Posts Tagged ‘posthumous’
‘Farcical and sinister’ trial of lawyer in tax fraud case who died in prison
A macabre new chapter in legal history will begin in Moscow today when the Russian authorities put a dead man on trial for tax evasion.
Sergei Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya, said that the proceedings were immoral, illegal and designed to turn her son, a lawyer and anti-corruption whistleblower who died in prison three years ago, into a criminal.
Magnitsky’s co-accused, Bill Browder, a US-born British investor who was once one of the most vocal Western cheerleaders for the Putin Administration, said last night that the case would “bring Russia to an entirely new level of depravity; even during the worst moments of Stalin’s purges they never prosecuted dead people”.
Amnesty International has called the hearing — in a closed Moscow courtroom — “farcical but also deeply sinister”. According to Russian law, a criminal case can be restarted after a defendant’s death but usually only if the deceased’s relations are seeking his or her rehabilitation. Natalya Magnitskaya has written repeatedly to the authorities to say that neither she nor any of her son’s relations want the process to go ahead.
Last week Magnitsky’s brother-in-law was summoned for questioning by the Interior Ministry and then given a gag order. A scheduled pre-trial hearing in January was twice postponed because the family refused to recognise the case. The State has had to find its own defence lawyers as well as a prosecution team.
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Magnitsky: Posthumous Trial To Go Ahead
Russia pushes ahead with the posthumous prosecution of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a prison cell in 2009.
When the case of the state vs Sergei Magnitsky is called in a Moscow courtroom later, the defendant will not be in the dock – he has been dead for more than three years.
In a case that has been compared to the show trials of Stalin, Russia is pressing ahead with the posthumous prosecution of a whistle-blowing lawyer.
At the time of his death Mr Magnitsky was investigating what he believed was a massive tax fraud – worth around £150m – targeting both the British-based investment fund he was working for and the Russian state.
He went public with his evidence in October 2008, naming several senior police and tax officials, but the next month he was arrested.
The 37-year-old was held without trial for almost a year, during which time he became seriously ill – he lost 40lb and was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones – but despite repeated written requests he was denied medical treatment.
Mr Magnitsky said he felt he was being physically and psychologically pressured to withdraw his testimony, but he refused – instead he documented the conditions he was being held, describing raw sewage overflowing from the toilet in one cell and the sound of rats running along the corridors at night.
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Hearing resumes against dead Russian lawyer
Moscow on Monday resumes a controversial hearing against a dead person: Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive tax evasion schemes, was arrested and died in prison, causing great concern over human rights in the West.
In principle, such a trial should not exist. “It’s impossible,” Russian premier Dmitri Medvedev said in an interview with CNN at the end of January this year. The Russian penal code, he added, does not allow for the prosecution of people after their death. According to an early 2012 decision by the Russian constitutional court, an exception is only possible in the event of posthumous rehabilitation.
Yet it does not appear to be a case of rehabilitation when on Monday (04.03.2013) a preliminary hearing in the case of Sergey Magnitsky continues. Critics claim that his case has been casting a dark shadow over the Russian judiciary system for years.
The deceased’s mother has described the court proceedings as “cynical” and “illegal.” Human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement voicing concern over “a dangerous precedent that could lead to a deterioration on the human rights situation in Russia.”
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Russia opens macabre show trial
Russian authorities, in a legal twist bizarre even by their standards, are pushing ahead with the trial of anti-corruption whistle blower Sergei Magnitsky posthumously for alleged ”tax evasion”.
The prosecution of a dead man – a first for Russia, something that not even Joseph Stalin did – promises to be as shocking and puzzling from the Western perspective as last year’s inquisition of the punk rockers of Pussy Riot.
The trial, scheduled to begin on Monday in Moscow, will feature two empty chairs facing the judge, one for the dead lawyer and one for his former client, London-based investor William Browder, who will be tried on the same charges of ”tax evasion” in absentia.
The Kremlin, operating from its own logic, needs to discredit these two men in order to shore up its position, both domestically and internationally, political analysts and lawyers say.
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Mr Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest investor in Russia until the fund manager started exposing massive corruption, irritating the Russians so badly that they declared him a ”threat to national security” and expelled him in 2005. Mr Browder wound up his business in Russia and evacuated his staff.
”I didn’t want to end up like Khodorkovsky [Mikhail, the jailed billionaire oil tycoon],” he said. ”I thought that was the end of it but it turned out to be the beginning of the worst possible nightmare.”
He said that after he left Russia, his offices were raided and seized documents were used to fraudulently re-register some of his companies.
He hired Magnitsky to investigate. The lawyer discovered that the scammers, unable to steal assets because they had already been liquidated, applied instead for a refund on $US230 million of taxes Hermitage Capital had paid.
”They didn’t steal from us but from the Russian state,” Mr Browder said.
”It was the largest tax refund in Russian history. It was approved in one day, on Christmas Eve 2007. It could only have been done with the complicity of senior officials.”
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Habeas corpus
Irish Times
Sergei Magnitsky, the defendant, will not be in a position to plead. He is dead. His trial, however, following some celebrated historical precedents (notably, Joan of Arc’s), will proceed even though, as Amnesty says, it violates his fundamental rights, in particular that “to defend himself in person”.
The bizarre, and very rare, decision of the Russian authorities to go ahead with the trial is possible because the law allows a posthumous trial to continue – it closed 13 days after his death in 2011 – but only at the request of relatives anxious to clear an accused’s name. Yet Magnitsky’s mother is adamantly opposed to the reopening, and the prosecuting authorities have no intention of clearing his name. On the contrary, the point, it appears, is to discredit both Magnitsky and a US sanctions law named after him which offends President Vladimir Putin and some of his corrupt pals.
Prosecutors accuse Magnitsky and his former client William Browder, a London-based investor, of evading €12.6 million in tax. The former was arrested in 2008 while investigating a €170 million tax fraud. He died in jail after developing untreated pancreatitis. The US Congress passed a law sanctioning officials whom Browder accuses of involvement in the fraud, and Russia responded by banning adoptions by Americans.
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Sergei Magnitsky: How a dead man was put on trial
THE court calls Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. He’s a bit slow to take the stand. He’s a bit quiet. This is because Sergei Magnitsky is dead. He died in a Russian prison from pancreatitis. He’s buried at Moscow’s Preobrazhensky cemetery.
Mr Magnitsky was first arrested in 2008. The lawyer with US firm Firestone Duncan had been working for London-based Hermitage Capital Management. He claimed to have uncovered a massive fraud worth £125m. He told all to officials. He was then arrested for alleged tax evasion and sent to prison, where he was beaten and denied medical help. He was had been held for a year without charge. Well, just under a year. In Russia, you can be held for anything up a year without charge. That time would have lapsed on November 24. He died on Monday, November 16. Such was his misfortune.
He was kept in squalor. In his affidavit, Magnitsky noted:
“…sewage started to rise from the drain under the sink [the] floor was covered with sewage several centimetres thick … for the 10 months I have been under arrest, the investigator has not let me meet with my wife, mother or any other relative”. “Isolation from the outside world exceeds all reasonable limits …
In July 2009, Magnitsky was diagnosed with “gall bladder stones, pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis“. He blamed that on his confinement:
“Prior to confinement, I didn’t have these illnesses or at least there were no symptoms.”
Irina Dudukina, spokesman for the prosecutors’ investigative committee, said in November 2009:
“He was a key witness and his evidence was very important. The tragic news about his death came as a complete surprise. He had complained about the conditions of his detention but never his health.”
Spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee Irina Dudukina speaks at a news conference on the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in Moscow, Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2009.
Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital said Sergei Magnitsky, had in effect been “held hostage and they killed their hostage”. He had hired Magnitsky to search for fraud against his company. The Russian elite were not willing to play fair:
In 2005, Mr Browder was banned from Russia as a threat to national security after allegations that his firms had evaded tax, but Mr Browder says his company was targeted by criminals trying to seize millions of pounds worth of his assets. Mr Browder says he was punished for being a threat to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. Since then, a number of Mr Browder’s associates in Russia – as well as lawyers acting for his company – have been detained, beaten or robbed.
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Arraigning a corpse
Part 1 “Russian Justice”
A judge at Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court, stopped the trial of Sergei Magnitsky (above) yesterday – but not because the defendant was dead. Magnitsky’s demise was of no concern to the judge. It did not bother him in the slightest. The court merely postponed proceedings until 4 March when the world will see something rarely seen since the Middle Ages: a prosecutor arraigning a corpse.
The Putin regime – that mixture of autocracy and gangsterism – is desperate to discredit the late Mr Magnitsky and his employer, Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital. If you don’t know the story, I’ll explain why.
Browder exposed corruption in Russian companies. The Russian authorities did not approve. Interior Ministry police raided Hermitage’s offices after Browder and most of his employees had fled the country.
Magnitsky stayed and claimed that the Interior Ministry police had stolen the seals to its Russian subsidiaries and passed them to a crime gang. The gang re-registered the companies and claimed to be Hermitage’s rightful owners. They told the Russian authorities they owed Hermitage a tax rebate. Within a day, corrupt officials handed over £143m of public money.
Magnitsky complained to the Russian equivalent of the FBI. Russia being the way it is, the Interior Ministry arrested him for speaking out. The state held him for a year in wretched prisons. In June 2009, Magnitsky developed pancreatitis and cholecystitis. The prison authorities denied him treatment. They probably tortured him, too. When civilian doctors finally came to see him on the day of his death, the guards would not let them into his cell for an hour. The doctors found his body lying in a pool of urine. He died rather than retract his testimony.
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Show trial strengthens the case for an EU Magnitsky Act
The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, the anti-corruption lawyer beaten to death in a Moscow jail, is not just the moment Russia’s legal system becomes the theatre of the absurd, but something worse. It is a show trial that harks back to the blackest days of the Soviet Union. Even in the Stalin era, however, such trials took place before defendants met their deaths in the dark recesses of the penal system, not after.
Posthumous trials are not unheard of in history. Pope Formosus (891-896AD) was tried post mortem by political enemies in the Cadaver Synod. Joan of Arc’s sentence was annulled in a retrial after her death; Oliver Cromwell’s body was exhumed to be posthumously “executed”. The Nazi Martin Bormann was named as a defendant in the 1945 Nuremberg trials, his whereabouts unclear, and later proved to be dead.
But in modern legal practice, posthumous trials are usually held to provide justice for victims, or to clear a defendant’s name. A 2011 constitutional court ruling in Russia allowed such a hearing if the defendant’s family pressed for it. In this case, none of those elements applies.
Mr Magnitsky’s trial on trumped-up tax evasion charges is a clear attempt to blacken his name. It comes as Bill Browder, his former employer, embarks on a push to persuade European capitals to adopt measures similar to the US Magnitsky Act – which imposed visa bans and asset freezes on officials implicated in the lawyer’s death. Yet if the Kremlin believes a “guilty” verdict obtained in such bizarre fashion will alter perceptions outside Russia, that shows how divorced from reality it has become.
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Dead Russian lawyer to go on trial next month
The trial of the whistleblowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is to begin next month, even though he died in prison three years ago.
A Russian court ruled on Monday that the trial would begin on 4 March. Prosecutors accuse Magnitsky and his former client William Browder, a London-based investor, of evading $16.8m (£10.8m) in taxes.
The trial will be held under procedures allowing for posthumous trials to clear the deceased. Magnitsky’s relatives are boycotting the proceedings.
Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 while investigating an alleged $230m (£148m) tax fraud and died the following year after developing pancreatitis that was left untreated.
The US Congress passed a law sanctioning officials whom Browder accuses of involvement in the fraud. Russia in response banned adoptions by Americans. buy over the counter medicines hairy girl https://zp-pdl.com https://www.zp-pdl.com payday loan
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