Posts Tagged ‘jerome taylor’
Swiss prosecutors say death of Russian whistle blower will not derail huge fraud investigation
Alexander Perepilichnyy, a 44-year-old businessman who left Russia three years ago, was found dead outside his luxury mansion on an exclusive private estate in Surrey two weeks ago.
Prosecutors in Switzerland say the sudden death of a Russian whistle blower who was helping them uncover a money laundering network will not derail their investigation.
Alexander Perepilichnyy, a 44-year-old businessman who left Russia three years ago, was found dead outside his luxury mansion on an exclusive private estate in Surrey two weeks ago.
The Independent revealed today that he was helping investigators uncover a network of Swiss bank accounts that were used by Moscow tax officials who became incredibly wealthy in the immediate aftermath of an enormous fraud that cost Russian tax payers £230m.
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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November 2009 – After months of interrogation, coercion and deliberately withdrawn medication in prison, Sergei Magnitsky dies.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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Alexander Perepilichnyy: Supergrass who held key to huge Russian fraud is found dead in Surrey
A Russian supergrass who was helping Swiss prosecutors uncover a multi-million pound money laundering scheme used by corrupt Russian officials has died in mysterious circumstances outside his Surrey home, The Independent can reveal.
Alexander Perepilichnyy, a wealthy businessman who sought sanctuary in Britain three years ago after falling out with a powerful crime syndicate, collapsed outside his mansion on a luxury private estate on the outskirts of Weybridge. He was 44-years-old and was in seemingly good health.
The Independent has learned that Mr Perepilichnyy was a key witness against the “Klyuev Group”, an opaque network of corrupt Russian officials and underworld figures implicated in a series of multi-million pound tax frauds and the death in custody of the whistle-blowing Moscow lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. He is the fourth person to be linked to the scandal who has died suddenly.
Surrey Police said that a post mortem examination of Mr Perepilichnyy had proved “inconclusive” and further tests were being carried out to try to establish a cause of death. The force said the sudden death was not being treated as suspicious but left open the possibility that it will have to carry out further investigations.
Officers were called to his home on a cul-de-sac shared with seven multi-million pound properties shortly after 5pm on a Saturday two weeks ago but the Russian was declared dead at the scene 30 minutes later. Surrey Police would not confirm suggestions that the Russian had been out running.
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Police ‘risking lives’ by passing data to Russia
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has been accused of endangering the lives of British residents by passing confidential details to Russian investigators implicated in the death of the whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
British businessman Bill Browder and employees of his hedge fund Hermitage Capital have been pursued by Russian investigators ever since they went public about a £144m tax scam orchestrated by a corrupt network of police, judges and interior ministry officials.
Mr Magnitsky was hired by Hermitage’s Moscow branch to investigate the scam – the largest in Russian history. He named a network of corrupt officials but was promptly arrested by the same men he had accused. He died nine months later in custody having been beaten and denied vital medicine.
The case has become something of a cause célèbre in Russia, illustrating the often murky connections between the country’s powerful security services and organised crime syndicates. The UN, EU and the US government have spoken out against Mr Magnitsky’s death whilst the Kremlin’s human rights council claims he was tortured and probably beaten to death.
Despite grave concerns about the investigation it has emerged that Soca forwarded confidential details, including the home address of London-based Hermitage employee Ivan Cherkasov, to Russian officials implicated in the case.
Letters unearthed by a court in Moscow reveal that Soca handed the data to Russia’s interior ministry following a request made through Interpol. The move came as a surprise to Hermitage, who say they were told by Soca in 2009 that the Russian requests for information might contravene clauses which forbid the Interpol system from being used for political purposes.
Speaking to The Independent yesterday, Mr Browder accused Soca of endangering his employees’ safety. “The Russian interior ministry murdered my lawyer and is now publicly threatening my colleagues in the UK,” he said. “I would have expected the British authorities to do everything possible to protect us. Instead they are passing on crucial information to the Russians to carry out their plans. This is either evil or gross incompetence.”
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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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Government under pressure to publish names of Russians suspected of links to assassinations
The Government is under pressure to publish the names of Russians suspected of being linked to targeted assassinations amid increasing concerns that London is turning into a playground for mobsters and hit squads.
The calls come following the recent attempted murder of a prominent Russian banker who was due to testify in an upcoming murder trial and reports that a hit man sent to assassinate a prominent Chechen dissident leader has successfully fought off a deportation bid.
Former Europe minister Dennis MacShane believes the situation has become so critical that publicly outing the names of known Russians linked to political killings would send a powerful signal that such violence will not be tolerated on British streets.
“It is only by naming publicly the Russian security apparatus officials, in office or retired and working in the para-security services that Britain can send a message ahead of the Olympic Games that our main city is not ‘Londongrad’ and Russian killers should stay away and stop harassing British businesses,” the MP told The Independent. “Every Russian I meet tells me that private protests have no impact on the Kremlin. Britain has to take a lead and go public with naming names as that is one message the Russian security-business state which likes owning property here, likes sending its children to private schools, and needs City of London lawyers to write contracts actually understands.”
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Death in a Russian prison cell: Britain’s shameful silence
One minute Sergei Magnitsky was investigating tax fraud. The next he was dead. A coincidence? No, the businessman campaigning for the truth tells Jerome Taylor
Two years ago today the body of a father of two from Moscow was found face down in a prison isolation cell where he had languished in squalid conditions for more than 11 months. Every year hundreds of people die inside Russian prisons and most go unreported.
But the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer hired by a British firm to investigate a multimillion-dollar tax scam, lit a fire that has rallied those seeking to end the culture of corruption and impunity among Russian government officials and has caused diplomatic rifts that have reverberated around the world.
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