Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Elite Russians adopt the staycation habit

Financial Times

Annette Loftus, owner of a high-end Moscow travel agency, gets plenty of odd holiday requests from plenty of exotic people. She has had to organise a golf tournament at the North Pole, a buggy race on Bolivia’s salt flats and a getaway with an ice bar in the middle of a frozen Siberian lake.

Then, there was the mysterious caller who asked for “a holiday in a non-Interpol country” on behalf of his boss, who he would not name. She turned the last one down – first of all, she said, non-Interpol countries are very few, “and I would not be willing to run a trip in any of them”. Second, there was “the moral issue . . .”.

Recently Ms Loftus has seen more requests like the last one – clients with, as she puts it, “jurisdictional issues”. For a small but growing number of elite Russians, travel opportunities are increasingly limited. The trend was epitomised by the US Magnitsky act, which late last year imposed a US visa blacklist and asset freezes on roughly 60 Russians suspected of human rights violations. Its open-ended wording leaves open the possibility that the list of names will lengthen. The E U looks set to eventually pass similar legislation.