Posts Tagged ‘kratov’
Moscow court rules prison official not guilty in Magnitsky’s death
Moscow City Court has upheld the acquittal of former deputy head of the Butyrka detention center Dmitry Kratov, who had been accused of negligence that led to the death of Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital.
The court has rejected an appeal filed by Magnitsky’s relatives, contesting Kratov’s acquittal, instead seconding the original verdict.
In late December, Moscow’s Tverskoy Court ruled that there was not enough evidence that Kratov was guilty of negligence. The ex-deputy head of the prison where Magnitsky died was the only official facing a trial in connection with the tragedy.
Kratov says he has not decided yet whether he will demand compensation for the criminal proceedings lodged against him, now deemed false. But Interfax reports it’s unlikely he will take it any further.
The lawyer representing Magnitsky’s family, Nikolay Gorokhov, said he will study the motivation behind the court’s ruling before making any decisions to appeal it.
Financial lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, 37, died in pre-trial detention in Moscow in November 2009.
He was working for the British investment fund Hermitage Capital, which became embroiled in a series of scandals between 2007-2009. Magnitsky accused a group of Russian officials of embezzlement. Soon afterwards he was arrested on charges of assisting Hermitage Capital to evade tax and was awaiting trial in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. He died in jail in 2009, about a year after his detention, of what doctors said was a heart attack. Magnitsky’s family demanded an investigation into his death.
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Sergei Magnitsky’s posthumous trial gets under way in Russia
Family of lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after being accused of tax fraud say macabre proceedings are a mockery of justice.
The posthumous trial of lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky got under way in Moscow on Friday after repeated delays. Against the backdrop of an empty defendant’s cage, judge Igor Alisov brushed aside objections from defence lawyers, who argued that the macabre proceedings were a violation of the Russian constitution.
Magnitsky is accused of co-operating with his employer and co-defendant, London-based investor William Browder, to defraud the Russian state of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes – charges which friends and family say are fabricated.
Russia’s supreme court approved posthumous trials in 2011 as a way of allowing relatives to clear the name of deceased family members. Magnitsky’s family refuses to participate in the current trial, criticising it as a mockery of justice.
Magnitsky’s lawyer, Nikolai Gerasimov, said: “There have been statements by Magnitsky’s relatives that he was not guilty, but they have not expressed a wish to defend his innocence in the courts of the Russian Federation.
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Russia drops Magnitsky prison death probe
Russian detectives are dropping their investigation into the death in prison of the lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.
The Investigative Committee said no crime was committed against him. He was detained in 2008 after revealing alleged an embezzlement scam by interior ministry officials.
His family and the Presidential Human Rights Council say he was badly beaten and denied medical treatment.
Despite his death, he is himself being put on trial for fraud.
The Investigative Committee, the Russian equivalent of the FBI in the US, said Magnitsky had been legally arrested and legally detained and that he had not been tortured.
“Based on the preliminary investigation’s results, a decision was taken to end the criminal case due to a lack of evidence of a crime,” the Committee said.
Magnitsky, who died at the age of 37 in pre-trial detention after developing pancreatitis, was arrested after testifying that interior ministry officials, with organised criminals, had used the UK-based investment fund Hermitage Capital to embezzle $230m (£150m) by filing false corporate tax returns.
In December, a Moscow court acquitted a prison doctor accused of negligence over the lawyer’s death. Dmitry Kratov had argued that he was unable to ensure medical care because of a shortage of staff.
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Russia puts Sergei Magnitsky on trial – three years after he died in custody
On Monday, for the first time, Russia will put a dead man on trial.
Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer, will face charges of tax fraud that his friends and family say are fabricated. He will not actually face them at all, though: Magnitsky has been dead since 2009.
He was arrested the year before after concluding a multimillion-dollar corruption investigation that pointed the finger at a host of low-level Russian officials. Like thousands of other Russians each year, he never came out.
Unknown to the public when he was alive, Magnitsky’s name has come to symbolise the deep ills that haunt Russia since his death – its Kafkaesque justice system, its torturous prisons and even its vengeful foreign policy.
When the United States passed a bill banning those involved in Magnitsky’s death from entering or even keeping bank accounts in the US, Moscow responded by banning Russian orphans from being adopted by Americans.
Kremlin anger at the Magnitsky bill, now being considered in countries across Europe, has dominated domestic politics since the turn of the year.
“We found their achilles heel,” said William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management and Magnitsky’s former employer, who has launched a global campaign to avenge his death. “Following the money and freezing the money is by far the most effective tool there is when dealing with a kleptocracy.”
Browder, who is based in London, was once Vladimir Putin’s biggest fan, becoming the largest portfolio investor in Russia by the end of Putin’s first term in 2004.
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Preliminary hearings of Browder and Magnitsky tax case due at Tverskoy court
Moscow’s Tverskoy district court on Monday will have preliminary hearings of the tax-evasion case of the head of Hermitage Capital investment fund William Browder and the late lawyer of the fund Sergei Magnitsky.
The sides will file their motions after which the date of hearing of the merits of the case will be set. The interests of the sides will be represented by appointed attorneys Nikolai Gerasimov and Kirill Goncharov. They were given time until March 4 to examine the findings of the case.
The lawyer of Magnitsky mother, Natalia Magnitskaya, before the beginning of the Feb. 18 session read out for the press her message to the judge of Tverskoy court saying that she finds the trial illegal and the relaunching of criminal persecution after her son’s death without a corresponding application from the family cynical.
“I am not authorizing anyone to represent the interests of my son in Tverskoy court. The person who assumed this duty will be acting contrary to his interests,х” the statement says.
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Sergei Magnitsky: How a dead man was put on trial
THE court calls Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. He’s a bit slow to take the stand. He’s a bit quiet. This is because Sergei Magnitsky is dead. He died in a Russian prison from pancreatitis. He’s buried at Moscow’s Preobrazhensky cemetery.
Mr Magnitsky was first arrested in 2008. The lawyer with US firm Firestone Duncan had been working for London-based Hermitage Capital Management. He claimed to have uncovered a massive fraud worth £125m. He told all to officials. He was then arrested for alleged tax evasion and sent to prison, where he was beaten and denied medical help. He was had been held for a year without charge. Well, just under a year. In Russia, you can be held for anything up a year without charge. That time would have lapsed on November 24. He died on Monday, November 16. Such was his misfortune.
He was kept in squalor. In his affidavit, Magnitsky noted:
“…sewage started to rise from the drain under the sink [the] floor was covered with sewage several centimetres thick … for the 10 months I have been under arrest, the investigator has not let me meet with my wife, mother or any other relative”. “Isolation from the outside world exceeds all reasonable limits …
In July 2009, Magnitsky was diagnosed with “gall bladder stones, pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis“. He blamed that on his confinement:
“Prior to confinement, I didn’t have these illnesses or at least there were no symptoms.”
Irina Dudukina, spokesman for the prosecutors’ investigative committee, said in November 2009:
“He was a key witness and his evidence was very important. The tragic news about his death came as a complete surprise. He had complained about the conditions of his detention but never his health.”
Spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee Irina Dudukina speaks at a news conference on the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in Moscow, Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009.
Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital said Sergei Magnitsky, had in effect been “held hostage and they killed their hostage”. He had hired Magnitsky to search for fraud against his company. The Russian elite were not willing to play fair:
In 2005, Mr Browder was banned from Russia as a threat to national security after allegations that his firms had evaded tax, but Mr Browder says his company was targeted by criminals trying to seize millions of pounds worth of his assets. Mr Browder says he was punished for being a threat to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. Since then, a number of Mr Browder’s associates in Russia – as well as lawyers acting for his company – have been detained, beaten or robbed.
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Russia faces questions over acquittal at troubling trial; Charges quashed after Putin denied torture of whistleblower
Russia entered the New Year with new questions hanging over its human rights record, as a judge acquitted the only person charged in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing Moscow tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
It followed months of worsening relations with Washington, which has slapped sanctions against 60 people said to have played roles in Magnitsky’s death. The Russian parliament hit back with a bill forbidding Americans to adopt Russian orphans.
Last week negligence charges were quashed against Dmitry Kratov, who was responsible for medical care in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, at the time the severely ailing Magnitsky, 37, died on the floor of a jail cell with marks of a savage beating.
Magnitsky had been detained and allegedly tortured after uncovering evidence that pointed to senior officials he believed were implicated in the biggest tax fraud scheme in Russian history.
But turning the tables, Russian prosecutors now plan to try Magnitsky posthumously on charges of criminal fraud, along with his former boss, William Browder, who heads the London-based firm Hermitage Capital Management. They allege that the pair conspired in the tax-theft scheme.
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EU: Magnitsky acquittal will harm Russia’s reputation
Russia’s acquittal of the only man charged over the death of Sergei Magnitsky will harm its international reputation, the EU has said.
Magnitsky, an accountant who in 2007 exposed the fact that Russian officials and the mafia were stealing hundreds of millions of euros of tax money, later died in jail after being refused medical treatment for pancreatitis and after being beaten by his guards.
His case became a cause celebre when the US last year passed a law in his name that will see up to 60 Russian officials banned from getting US visas.
But in what amounts to an extraordinary u-turn for the Russian legal system, a Moscow judge on 28 December said there is no evidence that Dmitry Kratov – the former medical chief at the Butyrka jail, where Magnitsky died – helped caused his death by negligence.
A few days earlier the prosecutor himself called for the acquittal despite previously building a case against Kratov.
The sudden change came after Russian leader Vladimir Putin claimed on TV that Magnitsky died of natural causes.
For Magnitsky’s former employer, the UK-based investment fund, Hermitage Capital, the developments show that his killers enjoy protection at the highest level of the Russian state.
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Is Russia trying a dead whistle-blower because of a US law?
The US recently enacted legislation targeting those Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, spurring an angry reaction from the Kremlin.
At the center of the stormiest US-Russia diplomatic crisis since the cold war stands the enigmatic figure of Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the US Senate has named a punitive new law that imposes harsh visa and economic sanctions against scores of Russian officials who are deemed to have committed serious human rights violations.
The tale of Mr. Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer who blew the whistle on a vast corruption scheme, was arrested by the same officials he had implicated, and was allegedly beaten to death in prison over three years ago, appears to validate all the worst suspicions held in the West about the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last month, is a controversial new breed of legislation that aims to compensate for the perceived failures of Russia’s justice system by meting out punishment to about 60 Russian officials deemed to have been involved in the wrongful prosecution and alleged murder of Magnitsky.
The Kremlin’s incandescent response makes it likely that the mutual acrimony will expand in weeks to come. Mr. Putin called the Magnitsky Act a “purely political, unfriendly act” that demanded a stern riposte. Last week he signed the retaliatory Dima Yakovlev Act, whose key provision is a ban on all adoptions of Russian children by US citizens.
But in an apparent effort to overturn the widely-held Western narrative, which sees Magnitsky as the victim of corrupt officials and a lawless state, Russian prosecutors have announced they will put the deceased Magnitsky on trial later this month, seeking to prove that he and his former boss, Bill Browder, head of the London-based Hermitage Capital, were the real criminals.
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