Posts Tagged ‘moscow times’
Navalny Fined Over Magnitsky Allegations
Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny was convicted on Monday of slander in a lawsuit filed against him by a businessman linked to the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Moscow’s Lyublinsky District Court ordered Navalny to pay a fine of 100,000 rubles ($3,200) and disavow several statements claiming that Vladlen Stepanov was a beneficiary of fraudulent tax returns that Magnitsky was trying to expose, Navalny wrote on his Twitter.
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Jailed School Principal’s Death Raises Questions
Investigators announced Tuesday that a criminal inquiry has been opened into the death of a Moscow school principal awaiting trial on corruption charges, in a case that has drawn comparisons to that of Sergei Magnitsky.
Andrei Kudoyarov, 48, died in jail on Saturday of an apparent heart attack. He had been held since May on charges that he took a 240,000 ruble bribe in exchange for accepting a student into Moscow School No. 1308.
A preliminary investigation into his death raised enough concern that the case has been turned over to the federal Investigative Committee to determine whether negligence had played a role.
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Magnitsky Investigator Arrested on Bribery Charges
A police investigator implicated in the prosecution of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has been charged with extorting a $3 million bribe, officials said Wednesday.
Nelli Dmitriyeva, a senior investigator with the Interior Ministry’s Moscow branch, is suspected of extorting the bribe while holding an inquiry into contraband medical equipment, the Investigative Committee said in a statement. Her arrest was sanctioned by a Moscow court on Wednesday.
Dmitriyeva is one of 60 officials linked to the 2009 death of Magnitsky, 37, who died in detention after being beaten badly by guards and being refused treatment for existing health problems. Dozens of the officials have been banned from entering the United States. It was unclear whether Dmitriyeva is among them.
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Aleksanyan’s Death ‘Practically Murder’
Human rights activists said former Yukos vice president Vasily Aleksanyan, who died this week of AIDS-related illnesses, would have lived longer if the authorities had not kept him in prison for nearly three years on politically tainted charges.
Aleksanyan, who fought a protracted legal battle with the authorities before finally being freed on bail in 2009 to seek medical treatment, died at home Monday at the age of 39.
“It was practically a murder,” rights champion Valery Borshchyov told Business FM radio on Tuesday. “He could have lived longer if he had not been kept in detention.”
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Britain ‘Blacklists’ Magnitsky Officials
Britain has secretly blacklisted at least 60 Russian officials implicated in the 2009 prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a British media report said Sunday.
The move would replicate a measure taken by the United States in July that prompted the Russian Foreign Ministry to draw up a blacklist of U.S. officials in retaliation.
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After Jarring Week, Putin Is Showing New Image
Since President Dmitry Medvedev spectacularly backed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to become his successor last weekend, the world has stopped guessing who will be the country’s next leader.
But Kremlinology does not stop here, and the guessing game started immediately with a new question: What sort of Putin will the world get?
Some political commentators have suggested that Putin is about to change. A popular thesis, propagated in a New York Times article this week, speaks of a “Putin 2.0” who is going to pursue the path followed by Medvedev since 2008.
Putin, the argument goes, is already showing a new image of himself.
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Cameron, You Dropped the Ball
Dear Prime Minister Cameron,
During your recent visit to Moscow you claimed that you would like to take on the skeptics of the Russian-British relationship. I would like to accept that challenge.
In your speech at Moscow State University on Sept. 12, you outlined two types of skeptics — those who believe Britain is untrustworthy and for whom the relationship is connected to the Soviet past, and those, you said, who believe that Russia should not modernize, innovate and open up.
Taking your second set of skeptics first, I can think of almost no one who believes that Russia should not modernize, innovate or open up. Where did you get that from? You would have to be reliving the Cold War to believe that Russia should be deliberately kept down in any way. All reasonable people want a modern Russia, even if we only define modernization narrowly, as the Kremlin has done, as scientific-technical modernization.
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U.S. Senate Asked to Blacklist Yukos Foes
A group of humans rights activists, politicians and artists on Monday urged the U.S. Senate to blacklist 305 Russian officials linked to the jailing of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The list includes Prosecutor General Yury Chaika and Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin, but not Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his deputy Igor Sechin, whom Khodorkovsky has repeatedly named as his main enemies.
Rights champion Lev Ponomaryov, a co-signee, told The Moscow Times that Putin and Sechin were not included to make the proposal easier for U.S. senators to approve.
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One More Reason Not to Invest in Russia
In the 1990s, Anatoly Chubais was guilty for all the country’s economic woes, as the popular phrase goes. Now Regional Development Minister Viktor Basargin has found a new source of Russia’s economic problems — foreign investors.
At the Baikal International Economic Forum on Monday in Irkutsk, Basargin criticized foreign investors, calling them “vacuum cleaners” that “suck up Russia’s natural resources and export them out of the country.”
“Vacuum cleaners” is nothing compared with what Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was called. Although Hermitage was the largest portfolio investor in Russia in the mid-2000s — with more than $4 billion in investments in the country — the Russian government labeled him “a threat to national security” in 2006 and denied him entry into the country. Browder was blacklisted after he spent years fighting against corruption and abuse of shareholder rights in Gazprom and other large companies that Hermitage invested in.
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