Posts Tagged ‘NYT’
Dead Lawyer, a Kremlin Critic, Is Found Guilty of Tax Evasion
The steel cage reserved for the defendants was empty Thursday, which was not surprising since one of them is dead and the other lives in London. As the judge, his voice nearly inaudible, read out his verdict, one of the main defense lawyers paid no attention, tapping nonchalantly on his tablet computer instead.
If the posthumous prosecution of Sergei L. Magnitsky, the lawyer who was jailed as he tried to expose a huge government tax fraud and died four years ago in a Russian prison after being denied proper medical care, seemed surreal from the moment the authorities announced it, the verdict and sentencing on Thursday did not disappoint.
By all accounts, it was Russia’s first trial of a dead man, and in the tiny third-floor courtroom of the Tverskoi District Court, it took the judge, Igor B. Alisov, more than an hour and a half to read his decision pronouncing Mr. Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion.
Mr. Magnitsky was convicted along with a former client, William F. Browder, a financier who lives in Britain and was tried in absentia on the same charges. Mr. Browder, once Russia’s largest foreign portfolio investor, was sentenced to nine years in prison — a sentence that he will almost certainly never serve. Interpol in late May refused a request by the Russian government to track Mr. Browder’s whereabouts, a relatively rare instance of a law enforcement inquiry’s being set aside as politically motivated.
Mr. Browder, who has been barred from Russia since 2005, said in a telephone interview from London on Thursday that he believed that the Kremlin was acting out of desperation.
“Russia is a criminal regime,” Mr. Browder said. “The Russian state is a criminal state. And in order to operate in Russia, you have two options as a businessman: you can become part of the criminality, in which case you become a criminal, or you can oppose it, in which case you become a victim, and there’s no way you can avoid it.”
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INTERPOL REBUFFS RUSSIA ON HUNT FOR BRITON, A KREMLIN CRITIC
Interpol has rejected a Russian request for a worldwide police hunt for William F. Browder, a British investment banker and a Kremlin nemesis who has made no secret of his whereabouts or of his battle against the government of President Vladimir V. Putin over accusations of human rights abuses.
The decision, announced on Friday by Interpol, to delete all information about Mr. Browder from its databases amounted to a rare — and sharp — rebuke of Russia for trying to use international law enforcement agencies in a political dispute.
Mr. Browder, once the largest private foreign investor in Russia, has crusaded against Russia’s government since the death of his lawyer, Sergei L. Magnitsky, in a Russian prison in 2009, apparently after he was denied proper medical care.
Mr. Magnitsky was arrested while trying to expose a government corruption scheme, in which a company once owned by Mr. Browder was used to file a fraudulent $230 million tax return.
In December, President Obama signed a law named for Mr. Magnitsky that aims to punish human rights abuses in Russia by prohibiting Russians accused of such violations from traveling to the United States or holding financial assets there. Russia retaliated with its own law on human rights abuses by Americans, and barred American citizens from adopting Russian children.
Mr. Browder was a major force behind the American legislation and has been pushing for similar laws to be adopted in Europe.
Mr. Putin and other officials have brushed off questions about why no one has been convicted in Mr. Magnitsky’s death, and they have increasingly sought to portray Mr. Magnitsky and Mr. Browder as criminals.
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Russia Expels Former American Embassy Official
A former senior Justice Department official at the American Embassy here was declared “persona non grata” and barred from Russia this month, according to people familiar with the case, possibly because he had rebuffed an effort by the Russian Federal Security Service to recruit him as a spy.
The former official, Thomas Firestone, had been living and working in Moscow as a lawyer for an American law firm, and had extensive contacts in the Russian government. He was detained at Sheremetyevo airport outside Moscow on May 5 while trying to return to Russia from a trip abroad; the authorities held him for 16 hours and then put him on a flight to the United States.
Mr. Firestone was contacted in March by Russian intelligence operatives who sought to enlist him to spy for the Russians, according to one person who is familiar with the case. Mr. Firestone turned them down, the person said. It was not clear whether the episode was the cause of his ejection from Russia.
The Obama administration has raised the matter of Mr. Firestone’s expulsion with the Russian government, according to one American government official. Spokesmen for the White House, the State Department, and the American Embassy in Moscow all declined to comment.
Details of Mr. Firestone’s case emerged on Sunday as Ryan C. Fogle, an American Embassy official who was arrested in Moscow last week in an embarrassing spy scandal, finally left Russia, as the Russian Foreign Ministry had demanded. Mr. Fogle, whose official title at the embassy in Moscow was third secretary of the political desk, was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service, and was accused of trying to recruit a Russian counterterrorism officer to spy for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Senior political leaders, including Secretary of State John Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, have made clear that they do not intend to let the Russian-American spy games disrupt their cooperation on larger issues of international security, in particular a conference in Geneva aimed at resolving the civil war in Syria.
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Russia Using Adoption Leverage in Ireland
The Russian government has warned in a letter to Ireland’s Parliament that it may halt negotiations on an agreement for cross-border adoptions if an Irish parliamentary committee approves a resolution critical of rights abuses in Russia.
The letter signals Russia is ready to wield adoption policies as leverage to discourage Western criticism of human rights abuses in Russia with countries other than the United States, where an adoption ban took effect late last year.
The United States Congress passed the Magnitsky Law that banned travel to the United States and ordered the seizure of assets of Russian officials suspected of ties to the death in prison of the lawyer Sergei L. Magnitsky, and other officials suspected of corruption and rights abuses.
In response, Russia’s Parliament passed the Dima Yakovlev Law that bans American couples from adoption of Russian orphans. It is named for a Russian toddler who died after he had been left in a hot car by his adoptive American father.
The letter to Ireland’s lawmakers suggested Russia would proceed with this tactic despite criticism that it harms the interests of the country’s orphans, while also dashing the hopes of prospective adoptive parents abroad, who form an emotional and motivated constituency to influence elected officials. But the Kremlin, much diminished in its foreign policy reach since the end of the cold war, has few other levers of influence left.
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The New Russian Mob
I realize this is a somewhat irresponsible thought, but I keep wondering why anyone should care if some Russian oligarchs and businesses — and corrupt officials — lose a bundle in Cyprus.
Yes, I know, the European Union’s original, ham-handed proposal — a tax on every bank deposit in Cyprus — was potentially destabilizing to the world’s financial system. It raised the specter of bank runs not just in Cyprus but all over Europe. It served as a jolting reminder that the European crisis is still with us. Yada, yada.
But it also turns out that much of the hot money held in the Cypriot banking system is Russian. Russian companies like the low taxes that come with having entities in Cyprus. Because of the wink, wink, nod, nod relationship between Cyprus and Russia, rubles deposited in Cypriot banks are as untraceable as dollars once were in Swiss bank accounts, according to Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition politician (about whom more in a moment). Corrupt officials who embezzle money have long found Cyprus to be a friendly haven. Bloomberg Businessweek reported earlier this week that a substantial amount of the $230 million fraud perpetrated in 2007 against Hermitage Capital — a crime unearthed by Sergei Magnitsky, the brave lawyer who died in prison after he exposed the fraud — can be traced to Cyprus.
To put it another way, the henchmen of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who have gotten rich by trampling over the rule of law, are now getting a taste of their own medicine. In Cyprus, with no warning, the rules changed, and deposits larger than 100,000 euros may now face “haircuts” of as much as 40 percent. Though the purpose of the tax is to save the country’s banking system, the outcome is the same as when Russian officials create phony tax charges to steal a businessman’s assets. People feel they are being robbed. And they become extremely upset.
The funniest part is that according to Reuters, some Russian entities are threatening to sue. Actually, that makes a certain perverse sense: one of the reasons Russian bureaucrats are so quick to move their newly stolen wealth out of Russia is that they want it in a place where the rule of law actually has some meaning. They don’t want done to them what they’ve done to their fellow citizens.
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Syria Crisis and Putin’s Return Chill U.S. Ties With Russia
Sitting beside President Obama this spring, the president of Russia gushed that “these were perhaps the best three years of relations between Russia and the United States over the last decade.” Two and a half months later, those halcyon days of friendship look like a distant memory.
Gone is Dmitri A. Medvedev, the optimistic president who collaborated with Mr. Obama and celebrated their partnership in March. In his place is Vladimir V. Putin, the grim former K.G.B. colonel whose return to the Kremlin has ushered in a frostier relationship freighted by an impasse over Syria and complicated by fractious domestic politics in both countries.
The tension over Syria has been exacerbated by an accusation by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday that Russia is supplying attack helicopters to the government of President Bashar al-Assad as it tries to crush an uprising. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, rejected the assertions on Wednesday, saying that Moscow was supplying only defensive weapons and countering that the United States was arming the region.
The back-and-forth underscored the limits of Mr. Obama’s ability to “reset” ties between the two countries, as he resolved to do when he arrived in office. He has signed an arms control treaty, expanded supply lines to Afghanistan through Russian territory, secured Moscow’s support for sanctions on Iran and helped bring Russia into the World Trade Organization. But officials in both capitals noted this week that the two countries still operated on fundamentally different sets of values and interests.
The souring relations come as Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin are preparing to meet for the first time as presidents next week on the sidelines of a summit meeting in Mexico. With Mr. Obama being accused by Mitt Romney, his Republican presidential opponent, of going soft on Russia and Mr. Putin turning to anti-American statements in response to street protests in Moscow, the Mexico meeting is being seen as a test of whether the reset has run its course.
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