Posts Tagged ‘moscow news’
Visa ban?
Russian human rights activists and political opposition members have sent a new version of the controversial “Magnitsky list” to the U.S. Senate, proposing to include the names of 305 Russian officials connected to the Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos case – but whether or not anything will come of this proposal remains to be seen.
According to Gazeta, ru, Russia’s Prosecutor General, Yury Chaika, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, and Moscow city court chairman Olga Yegorova are on the list together with prosecutors and judges. The original “Magnitsky list” included names of 60 Russian officials who, along with their families, would be denied American visas for their alleged involvement in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Proposed by senator Ben Cardin, the visa restrictions went into effect in July.
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Do Snowden and Browder matter?
The United States wants Snowden back, but Ambassador McFaul insists it’s not extradition, just “returning” him. I’m still not clear on the distinction between forcibly “returning” someone they don’t want to go and extraditing them, or maybe we’re in hoods-and-shackled rendition territory. In any case, even if with no great eagerness, the Russian government instead looks likely to grant his asylum request.
Meanwhile, Moscow petitioned Interpol to put out a “Red Notice” – an international arrest warrant – on financier Bill Browder, the man who seems to have replaced not-so-dearly departed Boris Berezovsky as the Kremlin’s bête noire. The body that reviews such requests, the snappily-named Independent Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files, decided that this was essentially a political rather than criminal case and declined the request. They had already rejected a “Blue Notice” that would have required member states to gather information on Browder and send it to the Russians.
And, of course, Moscow still regards arms dealer, convicted terrorist supplier and reputed Russian spy Viktor Bout, currently serving 25 years in a U.S. federal penitentiary, as a political prisoner and wants him back.
All of this obviously matters to the principals in question and also to diplomats, for whom this kind of dispute is meat and drink. But does it really matter in the big picture?
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Magnitsky found guilty of tax evasion
Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court has found Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor for Hermitage Capital who died in a Russian prison in 2009, guilty of tax evasion, RAPSI reported from the courtroom.
This is the first time that a Russian court has tried a dead person.
The ruling came Thursday afternoon and also found Hermitage Capital head William Browder, a portfolio investor who came to Russia in the late 1990s, guilty of tax evasion in absentia.
Browder, who lives in London, was sentenced in absentia to nine years in a penal colony after being convicted of tax evasion. The court has also closed the case against Magnitsky in connection to his death.
Browder called the verdict “shameful” and vowed “to fight for justice for Sergei Magnitsky and his family until the job is done,” according to an emailed note.
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Hermitage Capital chief Browder placed on international wanted list
Investigators have asked the court to issue an arrest order in absentia for Hermitage Capital Management CEO William Browder.
A court in Moscow said that Browder has also been placed on an international wanted list, RAPSI reported. According to Russian law, once a court has sanctioned an arrest, his case is sent to the Russian Interpol division.
Browder has ignored several summonses from Russian authorities.
He has been accused of illegally buying Gazprom stock when foreign ownership of the world’s largest natural gas producer was restricted.
The Interior Ministry’s Investigation Department opened a case against Browder on March 5. The British Embassy in Moscow has been duly notified.
Hermitage Capital dismissed the charges as “absurd” and “hysterical.”
Browder is also on trial in absentia alongside lawyer Sergei Magnitsky on embezzlement charges. Investigators claim that they embezzled hundreds of millions of rubles from the budget by manipulating tax returns between September and October 2007.
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‘Cloud Atlas,’ Russian style
A story needs a beginning and end, but what has become the main narrative of Russia’s current political era doesn’t seem to have either. And the weak are meat the strong do eat, as David Mitchell coined in his novel “Cloud Atlas.”
Sometime in 2005-2006, William Browder, an American investment fund manager, ran afoul of someone close to the Kremlin. He had thought that his friends in high places would support him as he greenmailed their enemies, but as an outsider he overestimated his standing, and Russian authorities revoked his visa. When he went to the top for help, help was refused, and his capital fund suddenly became fair game in a tax-fraud racket run by a group of tax officials.
When a lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, blew the whistle on the racket, he was himself accused of tax fraud, jailed, and, in a maliciously lazy form of torture, denied medical treatment until he died.
Still barred from Russia, Browder (“I’ve spent every day thinking what I could have done that could have saved [Magnitsky’s] life,” he told me in November 2011) started lobbying hard in Washington to avenge Magnitsky’s death. American lawmakers, many of them desperate to appear hawkish during a presidential campaign, linked the bid to blacklist 60 Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death to the longawaited repeal of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a 1974 trade restriction with the Soviet Union.
In December 2012, the Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 were passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law. President Vladimir Putin, who had pushed for the Jackson-Vanik Repeal for years, was furious over the blacklist, as intended. Within days, Russian lawmakers came up with a tit-for-tat blacklist, adding a clause that banned the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans.
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Attorneys assigned for Magnitsky’s tax evasion case
Moscow’s Tverskoy District Court on Monday ruled to appoint an attorney for the tax evasion case against deceased Hermitage Capital auditor Sergei Magnitsky, who died while in a pretrial detention facility in 2009.
Under Russian criminal law, a dead person can be prosecuted. According to Article 24 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure, proceedings can be closed against a deceased person who stood accused of some crime pending the consent of his relatives. The case would then be closed on so-called non-rehabilitative grounds meaning that relatives of the person do not demand the deceased person to be recognized as innocent.
Preliminary hearings in the case had previously been postponed because the attorneys defending Magnitsky and Hermitage Capital Management Bill Browder, who has also been accused of tax evasion, did not appear in court.
Thus the court has appointed attorneys for both Magnitsky and Browder.
“The preliminary hearing which was to be held today has been postponed until 11:00 a.m. on February 18 because Magnitsky and Browder’s attorneys have not appeared in court. The court has decided to appoint attorneys for them. The next court session will also be preliminary and will be held behind closed doors,” the court’s press secretary, Alexandra Berezina, told journalists.
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Magnitsky’s mother asks lawyers to stay away from son’s trial
Sergei Magnitsky’s mother asked Moscow lawyers not to participate in the posthumous trial of her son, which she thinks is illegal.
Natalya Magnitskaya, the mother of murdered Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, wrote a letter to President of Moscow’s Chamber of Lawyers Genry Reznik, and asked all Moscow lawyers not to participate in the trial over her son, who died in a pre-trial detention center in 2009, RBC Daily reported.
Preliminary hearings have been set for January 28. On December 26, Sergei Magnitsky’s family lawyers and William Browder’s Hermitage Capital managers quit the process calling it a “political punishment by Russian authorities.”
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APEC and Pussy Riot
At first sight, there should be no reason to mention the APEC summit in Vladivostok and the Pussy Riot trial in the same sentence, let alone suggest that one could affect the other.
Yet, bizarrely, that is exactly what is happening.
While there is acknowledgement by Russia’s international partners that the workings of the country’s judicial system are a sovereign matter, in today’s highly globalized economy, no country is ever completely an island when it comes to applying the rule of law.
Whatever one thinks of the rights and wrongs of the Pussy Riot protest, the case has troubled leading domestic and international business figures alike – precisely because it has presented Russian courts as subject to pressure from the authorities.
While staging a punk protest in a place of worship would likely lead to prosecution and minor charges in many countries, the severity of the punishment meted out to these three young women is clearly due to the political overtones of the case – no matter what the prosecutors may say about its strictly “anti-religious” nature.
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New bill labels NGOs as ‘foreign agents’
A new bill soon to be introduced to the State Duma will label all NGOs with foreign finances that work in politics as “foreign agents,” United Russia’s press-service announced on Friday.
“One of the authors of the bill, deputy Alexander Sidyakin, stresses that the proposed changes to the law on NGOs do not ban them in any way and do not limit their rights, but are aimed at providing public scrutiny for their functions as a foreign agent and to make this data open knowledge for Russian citizens,” Interfax quoted United Russia’s press-release as saying.
United Russia member Sidyakin was also one of the authors of the new rally fines bill.
Foreign agents with a political agenda
Russian NGOs that receive funding and property from foreign states, international and foreign organizations, foreign nationals will be recognized as “foreign agents” in the new bill. NGOs that “take part in political activity in Russia in the interests of foreign sources” will be also be considered agents.
United Russia explained that NGOs that take part in Russia’s political life are the ones that “regardless of declared aims and tasks, finance and hold political campaigns in order to influence the decision-making by the state organs, aimed at changing state policies,” as well as participating in forming public opinion with said aims.
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