Posts Tagged ‘miriam elder’
Sergei Magnitsky verdict ‘most shameful moment since Stalin’
The courtroom cage in Moscow stood empty on Thursday as a judge found the late whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky and his London-based employer guilty of tax evasion in a move likened to Stalin-era justice.
The case against the two defendants – Magnitsky, allowed to die an excruciating death in prison in 2009, and William Browder, banned from entering Russia since 2005 – has come to symbolise the brutality of Russia’s system and the penalties incurred by those who uncovering official wrongdoing.
Magnitsky, a lawyer hired by Browder’s London-based Hermitage Capital Management fund, uncovered a $230m (£150m) tax fraud scheme run by a host of Russian interior ministry and tax officials using documents stolen in a raid on Hermitage Capital. Magnitsky and Browder were then charged with running the fraud themselves.
Magnitsky was thrown into one of Russia’s harshest pre-trial detention centres, repeatedly denied medical care and allowed to die. A presidential human-rights commission later found evidence that he was tortured.
Many of the officials involved in the alleged fraud the lawyer uncovered received promotions and awards.
Thursday’s verdict was the culmination of a year-long effort to discredit Magnitsky, and Browder, who has waged a global campaign to punish top Kremlin officials for the former’s death.
He successfully lobbied the US government to adopt a “Magnitsky list” that bans officials involved in the fraud from entering the US or keeping bank accounts there. Moscow retaliated by banning Americans from adopting Russian children.
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Edward Snowden: Russia offers to consider asylum request
Vladimir Putin’s spokesman says any appeal for asylum from whistleblower who fled US will be looked at ‘according to facts’.
Russia has offered to consider an asylum request from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, in the Kremlin’s latest move to woo critics of the west.
Snowden fled the United States before leaking the details of a top-secret US surveillance programme to the Guardian this month. He is currently believed to be in Hong Kong, but has reportedly changed hotels to keep his location secret.
Fearing US retaliation, Snowden said at the weekend that “my predisposition is to seek asylum in a country with shared values”, citing Iceland as an example. He defended his decision to flee to Hong Kong by citing its relative freedom compared with mainland China.
Snowden is not known to have made any asylum requests, including to Russia. Yet speaking to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said: “If such an appeal is given, it will be considered. We’ll act according to facts.”
Peskov’s comments were widely carried by the Russian media, which have largely ignored Snowden’s revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) was secretly empowered with wide-reaching authority to collect information from the US mobile provider Verizon and to snoop on emails and internet communications via a data-mining programme called Prism. Russia’s feared security services are widely believed to maintain similar powers.
Peskov’s comments on potential asylum opened the floodgates on support for Snowden. Robert Shlegel, an influential MP with the ruling United Russia party, said: “That would be a good idea.”
Alexey Pushkov, head of the Duma’s international affairs committee and a vocal US critic, said on Twitter: “By promising asylum to Snowden, Moscow has taken upon itself the protection of those persecuted for political reasons. There will be hysterics in the US. They only recognise this right for themselves.”
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Russia delays trial of dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky
Judge postpones hearing in controversial case of lawyer who died in detention while awaiting trial over alleged tax evasion.
A Russian court has postponed the trial of the dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in the latest move to drag out the controversial case.
Magnitsky, the first person to be tried posthumously in Russia, stands accused of tax evasion, alongside his former employer, London-based investor William Browder. Magnitsky died in pre-trial detention in 2009.
Browder has been banned from entering Russia. The head of the investment fund Hermitage Capital was accused of tax evasion after falling foul of the Russian government.
Investigating the charges in 2008, Browder’s auditor and lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered that police and tax officials had colluded to steal Hermitage’s tax payments for their own enrichment. The case has come to exemplify Russia’s corrupt justice system.
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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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Russian court clears doctor over Sergei Magnitsky’s death in custody
A Russian court has cleared the only person charged in the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer whose death in custody three years ago has driven a wedge between Russia and the US.
American outcry over the death in 2009 led to US legislation aimed at punishing those responsible. Russia retaliated with a ban on Americans adopting Russian children, which President Vladimir Putin signed into law on Friday morning.
Dmitry Kratov, a doctor in the prison where Magnitsky was held, was the only person charged over the death. Several other officials accused of involvement have been awarded promotions.
On Friday a judge in Moscow found Kratov not guilty of negligence. Fewer than 1% of Russians on trial each year are acquitted.
Magnitsky, a lawyer for the London-based investor William Browder, was arrested in 2008 while investigating state corruption and died in prison the following year after developing pancreatitis that was left untreated. An investigation by the Kremlin’s human rights council also found that he had been severely beaten.
Pointing to the absence of a full investigation in Russia, Browder helped lobby for a new US law that forbids Russians allegedly involved in the death from travelling to or keeping bank accounts in the US, dubbed the Magnitsky Act.
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Russia accuses US of using ‘cold war tactics’ over Magnitsky Act
Russia has accused the United States of engaging in cold war tactics and threatened tit-for-tat retaliation after the US Senate passed a bill banning Russian officials accused of human rights abuses from travelling to the country.
The US Senate on Thursday passed the Magnitsky Act, named after a Russian lawyer for London-based investor William Browder, who died in prison, as part of a bill that lifts Soviet-era trade restrictions on Russia. The bill, which must be signed by President Barack Obama before coming into force, includes a visa ban and asset freeze on those officials involved in Magnitsky’s death.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said after meeting Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, in Dublin late on Thursday that Russia would retaliate. “We will also close entry to Americans who are guilty of human rights violations,” he said.
Many Russians laughed off the threat, noting that the Russian propensity to keep assets and property in the US is not reciprocated. “And now they’ll shut down entry to Russia for some American officials who are involved, let’s say, in the death of Afghan kids. What are they going to do, cry?” Margarita Simonyan, the Kremlin-friendly head of Russia Today, the state-run international news channel, wrote on Twitter.
The Kremlin marshalled the Young Guard, the youth wing of the ruling United Russia party, to protest. The group held a protest in front of the US embassy in Moscow on Friday with the sign: “The US is a police state.”
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Russia promises ‘harsh’ response over progress of Sergei Magnitsky bill
Miriam Elder in Moscow. Wednesday 27 June 2012
Reprisals threatened over Senate committee’s approval of law designed to close borders to officials linked to death of lawyer
Russia has condemned a US Senate committee’s approval of a bill that would ban officials accused of human rights abuses from entering the United States.
On Tuesday, the Senate’s foreign relations committee unanimously passed a bill named after Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer who died in jail in 2009 after uncovering an alleged corruption scheme involving Russian tax officials and police. His arrest and subsequent death are widely seen as symbolising the absence of rule of law inside Russia.
Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, called the committee’s decision “counterproductive”. Russia’s response would be “harsh” and “not necessarily symmetrical”, he told state television on Wednesday.
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Russia’s treatment of US ambassador a reflection of shaky relations
In the past eight days, the US ambassador to Russia has been harassed by state media, called arrogant by his host country’s foreign minister and had guests accosted outside his home by the Kremlin youth group Nashi.
American officials had been assured that the anti-US rhetoric streaming out of Moscow since the end of last year was part of Vladimir Putin’s campaign to return to the presidency, a populist move to blame Russia’s ills on a tested enemy of yore. But the continued attacks on Michael McFaul, who took up his post as ambassador in January, have raised questions about the fate of US-Russia relations under Putin’s presidency.
The latest incident came on Wednesday, when Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, chided McFaul for reacting “arrogantly” to Russian concerns over US plans to build a missile defence shield in Europe.
“Yesterday our colleague, the US ambassador, arrogantly announced there will be no changes on missile defence, even though it would seem that an ambassador should understand it is necessary to take the interests of the state in question into account,” Lavrov said.
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Sergei Magnitsky’s mother vows to continue fight for justice in Russia
Two years after the Russian whistleblower died in custody, Natalia Magnitskaya says many people were behind his death.
Natalia Magnitskaya speaks in whispers, her tired eyes looking down at fingers that twist and turn from anxiety. She barely slept last night, as with most nights in the two years since her son died within the walls of one of Russia’s most notorious prisons.
Sergei Magnitsky was 37 when he died in November 2009 of multiple ailments he developed after being arrested a year earlier. The charges against him, of fraud and tax evasion, were designed to pressure the young lawyer into backing off on an investigation into an alleged attempt by corrupt state officials to steal $230m (£143m) in fake tax refunds, his supporters say.
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