Posts Tagged ‘mail on sunday’
Putin’s torturers: Blowing the whistle on government cronies who stole Russia’s riches
The riches of the former Soviet Union seemed an incredible opportunity for financiers such as Bill Browder, and so it proved when he moved to the ‘Wild East’ and found he needed bodyguards and armoured cars.
But it was when he crossed the henchmen of Russian president Vladimir Putin that the trouble really started, and Browder was thrown into a terrifying world of state-sanctioned criminality. He survived, but his loyal colleague, Sergei Magnitsky, was to suffer an horrific fate at the hands of the Kremlin’s goons, as Browder recalls in this gripping first extract of his extraordinary new book…
The terrifying message arrived on my voicemail shortly after midnight on November 14, 2009. It had been a trying day. My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was being held in a hellish Russian prison on trumped-up tax-evasion charges, and he had endured another tortuous day in court.
Sergei was seriously ill with pancreatitis and gallstones, but the police were unsympathetic and had chained him to a radiator in a corridor at the court building. When he finally entered the courtroom itself, the judge treated him with equal contempt, dismissing every one of his complaints about the mistreatment he’d endured for months.
I was a world away in London, but I was desperately worried. Another Russian lawyer of mine, who was safe with me in the UK, had recently received a series of menacing texts. ‘What’s worse, prison or death?’ one said. Another was a quote from The Godfather: ‘History has taught us that you can kill anyone.’
I’d shared these with officers from Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism unit, who traced the texts to an unregistered number in Russia. This was very disturbing. The only people with access to unregistered Russian numbers were the secret police, the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation), who’d been after me for years. The FSB doesn’t just issue arrest warrants and extradition requests – it dispatches assassins.
But the message I received late that November night was worse than any that had come before. When I listened to that voicemail, I heard a man in the midst of a savage beating. He was screaming and pleading. The recording lasted two minutes and cut off mid-wail. I called everyone I knew. They were all OK. The only person I couldn’t call was Sergei…
Before all these problems in Russia, I was the founder and chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, the largest investment advisory firm in the Russian stock market. I had left a safe job in the City of London and relocated to Moscow in 1996, when Russia was nicknamed the Wild East.
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How London turned into Richistan
The city with more super-rich than anywhere else proves Putin had a point when he taunted PM about losing his capital to oligarchs.
It is 3am on a warm Tuesday in Cadogan Square, Belgravia, and a £200,000 orange Maserati screeches to a halt.
The driver revs the engine for several minutes, and the car – with Arab script on its registration plate – roars off into the night. By the time the sleepless residents reach their windows to peer out, the car has long gone.
For the next month the streets of the capital will be dominated by Ferraris and Maybachs in often garish colours, driven by the over-indulged sons of the Emirates aristocracy.
Sometimes the cars come straight from the Park Lane showroom. Sometimes the playboy owners fly their favourite vehicles – heavily customised, from gold-plated interiors to velvet-covered bodywork – more than 3,000 miles for a few weeks of fun in the London traffic.
It is an annual sojourn, delayed this year by Ramadan. With temperatures reaching 110F in Kuwait, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, the ruling families have flocked to the temperate if polluted air of Knightsbridge for shopping and leisure.
And for the younger men – nights of boozing and ostentatiously bad behaviour impossible back home.
Welcome to super-rich London, the city with the highest number of multi-millionaires in the world, according to the respected Wealth Insight analysis – more than 4,000 individuals with more than £20 million per head, placing London ahead of Tokyo, Singapore and New York.
Last week, speaking at the G20 Summit, Vladimir Putin described Britain as ‘a small island’. Nobody, said his spokesman, pays attention to it – except of course the Russian ‘oligarchs who have bought Chelsea’.
To that list he might have added the Khazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Malaysians, Chinese, Indians and even Greeks and Italians who are all scrambling to buy up London in ever greater numbers.
The tide of foreign wealth seems unstoppable. ‘Super-prime’ homes, usually defined as the top 5 per cent of the most valuable properties, are being sold to international buyers at a rate of almost 85 per cent, while 60 per cent of newly built property in London is bought by overseas investors, mainly from the Far East.
Greek and Italian investors are said to be buying £500 million of British property a year.
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The Russians murdered my husband – and I could be next: Widow of Kremlin whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky reveals she fled to London in fear of her life
The contents of the food parcel Natasha Magnitsky packed for husband Sergei were achingly spare: tea, sugar, biscuits and bread, a few carrots and turnips to bolster his prison diet, and some caramel as a treat. But when she attempted to hand them in at the little hatch in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison, a female official snapped: ‘No, he’s gone.’
Terrified that Butyrka’s squalid conditions – raw sewage running through the cells, a shift system for beds – had made him sick, Sergei’s mother Nataliya dashed to Matrosskaya Tishina, a prison in northern Moscow where there was a medical unit, while Natasha went to work.
At the prison, the official at the parcel desk was rather more specific: Sergei, an accountant who’d blown the whistle on a £150 million corruption scandal that stopped at the door of the Kremlin, was dead.
‘We had been a fortress, we two,’ says Natasha, who has since fled to London with the couple’s 12-year-old son. ‘Our marriage, our family was our life. In that moment my world and my belief system disintegrated around me. The fortress crumbled.
‘The last thing he said to me the night he was arrested was, “Don’t worry, I’ll be home tomorrow.” Right to the end he believed innocence could always be proved, but now I understand that nobody is safe. The unimaginable happened to my husband – why couldn’t it also happen to me?’
Traditionally, people are sent to prison because they’ve committed a crime. Sergei, 37, found himself locked away because he uncovered one. He was the auditor who followed an extraordinary paper trail that led from an illegal Interior Ministry raid on the Moscow offices of a London investment company to law enforcers, judiciary, bankers and mobsters.
He was incarcerated for a year without trial and investigated by those with a vested interest in closing down his inquiries. A week before his family were expecting his release he died, officially of heart failure and toxic shock from untreated pancreatitis, but also from brutal beatings. America led world condemnation of the best-documented abuse of human rights to emerge from Russia in the past 25 years. It led to the Magnitsky Act, allowing the US to withhold visas and freeze the financial assets of the Russian officials involved.
Russia retaliated by posthumously prosecuting Sergei for complicity in the tax fraud he revealed. His corpse was found guilty last month and his name has now joined the growing list of other brave citizens, from the late dissident Alexander Litvinenko to the young mothers of the anti-establishment pop group Pussy Riot, who are Russia’s very modern martyrs.
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Magnitsky’s martyrdom makes Russia ask: What is to be done?
In the darkest pages of Russia’s historical catalogue of state murder – the period of the Stalin show trials – there is a recurring moment of intense poignancy.
Typically, some comrade with years of loyal service to the Bolshevik cause, suddenly finding himself under arrest and charged ludicrously with working to sabotage the USSR, would beg his accusers to make one quick phone call to Stalin; that’s all it would take, he thought, for the hideous misunderstanding to be cleared up. Little did he know.
I thought of this when Bill Browder told me his story of the events that ultimately led to the cruel death of Sergei Magnitsky.
The criminal acts that Magnitsky had been investigating as Browder’s lawyer were so brazen that, as Browder put it to me: ‘I thought there was no way Putin would let such things happen if he got to know about them.’ Little did Bill Browder know, but he knows now.
What is to be done? In retrospect, Lenin’s question seems to have been hanging over that great intractable country for two centuries, since the ‘officers’ revolt’ against Tsarist absolutism in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.
It hung over the generations of radicalised intelligentsia who came after, and, during the short 20th Century of Soviet communism; the same question, with a reverse twist, was being asked by the victimised children of the Russian Revolution, the generation of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. In the end, it seemed that the question would be answered by the movement of history.
For a short, heady, chaotic time after 1989, it looked possible that something like a just society could put down roots in Russia for the first time. The Magnitsky case is one of many that tell a different story.
It is fitting enough that the story of this brave and honest man is being brought again to public attention by a writer and playwright.
There is no country where literary culture is more saturated by political nightmares and dreams of a just society. The abuses of power have done that for Russia. What Is To Be Done? was the title of a novel by a revolutionary in the 1860s. Lenin picked up on it.
A century after Lenin, alas, the question is still there, hanging over the martyrdom (there is no other word) of Sergei Magnitsky. онлайн займы срочный займ www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php онлайн займ
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