitsky’s former employer, William Browder, a British citizen, of the Hermitage Capital Fund.
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