Posts Tagged ‘olga stepanova’
Russia: EU action on Magnitsky would ‘poison’ relations
Russia’s EU ambassador has said ties would suffer if member states follow the US in putting sanctions on suspected Russian killers and fraudsters.
“It would poison relations, definitely,” Vladimir Chizhov told EUobserver in an interview.
He added: “Well, I am sure that reason will prevail in the European Union. I have more confidence in the EU than I have in the US Congress.”
The Congress’ international committee in June approved the so-called Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act.
If it becomes law, the US will impose visa bans and asset freezes on 60-or-so Russian officials suspected of conspiracy to murder Sergei Magnitsky – an auditor who exposed tax fraud in the Kremlin and who was found beaten to death in prison in 2009.
Chizhov said that he is “not threatening anybody.”
But he noted that Russia might impose counter-sanctions on US officials if the Magnitsky bill gets through.
“The Russian Duma could launch a piece of legislation called the Guantanamo act or the Abu Ghraib act,” he said, referring to US human rights violations in Cuba and Iraq.
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Magnitsky documentary suggests fraud, collusion between Russian officials, police detectives
By Kathy Lally and Will Englund
MOSCOW — Shortly before the Russian government was defrauded of $230 million in 2007, the officials who approved the whopping tax refund at the heart of the scheme traveled to a sunny Mediterranean resort with the police who would later investigate the theft.
This wasn’t their first trip abroad together, nor was it the first or last scheme that would be traced back to the same set of tax officials and police, along with a banker who handled the proceeds of the thefts. Their relationship, newly revealed in travel records provided to The Washington Post, illustrates a level of collusion at the heart of the Russian government that allows corruption to flourish despite repeated official promises to vanquish it.
The 2007 case, unveiled by a Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, has become widely known. Magnitsky’s death in custody in 2009 has prompted the U.S. Congress to take up a bill named in his honor that would impose sanctions on Russian officials connected to his death, freezing their assets and prohibiting visas.
Russian authorities have said the tax officials were tricked into approving a fraudulent return. The prospect of U.S. sanctions has infuriated the Russian government, which has vowed to retaliate if the law is passed.
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Explosive Video Documents Depth of Putin’s Mafia State
World Affairs
Michael Weiss
It is no longer possible to distinguish where organized crime ends and the state begins in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. An extraordinary 17-minute video just exhibited by the anti-corruption website Russian Untouchables shows how an elite crime syndicate headed by a longtime gangster, Dmitry Klyuev, and including active agents of the Russian Interior Ministry and Moscow tax offices, managed to steal close to $1 billion from state coffers in fraudulent tax claims. It was the Klyuev Group that attorney Sergei Magnitsky exposed after one of his clients, Hermitage Capital, was raided and its corporate documents pilfered in order to defraud the Russian state of $230 million in a sham corporate tax refund—a refund which was processed in a single day by the co-conspirators themselves. After Magnitsky exposed it, the Klyuev Group had him framed, tortured, and murdered, then blamed for the crime. The substance of this new video, all obtained through Magnitsky’s relentless legal work and backed by bank, state, and airline records, is both the reason for his death as well as his testament. All the evidence corroborating what Magnitsky uncovered can be accessed at the Russian Untouchables website. What follows is a precis of the film.
Dmitry Klyuev was a petty crook who was hired in 2002 by Igor Sagiryan, the president of Renaissance Capital, one of Moscow’s most prominent investment firms, to act as a “tax advisor who had skills in arranging tax refunds through the Russian court system,” according to another Renaissance executive who testified in court. The scheme involved arranging a refund for a company Renaissance had only recently purchased; it was completed within 6 to 8 months.
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Russians tire of corruption spectacle
The most successful political slogan in Russia this year has been one coined by the opposition.
Say the phrase “the party of crooks and thieves”, and almost everyone knows who you are talking about – the ruling party, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia.
Although United Russia looks likely to win again in parliamentary elections on Sunday, there is growing dissatisfaction in the country.
Over the past few years, people have seen bureaucrats and politicians buying mansions and luxury cars, way beyond anything their official salaries could pay for.
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Assets probed in Russian lawyer’s killing
The people responsible for killing Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky have stolen money in European accounts, his former boss says.
Bill Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management, and his staff have spent a year hunting the assets of Russian officials exposed in a $250 million tax fraud by Magnitsky soon before he was jailed, the EUObserver reports.
Magnitsky died under suspicious circumstances in police custody Nov. 16, 2009, after almost a year in prison.
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Stolen Russian tax money is in EU banks, US sleuth says
People responsible for the death of Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky have salted away stolen money in EU bank accounts, Magnitsky’s former employer has claimed.
Bill Browder, the US-born head of the UK investment firm, Hermitage Capital Management, and five of his staff have spent the past year hunting down the assets of Russian officials exposed in a €175 million tax fraud by Magnitsky shortly before he was jailed and murdered in his cell.
Browder scored a victory last week when Swiss authorities froze a number of accounts in the Credit Suisse bank following evidence brought to light by Hermiatge and broadcast on YouTube.
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Swiss freeze Russian accounts over giant tax swindle
The Swiss authorities have frozen the bank accounts of Russian tax officials alleged to have pulled off Russia’s largest tax fraud, a U.S. magazine has said.
Credit Suisse accounts held by a former Moscow tax bureau head, Olga Stepanova, and her deputies were blocked at the request of Swiss prosecutors, according to an article in Barron’s Magazine.
Stepanova is alleged to have approved a $230 million tax refund in 2007 to a ring of embezzlers masquerading as representatives of subsidiaries of British investment company Hermitage Capital Management, once the leading foreign portfolio investor in Russia.
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Russian Accounts Frozen at Credit Suisse
Swiss authorities have apparently closed bank accounts held by Russians alleged to have been part of a giant Russian tax swindle.
Swiss law enforcement officials have apparently frozen the Credit Suisse (ticker: CS) bank accounts of the Russians alleged to have participated in Russia’s largest reported tax swindle.
Records from those bank accounts formed the basis of a Barron’s story (“Crime and Punishment in Putin’s Russia,” April 18) which showed that the family of an influential Russian tax official, Olga Stepanova, became fabulously wealthy after she approved part of a $230 million tax refund to scammers in 2007 who used corporate identities stolen from the well-known Russia-focused hedge fund Hermitage Capital. When Hermitage and its attorney Sergei Magnitsky presented evidence that the conspiracy involved Stepanova and police officials in Russia’s Internal Ministry, the police instead arrested Magnitsky and kept him in detention until he died in prison in November 2009.
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Magnitsky’s Colleagues: He exposed a fraud and paid for it with his life
WPS: What the Papers Say
Once they recovered from the shock caused by the news of Sergei Magnitsky’s death behind the bars, his colleagues initiated an investigation of their own. They are convinced that Magnitsky was murdered because he had exposed a fraud costing the Russian treasury 5.4 billion rubles and because he was prepared to testify in an open trial. Hermitage Foundation is still following the trail of the vast sums gone from the treasury in the hope to unearth a connection with people on the so called Cardin’s List. A video appeared in the Internet last week, focused on the colossal sums to be found on foreign bank accounts of Vladlen Stepanov, the husband of the former chief of Moscow Tax Inspectorate No 28 Olga Stepanova. It had been Stepanova who authorized return of the billions of rubles from the budget on December 24, 2007.
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