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Magnitsky

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Mean anything to you ?
Even worse than Litvinenko and Politskovskaya
Nearly as bad as the Smolensk massacre
What has Russia told you about this terrible case ?
One of the cases that will help bring the State to its knees .
Now the UN is involved
Sergei Magnitsky . Dead now . Killed by the FSB
What a story .

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We were told the following:
“Conduct a swift public investigation into the torture and, in effect, judicial murder of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and prosecute those who ordered them. An outside counsel to Hermitage Capital Management, formerly the largest foreign investment firm in Russia, Magnitsky dared to investigate the illegal takeover of Hermitage and the bilking of the Russian state out of $230 million in a fraudulent “tax refund.” Charged, like virtually all the opponents of the regime, with “tax evasion,” he died in pretrial detention in horrible pain from pancreatitis and gallbladder disease, which the prison authorities refused to allow to be treated, in an apparent effort by the prosecution to coerce Magnitsky to commit perjury and admit guilt.25 Thus far, Medvedev has fired only prison officials. Yet, just like a “tax refund” scam on so giant a scale, the orders to torture could have come only from officials high up in the tax police, perhaps even from within the Kremlin hierarchy.”
Leon Aron

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That is a fair and accurate summary and it is gratifying that the case is getting some attention .
I wonder what publication Aron was writing in and whether anymore than a small minority will have access to it ?
The one  key aspect not mentioned is that he was arrested by the very Police whom he had accused and produced massive evidence against .
The State then protected these corrupt Police by giving them either promotion and/or public service medals --- I need reminding of the full details .
The incident detail is so alarming that the EU last month passed a law allowing member states to ban 60 Russian officials implicated in the crime from entry and to seize their assets --- remarkable action from the EU.
Separately , the US is passing a similar law .
In another thread  , Moonlighting was trying to convince me of the booming Russian economy and the internal investment in your country .
It is matters like this dreadful case which show how nonsensical such thoughts are . The fact that the US , EU and now the United Nations itself are taking up investigative and legal action  , demonstrates the colossal damage that has flowed from it  , damage that   has already  further blackened Russia's standing as a country to do business with .
The most worrying factor  , after the crime itself and the torture of the poor man  , is the way that the State tried to hide matters by protecting the Police who were caught in this massive fraud . This has told the world that the Kremlin itself is involved in yet more super league corruption . Whereas , if they had sacrificed the most clear cut offenders , they could at least have pretended to have known nothing about the matter and  been seen to be taking  the right steps to behave correctly .
But ,No .
Once again the FSB and Kremlin have totally botched up everything and actually voluntarily chosen to follow the one path guaranteed to cause them the most trouble and embarrassment .
It prompts many observers to now question whether this represents more complete stupidity  , and  rather shows the indifference and arrogance of the Mafia elite in Russia to anybody inside and outside of Russia .
Most onlookers are now questioning the business sanity of BP in getting involved again with Russia in Oil exploration . Straightaway we heard that the TNK Russian Oligarch directors want part of this deal and in BPs position I would regard that as the kiss of death at some future point in time --- i.e Russia is  forced to either the US or the West for the technology but once exploration has been completed , new production rules will be created by force .
Everything surrounding this case has a very bad smell about it

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You should get your facts straight. FSB and Kremlin were not involved in this case. At least not according to http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/

Secondly, I was not trying to convince you of anything. I was merely stating well known facts.

I can openly admit that this case is very shameful. However, even after that, it is a matter internal to Russia, the crimes were committed on its soil. No foreign or international entity may interfere, and decisions of any such entity regarding this case would be extra-legal and arbitrary.

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Oh and speaking of Litvinenko.

Why is Russia blamed for the assassination, yet there has never been a trial, and the materials of the investigation have never been published?

Are you, Raymondo, not tired of being treated like a mushroom by your government?

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MLD
I admire your determination to support your country  , but  , as you will see if you follow my Posts and perhaps chat with Marina  , informed outsiders like myself know more about your country in certain areas ( economy , politics etc) than you can ever aspire to , as long as you remain inside the Federation.
I am sure you will find that comment irritating , if not infuriating , but that is how things are and will continue to be  , at least as long as your country has almost no free media and is held vice like in Putin's grasp and those of his personal army , the FSB.

The Magnitsky case is essentially a personal fight by  your beloved leader , our dear friend , Mister Putin  ,  to remove a personal enemy , or , as it was in this instance , to damage a personal enemy in the only way he could find .. Exactly as it was with Litvinenko , Politkovskaya and Khordokovsky . Personal revenge .
Magnitsky worked for Hermitage Capital Management and was the personal choice of the founder of the company , William Browder ,  and he acted as his  legal consultant in Moscow because he feared for his life if he ever set foot in Russia .And he would undoubtedly  have disappeared or been involved in a mysterious accident if he had ventured in.
Hermitage was a remarkably successful company on a world wide basis .It was created in 1996 and specialised in investing in emerging markets .The trouble arose because when Browder found great performing companies , he then investigated them in minute detail in order to locate areas of corruption which he would then expose  , to further increase the profit and profile of the concerned companies .
In the nineties he ripped Gazprom into shreds in several different high profile cases . As this company  is the jewel or money cow for Putin and his ex KGB and St Petersburg cronies , you can imagine the rage of Napoleon Putin  . He  was so enraged that he had  Browder black listed and denied all chance to enter the country .Then , as per the Yukos recipe ---he sent his police to raid the Moscow based offices of Hermitage  , confiscating computers and other documentation.Thereafter Putin ordered  corporate raiding  and  companies and assets were seized with the help of corrupt law enforcement officers and tame judges .

Have a look at the thread I wrote showing the connections between Gazprom  , SOGAZ and Bank Rossiya . Essentially these three institutions are where everything of any consequence that happens within the Federation are decided . The Kremlin itself is just a side show .And Putin runs these enormous institutions which are only staffed at the top by men who served with Putin in the KGB , or worked with him in the mayor's office in St Petersburg in the early nineties .
There is absolutely no question that Magnitsky and Hermitage were  not targeted by Putin .It is all about the standard reaction of one man who will not allow anybody to get in his way .  You are right about the Kremlin though . The orders came from Gazprom HQ which  rules the Kremlin  completely .

The EU , US and the United Nations have every right to investigate and report and pass any laws they choose . Russia is signatory to matters affecting Human Rights , Torture and illegal seizure of Assets . They literally have to pay huge penalties when they are repeatedly found guilty of infringing rights and in matters where the Rule of Law has failed . If you have any doubts , check it out . The fact that this is barely visible in the Russian media is hardly surprising .

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Raymondo написал(а):

I admire your determination to support your country  , but  , as you will see if you follow my Posts and perhaps chat with Marina  , informed outsiders like myself know more about your country in certain areas ( economy , politics etc) than you can ever aspire to , as long as you remain inside the Federation.

Then you should perhaps consider that I am and have been for years outside the Federation.

Given that, unlike you, I also speak the Russian language, not to mention my family ties, I find your assertion that you can ever know more about my home country highly amusing.

Even more amusing I find your attitude. Instead of debating the facts, you debate my alleged inability to have full command of the relevant information. This is an argumentum ad hominem, in all its glory. Well done.

I also note that you chose not to comment on the due process and transparency in the Litvinenko case. Instead you re-iterated what your government wants you to believe in, blindly. Do you really want to be a tool, Raymondo?

As for the right of the EU, UN and US to investigate anything within Russia without Russia's consent, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the concepts of jurisdiction and sovereignty.

Отредактировано moonlightdrive (2011-01-22 17:04:35)

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Your case is  even weaker if you tell us you live outside the Federation because  now there is no excuse for pleading ignorance of available  facts .
My Post on Magnitsky and Hermitage is factually accurate .I note you took no issue with anything I posted.
My comments re the EU , US and the UN are hard facts . If you do not like what they are doing --- all quite legally ---- , you must take issue with them direct . That should be interesting
So all you are doing is complaining because I have not had enough time to reply to the far more clear cut issue ---Litvinenko .
However , since writing the Magnitsky Post , I have been fitting a new cooker into my kitchen .
And having a working cooker takes precedence every time .
I shall enjoy prompting you on the key L facts though you might refer to the LL archives where the subject was discussed in considerable detail . However , I shall reply but first I want the Football Results , a bath , clean up the kitchen and cook a dinner .
Can you contain your enthusiasm?

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Raymondo написал(а):

I note you took no issue with anything I posted

Ramon, you are SO cute. What happened to you in Ukraine? Before you were expressing your opinions without involving your cooker into the process. Since when a bath, dinner and football are more important for you than Russian politics?  [взломанный сайт] 

MLD maybe could contain her enthusiasm but I cannot. Please come back soon  [взломанный сайт]

Отредактировано Lanya (2011-01-22 18:04:54)

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Raymondo написал(а):

My Post on Magnitsky and Hermitage is factually accurate .I note you took no issue with anything I posted.

Factually correct in a criminal case implies being found so in a relevant court. What you have so far are allegations, some of them quite amusing.

Raymondo написал(а):

My comments re the EU , US and the UN are hard facts . If you do not like what they are doing --- all quite legally ---- , you must take issue with them direct . That should be interesting

I do not represent Russia. Its Foreign Office does. They have responded, pointing out all that is wholly and entirely incompatible with international law.

Raymondo написал(а):

I shall enjoy prompting you on the key L facts though you might refer to the LL archives where the subject was discussed in considerable detail

I am not an LL member, and never was.

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Just time enough while the vegetables are being cooked by steam

1 . I doubt that   you want to chat about "relevant Russian courts" . They do not exist - as I am sure you know .
You may find the allegations amusing ,  but the EU , US and the United Nations do not share your view .
2.It always prompts huge laughter when Russia suddenly questions International Law when they fail to practise it and develop memory loss when asked to explain their alleged shortcomings .
3 You don't have to be a member , I gather , to view the LL  Forum archives . The last time the subject surfaced , women were not charged to be a member , but men were .So feel free to peruse the archives .

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Raymondo написал(а):

It always prompts huge laughter when Russia suddenly questions International Law when they fail to practise it and develop memory loss when asked to explain their alleged shortcomings .

After "WMD in Iraq", I understand why the EU and the US would laugh about questions of international law. They made it a laugable concept, indeed.

Regarding LL, I have no desire whatsoever to be associated with that nonsense.

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1 . Obviously an interesting opinion,  but I am not quite sure how it relates to Magnitsky or Litvinenko .
I  assume I have not been asked to be justify UK foreign policy but I will try and pass on your viewpoint to somebody appropriate. Although I would not have personally gone into Iraq , there were interesting passed UN resolutions which made Blair's decision legal but these have been forgotten by those eager to make selective judgements .
2 I did not ask what you wanted . I simply told you what you could have , if you wished .
Incidentally , you appear to be rather stressed . Are you OK ?

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As for poor Mister Litvinenko ......
The really  unlucky people were the FSB
Before this , nobody had ever before been able to detect someone poisoned by Polonium 210 . The FSB had used Thalium on many occasions and  it had  slowly become  relatively easy to identify  .But Polonium 210 was a master stroke until a certain brilliant forensic scientist decided to have a Eureka moment  . The trouble with P210 was that the moment it was pinpointed , its trail ( literally ) was as clear as a muddy footprint on a white carpet . A radiation trail  was as easy to follow as watching two and two making four .
Suddenly our Police were able to watch the killers fly twice from Moscow to London ,  return ,  and  then trace every step they made . Literally .

The radiation trails were there on the planes and in taxis , hotels , restaurants and every place Lugovoy and his two pals went --- they even visited my old friend Boris .
The subject is actually rather boring because once this route appeared  ,  the evidence literally presented itself  and any idiot could see what had actually  happened .
Frankly the rest of the story is irrelevant .We know Lugovoy  was front man which is why he was protected so completely .He was Fucked .
However ,  the likely lead man was a member of URPO and senior to both L and L who were both at one time brother officers in this extreme FSB branch ,  responsible for assassinations on behalf of the State  but without the requirement of obtaining prior agreement
Subsequently, our good friend Mister Putin changed the constitution so that anybody ( in principle) could assassinate anyone deemed a threat to the Federation , without  first obtaining approval . This allowed URPO to go " underground ".
YAWN .
Smolensk is far more interesting .With poor L , Putin just killed one man to preserve the honour of the FSB and to obtain personal satisfaction .
The Smolensk massacre is much more amazing

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Raymondo написал(а):

Obviously an interesting opinion,  but I am not quite sure how it relates to Magnitsky or Litvinenko .
I  assume I have not been asked to be justify UK foreign policy but I will try and pass on your viewpoint to somebody appropriate. Although I would not have personally gone into Iraq , there were interesting passed UN resolutions which made Blair's decision legal but these have been forgotten by those eager to make selective judgements .

After the US and the EU neglected international law by invading a country and overthrowing its government, citing wholly fabricated evidence as a pretext - which, even if true, would not be not a justification by international law - they have no moral authority whatsoever to lecture Russia, or anyone else, on international law.

Raymondo написал(а):

I did not ask what you wanted . I simply told you what you could have , if you wished .
Incidentally , you appear to be rather stressed . Are you OK ?

I am quite fine, I just have no desire to be associated with a web site whose raison d'être is between revolting and repulsive.

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Raymondo написал(а):

A radiation trail  was as easy to follow as watching two and two making four .

That was not what I asked. My questions were: "Why is Russia blamed for the assassination, yet there has never been a trial, and the materials of the investigation have never been published?"

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ML,
It has  been published .
You simply  have not bothered or been able  to acquaint yourself and judging by your comments you  only wish to see what suits you .

In fact  ,  you write as though you work for the Russian Government and specifically the State Police and as far as I am concerned  a closed mind is  counter productive.
Strangely I have just watched a BBC programme on modern life in Russian villages and the tentative conclusion was precisely what you seem to  exhibit in abundance -- having an ingrained  admiration for hard style management and almost a delight in watching your ship sink whilst blaming everything but yourself for the imminent sinking and drowning .
It's like watching a naughty youngster who has been caught on camera stealing but continues to protest innocence .
I am not here on this site to play the silly game of trying to score points with some self styled smart arse . I am , however , happy to engage in genuine dialogue with people who want to examine matters in detail and discuss possibilities with an open mind and a zeal for digging out the truth .
Therefore I shall ignore any future Posts from you until I see evidence that we have a shared idea of what a productive Forum might achieve .

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William Browder Founder and CEO, Hermitage Capital

My own experience with Russia began in 1992 when I first went to look at the privatisation programme. At the time, the government of Russia had made a very simple decision to go from communism to capitalism, and the best way they thought to do that was by giving everything away practically for free. So they created all sorts of privatisation schemes: voucher privatisation, loans- for-shares, etc., and transferred a lot of assets from public to private hands in a very short period of time. The privatisation we all know about is the oligarch part of this programme where 22 oligarchs got to own 40 per cent of the GDP of Russia. But there were actually crumbs falling off the table that allowed people like me to create businesses. I created a business to invest in the stock market in Russia. I moved to Russia full-time in 1996 and with the idea to start the Hermitage Fund to invest in Russian shares.
I’m trained as a financial analyst. Normally in the West when you do financial analysis you look at balance sheets and income statements and make judgements about companies and their growth and so on. But what I discovered in Russia was that there was one big part of the equation, which was even more important than balance sheets and income statements, which was how much money the managers of the company were stealing.
I ended up hiring Vadim Kleiner, who’s my head of research sitting here next to me, nine months into starting my business. He and I embarked on a programme of analyzing of Russian companies to figure out how much money they were stealing. This is not a course they teach you in business school; however it is one that we learned how to do quite well over a period of time. One of the things we learnt as we were going along was that because 22 people ended up with 40 per cent of the country in their hands, the other 142 million were pretty angry about it. So there were a lot of people who were willing to talk about who was stealing from who, and how much they were stealing. We found that there was a very sympathetic group of people ready to tell us everything they knew.
So we ended up creating a business model where we would interview people to get information about companies like Gazprom, Sberbank and other important Russian companies. We would then take all this information we had gathered and share it with the Western press, the Financial Times, theW all
Street Journal and various other important media outlets. Interestingly, if you went directly to a Russian newspaper to share information they weren’t all that interested in writing about it. But if you went to the Financial Times and

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they wrote about it, then the Russian press would say “we must write about it as well”. When the Russian newspapers wrote about large-scale fraud at Russian companies, this would often change things in Russia politically.
This might seem a little strange to people who have experience in Russia that just by publicising graft and theft would change anything, but it was roughly around the time that Putin came to power that things really started to change. We discovered that we had a confluence of interests with Vladimir Putin when he came to power. We were fighting with oligarchs, who were stealing money from the companies we had invested in, and he was fighting with oligarchs who were stealing power from the presidency. For a brief period of time, from 1999-2003, every time we publicised a major fraud, the government would step in and fix it. We ended up exposing the theft of huge amounts of assets at Gazprom and the board of directors ended up firing the CEO of Gazprom and making a programme to retain all the remaining assets. We made a lot of noise about the asset stripping plans at the electricity company, and the government cancelled the restructuring plan that had been proposed there. We filed lawsuits about the dilutive share increase at Sberbank. We didn’t stop the share issue, but we ended up getting a new law passed so no one could do that again at any other Russian company.
Our approach was working very nicely, and then something happened in 2003, which changed the environment in Russia forever. That was the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos. At that point they had arrested the richest man in Russia and it sent a very powerful message to the thirteenth, seventeenth and twenty-second richest men in Russia, which was “if we can arrest the richest guy, we can arrest you too”. I can remember how powerful the images were of Mikhail Khodorkovsky sitting in a cage. After that, if you were one of these other oligarchs, you realised that the game had changed, and all these oligarchs went back to the Kremlin and said “please tell us what needs to be done, how do we make sure we don’t become like Khodorkovsky?” Instructions were given, and all of a sudden Putin no longer had a problem with the oligarchs because they were no longer stealing power from him, they were now part of his power structure.
But we were still having problems with the oligarchs and still publicising their misdeeds and on November 13, 2005, as I was flying back to Russia after living in Moscow for ten years and running the largest foreign investment fund in the country, I was stopped at the border, told that I could no longer enter, detained for twenty four hours and then deported back to London where I’ve been ever since. They declared me a threat to national security and despite

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interventions by Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time, Tony Blair, George Bush, the Russians refused to let me back into the country. I thought that being denied a visa was a big problem. From a business perspective it was very detrimental because all of my clients said “why should we give you money to manage in Russia if you can’t get into the country” and they withdrew their money from the fund. But that was a very minor problem compared to what happened next.
About a year and a half later, the officers from the Moscow Tax Crimes Department of the Interior Ministry raided our Moscow offices and the offices of our law firm Firestone Duncan. They were particularly intent on getting hold of the statutory documents of our investment holding companies – the seals, charters, articles of association of our investment holding companies. They seized all of those documents even though they had nothing to do with the pretext of their search. The next thing we knew, a few months later, we get a phone call from a bailiff of the St Petersburg court looking for a couple of hundred million dollars of judgements which had been issued against these three holding companies. At this point, we got very upset and very confused. We didn’t know about any lawsuits in St Petersburg and had never been to court. How could there have been judgements against our companies? We said to ourselves, “who is the smartest lawyer in Russia who can help us figure out what’s going on here?” We called up Sergei Magnitsky, who was a 36-year-old partner at the law firm Firestone Duncan.
Sergei made some initial inquiries and came back and told us that our companies have been fraudulently re-registered into the name of a convicted murderer, that the lawsuits in St Petersburg had been based on forged backdated contracts and all of these actions couldn’t have been possible without the documents which had been taken by the police. We still didn’t understand why they had done this because we didn’t have any money left in Russia. At this point, we started doing more research, and Sergei sent letters to many registry offices and tax offices around Russia. Most didn’t reply. But he got one reply from the tax office of Khimki, which is a suburb of Moscow. The tax office said that these stolen companies had shown up in Khimki and opened accounts at two obscure Russian banks. With this letter he started to do further research into these banks and he figured out the whole scam. The tax police had taken our documents, the companies were then stolen using those documents, fake judgements against our companies were also created from those seized documents, and the purpose of this was to apply for a fraudulent tax refund. We had paid $230 million of taxes in 2006, and in two

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