Posts Tagged ‘putin’
OCCRP Names Aliyev “Person Of The Year “
Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, has won the first ever Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year bestowed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The award is given for the person who figured prominently in 2012 on stories on crime and corruption in its coverage area. Aliyev was chosen because of new revelations this year about how his family had taken large shares in lucrative industries including the telecom, minerals and construction industries often through government related deals.
The award is chosen by the 60 reporters and 15 news organizations that make up the OCCRP consortium. Runners-up included Albanian drug lord Naser Kelmendi, President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Is Russia trying a dead whistle-blower because of a US law?
The US recently enacted legislation targeting those Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, spurring an angry reaction from the Kremlin.
At the center of the stormiest US-Russia diplomatic crisis since the cold war stands the enigmatic figure of Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the US Senate has named a punitive new law that imposes harsh visa and economic sanctions against scores of Russian officials who are deemed to have committed serious human rights violations.
The tale of Mr. Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer who blew the whistle on a vast corruption scheme, was arrested by the same officials he had implicated, and was allegedly beaten to death in prison over three years ago, appears to validate all the worst suspicions held in the West about the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama last month, is a controversial new breed of legislation that aims to compensate for the perceived failures of Russia’s justice system by meting out punishment to about 60 Russian officials deemed to have been involved in the wrongful prosecution and alleged murder of Magnitsky.
The Kremlin’s incandescent response makes it likely that the mutual acrimony will expand in weeks to come. Mr. Putin called the Magnitsky Act a “purely political, unfriendly act” that demanded a stern riposte. Last week he signed the retaliatory Dima Yakovlev Act, whose key provision is a ban on all adoptions of Russian children by US citizens.
But in an apparent effort to overturn the widely-held Western narrative, which sees Magnitsky as the victim of corrupt officials and a lawless state, Russian prosecutors have announced they will put the deceased Magnitsky on trial later this month, seeking to prove that he and his former boss, Bill Browder, head of the London-based Hermitage Capital, were the real criminals.
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As usual, kids paying price
Vladimir Putin saved the worst for last in 2012. It’s hard to imagine a more dispiriting end to the year than the law Mr. Putin signed last week, preventing Americans from adopting Russian orphans.
Although there have been some documented cases of adopted children being mistreated by American adoptive parents, that’s not the motive for the new Russian law.
Rather, it’s retaliation for an amendment in an American-Russian trade law – approved by Congress and signed by President Obama – that establishes visa restrictions and freezes assets of Russian officials who are believed to be involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky.
Mr. Magnitsky, 37, a London-based lawyer for a major investment house, alleged that Russian officials had engaged in a $230 million tax fraud scheme. He was arrested in Russia in 2009 on tax evasion charges that human rights activists believe to be bogus. In prison while awaiting trial, Mr. Magnitsky was beaten and denied medical care, leading to his death. Recently a Russian court acquitted the only prison official implicated in Mr. Magnitsky’s death.
It is one thing for U.S. and Russian politicians to argue over human rights. It’s tragic that Mr. Putin has transferred the pain to tens of thousands of Russian orphans and the American families who could help those kids toward better lives.
But, as in many such disputes, the grief trickles down to the most vulnerable. займ на карту срочно без отказа займы на карту без отказа www.zp-pdl.com zp-pdl.com микрозаймы онлайн
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Putin and the Children
President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed into law a ban on adoptions of Russian children by U.S. citizens, with immediate and heart-wrenching impact.
As of Tuesday, none of the 120,000 or so abandoned and orphaned Russians currently eligible for adoption will be able to find a home in the U.S. In the past two decades, over 60,000 have done so, including disabled children who can’t get the care they need in Russia.
The U.S. has been the top foreign destination, though the number of adopted Russian children had come down to 1,000 annually in recent years. The fate of some 50 children who were in the final stages of adoption is unclear. In many cases they had met and bonded with would-be parents in America and now may not be allowed to join them.
The Russian law abrogates a bilateral agreement on adoption that went into force only last month. If Moscow can’t honor this kind of treaty, it’d be good to know why the Obama Administration expects to negotiate another arms control deal with this crowd.
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The History of Russia’s Future
Putin hopes that harsh policies will allow him to maintain a stranglehold on Russia. But they have merely ensured the country’s decline.
Strategic vision has never been a Russian attribute, and it certainly was absent in 2012. Russia’s vast territory continually seems to obscure for its leaders the need to plan for the future, while its seemingly infinite supply of natural resources convinces them that the country can handle any contingency.
As a result, Russia is perpetually unprepared for the future. Indeed, just as its leaders failed to prepare for the fall of communism, the softening of the Russian economy shows that they are poorly equipped for the coming decades, which will be characterised by depleted resources, a declining population, and shrinking territory.
Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency this year marked a new low for Russian strategic vision. After all, the past is the only future that Putin has ever wanted for the country. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Kremlin lost not only control of vast portions of territory, but also half of the USSR’s nearly 300 million people. Since then, the population has fallen by millions more, owing to Russia’s high mortality rate, especially among men. Over the same period, the population of the US has grown from 248 million to more than 300 million.
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Russia: Putin Parries on U.S. Adoption Ban
President Vladimir Putin was evasive about whether he would sign a controversial bill banning Americans from adopting Russian children.
Speaking at his annual news conference on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin sharply rebuked the American government, saying that U.S. officials had no right to lecture Russia about human rights and democracy. “They are up to their necks in a certain substance themselves,” Putin said of the Americans, returning to the subject over and over again during his lengthy press conference.
Putin defended his stance against military intervention in Syria and criticized the U.S.’s role in helping to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. But for all his anti-American invective, Putin was evasive about whether he would definitively back legislation passed by the Russian parliament that would prohibit American citizens from adopting Russian children. After being repeatedly questioned by journalists about the bill, Putin said he would have to read the text, reportedly adding that most Americans looking to adopt Russian children are “honest” and “decent.”
The legislation will become law if Putin signs it. It was passed in Russia in response to the Magnitsky Act, a bill that U.S. President Barack Obama signed last week, which imposes financial and travel restrictions on Russian human-rights abusers.
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Putin’s Russia: back to the bad old days
Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to undertake democratic reform has led to a cooling of relations with the US and Europe.
We can all sleep more safely. The end of the world will not happen on December 20 2012 , or even for another 4.5bn years, because Vladimir Putin has assured us that it won’t. Collective jitters produced by the end of the Mayan calendar have been good business for the suppliers of candles, matches, salt and torches in some parts of Russia, even though, as one psychiatrist noted, what happens every day can be a lot scarier than Armageddon.
Take, for instance, Mr Putin’s support for a ban on Americans adopting Russian children. This was a measure named after the horrific case of a Russian toddler who died of heatstroke in Virginia after his adoptive American father left him in a car for nine hours. The ban, however, was not born out of any wish to protect orphans. It was written out of anger. It was one of the responses to a law signed by Barack Obama named after Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who died in prison after trying to expose a government tax fraud. The Magnitsky law requires the US administration to compile a list of Russian citizens accused of human rights abuses, including those involved in Magnitsky’s case, and bar them from travelling to the US. The measure is designed to hit officials personally and where it hurts them most – to prevent them travelling to and from their luxury pads in New Jersey and accessing their copious bank accounts there. Many say, with some justice, that the same measure should apply to that greatest money-laundering centre of all – London.
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Tough Talks Expected At EU-Russia Summit
President Vladimir Putin will meet with European Union leaders in Brussels on Friday for a pre-Christmas summit, but the mood will hardly be festive.
Disputes involving visas, trade and energy have cast a shadow over EU-Russia relations in recent months, giving both sides tough issues to discuss. More broadly, the Europeans are expected to voice concern about the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent, while Moscow’s stance toward Europe is cooling following its recent foreign-policy emphasis on Eurasia.
“I have no high expectations of this summit,” said George SchЪpflin, a member of the European Parliament from Hungary’s conservative Fidesz party.
Schopflin said feelings among Brussels officials toward Moscow had definitely cooled over the past months.
“There is considerable unease about human rights,” he said by telephone.
In a highly critical motion passed last week, the European Parliament demanded that Russia end “politically motivated persecutions, arrests and detentions” among opposition members.
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US Magnitsky Law draws Kremlin ire – but many Russians support it
The new law, enacted in the US last week to target Russians involved in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, has infuriated the Kremlin, which sees it as a ‘purely political, unfriendly act.’
Russia’s State Duma will take up a stern new bill Tuesday, the Dima Yakovlev List, aimed at punishing US officials who are implicated in human rights violations against Russians, including adoptive children who die at the hands of American parents and others allegedly abused by the US justice system.
The Duma bill appears to be pure retaliation for the Magnitsky List, targeted against Russian officials involved in the 2009 prison death of Russian anti-corruption whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, which was signed into law by President Obama on Friday.
The Yakovlev List, named after one of about 15 Russian children to die at the hands of their adoptive US parents in the past two decades, will levy tough economic and visa sanctions against American officials perceived to be involved in mistreatment of Russians.
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