Posts Tagged ‘businessweek’
CIA Spy Caught in Recruitment Sting, Russia Says
Russian operatives caught a CIA agent trying to recruit a member of the special services in Moscow with a promise to pay as much as $1 million a year for information, the Federal Security Service said.
The spy, identified as Ryan Christopher Fogle, worked undercover as the third secretary of the political section of the U.S. embassy, the FSB, as the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB is known in Russian, said on its website today.
The man the FSB identified as Fogle was detained last night in a sting operation that included video footage and photographs that were later distributed to media outlets and broadcast on state television. Fogle was returned to the embassy today, an on-duty FSB officer said by phone.
One photo shows the contents of the backpack the FSB said Fogle was carrying at the time of his arrest neatly arrayed on a table, including dark and light wigs, sunglasses, a compass, a map of Moscow, two knives, a notepad, a microphone, a plastic cigarette lighter and an RFID shield.
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Medvedev Courts Davos Skeptics With Better-Than-China Pitch
Russia has a $10 billion sales pitch for investors at this year’s World Economic Forum: give us your money and we’ll worry about corruption for you.
That was the line from First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week and that’s what Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will try to convince skeptical investors of tomorrow with his keynote address at the conference in Davos, Switzerland, the third by a Russian leader in five years.
Russia plans to raise a record $10 billion from asset sales this year as it seeks to stem capital flight and reverse the state’s creeping hold over the economy, Shuvalov said. The government failed to reach a similar goal last year, when it retained its ranking as the most corrupt country in the Group of 20, an organization it leads this year.
“Russia, regardless of what people are saying, is a place that people can invest, can earn,” Shuvalov said on a Jan. 18 train ride to Moscow from Kaluga, a region that has attracted investment from companies including Volkswagen AG (VOW) and AstraZeneca Plc. (AZN) “If you talk with investors, they say they invest maybe less than in China, but lose less than in China. They say people don’t know Russia.”
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A Russian Lawyer’s Death Triggers a Global Money Hunt
In 2009, a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow jail after uncovering the biggest known tax fraud in Russian history—a theft of $230 million from the national treasury. The case has touched off a diplomatic row, with the U.S. imposing sanctions on Russian officials accused of having a role in Magnitsky’s death and Moscow retaliating on Dec. 28 by barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans.
Now about that $230 million. Russian authorities said it couldn’t be found because essential records were destroyed in a truck crash. A sawmill worker and a convicted burglar pleaded guilty to masterminding the heist, which involved filing bogus tax-refund claims. Both got five-year sentences.
Magnitsky’s associates, though, keep looking for the cash. An investigation spearheaded by his former client, Hermitage Capital Management, a London-based investment fund, has traced $134 million through bank accounts and shell companies in at least 17 countries. Banking records obtained by Hermitage and reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that millions wound up in offshore accounts and real estate owned by Russian officials, their relatives, and the former owner of a Russian bank. Authorities in four of these countries confirm that they have opened money-laundering investigations.
In the Magnitsky case, Hermitage accuses government officials of stealing from taxpayers, and the Kremlin has made no apparent effort to recover the money. “That’s the most awful thing—it is our money,” says Roman Anin, a reporter at the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta who has worked with Hermitage on its investigation. Russia’s Interior Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
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U.S. Online Petition Calls for Visa Ban on Russian Lawmakers
A petition on the White House website seeking to extend travel restrictions to Russian lawmakers who proposed to ban the adoption of Russian orphans in the U.S. surpassed 25,000 signatures, triggering a review.
Russia’s lower house of parliament, the Duma, proposed the adoption ban in retaliation for a law approved by Congress this month that imposes a visa ban and asset freeze on Russian officials suspected of involvement in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and other human-rights abuses.
Magnitsky, a Russian tax attorney, died in 2009 in a Moscow prison after saying he was abused and denied medical care to force him to withdraw allegations of a $230 million tax fraud by officials.
The web petition to U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration called the Magnitsky law “a profoundly pro- Russian step” in battling corruption and expressed outrage over the Duma proposal, which will “jeopardize the lives and wellbeing” of orphans.
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