Posts Tagged ‘charles clover’
Russia convicts Magnitsky of tax evasion in posthumous trial
A Russian court has found deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion, in a posthumous trial that has elicited widespread criticism in the west.
Magnitsky was convicted of tax evasion alongside his former client William Browder, the US-born chief executive of Hermitage Capital, who Russian authorities allege evaded about $17m in taxes.
Mr Browder, who lives in the UK and was tried in absentia, received a nine-year sentence. He has denied all charges against him. The judge closed the criminal case against Magnitsky but refused to rehabilitate him.
Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the German justice minister, condemned the verdict, saying on Twitter: “The conviction of the dead Magnitsky is further evidence of the Sovietisation of Russia.”
A spokesperson for Lady Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said the verdict “does not provide any answer to the real questions regarding the death of Mr Magnitsky”, adding that the EU would continue to raise the “disturbing” matter with the Russian government.
Magnitsky’s conviction comes almost four years after he died amid murky circumstances in a pre-trial detention centre after he had accused Russian police of complicity in a $230m tax fraud.
Mr Browder has used the subsequent years to launch an anti-corruption campaign in Magnitsky’s memory, and has been successful in his efforts to ban the officials he says were involved in Magnitsky’s death from travelling to the US or holding bank accounts there.
On Thursday Mr Browder condemned the verdict against his former lawyer. He told the Financial Times that with “the malicious pain” the trial had inflicted on Magnitsky’s family, President Vladimir Putin had “brought shame on Russia and firmly found himself a place in history for being the first western leader in a thousand years to prosecute a dead man”.
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MEPs threaten to block visa-free travel for Russian officials
Senior members of the European parliament are threatening to block a measure allowing some Russian civil servants visa-free travel to the EU unless the union in turn blacklists Russian officials linked to human-rights abuses.
On Tuesday 48 MEPs signed an open letter to demand that Brussels implement its own version of the US “Magnitsky list”, signed into law in December by President Barack Obama, which has sent US-Russia relations to their worst point in years.
The ban could be implemented only if the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, formally made it a condition of accepting visa-free travel for Russian civil servants, something the Kremlin has long sought from Brussels. So far the commission is “considering” such a condition, according to someone familiar with the situation, but could be forced to impose it if parliament had the votes to block the visa-free regime.
“Of course, if parliament makes it a condition for its consent, then at the end of the day we will need parliament on board,” the person said.
However, the commission appears to be preparing a compromise that stops short of the parliamentarians’ demands, according to an official in Brussels. Instead of a strict travel ban on certain Russian officials, it would consider restricting their access to the visa waiver.
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US lawyer expelled from Russia over fresh spy allegations
A US lawyer and former Justice Department official was expelled from Russia earlier this month after he apparently refused to co-operate with Russia’s domestic spy agency, it has emerged.
Thomas Firestone was posted to the US embassy in Moscow by the Justice Department but had left the US government to work at private law firm Baker & Mackenzie. On May 5, according to an acquaintance who requested anonymity, he was returning to Russia from a trip abroad when he was detained and interrogated at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for 15 hours and then declared persona non grata.
The acquaintance of Mr Firestone said he had been the target of a recruitment attempt by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, in March, but had refused to co-operate, and the person speculated that Mr Firestone’s expulsion was a consequence of that encounter.
Russian officials declined to comment, saying they had no information on the matter.
The case comes amid a shadowy struggle between US and Russian spy agencies that spilled over into the press this month following the arrest and expulsion of Ryan Fogle, a third political secretary at the US embassy whom the FSB detained and accused of having tried to recruit a senior Russian counterintelligence official. Mr Fogle was apparently arrested wearing a blond wig and carrying a street atlas and a compass; a videotape of his detention was broadcast on Russian television.
Russian officials told state television that they had been monitoring an increase in spy recruitments by the US over the past two years, and had previously complained to the CIA station chief in Moscow about tactics that they said “went beyond the ethical lines that exist within the security service”. They also said they had quietly expelled another US diplomat in January after a similar failed attempt to recruit a spy.
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Russia alleges $70m fraud against Browder
Russia authorities are seeking to charge former investor and shareholder activist Bill Browder with illegally obtaining Gazprom shares worth $70m, interior ministry officials announced on Tuesday.
The American fund manager based in London said the allegations were yet another attempt to intimidate him as he campaigns for Europe to adopt US-style legislation barring Russian human rights violators known as the “Magnitsky Law” named for Mr Browder’s former lawyer who died in a Russian prison in 2009.
The announcement that charges would be brought against Mr Browder followed a well-tested formula in Russia, where criminal indictments usually follow denunciation on state television. Russian network First Channel on Sunday night devoted a seven-minute slot to Mr Browder’s financial dealings in Russia prior to his ejection from the country in 2005.
The allegations themselves focus on whether Mr Browder violated any Russian laws when his fund, Hermitage Capital, used Russian companies registered in the region of Kalmykia to purchase shares in the gas monopoly between 2001 and 2004. At the time, according to presidential decree, foreigners were barred from directly owning Gazprom shares, but many funds used Russian derivative structures to play the market nonetheless.
“Browder used specially developed schemes according to which foreign companies bought liquid shares in the name of Russian legal entities, registered in zones with special tax treatment,” said Mikhail Alexandrov from the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Department on Tuesday. He also accused Mr Browder of seeking to use share holdings in Gazprom to gain a seat on the board, and to exercise influence at the gas monopoly.
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Russia’s missing billions revealed
Russia’s central bank governor has lifted the lid on $49bn in illegal capital flight last year – more than half of which, he says, was controlled “by one well-organised group of individuals” that he declined to name.
Sergei Ignatiev, due to step down in June after 11 years in his post, is seldom outspoken about any issue other than interest rates. But he unburdened himself in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Vedomosti about money leaving the country through the back door, which he said equalled 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product last year.
“This might be payment for supplies of narcotics . . . illegal imports . . . bribes and kickbacks for bureaucrats . . . and avoiding taxes,” he told the daily, which is part-owned by the Financial Times.
Russia’s central bank has access to daily monitoring data on all payments within the commercial banking system, and Mr Ignatiev said the $49bn figure was mainly drawn from analysing “payments made by Russian organisations to non-residents, the stated aims of which are clearly false”.
He added: “Apart from this, our analysis shows that more than half of the total of shady operations is conducted by firms directly or indirectly linked to each other by payments. The impression is created that they are all controlled by one well-organised group of individuals.”
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Dead lawyer to go on trial in Russia
The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, a crusading lawyer who died in prison in 2009, is set to begin in Moscow on Monday. The trial is part of an effort by Russia’s government to push back against countries adopting blacklists similar to the Magnitsky law passed last December by the US.
As far as anyone can remember, it will be the first trial of a dead defendant in Russian, or Soviet, history and most expect a speedy conviction.
Bill Browder, the head of investment fund Hermitage Capital, and Mr Magnitsky’s former chief, says he believes the trial is connected to the passage last December of the Magnitsky law in the US, which imposes a visa blacklist and asset freezes on certain Russian officials accused of human rights violations.
Mr Browder recently began a campaign to promote similar laws in Europe, starting with a trip to Paris last week.
“This is just pure vindictive nastiness because they are trying to get some sort of conviction right away,” said Mr Browder. “They can then go around the world and say: ‘Look, you’re naming a law after a convicted criminal.’”
A representative of the prosecutor’s office said it had no additional comment. “The case materials explain everything. We have nothing additional to say.”
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Russian money streams through Cyprus
A new parking scheme appeared late last year in some congested Moscow neighbourhoods. Street signs advised Muscovites either to buy a ticket at a nearby machine or text their licence plate details to a number: 7757.
Evgeny Schultz, a Moscow blogger, took a closer look. It turned out that the number 7757 had been bought by a company registered just six months previously, which itself had been founded by two Cyprus-registered companies whose ownership was unclear.
One of the names on the registration documents was the same as that of a senior adviser to the city’s department of transport and communications, which oversees the parking programme.
“This could just be a massive coincidence, of course,” Mr Schulz said, with an unmistakable note of sarcasm.
The city has defended the scheme, saying “every kopek” goes into its budget. But the episode underlines the unique, pervasive and dubious role that Cyprus plays in Russia’s economy.
In June, Cyprus became the fifth country in the eurozone to request an international bailout after lenders got caught up in the debt restructuring of Greece’s banks. Seven months later, the island is still waiting for funding amid EU fears that the island is a haven for Russian dirty money. Such fears are particularly strong in Germany and will need to be assuaged if Berlin is to back a bailout.
Estimates of the size of Russia’s deposits in Cyprus range from €8bn, according to some experts, to up to €35bn, according to a German intelligence report cited in Der Spiegel magazine.
In 2011, Cyprus was the number-one destination for Russian money being sent abroad and the number-one direct investor in Russia, with more than $13bn in investments, according to Russia’s Central Bank.
“From an economic perspective, Russia and Cyprus are so intertwined, Cyprus could almost be another region of the Russian Federation,” said Steven Dashevsky, founder of Dashevsky & Partners, a Moscow investment company.
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G8 absence threatens US-Russian rapport
When the G8 leaders gather at Camp David on Friday, one will be missing. Vladimir Putin, who was scheduled to have a post-summit meeting with Barack Obama, US president, sent his Dmitry Medvedev, prime minister, at the last minute instead.
The reason for his absence is still hotly debated in Moscow – almost no one believes the officially proffered reason that Mr Putin wants to stay in Moscow to interview prospective cabinet officials.
The cancellation casts a sudden pall over US-Russian relations, especially in the wake of Mr Putin’s aggressively anti-western campaign for the presidency, which he won on March 4. He barely let a public appearance go by without accusing the US of secretly plotting to overthrow him.
His absence seems to realise the worst predictions that the re-election of Mr Putin would mean the end of the tentative thaw in relations known as the “reset”, described in March by outgoing president Mr Medvedev as “the best three years in Russia-US relations in a decade”. Those may indeed now be over.
“The beginning of the Obama-Putin relationship doesn’t look optimistic,” said Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies in Moscow, who declined to guess at the reasons for Putin’s absence, underlining the extent to which even senior experts are puzzled by the Kremlin’s Byzantine ways.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the think-tank, said: “The [US-Russia] relationship is certainly wrong-footed at this point.
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Sergei’s Law – Justice for Sergei Magnitsky
More than two years after lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian prison, the doctors, guards, and government officials who are to blame have not been held responsible. As Financial Times Moscow Bureau Chief Charles Clover put it: “These guys basically just killed him. They murdered him. They tortured him to death.” If that wasn’t bad enough, the Russian government has chosen to open its first posthumous prosecution in the country’s history against Magnitsky.
While it would be ideal to rely on the Russian justice system to bring these people to justice, time has shown that some type of additional pressure is needed. Enter Sergei’s Law, a US congressional bill that would bar the Russians involved in Magnitsky’s death from entering the United States:
If passed, the bill would send a signal to the Russian government that the treatment of people like Magnitsky is simply unacceptable and will not go without tangible consequences.
As the video shows, more information on how you can help get Sergei’s Law passed can be found at SergeisLaw.com. займы онлайн на карту срочно займы онлайн на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php hairy woman
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