By Andrei Skvarsky
A Moscow legal group has claimed laywers for 'murdered' Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky have been under persecution from criminal justice officials whom they accused of stealing $230m in budget funds.
In a letter to Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, the Moscow City Bar Association highlighted the actions by Artem Kuznetsov, an employee of the Tax Crimes Department of the Moscow Branch of the Interior Ministry.
Hermitage says Kuznetsov appears to have been "complicit in embezzlement of 5.4 billion rubles [$230 million] of budget funds and, despite this, was chosen to provide operational support into the investigation of the crime."
The Moscow City Bar highlighted unlawful actions against the lawyers by another official, Investigator Oleg Silchenko of the Investigative Committee of the Interior Ministry. Lawyers described how he “used dirty and illegal methods" to obstruct and intimidate.
Hermitage, which specialises in emerging markets and has an office in Moscow, hit the headlines when its lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, 37, died in a Moscow remand prison in November 2009. Hermitage and human rights activists claimed he was systematically tortured regularly and murdered.
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Are you naïve enough to allow yourselves to be manipulated by Browder?
For f-sake! The man is crooked. Yes, Magnitsky WAS murdered – NO there is no evidence whatsoever that he was tortured. Browder tossed that one in assuming that the journalists were stupid enough to pick it up unchallenged. You never go broke underestimating the press, do you?
You guys are supposed to be fearless and free. Why do you not investigate a bit about Browder? The restructuring of his fund in 1998 where he ripped off all of his investors except the guys who were threatening his life. The use not just of offshore structures for tax optimisation, but the sort of “on-shore off-shores” used by Menatep and the like, and his attempt to screw the Russians who set them up for him, leading to the $10m tax fraud claim against him (entirely separate from the purported $230M).
The fact that the son of a bitch was on the barricades – with me – in 2003 decrying Khodorkovsky and the bent Western press coverage of Russia, now is mouthing the same line he disparaged then, and trying to crawl into bed with the Oligarch, for chrissake?
Its not like Moscow were crying out for a sort of The Economist Lite – lets see a bit of contra-courrant!