Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Trial by Russian television convicts whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky as MI6 agent

The Independent

As Russia prepares to mount a posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, state-controlled television has aired a documentary accusing the dead whistleblowing lawyer and his bosses of being part of an MI6-led conspiracy.

The documentary, which aired on Russia’s NTV on Wednesday night, said that Mr Magnitsky and William Browder, the US-born British head of the investment fund that hired him, were involved in the “crime of the century” against the Russian state.

Both the television programme and the trial, which starts on Monday, appear to be part of a vitriolic rearguard action by the Russian state, after Mr Magnitsky’s fate became the catalyst for international pressure on Moscow. Mr Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 while investigating an alleged $230m fraud perpetrated by a group of corrupt Russian officials that defrauded the Russian state. However, instead of locking up the culprits, Russian investigators moved against Mr Magnitsky himself. Locked up in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, he was refused medical treatment for a pancreatic condition, mistreated, and died in 2009.

Since then, his case has become an international rallying cry, with the US Congress passing a resolution banning Russian officials involved in his death from travelling to the US or owning property there. Enraged by the move, Russia retaliated by drawing up its own list of US officials to be banned from Russia, and also outlawed US citizens from adopting Russian orphans. President Vladimir Putin also said on live television in December that Mr Magnitsky had died of heart failure, not mistreatment, and added that the case needed further investigation, as the lawyer himself had been no angel.

Since those words, the Russian state appears to have ratcheted up a campaign against the memory of the dead lawyer, his family, and his former employer, Hermitage Capital. Hermitage, headed by Mr Browder, had employed Mr Magnitsky to investigate the fraud.