Posts Tagged ‘moscow times’
I’m Sick and Tired of the Kremlin’s Blatant Lies
Last week, anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in jail for protesting election fraud.
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Fighting the ‘Mafia State’
Russian businessman Alexei Kozlov was arrested and sentenced to eight years after falling out with his business partner, former Federation Council Senator Vladimir Slutsker. The villains in this case, alleges Kozlov’s wife, Olga Romanova, were prosecutors who were paid to trump up charges.
Romanova, an energetic and resourceful television reporter, was able to get her husband’s conviction overturned. In the process, she formed a human rights organization, Russia Behind Bars (rus-sidyashaya.org), to defend others railroaded by crooked law enforcement officials and combat abuses in the penal system. Russia Behind Bars has also become a resource to publicize miscarriages of justice and for mothers, wives and children of convicts simply to state their case, often for the first time.
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Barred Reporter Says RusAl Behind Visa Loss
An Australian-American journalist and self-declared doyen of the country’s foreign press corps has been barred entry into Russia in what he says is revenge from Oleg Deripaska’s RusAl for his “aggressive reporting” on the aluminum giant.
John Helmer, who had lived in Moscow since 1989 and briefly worked as a Moscow Times reporter in the early 1990s, said RusAl has hounded him for two years because he rejected an offer for cash payments in exchange for favorable articles.
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Report: Lawyer Beaten to Death
New evidence released Monday added weight to suspicions that Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death by prison guards in 2009 and did not die from health problems as previously claimed by the authorities.
A report by Hermitage Capital, once Russia’s largest foreign investment fund, found that the 37-year-old lawyer was left to die on a cell floor after suffering a brain trauma in the beating apparently ordered by prison officials.
The report, which runs at 75 pages in English and 100 pages in Russian, offers gruesome photos from the morgue that depict bad bruises on what it says are Magnitsky’s wrists and legs.
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France Enters Magnitsky Fray
France has become the latest Western country to publicly criticize Russia’s investigation into the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in pretrial detention in 2009.
“The circumstances of the death of Mr. Magnitsky, who led a courageous fight against corruption and arbitrariness, are a matter of great concern for us,” Foreign Minister Alain Juppe wrote in a letter to French National Assembly Deputy Jack Lang.
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A Quick Way to Become a Superpower
In a meeting with Volga Federal District media professionals on Saturday, President Dmitry Medvedev essentially buried his earlier proposal for government officials to declare their large expenditures.
Russia, along with 139 other countries, is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. The only problem is that when the State Duma ratified this convention, it insisted on excluding one of its most important articles: Article 20, which states that illicit enrichment — a significant increase in the assets of public officials that they cannot justify in relation to their declared income — is a criminal offense.
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U.S. Prods Russia Over Magnitsky’s Death
The U.S. government marked the second anniversary of the prison death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky on Wednesday by urging the Russian government to hold accountable those officials involved in his death.
“Despite widely publicized credible evidence of criminal conduct in Magnitsky’s case, Russian authorities have failed to bring to justice those responsible,” U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said in an e-mailed statement.
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Russia Ignores Magnitsky Anniversary
Supporters of the late lawyer Sergei Magnitsky are marking the two-year anniversary of his death on Wednesday with events around the world — with the notable exception of Russia.
“In Russia, the only official thing that is going on is the continued cover-up by officials,” a spokesman for Magnitsky’s firm, Hermitage Capital, told The Moscow Times.
By contrast, the U.S. Helsinki Commission in Washington is hosting the performance of a play, “One Hour Eighteen,” depicting the last moments before Magnitsky died in custody in 2009 while awaiting trial on widely criticized fraud charges.
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Bout Illustrates Why Putin Will Fail
When a U.S. jury last week convicted Viktor Bout, the so-called Merchant of Death, of conspiracy to kill Americans and selling weapons to a terrorist organization — a crime that carries a sentence of 25 years to life in prison — Russian authorities reacted with anger.
The Foreign Ministry stated, “The guilty verdict was delivered … under unprecedented political pressure by U.S. authorities.” The ministry has created a “Bout’s list” of U.S. citizens who would be denied entry to Russia for allegedly violating the human rights of Bout and other Russian citizens. It is also seeking Bout’s extradition to Russia.
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