Posts Tagged ‘navalny’
Moscow protest: Thousands rally against Vladimir Putin
Tens of thousands of people have rallied in central Moscow in a show of anger at alleged electoral fraud.They passed a resolution “not to give a single vote to (PM) Vladimir Putin” at next year’s presidential elections.
Protest leader Alexei Navalny told the crowd to loud applause that Russians would no longer tolerate corruption.
“I see enough people here to take the Kremlin and [Government House] right now but we are peaceful people and won’t do that just yet,” he said.
Demonstrators say parliamentary elections on 4 December, which were won by Mr Putin’s party, were rigged. The government denies the accusation.
A spokesman for Mr Putin, currently Russian prime minister, later said that “the majority of the population” supported him, describing the protesters as a minority.
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A Bitter Pill
In the hours after anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny was detained at a December 5 rally protesting falsified election results, he continued tweeting cheerful pictures snapped with his cell phone, showing a tight cadre of fellow protesters in the back of a police van and himself penning an official protest of his arrest. Yet in the same detention center from which Navalny will be released today, Left Front leader Sergei Udaltsov declared his latest hunger strike, which once again landed him in critical condition in a local hospital over the weekend.
This evening Navalny, along with Solidarnost Youth Coordinator Ilya Yashin and other protesters, will be released 15 days after they were arrested at the first mass rally against alleged election fraud on December 5. For the opposition, the return of one of their most recognizable and popular leaders Navalny will be a welcome boon as they prepare a 50,000-person demonstration on Sakharov Street in downtown Moscow on December 24.
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The Decembrists
No one’s quite sure what’s going on in the streets of Moscow — or what to call it — but it’s growing and powerful … and could all end badly.
Tonight is the first night without protests here since some 6,000 young people gathered Monday night to express their frustration with the electoral fraud in Sunday’s parliamentary elections and, more broadly, the institution of Putinism. They came out again Tuesday night, where they were met by thousands of drum-beating pro-Kremlin youth activists. And again on Wednesday. Nearly 1,000 people were arrested, and many of them — including anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny, a political rising star since he coined the phrase “Party of Crooks and Thieves” to describe Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia — are still in jail. Moscow is filled with tens of thousands of extra Interior Ministry troops and armored personnel carriers, and the city’s skies crackle with the sound of helicopter blades.
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A Blogger Could Start Russia’s Arab Spring
The new face of the Russian opposition is a young whistle-blowing, shareholder activist, muckraking blogger by the name of Alexei Navalny. At 2:15 p.m. on Monday, he called his huge internet following to a 7 p.m. demonstration at the Chistye Prudy park to protest “the rotten total fabrication of Moscow election results.” He wondered why some Moscow districts reported 20 percent while identical districts next door reported 70 percent votes for United Russia.
Thousands showed up (the police claim 400). The protest was broken up violently and Navalny arrested.
The internet reacted immediately: Navalny’s wife posted the police station address and telephone number where he was being held. Navalny was quickly transferred to another location, which she duly reported to Navalny’s followers.
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Alexei Navalny vs. Vladlen Stepanov
Anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny has lost a defamation lawsuit filed by Vladlen Stepanov, whom Navalny had implicated in the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. This is very good news — not that Navalny lost, of course, but that the lawsuit publicized some very important information. But let’s first look at what we knew before the lawsuit.
We knew that there was a greenmailer, Hermitage Capital founder William Browder, who had a falling out with the Russian authorities. We know that in June 2007 Interior Ministry officer Artyom Kuznetsov entered Browder’s offices and seized documents and stamps of three of his “shell” firms — Hermitage Capital subsidiaries Makhaon, Parfenion and Riland.
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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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Empty Words
When are Westerners going to learn that reform talk is cheap in the Kremlin?
The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — Russia’s Davos — opened with a speech by President Dmitry Medvedev. It was a frank speech, a tough speech. “It is incorrect to focus on calm, slow growth. It is a mistake,” he said. “This infamous stability can hide another period of stagnation…. This is why we must quickly and deliberately change everything that hampers breakthrough development.” After listing some of Russia’s achievements since the collapse of the Soviet Union, he laid out his vision: privatizing government assets, overhauling the legal system, lifting visa restrictions, lowering taxes, and fighting corruption. Or, as Medvedev so kindly put it, “The squeeze of the noose on the neck of corruptioneers must be constant and merciless.”
The praise from Western writers was instant. It was “a blueprint for changing Russia,” Medvedev’s were “bold comments,” he had “Set a Goal to Reform, Modernize and Decentralize Russia as Quickly as Possible,” he had left investors “inspired” and “enthusiastic.”
I bet he had. Such tough-love speeches are common and often heard at economic conferences from other high-ranking Kremlin liberals. They work because they’re delivered by very smart, very persuasive people, people like First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov or privatization legend Anatoly Chubais, people who sound like they get it. And they do.
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After Swiss Freeze Millions, Stepanov Swings Back
An abbreviated version of this story ran in May 28 edition of Barron’s Magazine.
Swiss prosecutors have frozen Eur. 8 million in Credit Suisse bank accounts of Vladlen Stepanov, a subject of our story about a $230 million tax scam in Russia that victimized the hedge fund firm Hermitage Capital and led to the death in police custody of Hermitage’s whistle blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky (“Crime and Punishment in Putin’s Russia,” April 16).
Stepanov isn’t taking the Swiss action lying down. Last week he placed a self-justifying advertisement in a Russian newspaper, and this week he appeared for a video-taped interview at the Russian financial daily Vedomosti. In both forums, Stepanov denies that the Swiss bank money, and other riches detailed in our article, were illicitly obtained or derived from the hundreds of millions in dubious Russian tax refunds doled out by Olga Stepanova, a former tax official from whom Stepanov says he’s been divorced since 1992.
The evidence of corruption amongst police and other officials involved in the Magnitsky case has created enough of a stink that President Dmitry Medvedev called a press conference last week to discuss an independent inquiry into the scandal.
“I do not want to be a wood chip,” is the headline of Stepanov’s May 17th ad in the RBK Daily newspaper – an allusion to a Russian proverb suggesting that he sees himself as an innocent victim who’s been ground up in the chainsawing of a forest. He dismisses as “recreational arithmetic,” the estimates of his wealth presented in “horror videos” about the Magnitsky case produced by Hermitage Capital’s founder William F. Browder (see www.russian-untouchables.com).
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Russia reopens tax case linked to lawyer’s death
A Moscow court on Tuesday reopened a hearing into the alleged theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from a US investor by Russian police in a case that led to the death of his jailed lawyer.
The November 2009 death in Butyrka prison of ailing 37-year-old attorney Sergei Magnitsky sparked Western outrage and refocused investor concerns about corruption and the lack of judicial independence in Russia.
Magnitsky claimed to have unravelled a clandestine scheme through which Russian interior ministry officers won control of three subsidiary companies formed by the US investment firm Hermitage Capital.
Executives at Hermitage — formed in 1996 and once ranked as the world’s best-performing fund in emerging markets — discovered the theft after learning that their own companies had inexplicably moved to different cities.
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