Posts Tagged ‘putin’
The enemy within
MARTYRED human-rights activists; fatally brave journalists: Russia, alas, has plenty of other cases of violent death that are as deserving of outrage as Sergei Magnitsky’s. So the fuss over one lawyer’s demise might seem overdone. Yet there is something grimly instructive about Magnitsky’s story. In a stark, almost cartoonish way, it has demonstrated that Russia is run for the benefit of a ruling clique, rather than in the interests of its people. As this gruesome affair has degenerated from brutal tragedy to bleak farce, those interests have been relentlessly disregarded by officials, politicians and the courts.
To recap: Magnitsky worked for Hermitage Capital Management, once the biggest portfolio investor in Russia. Bill Browder, its boss, was a long-term and zealous fan of Vladimir Putin, even as the vices of Mr Putin’s rule became unignorable. That devotion did not help Mr Browder when, in 2005, one of his campaigns against corporate malfeasance in big Russian companies apparently irked someone important. Mr Browder was ejected, and his fund went with him. The broader benefit Hermitage brought to the Russian economy evidently mattered less than the threat his activism posed to the kleptocrats.
The ensuing attack on Hermitage eventually involved a huge fraud, by officials and police officers with the connivance of the courts, which used the wreckage of the firm to purloin a tax refund of $230m from the Russian exchequer. Magnitsky blew the whistle on this scam. He was arrested, jailed for a year in dreadful conditions, and in 2009 died of neglect and abuse. No one has been convicted as a result of his death; some of those allegedly involved in the fraud have been awarded medals. The message could not be clearer: notwithstanding a recent, selective push against corruption, in Mr Putin’s system stealing from the Russian people is often forgivable. Exposing such theft, on the other hand, can be suicidal.
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Magnitsky case: Russia accuses Browder over Gazprom
Russia is preparing new charges against UK-based fund manager Bill Browder, whose lawyer died in a Russian jail but now faces tax evasion charges.
Mr Browder will be accused of illegally buying shares in Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom, the interior ministry said. Mr Browder called the move “absurd”.
On Monday a Russian judge ruled that a trial of the dead lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, should go ahead next week.
Mr Browder, who runs Hermitage Capital Management, is to be tried in absentia.
Speaking to BBC Russian, Mr Browder said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin “has given an instruction to law enforcement agencies to charge me with any crime they can think up, no matter how spurious or absurd”.
“Every single securities firm in Russia set up derivatives structures which were legal, to invest in Gazprom shares… there was nothing illegal going on,” he said.
Mr Magnitsky died after his pancreatitis went untreated. He had uncovered an alleged $230m (£150m) tax fraud involving Russian government officials.
Nobody has been convicted over his death or the alleged theft from Russian state coffers.
However, Mr Magnitsky and Mr Browder were charged with tax evasion in the wake of Mr Magnitsky’s offer of evidence to the Russian authorities.
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A Russian ‘frenemy’
The White House is trying to revive the “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is likely to be a wasted effort. The reset is dead not because of someone’s ill will or mistakes. It is because Washington and Moscow have reached the limit of accommodation that neither could overstep without compromising the central elements and moral content of their foreign and domestic policies. The Obama administration’s effort would be far better spent on devising a more realistic strategy that at least stabilizes the relationship, albeit on a lower level of interaction.
Two sets of factors are mostly responsible for the growing disjunction between the United States and Russia: the diminution of Russia’s geo-strategic relevance for some key U.S. objectives, and the increasing prominence and role that Kremlin domestic behavior plays in U.S.-Russian relations.
In Afghanistan, the rapid drawdown of U.S. troops obviates much of the need for personnel and materiel transportation through Russia after 2014. With regard to Iran, another key U.S. concern, Russia has unambiguously signaled the end of its support for even watered-down resolutions that it previously voted for at the U.N. Security Council.
Syria has been an even starker demonstration of the diversion in guiding values and objectives. Russia thrice vetoed U.S.-supported Security Council resolutions calling for sanctions against the murderous Assad regime. The last of the vetoes was cast in July, despite President Obama’s appeal to President Putin in an hourlong telephone conversation. Throughout the conflict, Russia has continued to sell weapons and technology to Assad.
On Russia’s domestic front, following Putin’s reelection in March 2012, the Kremlin has undertaken a concerted and consistent effort to repress, intimidate, marginalize and stigmatize not just the political opposition but also citizens participating in peaceful protests and members of nonpolitical, independent civil movements and groups. Since the run-up to the Duma election in the second half of 2011, from Putin on down, the regime has been using alleged subversion by external enemies to justify the crackdown.
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Putin’s government clings to strategy of the Big Lie
A meteor streaked across the Russian sky and exploded over a populated area with the force of a nuclear bomb last month, injuring hundreds of people and casting the light on the world’s largest country that has failed to put anti-Americanism in the rearview mirror despite more than two decades of post-Soviet development.
Once dashboard-camera video footage of the phenomenon spread across the Internet, Vladimir Zhirinovsky — the founder and leader of Russia’s ultra-nationalist LDPR party and a former vice chairman of the lower house of the country’s legislature — announced that it was not a meteor falling but a secret U.S. weapon being tested.
A showman of Russian politics, Mr. Zhirinovsky is notorious for making outrageous public pronouncements aimed at pleasing Russian President Vladimir Putin. The latter uses Mr. Zhirinovsky as a scare for those in the Russian middle class who are unhappy with the country’s systemic corruption and his autocratic regime that perpetuates it.
Unfortunately, many uneducated Russians believe Mr. Zhirinovsky and support him and Mr. Putin, bringing to mind a propaganda technique that Adolf Hitler termed the Big Lie — a lie so preposterous that people believe it to be the truth because they can’t imagine anybody making it up. According to opinion polls, close to half the Russians do not believe the United States is a friendly country.
Until recently it was not that important for us in the U.S. because the livelihood of the Russian elite depended in part on the goodwill of the West, and its leader, the United States.
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French ‘Magnitsky Act’ Is Gaining Momentum
As French President Francois Hollande met with President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, he was under serious pressure to raise the case of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose mysterious death in a Moscow jail led the U.S. to impose sanctions on Russians suspected of human rights violations.
A survey published Thursday by the independent French Institute of Public Opinion (IFPO), one of the country’s most respected pollsters, revealed that 85 percent of French citizens would support their own version of the sanction-imposing Magnitsky Act, which U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law in December.
Bill Browder, the man behind the US Magnitsky Act has been drumming up support in France to pass its own version of the legislation. Shortly after the American law was passed Russia banned U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans in what was widely seen as a tit-for-tat response.
“Now that the U.S. Magnitsky Act has been passed, it’s our major priority to get the Europeans to the same level within a year,” Browder said in an interview in Paris earlier this month.
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Russia denies visa for leading congressional human-rights advocate
The Russian government has denied a visa for a prominent congressman in what that the lawmaker believes is clear retaliation for U.S. efforts to punish Russian human rights violators.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on human rights, has been traveling to Russia and before that the Soviet Union for decades. But this month, the Russian government denied him a visa for the first time, despite a personal intervention from the U.S. ambassador in Moscow.
In an interview Wednesday with The Cable, Smith said the Russians were already retaliating for a recent U.S. law that seeks to call out and punish Russian human rights violators. That bill, the Sergei Magnitsky Accountability and Rule of Law Act of 2012, was named after the Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in prison, allegedly after being tortured by Russian officials.
Smith was an original sponsor of the bill.
“The Magnitsky bill is the reason I didn’t get the visa. This is the first time,” Smith said. “I was shocked. During the worst days of the Soviet Union I went there repeatedly.”
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In Putin’s Russia, Shooting the Messenger
WHAT is the difference between Dmitri A. Medvedev and Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s tag-teaming presidents? It’s the difference between officially asking experts for unvarnished advice, and punishing those experts for giving it.
In early 2011, when Mr. Medvedev (now prime minister) was still president, the Kremlin’s human rights council selected nine experts to scrutinize the 2010 conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once one of Russia’s richest men but is now its best-known political prisoner. I was invited to serve, the one American in a group with six experts from Russia, one from Germany and one from the Netherlands. We did not mince our words criticizing the Khodorkovsky trial.
That December, Russian television showed the council’s chairman delivering our findings to Mr. Medvedev, with a recommendation that Mr. Khodorkovsky’s conviction be annulled. But then Mr. Putin, who was president from 2000 to 2008 and then bided his time as prime minister, returned to the presidency in May 2012. Since then, for their willingness to speak truth to power, at least four of my Russian counterparts have been questioned in connection with a criminal investigation. The court order used to harass them refers to their “deliberately false conclusions.” Talk about killing the messenger.
You may be surprised to learn that the Kremlin has a human rights agency. Not only has one existed since 1993, but the human rights council, as it is currently known, was active and respected under Mr. Medvedev’s presidency. Its membership was a who’s who of leading Russian human rights personalities, including Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, the leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a former Soviet dissident.
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Disarray Among Putin’s Elites Deepens as Russia’s Self-Isolation Progresses
The meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk in the early hours of February 15, as damaging as it was, produced even more jokes than material destruction. One of those was about the State Duma urgently approving legislation banning the incursions of celestial bodies because of their pronounced anti-Russian inclinations (Newsru.com, February 15). The joke captures the frantic activity of the Russian parliament, which has lost legitimacy in the crudely falsified elections in December 2011. As a result, the Duma now tries to compensate for this disgrace by producing a deluge of laws aimed at restricting the growth of the country’s fledgling civil society and promoting “patriotism” even in such ugly forms as the prohibition of adoption of orphans by American families. Consequently, this commonly disparaged institution is now seen by a record high 42 percent of Russians as playing a big or very big role in Russia’s political life (Levada.ru, February 14). The unintended consequence of this attention-seeking behavior, however, has been a series of scandals that reveal the scope of corruption among the parliamentarians who are supposed to represent a key part of the political establishment (Moskovsky Komsomolets, February 14).
Vladimir Pehtin, the head of the committee on parliamentary ethics, had to resign from this chair after the publication by activist-blogger Alexei Navalny of documents confirming his ownership of a condo in Miami, which was not mentioned in his tax declaration (RIA Novosti, February 13). This revelation could have gone unnoticed, if it had not coincided with President Vladimir Putin’s introduction of a draft law that would prohibit a wide group of key state officials from holding bank accounts abroad, while all real estate owned overseas would need to be declared (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, February 13; see EDM, February 14). The aim of this legislation is to ensure loyalty among the prime beneficiaries of the “power-is-money” regime through the newly-launched campaign of “nationalization of the elites” (Forbes.ru, February 13). The predatory elites, however, remain reluctant to be “nationalized” in terms of repatriating their ill-gained fortunes. Keeping their wealth abroad allows them to enjoy a level of property rights, which are mostly non-existent in Russia.
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Putin proposes ban on foreign accounts for officials
President Vladimir Putin has sent to the State Duma a bill proposing to ban senior officials and their relatives from having accounts in foreign banks and holding securities issued by foreign bodies.
The text of the bill was published on the legislative activity portal of the lower parliament chamber on Tuesday.
The ban should apply to members of federal and regional parliaments and governments, board members of the Central Bank, judges, officials working in government-run companies and foundations, as well as other officials appointed by the president, government or prosecutor general, the bill said.
It will also apply to officials’ spouses and children, but it will not affect diplomats, it said.
After the bill becomes effective, officials will have to choose between closing their accounts and selling securities within three months or a voluntary or forced resignation.
Normally, a bill becomes effective one month from its official publication after it is passed in three readings by the Duma, endorsed by the Federation Council, the upper parliament chamber, and signed into law by the president. займ на карту buy over the counter medicines https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php hairy woman
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