Posts Tagged ‘vedemosti’
Punishing Magnitsky One More Time
Thursday’s ruling by Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court that convicted the late Sergei Magnitsky, the Hermitage Capital lawyer who died in pretrial detention in 2009, of tax evasion charges shows how far Russia is willing to go to discredit itself.
Simultaneously, the court found Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder guilty of colluding with Magnitsky to create an illegal tax-break scheme using two of Hermitage Capital’s subsidiaries in the republic of Kalmykia. On Thursday, Browder was sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison for allegedly failing to pay more than $15 million in taxes in 2001.
Following Magnitsky’s death in November 2009, the case against him was dropped. Nonetheless, the case was resumed in August 2011, loosely based on a Constitutional Court decision stating that posthumous trials in Russia can be held when the family of a dead person requests to clear their relative of charges. But Magnitsky’s relatives never requested the trial against Sergei for the obvious reason that they don’t trust the authorities’ impartiality or their motives. What they did request and demand was an investigation into the cause of his death and a fair, honest trial against those who perpetrated the crimes against him.
But the Investigative Committee closed that investigation early this year, claiming that no crimes had been committed. The deputy head of the prison where Magnitsky was being held was acquitted, and the prosecutor who brought charges for criminal negligence against a prison doctor, who was responsible for Magnitsky’s health while in detention, suddenly withdrew his charges in early April, claiming that there was no corpus delicti.
Even before Magnitsky’s arrest, Hermitage Capital had informed the authorities that government officials had used a fraudulent tax-refund scheme to steal $230 million in state funds. After that, the officials implicated in the crime organized Magnitsky’s arrest and his inhumane conditions in a pretrial detention center. No charges were ever filed against those individuals.
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Russian paper details business interests of defence minister’s associates
Vedomosti
Article by Roman Shleynov, Dmitriy Kazmin, Filipp Sterkin, and Aleksey Nikolskiy: “He Is a Machine, Not a Person”
There have been surprising twists and turns in Minister of Defense Anatoliy Serdyukov’s life. He came from retailing to impose order in the tax service and from a civilian finance job to reform the army. Generals complain that he taunts them as little green men.
Zubkov’s son-in-law
When Serdyukov came to the Petersburg Tax Inspectorate in 2000 he was already an established furniture retailer. After graduating from the Accountancy and Economics Faculty at the Leningrad Institute of Soviet Trade in 1984 Serdyukov went into the army. He served as a conscript in the 85th Motorized Infantry Division Communications Battalion in Novosibirsk. At that time, conscripts with higher education were offered the chance to enroll on a reserve lieutenant training course after nine months. After serving for 18 months they would be discharged with an officer’s rank. This was also the path that Serdyukov chose, a former officer in the Defense Ministry central apparatus says, clarifying that in the event of a war Serdyukov would have been eligible to be drafted to serve as a regimental military commissary chief.
But Serdyukov became a strictly peacetime retailer — after leaving the army he went to work for the No. 3 Lenmebeltorg furniture store in Petersburg. It was within the Lenmebeltorg system that he rose from assistant accountant to become director and joint owner of the Petersburg industrial trading company Mebel-market formed on the basis of Lenmebeltorg.
A possible contributory factor to Serdyukov’s transition to state service was his marriage. In 2000 he married Yuliya Pokhlebenina — the daughter of Viktor Zubkov. Zubkov was a party official during Soviet times, he became Vladimir Putin’s deputy in the Petersburg Mayor’s Office in 1990, and he then moved to the tax service – by 1999 he had risen to become deputy minister for taxes and levies while retaining the post of head of the Tax Service’s Petersburg Office.
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