Posts Tagged ‘tax’
After Swiss Freeze Millions, Stepanov Swings Back
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).
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No matter how much damaging information civic activists or foreign investors have dug out, the fight against corruption will still depend entirely on the country leadership’s political will
WPS: What the Papers Say
On Monday May 16th, 2011, the lawyers of Hermitage Capital Investment Fund Managing Director William Browder attended the IAM Investigation Committee. According to Investigation Committee official representative Irina Dudukina, they were acquainted with the order on the prolongation of the investigation of the criminal case against their client. There is little doubt that all of this is a direct response to the actions of Hermitage Capital. As is known, some time ago Fund lawyers filed an appeal to the Prosecutor’s Office of Switzerland and thus began a criminal investigation of money laundering by Russian officials and members of their families. Representatives of the Fund argue that part of the funds stolen from the Russian budget have been placed on the accounts in Swiss banks. Earlier Fund lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, who was accused of tax evasion and died in prison in 2009, insisted on the investigation of that crime.
If William Browder, who now lives abroad, was interrogated by an investigator, probably he would have been behind the bars already, like it was with Magnitsky, and it cannot be excluded that he we would end up like his colleague.
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Briton uses YouTube to accuse Russian tax official of £25m fraud
The Sunday Times
A leading British investor has accused a Russian official and her husband of embezzling more than £25m (€29m) through their part in a scam that led to the theft of three of his companies and the largest tax fraud in Russia’s history.
William Browder, a British citizen born in America who has been barred from Russia since 2005, has gathered evidence that, he claims, shows a senior Moscow tax official and her husband went on a multimillion-pound spending spree, despite earning a combined annual salary of only £25,000.
It happened after interior ministry officials allegedly stole three companies from Hermitage Capital, Browder’s London-based investment fund, and used them to apply for a fraudulent £140m tax rebate, which was paid in a single day.
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Magnitsky’s Colleagues: He exposed a fraud and paid for it with his life
WPS: What the Papers Say
Once they recovered from the shock caused by the news of Sergei Magnitsky’s death behind the bars, his colleagues initiated an investigation of their own. They are convinced that Magnitsky was murdered because he had exposed a fraud costing the Russian treasury 5.4 billion rubles and because he was prepared to testify in an open trial. Hermitage Foundation is still following the trail of the vast sums gone from the treasury in the hope to unearth a connection with people on the so called Cardin’s List. A video appeared in the Internet last week, focused on the colossal sums to be found on foreign bank accounts of Vladlen Stepanov, the husband of the former chief of Moscow Tax Inspectorate No 28 Olga Stepanova. It had been Stepanova who authorized return of the billions of rubles from the budget on December 24, 2007.
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Marital murmurings in Magnitsky case
Embezzlement charges against tax official Olga Stepanova are now washing around her marriage and her relationship with her husband.
Stepanova and a $230 million fraud are at the centre of a media storm, with supporters of the late lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison, say ended up in Stepanova’s husband’s offshore bank accounts.
Stepanova’s lawyer says that this in no way implicates her client, as the two have been separated for almost 20 years.
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Moscow tax official’s $39 million fortune revealed
A Moscow tax official who approved a fraudulent $230 million tax return in 2007 has bought luxury real estate in Moscow, Dubai and Montenegro and wired money through her husband’s bank accounts worth $39 million, a U.S. investor said Monday.
All that was done with an average annual household income equivalent to $38,000, according to documents released by William Browder, an American-born investor barred from Russia.
Browder has been campaigning against Russian corruption since 2009 when his lawyer died a year after being sent to prison. Authorities have not explained why Browder was himself expelled as a security risk in 2005 in the first place.
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Tax official blasted over the Magnitsky affair
A sudden boom in the finances of a former tax official has come under the spotlight as part of a campaign to keep up the pressure on those allegedly involved in the incarceration and subsequent death of Sergey Magnitsky.
Olga Stepanova, a former tax official, and her family members became unwilling stars in a new video, part of the “Stop Untouchable!” campaign. Activists want to get justice for Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in pre-trial detention custody in 2009.
Jamison Firestone, Magnitsky’s former colleague at Firestone Duncan, has filed a claim to the Investigative Committee, calling for a criminal case to be opened against Stepanova, the then head of Moscow’s tax inspectorate no. 28.
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Russian Officials Said to Reap Wealth in Tax Case
After accusing government officials here of involvement in large-scale tax fraud three years ago, Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer for a major international investment fund, was arrested and jailed for nearly a year until he died mysteriously in detention.
Mr. Magnitsky’s claims have never been fully investigated, and on Monday, a year and a half after his death, his former colleagues unveiled information that they said showed that the officials he implicated had become astonishingly wealthy.
The findings are the latest in a series of independent investigations into Russian officials by Mr. Magnitsky’s supporters, including William F. Browder, the owner of Hermitage Capital Management, the fund that Mr. Magnitsky represented. A $12 million country house outside Moscow and seaside villas in Dubai and Montenegro are some of the purchases made by the officials since Mr. Magnitsky made his accusations against them, according to the investigation.
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Hermitage claims against Russian official prompt Swiss probe
Switzerland has opened a money-laundering probe against a former Russian tax official at the request of British investment company Hermitage Capital Management Ltd., the Barron’s weekly said on Thursday.
Prosecutors are investigating suspicious transactions in a number of Credit Suisse accounts opened on behalf of the husband of former tax official Olga Stepanova. Stepanova approved the refund in 2007 of $230 million to scammers impersonating Hermitage Capital.
The Russian Interior Ministry has blamed the theft on Hermitage lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who first reported the theft. Magnitsky died in a Moscow pre-trial detention facility in 2009 after being refused medical treatment for pancreatitis.
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