Posts Tagged ‘FIN Alternatives’
Browder May Win EU Version Of Magnitsky Law
Hermitage Capital Management founder Bill Browder seems to have convinced the EU to join the U.S. in making life difficult for Russians linked to the death in prison of Browder’s colleague, Serge Magnitsky.
Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer who represented Browder’s hedge fund in a tax fraud case and who accused Russian Interior Ministry officials of defrauding Hermitage, was charged with tax fraud in 2009 and spent almost a year in Moscow’s most notorious prisons where Russian human rights activists allege he was tortured to death.
Only two people were ever charged in Magnitsky’s death, both doctors. The doctor who treated Magnitsky during his last weeks, Larisa Litvinova, had charges against her dropped last year; officials said that statute of limitations had run out. Other officials linked to Magnitsky’s death have been cleared, and some have been promoted.
But Browder, not satisfied with these outcomes, successfully lobbied the U.S. government to pass the Magnitsky law, barring Russian officials tied to his death from entering the country and freezing their assets.
In October, the European Parliament adopted a recommendation to the European Council to establish common visa restrictions for Russian officials involved in the Magnitsky case and freezing their assets in Europe.
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Russia Announces Retaliation For U.S. Magnitsky Bans
FIN Alternatives
Three months after the U.S. banned from entering the country 60 Russian officials linked to the death of hedge fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Russia has responded in kind.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said Saturday that it had barred dozens of unidentified U.S. officials. While the ministry said it was targeting officials with ties to the controversial prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the killings of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the kidnapping or abuse of Russians in the U.S., the move apparently fulfills the country’s promise in July to retaliate for the U.S. move. That month, a spokesman for Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said the country’s own bans would be “analogous to those announced by the State Dept.”
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Report Blames Prison Officials In Magnitsky Death, Russian President Cites ‘Criminal Actions’
Nearly two years after Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev called his treatment “criminal” in the wake of a damning report blaming prison officials for the hedge fund lawyer’s death.
A report issued yesterday by Medvedev’s investigative council concluded that Magnitsky, who represented Hermitage Capital Management, “was completely deprived of medical care. Additionally, there are grounds to suspect that Magnitsky’s death was the result of a beating,” and not merely the pancreatitis he contracted during the year he spent behind bars on suspicion of tax evasion.
One member of the investigative committee went even further, telling The Telegraph, “we have concluded he died of a beating. It was real torture to beat an ailing man with truncheons.”
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No Charges For Top Investigator In Magnitsky Case
Russian officials have exonerated one of their own in the prison death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management.
Russia’s powerful central prosecutors, the Investigative Committee, said Monday that Oleg Silchenko, the Interior Ministry official who ordered Magnitsky’s arrest and oversaw the investigation of the lawyer, had “not allowed” any illegal treatment in the case. The committee would not comment beyond its three-paragraph statement.
Silchenko was cleared despite a finding by the head of Russia’s prison oversight panel that Silchenko was to blame for Magnitsky’s treatment. Magnitsky died in a notorious Moscow prison in November 2009 at the age of 37. Human rights officials say he was tortured and denied adequate medical care; the latter claim was echoed by the oversight panel’s Valery Borshchev.
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Hermitage Sues Russia Interior Ministry
Hermitage Capital Management has sued Russia’s Interior Ministry, accusing it of abuse of power.
According to the hedge fund, once one of the largest foreign investors in Russia, the ministry had no basis for launching a tax investigation of Hermitage in 2007. Hermitage claims that Interior Ministry officials used the pretense of that investigation to raid the hedge fund’s offices and seize documents that they later used to defraud the Russian government of US$230 million in taxes paid by Hermitage.
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Hedge Fund Lawyer’s Death Gets UN Probe
The death of hedge fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is now the subject of a United Nations investigation.
Juan Mendez, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, has opened a probe into Magnitsky’s death in 2009 after nearly a year in jail awaiting trial on tax fraud charges. Magnitsky, in a series of notes he kept during his confinement in some of Moscow’s most notorious jails, claimed to have been denied adequate medical treatment, and supporters say he was tortured.
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