Posts Tagged ‘sydney morning herald’
Russia tries dead man who dobbed in tax scam
The defendant cage stood eloquently empty as the posthumous trial of the whistle-blowing auditor Sergei Magnitsky got under way in Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court on Friday.
Mr Magnitsky, who died in custody in 2009 after having exposed a scam by Russian tax officials, is accused of tax evasion, for which a six-year jail sentence could be handed down. His co-defendant, American-born investor William Browder, is being tried on the same charges in absentia.
The case is widely seen as an attempt by Moscow to justify itself following the adoption in the US of the Magnitsky Act, barring officials connected with the auditor’s death entering America.
Mr Magnitsky died in pretrial detention from a mixture of medical neglect and physical abuse but no officials have been brought to justice; indeed on Tuesday Russia closed the investigation into Magnitsky’s death for ”lack of evidence”.
Rather, the authorities believe they can show that Mr Magnitsky and his client, Mr Browder, evaded $US16.8 million in taxes.
The posthumous prosecution had nothing to do with Mr Magnitsky’s claims to have uncovered official corruption, the Investigative Committee said.
Mr Magnitsky’s mother Natalya and widow, also called Natalya, have expressed their anguish at the trial, saying it added to the loss they had already suffered.
But Judge Igor Alisov said the court had ”the right to examine the case against the dead man, including with the aims of rehabilitating him”.
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Russia opens macabre show trial
Russian authorities, in a legal twist bizarre even by their standards, are pushing ahead with the trial of anti-corruption whistle blower Sergei Magnitsky posthumously for alleged ”tax evasion”.
The prosecution of a dead man – a first for Russia, something that not even Joseph Stalin did – promises to be as shocking and puzzling from the Western perspective as last year’s inquisition of the punk rockers of Pussy Riot.
The trial, scheduled to begin on Monday in Moscow, will feature two empty chairs facing the judge, one for the dead lawyer and one for his former client, London-based investor William Browder, who will be tried on the same charges of ”tax evasion” in absentia.
The Kremlin, operating from its own logic, needs to discredit these two men in order to shore up its position, both domestically and internationally, political analysts and lawyers say.
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Mr Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest investor in Russia until the fund manager started exposing massive corruption, irritating the Russians so badly that they declared him a ”threat to national security” and expelled him in 2005. Mr Browder wound up his business in Russia and evacuated his staff.
”I didn’t want to end up like Khodorkovsky [Mikhail, the jailed billionaire oil tycoon],” he said. ”I thought that was the end of it but it turned out to be the beginning of the worst possible nightmare.”
He said that after he left Russia, his offices were raided and seized documents were used to fraudulently re-register some of his companies.
He hired Magnitsky to investigate. The lawyer discovered that the scammers, unable to steal assets because they had already been liquidated, applied instead for a refund on $US230 million of taxes Hermitage Capital had paid.
”They didn’t steal from us but from the Russian state,” Mr Browder said.
”It was the largest tax refund in Russian history. It was approved in one day, on Christmas Eve 2007. It could only have been done with the complicity of senior officials.”
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