Posts Tagged ‘moscow times’
Magnitsky Relative Summoned for Questioning by Police
Police summoned for questioning a family member of former Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison over three years ago, the company’s press service said Wednesday.
“The family member summoned as a witness was asked to ‘arrive for questioning’ at the Interior Ministry’s investigative department on Gazetny Pereulok, where Sergei Magnitsky was taken for questioning over four years ago, on Nov. 24, 2008,” Interfax cited Hermitage Capital’s press office as saying.
The company did not disclose the name of the relative or what criminal case he was due to be questioned over.
The Interior Ministry did not officially comment on the matter.
Sergei Magnitsky, a former lawyer of the Hermitage Capital fund and partner of the British law firm Firestone Duncan Ltd., was arrested on suspicion of fraud and tax evasion on Nov. 24, 2008.
A month before his arrest, Magnitsky had presented evidence against two police officials, implicating them in a tax fraud scheme in which Magnitsky said $230 million was stolen from the Russian budget.
He died on Nov. 16, 2009 in a Moscow prison, where, according to a Kremlin human rights council investigation, he was badly beaten by guards shortly before he died.
His death has not only damaged Russia’s image abroad and strained ties with the United States, but also prompted the Magnitsky Act, controversial U.S. legislation passed last December that imposes sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights abuses. buy over the counter medicines займы на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php zp-pdl.com buy viagra online
Facebook
Twitter
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
del.icio.us
Google Bookmarks
Yahoo! Buzz
Tumblr
StumbleUpon
FriendFeed
NewsVine
Digg
Magnitsky Hearing Put Off for 2 Weeks
The opening of a tax evasion trial against deceased whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and business associate Bill Browder, who founded what was once one of Russia’s largest foreign investors, has been postponed to March 4 so the state-appointed defense team can familiarize itself with some 60 tomes of case documents.
Magnitsky, whose name titled a recently passed U.S. law imposing international sanctions on alleged human rights abusers, died in a Moscow pretrial detention facility in 2009, about a year after he accused high-ranking Russian officials of a multimillion-dollar embezzlement. Soon after he made that accusation, Magnitsky was jailed on tax evasion charges.
In April 2012, the Prosecutor General’s Office moved to revive the case because, it said, Magnitsky’s mother had on many occasions said she wanted official acknowledgement that her son was innocent. In 2011, Russia’s Constitutional Court had ruled that dead people could be tried in a court of law if close relatives sought vindication for the accused.
But Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya, has publicly condemned her son’s posthumous trial as “unlawful” and refused to allow any lawyer to represent him.
Ahead of Monday’s hearing, in which Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court honored the defense’s request to delay the trial, Magnitskaya’s lawyer read a statement saying she did not authorize anyone to represent her son. “Any person who assumes such an obligation acts against my son’s interests,” the statement said.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Why Russia’s Patriots Love to Buy U.S. Real Estate
Imagine a newspaper exposé about several members of the U.S. Congress who didn’t declare on their tax forms luxury villas on the Iranian Persian Gulf coast. This would be a scandal of Watergate proportions and most likely produce a couple of best-sellers and a made-for-TV movie. Now imagine an analogous situation in Russia. What happens? Almost nothing. There is no scandal, no movie, only a lot of talk on the Internet.
The story began when a group of Russian senators went to the U.S. last summer to persuade their U.S. counterparts to vote against the Magnitsky Act. One of the most vocal opponents of the act was Senator Vitaly Malkin, who said Magnitsky had died in prison from consequences of alcoholism. The senators’ “anti-Magnitsky road show” in Washington raised suspicions that their actions not only were not just political but also that their personal interests might have been threatened by the act’s ban on visas and asset holdings for some Russian officials.
Journalist Andrei Malgin decided to get to the bottom of the mystery. Using just his computer and the Internet, he dug up some very interesting facts. It turned out that Malkin has real estate in North America. Furthermore, since 1994 he has been trying to get a residence permit in Canada, justifying his request by his business interests. In his application, he openly declared that he owns 111 — yes, 111 — apartments in Toronto. The Canadian authorities turned down his request, and Malkin even tried to take them to court. Unfortunately for him, the court refused to hear his suit.
But as Malgin discovered, those aren’t the only properties in the Western Hemisphere belonging to Malkin, who is from far-away Buryatia. Public documents show that Malkin’s company, which has the mysterious name 25 СС ST74B LLC, owns a duplex worth $15.6 million in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Malkin’s lawyers denied that he is the owner, but public documents from a suit the company brought against its construction manager show that Malkin owns the apartment. They also solved the mystery of his company name, which is an abbreviation of the address: 25 Columbus Circle, apartment 74B.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Putin proposes ban on foreign accounts for officials
President Vladimir Putin has sent to the State Duma a bill proposing to ban senior officials and their relatives from having accounts in foreign banks and holding securities issued by foreign bodies.
The text of the bill was published on the legislative activity portal of the lower parliament chamber on Tuesday.
The ban should apply to members of federal and regional parliaments and governments, board members of the Central Bank, judges, officials working in government-run companies and foundations, as well as other officials appointed by the president, government or prosecutor general, the bill said.
It will also apply to officials’ spouses and children, but it will not affect diplomats, it said.
After the bill becomes effective, officials will have to choose between closing their accounts and selling securities within three months or a voluntary or forced resignation.
Normally, a bill becomes effective one month from its official publication after it is passed in three readings by the Duma, endorsed by the Federation Council, the upper parliament chamber, and signed into law by the president. займ на карту buy over the counter medicines https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php hairy woman
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Putin Aide Says U.S. Holds Key to Improving Ties
Strained U.S.-Russian ties will not improve unless Washington stops openly criticizing Moscow’s human rights record and supporting President Vladimir Putin’s foes, the top foreign policy official in the Russian parliament said.
Relations between the Cold War-era rivals took a dive after Putin’s return to the Kremlin in May, undermining a 2009 initiative by U.S. President Barack Obama and Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, a more liberal Putin protege, to “reset” ties.
Alexei Pushkov, head of the international affairs committee in parliament’s lower chamber and a Putin ally, said the ties were “negatively stable” now and the “reset” could be considered over without an initiative on the highest political level to save it.
“The priority is political realism. Ideology matters should be secondary. I tell you, issues over ideology and values can destroy anything,” Pushkov said in an interview.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Kadyrov Faces Sanctions Under Magnitsky Act
One month after U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, it is clear that Russo-American relations have entered a difficult period.
But the dispute over Moscow’s adoption ban might mark only the beginning of the difficulties Obama is facing with the Kremlin in his second term, which officially starts with Monday’s inauguration ceremony.
The Magnitsky Law states that no later than 120 days after its Dec. 14 signing, the president must submit to Congress the names of those facing sanctions. That list is likely to contain Ramzan Kadyrov, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
The Chechen leader “is on the list of Russian officials to be sanctioned, as [the commission] recommended,” the organization said in a report published on its website earlier this month.
The report argues that Kadyrov “condones or oversees” mass human rights violations and instituted a repressive state based on his religious views. “At least nine women have been killed for ‘immodest behavior’ since 2008, with Kadyrov praising the murders, and the killers did not stand trial,” it said.
Kadyrov has long been accused of involvement in murders, torture and disappearances of political opponents and human rights activists both in the country and abroad. He denies wrongdoing, and his spokesman, Alvi Karimov, reiterated Tuesday that the report’s accusations were baseless.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Magnitsky Play at Teatr.doc Hits Harder Than Ever
Some things remain relevant longer than you would expect.
Take the death of Sergei Magnitsky. This muck-raking attorney was allowed to die in a Moscow prison in November 2009. That story was still making news when Teatr.doc opened a show called “One Hour Eighteen” in the early summer of 2010. The show examined the actions of several people in close proximity to the prisoner when he mysteriously was allowed to die, apparently handcuffed, on a cold floor in a prison cell.
Teatr.doc has just reopened a second, renewed version of the play with several scenes added to respond to events of recent years. In fact, at the performance I attended last weekend there were lines drawn from that very day’s biggest news — the passing by the Russian Duma of the so-called “anti-Magnitsky” law. This measure banning Americans from adopting Russian children is widely seen as a response to the so-called Magnitsky Act, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Barack Obama two weeks ago. This act bans Russian officials suspected of being involved in the death of Magnitsky from traveling to the United States.
In short, unlike most stories entering the endless news cycle, the Magnitsky case is not going away. Mikhail Ugarov, who co-directed “One Hour Eighteen” with Talgat Batalov and who performs a scene in the new version, told me ruefully minutes before curtain time last week that he suspects a third version of the play is not far away.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
State Prosecutor Requests Acquittal of Sole Defendant in Magnitsky Death
A state prosecutor on Monday asked a Moscow court to acquit a former senior prison official and the only remaining defendant in Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death of negligence charges that resulted in the lawyer’s death in pretrial detention in 2009.
If the plea is satisfied, no one will be prosecuted in Magnitsky’s death, since the charges against the first of the two suspects were dropped in April.
State prosecutor Dmitry Bokov asked Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court to acquit Dmitry Kratov, former deputy head of Moscow’s Butyrka pretrial detention center, over a lack of evidence, legal news agency Rapsi reported.
In late 2008, shortly after accusing tax and police officials of embezzling $230 million, Magnitsky was jailed on tax evasion charges. He died of heart failure at the Matrosskaya Tishina prison a few months after being transferred from Butyrka.
An independent inquiry by the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council determined that Magnitsky died after being beaten by guards.
In an e-mail in June, Hermitage Capital called the investigation a “farce” because Kratov was “not present at Matrosskaya Tishina.”
Although it was determined that Kratov “failed to take the necessary diagnostic and treatment measures, which resulted in Magnitsky’s death through carelessness,” the prison official hadn’t received any written complaints from Magnitsky or other people about the lawyer’s health, Bokov said.
The prosecutor also reminded the court that in April investigators closed a criminal case against prison doctor Larisa Litvinova on manslaughter charges related to Magnistky’s death because the statute of limitations had run out, not because Litvinova had been acquitted of the charges.
Kratov faces up to five years in prison. hairy girl займы на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com zp-pdl.com займ на карту
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
Duma Bill To Clamp Down on NGOs
Amid the public furor over the State Duma’s proposed ban on U.S. adoptions, many seem to have overlooked the fact that the so-called “anti-Magnitsky act,” which passed the lower house of parliament on Friday, would also place harsh new restrictions on non-governmental organizations.
Unlike the adoptions ban, the new restrictions on U.S. funding for certain groups haven’t sparked pickets outside the Duma, and tens of thousands haven’t signed online petitions opposing them.
But human rights leaders say the rules are a further tightening of the screws on civil society organizations, which have been pressed in recent months by new laws that expanded the definition of treason and required certain groups to classify themselves as “foreign agents,” which all major NGOs boycotted.
“It feels like war has been declared,” said Alexander Cherkasov, head of the Memorial human rights organization. “Nobody sewed on the yellow star. The new law, to extend the metaphor, says: ‘We’ll shoot you even if you’re not wearing a yellow star.'”
The proposed rules would make it illegal for NGOs that receive funding from U.S. citizens or organizations to participate in “political activities” or otherwise threaten Russia’s national interests.
They would also ban Russian citizens who hold American passports from being members or leaders of “political” NGOs, including local branches of international groups, which could see their assets seized for breaking the law.
Read More →
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google Buzz
- LinkedIn
- del.icio.us
- Google Bookmarks
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Tumblr
- StumbleUpon
- FriendFeed
- NewsVine
- Digg
