Scam Patrol: Following Moscow’s Money

Barron’s

Russian law enforcement jumped into action after we highlighted the sudden wealth enjoyed by some Moscow tax officials last spring. Their bureaus had handled a $230 million tax scam that victimized the hedge-fund firm Hermitage Capital and led to the 2009 prison death of Hermitage’s whistle-blowing lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky (“Crime and Punishment in Putin’s Russia,” Barron’s, April 18).

Prosecutors and police say they are reopening their criminal investigation…of Magnitsky, two years after the young lawyer died in the custody of the very officials he accused of participating in the tax scam. In pressing their case against the dead man, the cops have summoned Magnitsky’s elderly mother for interrogation. And they’ve vowed to ignore the findings of a human-rights council appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev, which concluded that Magnitsky had been framed by his arresting officers and beaten to death in jail.

If justice seems far off, the revelations continue. This month, the paper Novaya Gazeta showed government records documenting another apparent scam, in which the same Moscow tax officials approved $42 million in fraudulent refunds. The refunds supposedly returned the payment of value-added tax on transactions that involved some of the same shell companies that had appeared in the earlier tax schemes. One company claimed tax refunds for inventories that amounted to about 500 years’ worth of its reported sales. Then, the refunds disappeared into the same obscure bank that vanished with all of its records after draining away the money in the Hermitage case. онлайн займы займы без отказа https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php buy viagra online