INTERPOL REBUFFS RUSSIA ON HUNT FOR BRITON, A KREMLIN CRITIC
Interpol has rejected a Russian request for a worldwide police hunt for William F. Browder, a British investment banker and a Kremlin nemesis who has made no secret of his whereabouts or of his battle against the government of President Vladimir V. Putin over accusations of human rights abuses.
The decision, announced on Friday by Interpol, to delete all information about Mr. Browder from its databases amounted to a rare — and sharp — rebuke of Russia for trying to use international law enforcement agencies in a political dispute.
Mr. Browder, once the largest private foreign investor in Russia, has crusaded against Russia’s government since the death of his lawyer, Sergei L. Magnitsky, in a Russian prison in 2009, apparently after he was denied proper medical care.
Mr. Magnitsky was arrested while trying to expose a government corruption scheme, in which a company once owned by Mr. Browder was used to file a fraudulent $230 million tax return.
In December, President Obama signed a law named for Mr. Magnitsky that aims to punish human rights abuses in Russia by prohibiting Russians accused of such violations from traveling to the United States or holding financial assets there. Russia retaliated with its own law on human rights abuses by Americans, and barred American citizens from adopting Russian children.
Mr. Browder was a major force behind the American legislation and has been pushing for similar laws to be adopted in Europe.
Mr. Putin and other officials have brushed off questions about why no one has been convicted in Mr. Magnitsky’s death, and they have increasingly sought to portray Mr. Magnitsky and Mr. Browder as criminals.
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Interpol rejects arrest warrant for dead Russia lawyer’s boss
International police agency Interpol has rejected a Russian request to issue an international arrest warrant for the former employer of late lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, saying the case is of “political nature”.
Magnitsky died in prison in 2009 after revealing a massive fraud scheme. At the time he blew the whistle he was working for US-born British citizen William Browder, the biggest foreign investor in Russia in the past decade, who has now become a target for Russian authorities.
In a statement issued on Friday, Interpol said it had “deleted all information in relation to William Browder following a recommendation by the independent Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF)”.
After studying the case, it said the CCF had concluded it “was of a predominantly political nature and recommended that all information be deleted from Interpol’s databases”.
Browder is the founder of the Hermitage Capital hedge fund where Magnitsky worked when he went public with details of massive fraud by state officials. Shortly afterwards Magnitsky himself was charged with tax evasion.
Magnitsky died in detention after having spent 11 months on remand in squalid prisons and is currently on a controversial posthumous trial.
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Interpol Rejects Russia’s Bid for Help in Browder Case
The international police agency Interpol has deleted from its database all information in relation to UK-based investor William Browder, the organization said in a statement on Friday.
Browder, who heads the Hermitage Capital equity fund, is a former boss of deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and a prominent campaigner for justice in his case. Magnitsky’s 2009 death in a Moscow jail triggered a furious diplomatic row between Moscow and Washington.
Russia put Browder on an international wanted list following Moscow’s Tverskoi Court arrest warrant issued last month. On Monday Moscow also requested Interpol to issue a “blue notice” for Browder, requiring all 190 member states to “collect additional information about a person’s identity, location or activities in relation to a crime,” The Telegraph reported.
The issue was considered by the independent Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF) on Friday.
“The CCF studied a complaint brought before it by Browder and concluded that the case was of a predominantly political nature and recommended that all information be deleted from Interpol’s databases,” Interpol said in a statement posted on its website.
“Immediately upon receipt of the CCF’s decision, the Interpol General Secretariat followed their recommendation,” the statement reads.
The General Secretariat has informed all member countries about the decision.
The Russian Interior Ministry has so far only requested Interpol to gather information on Browder, not to arrest him, a ministry spokesman told RIA Novosti on Saturday.
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Interpol Stands Up to Putin
The international police organization Interpol on Friday rejected Russia’s request for help in arresting a hedge-fund chief who has accused the Russians of looting his fund.
William Browder, a London-based investor, has stubbornly railed against Russian corruption since the arrest and death in a Moscow prison of Sergei Magnitsky — a lawyer for Browder’s Hermitage Capital. Magnitsky exposed a $230 million tax fraud that seemed to involve Russian police, tax officials and organized criminals (see “Crime and Punishment in Putin’s Russia,” April 16, 2011). A Moscow criminal court issued a warrant for Browder’s arrest on April 27, and Interpol duly put out an “all points bulletin” asking its 190 member states to detain Browder for extradition to Russia.
But after deliberations at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, the police agency rejected Russia’s request as having a “predominant political character.”
“This will be very humiliating for Putin,” Browder told Barron’s. “His whole position on the Magnitsky case has been rejected by an independent international law enforcement body.”
As an organization designed to apprehend international criminal fugitives, Interpol’s constitution bars the agency from matters of “a political, military, religious or racial character.” But the 90-year-old organization rarely refuses requests like Russia’s. Browder says that only about 3% of requests to Interpol are reviewed for impropriety by the agency’s governing committee.
Browder successfully lobbied for the December 2012 passage of a U.S. law that bans travel and freezes assets of Russian officials involved in the Magnitsky affair. Russia retaliated with its own list of sanctioned U.S. officials, and also forbade the adoption of its orphans by Americans. Russian prosecutors launched a criminal case against Magnitsky, posthumously, and Browder, in absentia, charging them with improperly purchasing shares of the oil and gas giant Gazprom about a decade ago, in an investment that Hermitage made with no government objections at the time.
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INTERPOL statement following decision by independent Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files
LYON, France – The INTERPOL General Secretariat has deleted all information in relation to William Browder following a recommendation by the independent Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF).
At its session today, Friday 24 May, the CCF studied a complaint brought before it by Mr Browder and concluded that the case was of a predominantly political nature and recommended that all information be deleted from INTERPOL’s databases.
Immediately upon receipt of the CCF’s decision, the INTERPOL General Secretariat followed their recommendation.
In addition, the General Secretariat has informed all member countries which had received the diffusion in relation to Mr Browder of the CCF’s findings and recommendation.
INTERPOL has no further comment to make on this individual case. займ на карту онлайн займы https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php https://www.zp-pdl.com онлайн займы
Norway Has No Plans for Magnitsky Sanctions
Norway has reiterated its concern about an investigation into the 2009 prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky but said it has no plans to impose any sanctions.
“Norway has no tradition of introducing unilateral actions against individual countries or persons. This policy remains also in the Magnitsky case,” the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow said in a statement.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, writing about Magnitsky in a letter to a group of the country’s lawmakers earlier this month, said Olso was following the case closely but its policy was to only accept sanctions reached by the UN Security Council.
In response to Magnitsky’s death, the U.S. has passed the Magnitsky Act that blacklists Russian officials implicated of human rights violations. Magnitsky’s supporters have been pushing other countries to adopt similar sanctions.
Norway’s foreign minister said that while Oslo would stop short of imposing sanctions, it would use its membership in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe to raise the human rights agenda in Russia.
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Russian Spy Games: Ryan Fogle and the New Cold War
The case of Ryan Fogle, a 29-year-old third secretary in the political department of the U.S. embassy in Moscow who was arrested last week by Russian authorities, sparked a media furor worthy of the heights of the Cold War. The Russian government accused him of being a CIA officer, suggesting that he had been sent to the North Caucasus to meet with Russian security officials and to follow up on leads about the Tsarnaev brothers, the two ethnic Chechens implicated in the recent Boston bombing. Fogle left Moscow speedily. But in case anyone thought the episode was a one-off, news has also leaked of another: the expulsion on May 5 of Thomas Firestone, a prominent American lawyer in Moscow who used to work at the Department of Justice and is a caustic and well-informed observer of official corruption in Russia. The Russian security service, the FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti), had apparently tried, and failed, to recruit him.
Although it would be a scandal if the United States were caught spying on Canada or the United Kingdom, no one should be surprised that the United States spies on Russia — or vice versa. Russia is not a member of the Five Eyes, the intelligence-sharing alliance between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which is the closest thing the intelligence community has to a trusting family. Russia is not even a member of NATO — and NATO allies, such as Greece and Turkey, spy on each other all the time.
For all the talk of resets, moreover, Russia and the United States remain adversaries. Russia is no longer the United States’ top priority, but it does rehearse military strikes on NATO targets, its media is full of anti-Western propaganda, and the country’s security services have a mixed record when it comes to dealing with violent Islamist extremists. Sometimes it represses them harshly; sometimes it uses them to serve Russian interests. The Russians captured Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al Qaeda, in 1996, but let him go for reasons that remain unclear.
So it is only natural that CIA officers at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, working under diplomatic cover, seek out and cultivate potential sources. And in fact, the CIA’s recent track record of recruiting Russians is excellent. It flipped Alexander Poteyev, the number two in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) department dealing with the United States. Poteyev, in turn, betrayed the service’s crown jewels: its ten undercover sleeper agents in North America. That led to the arrest of Anna Chapman, a Russian national who had partied her way through London and New York, probably to build up a cover story for use later, and her colleagues. Poteyev, who was on the verge of being caught, was smuggled out of Russia in a textbook CIA exfiltration operation. Shock waves from that continue to provide other victories. German authorities arrested Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, Russians who had lived in Germany for more than two decades under false identities and had apparently passed information on German, EU, and NATO security policies to the SVR.
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Is Interpol fighting for truth and justice, or helping the villains?
Most of us take an entirely positive view of Interpol, the cross-border crime-busting organisation, even though we have only the haziest view of what it actually does. This is at least partly thanks to the influence of Biggles, hero of schoolboy fiction, who used to go on perilous missions for Interpol to track down international felons. Agatha Christie was another powerful influence. Her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot might have a discrete word with well-placed Interpol friends when he wanted information on some master criminal.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, Interpol is no longer the virtuous force it was. These days it doesn’t just chase villains. It aids and abets them. Its former president, Jackie Selebi, was recently found guilty of taking bribes from a drugs baron.
More worrying by far, there is now overwhelming evidence that Interpol’s channels are happy to assist secret police from some of the world’s most vicious regimes as they target and then persecute internal dissidents. It may once have been the case that it was the sort of organisation that helped honest citizens sleep more soundly at night. But many of the things Interpol has done over the past few years ought to wake us up at night, screaming.
Let us consider the appalling case of Bill Browder, the former chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, whose colleague Sergei Magnitsky died four years ago in a Russian prison, almost certainly tortured to death on the orders of the FSB state security service.
Ever since then, Mr Browder, a man of courage and high principle, has demanded posthumous justice for Mr Magnitsky. In return the Russian authorities accuse the financier of corporate theft. Earlier this month, the FSB took its latest retaliatory action. It demanded that Interpol issue an “all points bulletin” to help locate Mr Browder – a move which is presumably intended to lead to his arrest and extradition. Any decent organisation would have dismissed this outrageous demand out of hand. Not Interpol, which is expected to decide whether to comply with the Russian request at a meeting today at its Lyon headquarters. There is every chance it will, if precedent is anything to go by.
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Browder Refused Safe Passage to Germany for Magnitsky Event
The European Magnitsky Law event has been canceled after German authorities refused to grant safe passage to William Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital, who was due to speak at the event in Berlin on May 27.
Germany’s refusal to grant Browder safe passage comes after Russian authorities filed a request with Interpol to monitor the investor’s international movements. Browder is wanted in Russia on charges of tax evasion.
Browder has denied the charges and tied them to his work with late lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested in 2008 after reporting the embezzlement of $230 million by tax authorities.
Magnitsky later died in a pre-trial detention center after being refused treatment for a medical problem. The Kremlin human rights council also ruled that the lawyer had been beaten before his death.
In April this year, the U.S. imposed sanctions on a number of Russian officials implicated in the Magnitsky case. Browder, who has campaigned for the adoption of a similar law in Europe, was due to speak at the Magnitsky Law event next Monday.
Germany’s refusal to protect Browder at the event has drawn the ire of the Hermitage group, who released a statement saying “the German authorities are … becoming an accessory to the Russian cover-up of Magnitsky’s killers.” unshaven girl займы онлайн на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php займы онлайн на карту срочно
To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
