Posts Tagged ‘stepanova’
Tax Official Cleared in Magnitsky Case
Russian investigators cleared a Moscow tax official off the “Magnitsky list” who was implicated in a $230 million swindle.
The Investigative Committee said it found no evidence that Olga Stepanova was involved in the alleged tax return fraud scheme, Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported Friday.
The committee was also cited as saying it could not question two other tax officials linked to the case. It said earlier they have left the country.
Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has claimed that Stepanova authorized an illegal tax return in 2007 that robbed companies linked to Hermitage of 5.4 billion rubles ($230 million).
Magnitsky was himself arrested after the exposé on unrelated tax evasion charges he called fabricated.
He died in custody in 2009 of health problems amid claims that he was denied treatment and subjected to physical abuse.
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Russian officials: Banned by the US, on holiday in the EU
Russian officials banned from entering the US on accusations of corruption and conspiracy to murder are frequent visitors in EU countries, leaked information shows.
Pavel Karpov, a senior investigator in the Russian interior ministry, Artem Kuznetsov from the ministry’s economic crimes unit, and Olga Stepanova, a director in the Moscow tax authority, feature on a list of 18 persona non grata published by the US state department on 12 April.
All 18 were banned for their roles in an affair involving embezzlement of Russian tax money and the death of the man who exposed them – Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky.
But Karpov, Kuznetsov and Stepanova stand out as leading protagonists.
Karpov and Kuznetsov organised the seizure of corporate seals and documents from Magnitsky’s former employer, British investment firm Hermitage Capital, used to expedite the fraud.
Kuznetsov also organised Magnitsky’s arrest and pre-trial detention, in which he died.
Meanwhile, Stepanova authorised a tax refund of $153 million, which flowed into the private bank of Dmitry Kluyev, a convicted criminal, who went on to launder the money in six EU jurisdictions and in Switzerland.
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A Russian Lawyer’s Death Triggers a Global Money Hunt
In 2009, a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow jail after uncovering the biggest known tax fraud in Russian history—a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case has touched off a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of having a role in Magnitsky’s death and Moscow retaliating on Dec. 28 by barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans.
Now about that $230 million. Russian authorities said it couldn’t be found because essential records were destroyed in a truck crash. A sawmill worker and a convicted burglar pleaded guilty to masterminding the heist, which involved filing bogus tax-refund claims. Both got five-year sentences.
Magnitsky’s associates, though, keep looking for the cash. An investigation spearheaded by his former client, Hermitage Capital Management, a London-based investment fund, has traced $134 million through bank accounts and shell companies in at least 17 countries. Banking records obtained by Hermitage and reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that millions wound up in offshore accounts and real estate owned by Russian officials, their relatives, and the former owner of a Russian bank. Authorities in four of these countries confirm that they have opened money-laundering investigations.
In the Magnitsky case, Hermitage accuses government officials of stealing from taxpayers, and the Kremlin has made no apparent effort to recover the money. “That’s the most awful thing—it is our money,” says Roman Anin, a reporter at the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta who has worked with Hermitage on its investigation. Russia’s Interior Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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US starts a new ‘cold war’ over Magnitsky affair: Furious Russia vows to list Americans blocked from entering country, after US votes to name and shame corrupt officials
The Independent. Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs described ‘biased approach’ as ‘nothing but a vindictive desire to counter Russia in world affairs’
SHAUN WALKER, JEROME TAYLOR MOSCOW FRIDAY 07 DECEMBER 2012
One of Russia’s top foreign policy officials responded furiously and promised that Russia would indeed answer with its own list of Americans to be banned from entry to Russia.
“The reciprocal list will be fairly significant, if we name those behind Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib, and the CIA secret jails, Mikhail Margelov, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia’s Federation Council.
“The list will include those who have violated human rights [in the Middle East], and that would be according to global opinion, and not just the opinion of this Mr Browder, who some experts feel is simply using the Magnitsky List as a diversion.”
However, according to a poll by the Levada Centre, an independent Russian polling agency, 39 percent of Russians who had heard about the Magnitsky Act approved of it, rising to 45% among Muscovites.
Yesterday the US Senate voted to name and shame Russian officials involved in corruption and to forbid them from travelling to America or investing there.
The overwhelming vote in favour of the new law prompted a furious response from Moscow – as well as demands from two former British Foreign Secretaries, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and David Miliband, for a similar ban to be introduced by the UK.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs hit back, describing the “biased approach” as “nothing but a vindictive desire to counter Russia in world affairs”.
The Ministry published a series of furious remarks on its official Twitter feed: “It is perplexing and preposterous to hear human rights complaints from the US, where torture and kidnapping are legal in the 21st century. Apparently, Washington has forgotten what year this is and still thinks the Cold War is going on.
“The US decision to impose visa and financial sanctions on certain Russian citizens is like something out of the theatre of the absurd. Obviously, US passage of the ‘Magnitsky Law’ will adversely affect the prospects of bilateral cooperation.”
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The lawyer and businessman who tried to take on the criminal gang
Sergei Magnitsky, 37, was a lawyer for the US firm Firestone Duncan and represented the London-based hedge fund Hermitage Capital. Hermitage’s founder Bill Browder was once Russia’s biggest foreign investor until he was banned from the country on national security grounds in 2005.
Mr Magnitsky testified against a group of Interior Ministry police officers that he had accused of fraudulently reclaiming $230 million (£144 million) in state taxes paid by Hermitage companies in 2008. He alleged that they had raided the law firm to seize documents relating to the companies, and had then changed the ownership to carry out the largest tax fraud in Russian history.
The same police arrested him a month later and accused him of tax evasion. He complained of repeated torture and beatings to try to force him to withdraw his testimony, while family members were barred from visiting him.
Mr Magnitsky was denied medical treatment for his illnesses and died in pre-trial detention shortly after being beaten in his cell by a group of eight guards as an ambulance waited for more than an hour outside the prison in November 2009.
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A $230 million fraud – and a trail of death that just keeps growing
With its sweeping vistas of the Persian Gulf and central location in the Middle East’s glitziest city, Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah is one of the most exclusive patches of real estate in the world. Created in the shape of a palm tree, the artificial archipelago is home to the cream of a city already bulging with the super wealthy. It’s not the kind of place you might expect a lowly Moscow tax official with a declared family annual income of $38,000 to own a $3 million beach front villa. How could someone with a comparatively low-level civil service job become so wealthy?
That is the question Swiss prosecutors are currently probing as part of a complicated investigation into an alleged Russian money laundering scheme through Swiss bank accounts that began when a whistle blower handed them a damning dossier of evidence at the start of this year. The whistle blower, Alexander Perepilichnyy, died two weeks ago suddenly at the age of 44. But the investigation continues.
The origins of this tale, which sounds like a KGB era thriller but is in fact a depressingly real indictment of modern day Russia, can be traced back to a cold jail cell in Burtyrka Prison in November 2009 where Sergei Magnitsky, a pioneering Moscow lawyer lay dying.
Magnitsky, a charismatic and forensically bright father of two, had been hired by the British based investment fund Hermitage Capital Management to investigate a monumental tax fraud which had been carried out against them. Nine months earlier he pointed the finger of blame at a network of Interior Ministry officials and Russian underworld figures expecting his revelation to be the start of a sustained police investigation into how $230million in Russian taxpayers’ money was squirrelled away in one of Russia’s largest declared frauds.
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U.S. House to take up Russian rights bill as another graft case comes to light in Moscow
As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to take up legislation known as the Magnitsky bill this week, a newspaper reported Wednesday that a key figure in the Russian corruption case that inspired the measure is involved in a two-year-old criminal investigation.
Olga Stepanova was the head of a tax office that approved a fraudulent $230 million refund in 2007, a scheme revealed by whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky before he was arrested. He died in jail three years ago Friday. Now, the newspaper Vedomosti reports that criminal investigators have been following a separate tax-refund case — from 2009, worth $130 million — in which Stepanova was a principal actor.
The Vedomosti article was sparked by the burgeoning corruption cases that have made news here over the past few weeks. They began with an investigation in late October into Russia’s Defense Ministry that has claimed the job of one of President Vladimir Putin’s most loyal colleagues, Anatoly Serdyukov.
Stepanova worked for former defense minister Serdyukov when he was head of the tax agency, and she later transferred to work under him at the Defense Ministry. She no longer works there and has not been directly linked to the Defense Ministry scandal, which involves the sale of millions of dollars worth of property at rock-bottom prices.
Andrei Piontkovsky, a political analyst, suggested Wednesday that without Serdyukov’s protection, Stepanova may have been sacrificed in a last-ditch bid to mollify the West and perhaps even derail the House bill, which would put strict banking and visa sanctions on Russian officials associated with the Magnitsky case.
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Police raid on Moscow love nest splits Putin’s inner circle
A dawn police raid at the luxury Moscow flat of the blonde director of a defence procurement agency at first seemed merely the latest in a long line of corruption scandals to hit the Russian government.
But when news broke that a bleary-eyed Anatoly Serdyukov, the defence minister, had opened the young woman’s front door when police came knocking, it became clear that this was altogether bigger news.
The titillating detail seemed to break the Russian media’s traditional refusal to delve into the private lives of politicians.
It appears that the scandal became public because Serdyukov, 50, is married to Yulia, the daughter of Viktor Zubkov, 71, a deputy prime minister, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and one of the most powerful men in Russia.
Serdyukov, who is reported to owe his meteoric rise from furniture salesman to minister to the influence of his father-in-law, incurred Zubkov’s wrath by allegedly having an affair with Yevgenia Vasilyeva — the official whose flat was raided — and in the process humiliating his daughter.
The case is mushrooming into an embarrassing scandal that may lift the veil on corruption, nepotism, selective justice and bitter Kremlin infighting under Putin’s rule.
Prosecutors searched Vasilyeva’s flat for several hours as part of a £60m fraud investigation into Oboronservis, a state-owned company that manages supplies to the armed forces. Vasilyeva, 33, who was until recently the head of the defence ministry’s vast property portfolio, is one of the company’s directors.
Officers from the prosecutor’s investigative committee said they had seized documents at her flat and confiscated more than £60,000 in cash plus antiques, paintings and hundreds of items of jewellery, including many diamonds. They also searched Oboronservis’s offices and have charged five people who, they allege, skimmed off large personal profits by using the company to sell state assets at far below their market value.
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British aristocrat linked to Sergei Magnitsky case
A British aristocrat has been linked to the suspected laundering of the fraudulent gains of Russian criminals involved in the death of anti-corruption campaigner, Sergei Magnitsky.
Andrew Moray Stuart, heir to the Viscountcy of Stuart of Findhorn, has been named alongside other Britons in a legal complaint filed with the City of London police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
Lawyers for Hermitage Capital Management, the UK hedge fund whose Moscow lawyer – Mr Magnitsky – uncovered the alleged $230m (£140m) fraud, have called for a formal investigation by the economic crimes department into alleged money laundering.
Mr Stuart, who lives in Mauritius and Dubai but is named as a director of more than 500 UK companies, is alleged to have transferred about $1.4m through a British Virgin Islands’ shell operation on behalf of Vladlen Stepanov, the husband of a senior tax official at the centre of the alleged fraud.
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