Posts Tagged ‘karpov’
US risks angering Russia by publishing blacklist
Washington risked reopening a diplomatic rift with Moscow following the publication of a blacklist of Russian officials who are banned from the United States because of their alleged involvement in the death in custody of the whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Earlier in the day Moscow had warned that any decision to go ahead and release the list could damage relations between the two countries. Washington passed legislation banning the officials in December but had so far put off making the list public until now.
According to the list released last night on the Treasury’s website there are 18 officials who have been named. It was compiled in the wake of the arrest and death in custody of Mr Magnitsky, a father of two and Moscow-based lawyer who helped expose a multi-million dollar tax scam that was allegedly carried out by criminal underworld figures allied with Russian officials and police officers.
Among those included on the blacklist is Pavel Karpov, a former interior ministry police officer who is currently suing William Browder in the UK courts for libel. Mr Browder, a millionaire hedge fund manager and staunch critic of official corruption inside Russia, employed Mr Magnitsky to uncover a $230million tax scam against a series of subsidiaries that were once owned by his company Hermitage capital.
After publicly naming a number of officials Mr Magnistky was arrested for tax evasion and died nine months later in prison. His family, rights groups and Russian’s own human rights investigation body say there was evidence he was beaten in custody and denied vital medication.
Mr Browder has named Mr Karpov as one of the officials behind the scam. However the former detective has vehemently denied any involvement and has launched a libel case against him in the High Court.
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Arraigning a corpse
Part 1 “Russian Justice”
A judge at Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court, stopped the trial of Sergei Magnitsky (above) yesterday – but not because the defendant was dead. Magnitsky’s demise was of no concern to the judge. It did not bother him in the slightest. The court merely postponed proceedings until 4 March when the world will see something rarely seen since the Middle Ages: a prosecutor arraigning a corpse.
The Putin regime – that mixture of autocracy and gangsterism – is desperate to discredit the late Mr Magnitsky and his employer, Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital. If you don’t know the story, I’ll explain why.
Browder exposed corruption in Russian companies. The Russian authorities did not approve. Interior Ministry police raided Hermitage’s offices after Browder and most of his employees had fled the country.
Magnitsky stayed and claimed that the Interior Ministry police had stolen the seals to its Russian subsidiaries and passed them to a crime gang. The gang re-registered the companies and claimed to be Hermitage’s rightful owners. They told the Russian authorities they owed Hermitage a tax rebate. Within a day, corrupt officials handed over £143m of public money.
Magnitsky complained to the Russian equivalent of the FBI. Russia being the way it is, the Interior Ministry arrested him for speaking out. The state held him for a year in wretched prisons. In June 2009, Magnitsky developed pancreatitis and cholecystitis. The prison authorities denied him treatment. They probably tortured him, too. When civilian doctors finally came to see him on the day of his death, the guards would not let them into his cell for an hour. The doctors found his body lying in a pool of urine. He died rather than retract his testimony.
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Libel case puts fraud in the public forum
The London court case brought by Pavel Karpov is an interesting development, because if the case comes in front of a judge it would be likely to throw up details that officials fingered for their alleged involvement in the fraud would perhaps prefer to keep quiet.
In Russia, the approach from the authorities over the Magnitsky case has been twofold. Firstly, there has been no real investigation into the claims put forward by Bill Browder and Hermitage Capital about the massive fraud that was perpetrated. The second approach has been to turn the tables and suggest that Mr Magnitksy and Mr Browder are the real criminals.
Just this week Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking in Davos, said that Hermitage’s claims were the “politicised fiction of certain people”. Mr Magnitsky, he said, was “not a truth seeker” but “a corporate lawyer or an accountant who defended the interests of the people who hired him.”
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Exclusive: Briton who took on Sergei Magnitsky network faces libel case in UK
A former Moscow police officer is suing a British businessman who exposed how a network of corrupt officials and shadowy criminal underworld figures were behind the largest tax fraud in Russian history.
Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Karpov has launched libel and defamation proceedings in the High Court against William Browder, a millionaire hedge-fund magnate who has campaigned against corruption within the Russian government after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was tortured and died in police custody.
The 35-year-old officer, who was until recently a Moscow and Interior Ministry investigator, is one of more than 60 Russian officials who Mr Browder has publicly accused of being behind a scam that led to the theft of $230million from the Russian tax payer. Mr Browder has also accused him of being among a group of police officers who arranged for the arrest and torture of Mr Magnitsky when he uncovered the scam and went public with his allegations.
If the case ends up in the High Court, it will shed a spotlight on a scandal that has become a source of major international embarrassment to the Kremlin because of the mounting evidence that prominent officials within the Interior Ministry, tax offices and the judiciary aided the scam.
Mr Karpov insists he had nothing to do with the fraud or the subsequent cover up – or the arrest, torture and death of Mr M. In court documents obtained by The Independent Lawyers from Olswang, the major London law-firm which represents the former detective, say the allegations made by Mr Browder have caused “serious hurt, embarrassment and distress.”
They insist that while Mr Browder’s quest to pursue those who killed Mr Magnitsky might be legitimate, his campaign has wrongfully made false and highly defamatory claims against their client including that he is complicit in fraud, torture, kidnapping and murder.
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Are our lawyers being used by the Kremlin kleptocracy?
Bill Browder’s successful campaign against the Russian authorities who stole his company and contributed to his lawyer’s death has landed him in an English libel court.
One of the main aims of Russian foreign policy is to stop Bill Browder. The pugnacious financier has developed a devastating way of parting Putin’s gangsters from their money. I cannot tell you how much they hate him for it.
At the instigation of Browder’s researchers in London, parliaments are passing “Magnitsky laws”, named after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after revealing how criminals had taken $230m (£143m) from the Russian taxpayer. The US, Britain and other EU countries are considering or have already implemented a ban on entry to, and the freezing of the assets of those responsible for his detention and death, those who benefited from the conspiracy Magnitsky uncovered.
The Kremlin crime gang fears revolution. Maybe there will be a democratic uprising. Maybe a new bunch of thieves will replace the old bunch of thieves. In either event, they would want to flee abroad and enjoy their loot. Now, thanks to a novel human rights campaign, they may not be able to enjoy uncontested possession of stolen goods.
What would you do in their position? Ideally, you would want outwardly respectable people and institutions to discredit the campaign against you; to make it seem as if you were the victim of unwarranted smears. The willingness of the English law to help on these occasions has led to organisations as varied as the United Nations and the Obama White House to treat England as a global threat to freedom of speech.
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‘Magnitsky law’ makes progress in Senate
By Catherine Belton in Moscow and Geoff Dyer in Washington
A US Senate committee has approved a bill named after Russian anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky that would impose sanctions on human rights abusers as new evidence emerged concerning the events leading up to Mr Magnitsky’s death.
On Tuesday the Senate foreign relations committee approved the “Magnitsky Law”, which has also passed a committee in the House of Representatives and which imposes restrictions on the financial activities and travel of Russian officials allegedly involved in the case.
The vote was held as friends and former colleagues of Mr Magnitsky released evidence that showed those accused by the lawyer of taking part in a lucrative tax rebate fraud had flown on numerous trips abroad with the owner of the bank that received the funds.
Mr Magnitsky died in a pre-trial detention centre in November 2009, more than a year after he alleged that a circle of interior and tax ministry officials had conspired to defraud the Russian budget through a $230m tax fraud scam.
The federal prison service has assumed partial responsibility for his death, accepting he was denied medical attention, while a government human rights council concluded that he was probably beaten to death while in custody on separate tax fraud charges.
His case has become a big irritant for the Obama administration’s efforts to “reset” relations with Russia and Moscow has threatened retaliation if the Magnitsky bill becomes law.
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Russia’s posthumous trial of lawyer shows corruption is still rife
This week it was announced that the Russian authorities are planning to resubmit a tax evasion case for trial. Nothing out of the ordinary, you might think, except for the fact that the defendant is deceased.
The accused in question is Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow prison cell in November 2009. Magnitsky was initially detained in November 2008 on suspicion of assisting one of his clients – UK-based investment fund Hermitage Capital – evade about $17.4m in taxes. Although the original allegations were lodged against Hermitage, during the investigation Magnitsky discovered what he believed to be a cover-up for Russian state officials to embezzle an estimated $230m from the Russian treasury.
Subsequently, Magnitsky testified against two senior officials in the interior ministry, Lt Col Artyom Kuznetsov and Major Pavel Karpov, and accused them of tax fraud. Shortly after, Magnitsky himself was arrested and detained in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion. It is thought that the charges placed against him were designed to make him back down and sweep the whole embezzlement scandal under the carpet. However, Magnitsky never made it to trial. After a year of being detained, he died in a prison cell aged 37 and the exact causes and circumstances surrounding his death remain a mystery.
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Alexei Navalny vs. Vladlen Stepanov
Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny has lost a defamation lawsuit filed by Vladlen Stepanov, whom Navalny had implicated in the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. This is very good news — not that Navalny lost, of course, but that the lawsuit publicized some very important information. But let’s first look at what we knew before the lawsuit.
We knew that there was a greenmailer, Hermitage Capital founder William Browder, who had a falling out with the Russian authorities. We know that in June 2007 Interior Ministry officer Artyom Kuznetsov entered Browder’s offices and seized documents and stamps of three of his “shell” firms — Hermitage Capital subsidiaries Makhaon, Parfenion and Riland.
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Russia charges doctors over jail death
Russia has charged two doctors at a Moscow prison with causing the 2009 death in pre-trial detention of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a tragedy that ignited global outrage, investigators say.
The Investigative Committee said on Friday it had “established a direct link between Magnitsky’s death and actions of the doctors in the prison” and had charged prison doctors Larisa Litvinova and Dmitry Kratov.
Litvinova is charged with causing death by negligence and if convicted could face up to three years in prison.
Kratov, who holds the senior post of deputy prison director, is charged with carelessness and faces up to five years in jail.
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