Posts Tagged ‘kratov’
US Notes Politics, Tragedy of New Russian Adoption Law
The United States says it “deeply” regrets Russia’s passage of a law ending inter-country child adoptions between the U.S. and Russia.
The State Department made the announcement Friday, hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the controversial bill into law. The State Department said American families have adopted more than 60,000 Russian children in the past 20 years. It called the new law “politically motivated” and said it would reduce adoption possibilities for children who are now under institutional care.
The State Department said it is further concerned that adoptions already underway may be stopped. It urged the Russian government to allow those legal procedures to continue.
Before Putin signed the bill into law, a U.S. adoptee from Russia, Tatyana McFadden, told VOA why she supported a petition asking Putin to veto the bill.
“My name is Tatyana McFadden, and I think it’s very important to bring this petition to the U.S. embassy because I am here to speak for others who can’t on why adoption is very important. Adoption has saved my life and changed my life forever,” she said.
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Not guilty: Court acquits official charged with Magnitsky’s death
A Russian court has acquitted the former deputy chief of the prison where lawyer Sergey Magnitsky died. A judge ruled there was not enough evidence Dmitry Kratov was guilty of negligence.
Kratov was the only official facing a trial following the death of Magnitsky who died in a Moscow prison while under investigation for tax evasion and fraud. The prosecutor also asked the court to acquit Kratov.
“Diseases revealed in Magnitsky are not related to his death. It was impossible to diagnose diseases that caused his death”, said Tverskoy Court judge Tatyana Neverova.
“Kratov’s inaction wasn’t confirmed. There was no ‘corpus delicti’ in Kratov’s action,” added the judge.
The Magnitsky case began in 2007, when British investment fund Hermitage Capital, one of the biggest foreign investors inside Russia, fell victim to a US$230 million fraud. The fund hired corporate lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, whose investigation brought forth names of officials in Russia’s Interior Ministry he believed to be involved in the scam.
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Acquitted: the only man charged over Sergei Magnitsky death
A Moscow court has exonerated the only person to be put on trial for the death of the Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, days after President Vladimir Putin publicly stated that the lawyer was not tortured in prison and in fact died of natural causes.
Mr Magnitsky died in Moscow’s Butyrka prison in 2009, after being refused treatment for a pancreatic illness. The court found that Dmitry Kratov, a doctor at Butyrka who allegedly signed medical records detailing Mr Magnitsky’s complaints but then refused treatment, had no case to answer.
Nobody has been charged for the fraud that Mr Magnitsky uncovered, despite evidence that a group of Russian officials conspired to defraud the state of around 5.4 billion roubles (£140m). Instead, he was locked up by the officials he was investigating.
The only case to have been opened with regard to the crimes Mr Magnitsky was investigating or to his death, aside from a posthumous inquiry into the lawyer himself, was the negligence case against Mr Kratov. In a highly unusual move, the prosecutors said they did not feel there was a case to answer and asked the judge to announce an innocent verdict.
At a press conference last week Mr Putin said Mr Magnitsky died of natural causes, a statement that could have been interpreted as a signal to halt investigations into his death. “There is no doubt that people responsible for Magnitsky’s death are being protected by the President of Russia,” said a representative of Hermitage Capital, the London-based investment fund for which Mr Magnitsky worked. “Russia normally has a 99 per cent conviction rate. In this case, there was overwhelming evidence of Kratov’s involvement and his acquittal goes against any logic or concept of justice.”
“I am sincerely sorry that Sergei Magnitsky died,” Mr Kratov told the court yesterday. “But I had no possibility to affect his fate.” The court said Mr Kratov could file for compensation for the unfair accusations.
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Russian court clears doctor over Sergei Magnitsky’s death in custody
A Russian court has cleared the only person charged in the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer whose death in custody three years ago has driven a wedge between Russia and the US.
American outcry over the death in 2009 led to US legislation aimed at punishing those responsible. Russia retaliated with a ban on Americans adopting Russian children, which President Vladimir Putin signed into law on Friday morning.
Dmitry Kratov, a doctor in the prison where Magnitsky was held, was the only person charged over the death. Several other officials accused of involvement have been awarded promotions.
On Friday a judge in Moscow found Kratov not guilty of negligence. Fewer than 1% of Russians on trial each year are acquitted.
Magnitsky, a lawyer for the London-based investor William Browder, was arrested in 2008 while investigating state corruption and died in prison the following year after developing pancreatitis that was left untreated. An investigation by the Kremlin’s human rights council also found that he had been severely beaten.
Pointing to the absence of a full investigation in Russia, Browder helped lobby for a new US law that forbids Russians allegedly involved in the death from travelling to or keeping bank accounts in the US, dubbed the Magnitsky Act.
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Prosecutors drop charges in Magnitsky killing to leave family at square one
Supporters of Russian anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky have seen their hopes of justice fade after it emerged that prosecutors have withdrawn charges against the only person to be tried in connection with his death.
An investigation into the death of Mr Magnitsky in Moscow’s Butyrka prison in 2009 saw charges brought against two people, both doctors: Larisa Litvinova, who was responsible for the lawyer’s treatment during the last weeks of his life, and Dmitri Kratov, who at the time was the chief medical official at the prison.
Charges of professional negligence against Dr Litvinova were dropped earlier this year after prosecutors claimed the statute of limitations had run out, and on Monday the state prosecutor, Konstantin Bokov, urged the court to acquit Dr Kratov. “There is no cause-and-effect relationship between Kratov’s actions and Magnitsky’s death,” Mr Bokov is reported to have said. “I request his acquittal.” The court is expected to make its ruling on Friday.
Mr Magnitsky died in November 2009 after nearly a year in jail – the victim, former colleagues say, of retribution from the same police investigators he had accused of stealing $230m from the state through fraudulent tax refunds. The 37-year-old’s death was attributed by the prison to a heart attack, but Mr Magnitsky’s supporters insist he was fatally beaten after exposing what he described as a web of corruption.
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State Prosecutor Requests Acquittal of Sole Defendant in Magnitsky Death
A state prosecutor on Monday asked a Moscow court to acquit a former senior prison official and the only remaining defendant in Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death of negligence charges that resulted in the lawyer’s death in pretrial detention in 2009.
If the plea is satisfied, no one will be prosecuted in Magnitsky’s death, since the charges against the first of the two suspects were dropped in April.
State prosecutor Dmitry Bokov asked Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court to acquit Dmitry Kratov, former deputy head of Moscow’s Butyrka pretrial detention center, over a lack of evidence, legal news agency Rapsi reported.
In late 2008, shortly after accusing tax and police officials of embezzling $230 million, Magnitsky was jailed on tax evasion charges. He died of heart failure at the Matrosskaya Tishina prison a few months after being transferred from Butyrka.
An independent inquiry by the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council determined that Magnitsky died after being beaten by guards.
In an e-mail in June, Hermitage Capital called the investigation a “farce” because Kratov was “not present at Matrosskaya Tishina.”
Although it was determined that Kratov “failed to take the necessary diagnostic and treatment measures, which resulted in Magnitsky’s death through carelessness,” the prison official hadn’t received any written complaints from Magnitsky or other people about the lawyer’s health, Bokov said.
The prosecutor also reminded the court that in April investigators closed a criminal case against prison doctor Larisa Litvinova on manslaughter charges related to Magnistky’s death because the statute of limitations had run out, not because Litvinova had been acquitted of the charges.
Kratov faces up to five years in prison. hairy girl займы на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com zp-pdl.com займ на карту
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Prosecutor requests to acquit defendant in Magnitsky case
The prosecutor has asked a Moscow district court to acquit Dmitry Kratov, former deputy head of the Butyrka pretrial detention center, accused of negligence which resulted in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the court spokesperson told the Russian Legal Information Agency.
Kratov has been charged with negligence in regards to the death of Sergei Magnitsky. Prosecutor requested to acquit Kratov as no link was established between the actions of the defendant and Magnitsky’s death.
“Pursuant to the experts’ conclusion, Magnitsky died from the heart failure,” the prosecutor said, stressing that Kratov was acting duly.
Magnitsky, who served as a managing partner of the Firestone Duncan auditing firm and a legal consultant of the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund, was detained on November 24, 2008.
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Russia seeks to drop charges over Magnitsky death
Russian prosecutors said on Monday the man on trial for causing the death of a whistle-blowing attorney should be freed without charge, in a surprising development in a case that has triggered a major row between Moscow and Washington.
Dmitry Kratov is the only official remaining as a defendant in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died of untreated illnesses in 2009 while under pre-trial arrest at a Moscow jail.
Magnitsky had claimed to have uncovered a $235 million state embezzlement scheme, before being arrested by the very officials he implicated in the crime.
His case caused international outrage and led to the passage of a US law that blacklists Russian officials allegedly involved in the death.
Moscow retaliated by introducing legislation banning adoptions of Russian children to American citizens in the biggest diplomatic scandal in years between the two powers.
In Monday’s development, prosecutor Dmitry Bokov said that Kratov, deputy head of the prison where Magnitsky died, should be acquitted of a charge of carelessness, because he acted according to the rules and did not receive any complaints from the lawyer.
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Sergei Magnitsky: symbol of prison abuse in Russia
Sergei Magnitsky, whose case triggered a US-Russia row on Thursday, was a lawyer working for a Western firm who died in pre-trial jail at 37 in Moscow in 2009 after claiming to have discovered a major tax fraud covered up by government officials.
He died after spending almost a year under pre-trial arrest that his mother said had exposed him to “torture conditions” and which his employer called retribution for his testimony against interior ministry officers.
Prosecutors said that Magnitsky died from acute heart and pancreatic failure and fluid in the brain in combination with other conditions, including diabetes.
Human rights campaigners, including the Kremlin’s human rights council, said that the lawyer was ill-treated deliberately and even tortured, handcuffed one hour before his death despite suffering from acute pain.
Magnitsky’s firm Firestone Duncan was providing legal support to what was once Russia’s largest investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, whose head William Browder fell out of favour with the Kremlin and was denied a visa in 2005.
Prior to his arrest, Sergei Magnitsky claimed to have uncovered a scheme used by police officials to reclaim about $235 million in taxes paid by his client.
However instead of looking into the claims Russia charged the lawyer with fraud and locked him up in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina jail, later transferring him to Moscow’s infamous Butyrka prison.
His death caused an international outrage, whose ripple effects are still felt today.
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