Posts Tagged ‘posthumous’
Russian court convicts dead lawyer Magnitsky; case led to adoption ban
A judge on Thursday found Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who died in custody in 2009, guilty of tax evasion, bringing an end to an unusual, posthumous trial that drew international condemnation and eroded U.S.-Russian relations.
The ruling against Magnitsky, a lawyer who disclosed an alleged multimillion-dollar scam, was largely symbolic. Judge Igor Alisov of Moscow’s Tverskoy district declared the case closed and there was no judgment against Magnitsky’s estate.
However, Magnitsky’s former boss, William Browder, CEO and co-founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, was also found guilty of tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison camp. He had been tried in absentia as part of the same case and said he will stop traveling to Russia or allied countries where he might face arrest.
In a telephone interview from New York, Browder called the court ruling “one of the most shameful moments for Russia since the days of Josef Stalin.”
Some human rights activists, including those close to the Kremlin, called the ruling against Magnitsky and the trial itself absurd.
“It is not the most appropriate of judicial decisions taken in Russia in recent times, putting it mildly,” said Mikhail Fedotov, the chairman of the Presidential Council on Civic Society and Human Rights, a Kremlin advisory body. “Besides, the dead can’t be tried by any human court; it is up to history to try them.”
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Guilty: Russian court passes verdict on dead lawyer at center of row with the West
A mild-mannered corporate lawyer who’s been dead for almost four years was found guilty of tax evasion in a Moscow court today.
The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, who testified about a $230 million tax scam by high officials and then found himself arrested by the same police officers he had accused, had become for many people around the world a symbol of just how strange – and often, scary – a place Russia has become during the third Kremlin term of Vladimir Putin.
The vast gulf of disagreement between Russia and the West over the Magnitsky case has been, perhaps, the single most painful aggravating factor in the worst diplomatic chill between Moscow and Washington since the end of the cold war.
Mr. Magnitsky died under suspicious circumstances, after allegedly being beaten in a Moscow pre-trial detention center in November 2009, about a year after his arrest.
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U.S. Slams Posthumous Magnitsky Conviction
The U.S. on Thursday condemned Russia’s conviction of deceased whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky on tax evasion charges, calling the case a “discredit” to efforts to bring the officials he accused of a $230 million tax fraud to justice.
“We are disappointed by the unprecedented posthumous criminal conviction against Sergei Magnitsky,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters in Washington. “The trial was a discredit to the effort of those who continue to seek justice in his case.”
A Moscow court on Thursday found Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion, a conviction that came more than three years after he died in disputed circumstances while in pretrial custody. His former boss, Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder, was convicted in absentia of tax evasion and handed a nine-year sentence Thursday.
Prior to his detention and subsequent death in a Moscow jail in November 2009, Magnitsky claimed that a group of law enforcement and tax officials had swindled the federal budget out of $230 million in a phony tax scheme. His supporters claim he was jailed and tortured to death in retribution, allegations that the authorities deny.
“Despite widely publicized credible evidence of criminal conduct resulting in Magnitsky’s death, the authorities have failed to prosecute those responsible,” Psaki said.
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Russia convicts dead lawyer of tax evasion
Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who died in suspicious circumstances in police custody, is posthumously convicted of tax fraud in Moscow. We hear from his former boss, Bill Browder, an investor also sentenced to jail in Russia.
