Posts Tagged ‘reuters’
U.S. Treasury Adds 12 Russians to ‘Magnitsky List’
The U.S. has sanctioned 12 Russians for human rights abuses, including officials who allegedly withheld medical care from lawyer Sergei Magnitsky who died in prison after exposing large-scale corruption in Russia.
The U.S. Treasury Department, which announced the action on Tuesday, did not link it with the confrontation between Washington and Moscow over the Ukraine crisis, which has led the U.S. to target a number of senior Russian officials with sanctions.
The Treasury said in a statement that the sanctions would freeze any U.S. assets held by the 12 individuals and bar Americans from doing business with them.
Since 2012, the U.S. has targeted Russians for human rights abuses under a law named for Russian lawyer Magnitsky, who allegedly uncovered tax fraud that involved Russian officials.
The State Department has placed 18 Russians on a public list of those affected, and a handful of other senior officials are on a list that was not made public.
Last year, Russia convicted Magnitsky of tax evasion even after his death.
The people sanctioned on Tuesday included prison doctors, the judge who oversaw his posthumous trial and a banker alleged to have masterminded the conspiracy he uncovered.
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UK court throws out Russian Magnitsky libel case
London’s High Court on Monday threw out a libel suit brought against British investment fund manager Bill Browder by a Russian former police officer who denies allegations that he played a part in the death of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Pavel Karpov, a former Russian Interior Ministry investigator who is on the “Magnitsky list” of people barred from the United States over the lawyer’s death, was suing Browder over four videos and two articles linking Karpov to the case.
Magnitsky, who was acting for Browder and his Hermitage Capital Management at the time, was arrested after accusing Russian officials of a $230-million fraud, and died in prison in suspicious circumstances in 2009.
In Monday’s High Court judgement, Mr Justice Simon said: “I have concluded that these proceedings should be struck out as abuse of the (court) process …”
The judge also found that there was “a degree of artificiality” about Karpov trying to protect his reputation in Britain.
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U.S. wants to seize assets tied to Russian tax refund scheme
U.S. authorities are looking to seize luxury apartments and other property they say Russian companies used to launder proceeds from a $230 million tax fraud.
The scheme was uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in a Russian jail, U.S. prosecutors said in a civil complaint filed in New York on Tuesday.
According to the complaint, the organization stole corporate identities belonging to the Hermitage Fund, an investment fund operating in Russia, and used them to make fraudulent claims for tax refunds.
“As alleged, a Russian criminal enterprise sought to launder some of its billions in ill-gotten rubles through the purchase of pricey Manhattan real estate,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.
The organization included officials at two Russian tax offices, Olga Stepanova and Yelena Khimina, who approved the refunds of approximately $230 million, according to the complaint. Stepanova and Khimina could not be immediately reached for comment.
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Libel suit over Magnitsky allegations challenged in London court
British investment fund manager Bill Browder has asked a London court to throw out a libel suit brought against him by a Russian former police officer who denies allegations that he played a part in the death of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, court documents show.
Pavel Karpov, a former Russian Interior Ministry investigator who is on the “Magnitsky list” of people barred from the United States over the lawyer’s death, is suing Browder over four videos and two articles linking Karpov to the case.
Magnitsky, who was acting for Browder and his Hermitage Capital Management at the time, was arrested after accusing Russian officials of a $230-million fraud, and died in prison in suspicious circumstances.
He was posthumously found guilty of tax evasion by a Moscow court on July 11 this year and Browder was convicted in absentia and sentenced to nine years in jail in the same trial, which was criticised by both the United States and the European Union.
Browder’s campaign to vindicate Magnitsky helped to bring about the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which bars Russians suspected of involvement in the lawyer’s death from the United States and freezes their assets there.
During a two-day hearing at the London High Court, which Browder attended, his lawyers argued that Karpov’s libel suit against him was an abuse of process.
“An avowed purpose of (Karpov) in pursuing the claims, to attack his inclusion on the United States government’s Magnitsky list, is not an appropriate use of the process of the court,” the lawyers wrote in a document presented to the judge.
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Russia convicts lawyer Magnitsky in posthumous trial
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in prison in suspicious circumstances, was found guilty of tax evasion on Thursday in a posthumous trial that has further damaged President Vladimir Putin’s reputation in the West.
The Moscow court also convicted Magnitsky’s former client William Browder, a British investment fund boss who has led an international campaign to expose corruption and punish Russian officials he blames for Magnitsky’s death in 2009.
Browder, tried in absentia, was sentenced to nine years’ jail in the case, which deepened U.S. and European Union concerns over human rights and the rule of law in Putin’s Russia.
“Today’s verdict will go down in history as one of the most shameful moments for Russia since the days of Josef Stalin,” Browder, who is unlikely to be extradited from Britain to Russia, said in an emailed statement.
Amnesty International called Magnitsky’s prosecution – Russia’s first posthumous trial – “deeply sinister”, saying it “set a dangerous precedent that could open a whole new chapter in Russia’s worsening human rights record.”
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Washington to Release Magnitsky Blacklist Today
The Kremlin was bracing for the release late Friday of a U.S. blacklist of Russians that could include Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
At the same time, the authorities were preparing to release their own blacklist with U.S. citizens.
Washington was expected to release its blacklist at 2 p.m. (10 p.m. Moscow time). The list, required under the Magnitsky Act signed into law in December, aims to punish Russian officials implicated of human rights violations by barring their entry into the U.S. and depriving them of U.S.-based assets.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman acknowledged Friday that the release of the blacklists would further strain relations between the two countries.
“The appearance of any kind of blacklist will, of course, have a negative impact on Russian-U.S. relations,” Peskov said.
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Russia warns U.S. on human rights law, seeks to limit damage
The forthcoming publication of a list of Russians barred from the United States over alleged human rights abuses will severely strain relations, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said on Friday, but he also sought to limit the damage.
“The appearance of any lists will doubtless have a very negative effect on bilateral Russian-American relations,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters while accompanying Putin on a trip to eastern Siberia.
“At the same time, these bilateral relations are very multifaceted, and even under the burden of such possible negative manifestations … they still have many prospects for further development and growth.”
President Barack Obama must submit to U.S. lawmakers by Saturday a list of Russians to be barred entry to the United States under a law penalizing Moscow for alleged human rights abuses. Their assets in the United States will also be frozen.
The Magnitsky Act is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in a Moscow jail in 2009 while awaiting trial on tax evasion charges. Relatives and former colleagues say he was jailed by the same officials he had accused of stealing $230 million from the state through fraudulent tax rebates.
His death underscored the dangers of challenging the Russian state and deepened Western concerns about human rights and the rule of law in Russia.
Passage of the Magnitsky Act in December added to tension in ties already strained by disagreement over issues ranging from the conflict in Syria to Russia’s treatment of Kremlin critics and Western-funded non-governmental organizations since Putin returned to the Kremlin for a six-year term last May.
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Russian court brushes aside lawyer’s protest in posthumous trial
A Russian judge said on Friday the posthumous trial of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky would continue despite a protest from a court-appointed defense lawyer who argued the state had no right to try a dead man without his relatives’ consent.
Judge Igor Alisov’s decision appeared to underscore Russia’s determination to press ahead with a trial that has caused an outcry among rights groups and added to Western concerns about human rights and the rule of law under President Vladimir Putin.
Magnitsky, a lawyer working for Hermitage Capital Management, once one of the biggest investors in Russia, was arrested shortly after accusing Russian officials of stealing $230 million from the state through fraudulent tax refunds.
He died in November 2009, after nearly a year in jail during which he said he was denied medical treatment. A Kremlin human rights council has aired suspicions he was beaten to death, but Putin has dismissed allegations of foul play.
Russia has abandoned investigations into Magnitsky’s death, for which nobody has been held criminally responsible, and in 2011 reopened a tax evasion case against the dead lawyer despite opposition from his family.
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U.S. debates how severely to penalize Russia in human rights spat
In a controversy underscoring continued stresses in U.S.-Russia relations, Obama administration officials are debating how many Russian officials to ban from the United States under a new law meant to penalize Moscow for alleged human rights abuses.
The debate’s outcome, expected in about two weeks, is likely to illustrate how President Barack Obama will handle what critics say is a crackdown on dissent in Russia and set the tone for Washington-Moscow relations in the president’s second term.
The new law is named for Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old anti-corruption lawyer who died in his jail cell in 2009. It requires the United States to deny visas and freeze the U.S. financial assets of Russians linked to the case, or to other alleged violations of human rights in Russia.
The act was passed in December as part of a broader bill to expand U.S. trade with Russia, and Obama signed it December 14. But the White House was never keen on the rights legislation, arguing that it was unnecessary because Washington had imposed visa restrictions on some Russians thought to have played a role in Magnitsky’s death. The United States has declined to name those people.
The Magnitsky Act says the president must publish by mid-April the list of accused human rights abusers – or explain to Congress why their names can’t be published. The reasons for not publishing must be tied to national security.
U.S. officials said there are differences within the Obama administration over what kind of list to produce – short or long – or whether to even produce two lists, one for the visa bans and another for the asset freezes.
“The difference is essentially between those who don’t want to piss off the Russian government any more than we absolutely have to, and those who don’t want to piss off Congress any more than we have to,” a State Department official said on condition of anonymity.
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