Posts Tagged ‘corruption’

16
November 2015

U.S. Department of State Honours the 6th Anniversary of Sergei Magnitsky’s Death


Press Statement
Mark C. Toner
Deputy Department Spokesperson
U.S. Department of State
Washington, DC
November 13, 2015

Six years ago, on November 16, 2009, Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitskiy died in a Moscow prison. An investigation by Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council found that Magnitskiy had been severely beaten in prison and members of the Council said his death resulted from the beatings and “torture” by police officials.

Sergey Magnitskiy was arrested after uncovering corruption by Russian officials, spent a year in pre-trial detention before his death, and was posthumously convicted for the crimes he himself uncovered.

The anniversary of Sergey Magnitskiy’s death is a reminder of the human cost of injustice. Those responsible for his unjust imprisonment and wrongful death remain free, despite widely-publicized and credible evidence of their guilt. We salute Sergey Magnitskiy’s memory and those who work to uncover corruption and promote human rights in Russia despite official intimidation and harassment.

In honor of Sergey Magnitskiy, we will continue to fully support the efforts of those who seek to bring these individuals to justice, including through implementation of the Sergei Magnitskiy Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012.
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17
February 2014

Bill Browder on Putin’s Russia

CBS

While the Winter Olympics in Sochi project a bright, white image, Bill Browder tells a darker story of theft, vengeance and death in a corrupt Russia

There is a darker side to the bright, white images of Russia that millions of Americans see coming from the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Bill Browder says he lived it and then had his life threatened as the victim of outrageous corruption perpetrated by the Russian government. Browder tells Scott Pelley this story of theft, vengeance and death for a 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, Feb. 16 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

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13
August 2013

The Rise and Probable Fall of Putin’s Enforcer

The Atlantic

On June 4 2012, Russian reporter Sergei Sokolov was part of a press delegation accompanying the three-year-old Investigative Committee, often described as Russia’s FBI, on a trip to Kabardino-Balkaria, a republic in the Caucasus. Sokolov’s publication, Novaya Gazeta, is one of the few independent newspapers left in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a fact ominously borne out by the five journalists who have been removed from its masthead by being murdered — among them, Anna Politkovskaya. So the 59-year-old head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, might have expected a less-than-friendly audience in Sokolov, who had indeed already filed a blistering dispatch about the Committee’s bungled investigation into the murder of 12 people, including four children, in Kushchevskaya, a village in the Krasnodar region, which took place in 2010. Krasnodar is notorious for its gang violence and Sokolov was particularly incensed about what had happened to Sergei Tsepovyaz, a local state official who’d destroyed evidence in the case and whose brother was a known member of the gang that perpetrated the killings: the brother got off with a $5,000 fine. Sokolov not unreasonably alleged a state coverup and named Bastrykin and Putin as “servants” of Krasnodar gangsters. After being cornered by his quarry in Kabardino-Balkaria, however, the journalist apologized for some of his prior coverage, but Russia’s top cop was neither appeased nor amused. “I consider myself insulted,” Bastrykin replied, “and not just personally. In czarist times they would have called people out to duel over this.”

A duel wasn’t quite what happened next. The delegation, including Sokolov, returned safely to Moscow. Nine days later, on June 13, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, published an open letter addressed to Bastrykin, in which he claimed that Bastrykin had threatened to behead and dismember Sokolov:

“Sokolov was placed in a car by your bodyguards. He was taken without any explanation to a forest near Moscow. There, you asked the bodyguards to leave you and remained face to face with Sokolov… The hard truth is that, in your emotional state, you rudely threatened the life of my journalist. And you joked that you would investigate the murder case personally.”

Bastrykin’s initial reaction, in an interview with pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia, was to say that he hadn’t even been in a forest “in years.” All the allegations made in Muratov’s letter, he said, were “outright lies.” However, his denial couldn’t stop an undeniably scandalous story — what Muratov later described as “bad Hollywood” — from gripping the nation’s attention. Five journalists were arrested for picketing outside the Committee’s headquarters in Moscow the day the letter was published. What then followed was unprecedented. Rather than retrench and perhaps lock up Muratov, Bastrykin invited the Novaya Gazeta editors to a meeting hosted by Interfax, another media outlet, whereupon the Committee chief issued a formal apology to Sokolov, who was by now well out of Russia, fearing for his life. (Sokolov returned a few days later.)

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08
May 2013

Strongman Putin Is No Match for Corruption

Bloomberg

President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on corruption is vital to Russia’s future. It’s also certain to fail unless he recognizes the shortcomings of his methods.

In 2008, under then-President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia began a genuine and somewhat successful effort to bring its corruption laws into the first world. At the same time, the state restricted investigative news media, stepped up its intimidation of nongovernment organizations, persecuted whistle-blowers and subverted the judicial system.

No bureaucracy can police itself effectively. That’s why international conventions (and now Russian law) clearly state that graft can be reduced only if whistle-blowers and nonstate actors play an active role. Yet Putin, back in power after four years as prime minister, is sending a message that he is Russia’s only anti-corruption champion, and that exposing dishonest officials is at the sole discretion of the Kremlin.

Corruption costs Russia about $300 billion a year, a whopping 16 percent of gross domestic product. And that measure doesn’t capture the distorted incentives and lost investment that are side effects. Russia placed last in Transparency International’s most recent Bribe Payers Index, which ranks countries according to their companies’ propensity to offer bribes.

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08
May 2013

Russia’s child-shields

European Voice

To prevent corrupt Russian officials being barred from Europe, Russia is now using the threat of an adoption ban against European states.

I am no great fan of the international adoption business – it can easily turn into a corrupt, unregulated and even sinister market in children. It is much better to deal with the reasons that the children end up in institutions in the first place and to encourage people to provide homes for them in their own country.

Now Russia is threatening to ban international adoptions. Not as part of a big push to improve child welfare, but to punish foreign countries for their temerity in imposing visa sanctions and asset freezes on the people – mainly officials – involved in the death of the auditor Sergei Magnitsky, and the $230 million (€176m) fraud that he uncovered.

It is worth bearing in mind the nature of the fraud. My email inbox is peppered with complaints from foreigners who have fallen foul of officialdom or local competitors in Russia. My answer is always the same: tough. If you go mud-wrestling, in a seemingly lucrative contest where the referee is known to be corruptible, and where your adversaries are rich and unscrupulous, you will certainly get dirty and may well lose.

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18
March 2013

Russian Bloggers Expose Corruption, One Top Official at a Time

Huffington Post

Can a businessman who is connected with organized crime, banned on these grounds from entering a country where his business is located, and has foreign citizenship be a senator? In Russia, the answer is yes. At least, this is the result of an investigation made by the country’s No. 1 blogger, Alexei Navalny. On March 14, he published documents that prove that Senator Vitaly Malkin not only runs business in Canada (which is against the law in Russia), but he has been denied a visa to that country because Canadian authorities suspect him of links with money laundering networks. Moreover, Malkin has (or had) a double Israeli citizenship, which is prohibited for members of either house of the Russian Parliament. Besides, Malkin was a member of a delegation of Russian parliamentarians last year who toured Washington, D.C., attempting to prevent passing of the Magnitsky Act. The blogger demanded that Malkin’s appointment be invalidated. The senator’s spokesperson denied the accusations but failed to comment on the documents.

In recent months, similar reports of corruption in the highest ranks of the government have become almost a daily routine. Last week, the Chairperson of Duma Anti-Corruption Committee Irina Yarovaya was accused by Navalny of living in an undeclared $2,900,000 flat in downtown Moscow. The week before, the blogger found that the Governor of Pskov Andrey Turchak owned a luxury house worth 1,270,000 Euro in Nice, France. And it’s not just Navalny; other bloggers are also discovering transgressions of members of Parliament, governors and other top officials. Most investigations deal with undeclared property or illegally acquired academic titles.

Bloggers even coined a humorous term for this activity — pekhting — after a veteran MP, Chairman of Duma Ethics Committee and Putin loyalist Vladimir Pekhtin. Earlier this year Navalny published documents indicating that the deputy owns two expensive apartments in Miami. After initially denying the accusations, Pekhtin eventually had to resign from the Parliament. His act sent shockwaves through the ranks of bureaucrats who had become used to impunity in exchange for loyalty.

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22
January 2013

Medvedev Courts Davos Skeptics With Better-Than-China Pitch

Washington Post

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 and AstraZeneca Plc. “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.”

Putin Critique

Medvedev used his Davos speech in 2011 to highlight the “new opportunities” for foreigners “for doing business with success” in Russia. The message was more upbeat than the one then-premier Vladimir Putin delivered in 2009, in which he said the global crisis had shown the dangers of rampant greed in the U.S.-dominated global financial system.

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17
January 2013

Russia’s Anti-Corruption Moves Draw Renewed Skepticism

Wall Street Journal

Is Russia finally getting serious about corruption?

Russia’s Interior Ministry has taken the rare step of spearheading a high-profile international investigation, charging a former member of the board of directors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development with seeking a bribe from a company that wanted a loan.

Yelena Kotova, who sat on EBRD board from 2005 to the end of 2010 as a representative of Russia, Belarus and Tajikistan, denies the allegations.

Coming after the introduction of higher fines for bribery, more investigations, official jawboning on the issue and a higher ranking in the latest Transparency International data, does this signify the turning of a page?

It does not, according to two attorneys who work with companies in Russia.

“It’s good that the Russians are investigating corruption,” said Danforth Newcomb at Shearman & Sterling, but he said he hasn’t detected any significant improvement in the level of corruption there.

Likewise, Daniel Rothstein from a New York law firm with the same name, said his view, partly based on conversations with professional colleagues in Russia, is to “doubt there is a trend toward cleaning up private or public corruption.”

Both lawyers point out corruption investigations in Russia are often used for settling scores. “Unless you’re inside the case, it’s impossible to know the significance of any corruption investigation in Russia,” said Rothstein.

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02
January 2013

Congress talks about Magnitsky’s torture and death

FCPA Blog

The United States Congress sometimes includes ‘findings’ in laws it adopts. They’re reasons behind a law — a bit of built-in legislative history.

Here are some findings from the Magnitsky Act, legislation we tabbed as the biggest anti-corruption story of 2012.

The findings reflect America’s expectations for the Russian regime, the principles those expectations are based on, and how the regime has fallen short. There’s also encouragement for ‘the people of the Russian Federation’ and beyond.

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