Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

After Swiss Freeze Millions, Stepanov Swings Back

Barron’s

An abbreviated version of this story ran in May 28 edition of Barron’s Magazine.

Swiss prosecutors have frozen Eur. 8 million in Credit Suisse bank accounts of Vladlen Stepanov, a subject of our story about a $230 million tax scam in Russia that victimized the hedge fund firm Hermitage Capital and led to the death in police custody of Hermitage’s whistle blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky (“Crime and Punishment in Putin’s Russia,” April 16).

Stepanov isn’t taking the Swiss action lying down. Last week he placed a self-justifying advertisement in a Russian newspaper, and this week he appeared for a video-taped interview at the Russian financial daily Vedomosti. In both forums, Stepanov denies that the Swiss bank money, and other riches detailed in our article, were illicitly obtained or derived from the hundreds of millions in dubious Russian tax refunds doled out by Olga Stepanova, a former tax official from whom Stepanov says he’s been divorced since 1992.

The evidence of corruption amongst police and other officials involved in the Magnitsky case has created enough of a stink that President Dmitry Medvedev called a press conference last week to discuss an independent inquiry into the scandal.

“I do not want to be a wood chip,” is the headline of Stepanov’s May 17th ad in the RBK Daily newspaper – an allusion to a Russian proverb suggesting that he sees himself as an innocent victim who’s been ground up in the chainsawing of a forest. He dismisses as “recreational arithmetic,” the estimates of his wealth presented in “horror videos” about the Magnitsky case produced by Hermitage Capital’s founder William F. Browder (see www.russian-untouchables.com).