Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Browder: Tymoshenko imprisonment ‘sends the most terrible message’

Kyiv Post

William Browder, the London-based head of Hermitage Capital, remains unrelenting in his quest for justice in the 2009 death of his former lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.

Magnitsky was a 37-year-old lawyer who was tortured, deprived of medical attention and left to die in a Russian prison in 2009, nearly a year after uncovering a $230 million tax fraud allegedly committed by top Russian law enforcement officials. Russian officials say he was not murdered, but died of a heart attack while awaiting tax evasion charges. The people Magnitsky implicated in the fraud arrested him in 2008. A year after his death, several of these officials were promoted.

The traumatic events transformed Browder into an activist. He lobbied successfully for the passage in America last year of the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which denies visas to and freezes the assets of those in the Russian ruling elite implicated in Magnitsky’s murder, corruption and other human rights violations. He now wants to push for a similar law in the European Union, and says such laws may need to be broadened and aimed against leaders in Ukraine, Belarus and other nations where human right violations are severe.

Browder has made himself an enemy of Kremlin leaders, who accuse him of tax fraud. Browder is also a co-defendant in the posthumous tax-fraud trial of Magnitsky set to resume in Russia later this month. He is being tried in absentia, after being barred from entering Russia since 2005.

“This Mr. Magnitsky, as is known, was not some human rights champion; he did not struggle for human rights,” Russian President Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying at a December news conference. “He was the lawyer of Mr. Browder, who is suspected by our law enforcement of committing economic crimes.”