Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

The yoga guru and the British firms at the heart of Sergei Magnitsky’s death

Daily Telegraph

To her students Lana Zamba is simply an experienced yoga teacher, expert in a 500-year-old form of the mystic Eastern discipline. But Mrs Zamba is equally pliable, it appears, when it comes to choosing business directorships.

The yoga instructor, who lives in Limassol in Cyprus, has been a director of no fewer than 24 British-based companies including one at the centre of an alleged multi-million-pound fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the Moscow lawyer whose death in a Russian jail became an international cause célèbre.
Quite why a yoga instructor, who describes herself on the internet as “the leading teacher and representative of the Patanjali International Yoga Foundation”, should head so many different businesses is unclear.

But Mrs Zamba, 47, is named in a series of letters sent to authorities demanding a criminal investigation in Britain into a fraud that led to Mr Magnitsky’s death.

Mr Magnitsky, 37, who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a British-based hedge fund, had uncovered evidence of a £150 million fraud committed by Russian tax officials and an organised crime syndicate.

He was then arrested on tax evasion charges and held in the notorious Butyrka prison for 358 days before his death in 2009, developing pancreatitis for which he did not receive proper medical treatment. He was also beaten in jail.

Despite being dead for four years – and to the anger of the outside world – Mr Magnitsky is being tried posthumously in Moscow for tax evasion.

Hermitage’s investigations into the fraud suggest as much as £35 million was laundered through 10 British companies. One of those companies – Nomirex Trading Ltd, based in an office block in Birmingham – lists only two directors: Mrs Zamba and a company based in Cyprus.