Posts Tagged ‘toronto star’
Whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky has posthumous day in court
Some lines you just can’t make up, even if you’re Monty Python.
The latest was from the Russian prosecutor heading the case against tax lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who exposed an alleged massive $230 million tax theft that he linked to high echelons of Russian power.
“Magnitsky is fully incriminated,” he argued, “and there are no grounds for his rehabilitation.”
No rehabilitation!
The prosecutor, apparently, was channeling the Heavenly Host this week in Moscow’s Tverskoi court: Magnitsky died more than three years ago in Butyrka prison, his body bearing signs suggesting a fatal beating, according to the Kremlin’s own human rights council.
After reporting his findings, Magnitsky had been jailed on a tax swindle charge himself – a role reversal routinely used by the authorities. His employer, William Browder of the Hermitage Capital Management investment company, was also accused and tried in absentia.
Magnitsky’s much-derided posthumous prosecution is almost unique in history. But it stopped short of exhuming his body and dragging it into court, as Italian papal officials had done in another politically-loaded case against Pope Formosus in 897 AD.
In Russia, posthumous trials were meant to give grieving families the chance to clear the names of relatives falsely executed for political crimes after the death of Joseph Stalin. But although Magnitsky’s mother protested the Moscow proceedings, her pleas were ignored.
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Dead Russian whistleblower at forefront of Cyprus bailout crisis
Sergei Magnitsky discovered a huge Russian tax fraud — $230 million had been stolen from the Russian government, said his ex-boss, William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management, a former major investor in Russia.
In life, Sergei Magnitsky was a modest Moscow tax lawyer with a dogged determination to track financial wrongdoers.
More than four years after his death, he is part of a spiralling banking crisis that has swept up Russian money launderers, Cypriot citizens and their increasingly desperate government in a tornado that could take down the tiny island state, and suck in already wobbly countries in the eurozone.
Cyprus is struggling to stave off bankruptcy with a $13 billion (10 billion euro) bailout that lenders insist must be tied to taxes on Cypriot bank accounts — touching off fury on the island and in Russia, whose high-rollers use it as a tax haven. On Wednesday Cyprus pleaded for an alternative loan from Moscow, so far without results.
Some of Cyprus’s bailout woes may be linked with Magnitsky’s quest for justice, said his ex-boss, William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management, a former major investor in Russia, who hired him to probe murky Russian tax refunds in the mid-2000s.
“Sergei discovered a huge Russian tax fraud,” said Browder in a telephone interview. “He found that $230 million was stolen from the Russian government. But we knew there would be no accountability, so we followed the money ourselves.”
Magnitsky said he had found a “web of corruption” spun by Russian tax officials who allegedly masterminded the biggest Russian tax heist of the century.
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Russia faces questions over acquittal at troubling trial; Charges quashed after Putin denied torture of whistleblower
Russia entered the New Year with new questions hanging over its human rights record, as a judge acquitted the only person charged in the 2009 death of whistle-blowing Moscow tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
It followed months of worsening relations with Washington, which has slapped sanctions against 60 people said to have played roles in Magnitsky’s death. The Russian parliament hit back with a bill forbidding Americans to adopt Russian orphans.
Last week negligence charges were quashed against Dmitry Kratov, who was responsible for medical care in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, at the time the severely ailing Magnitsky, 37, died on the floor of a jail cell with marks of a savage beating.
Magnitsky had been detained and allegedly tortured after uncovering evidence that pointed to senior officials he believed were implicated in the biggest tax fraud scheme in Russian history.
But turning the tables, Russian prosecutors now plan to try Magnitsky posthumously on charges of criminal fraud, along with his former boss, William Browder, who heads the London-based firm Hermitage Capital Management. They allege that the pair conspired in the tax-theft scheme.
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