// In The Press - English Press

The AmLaw Daily: From Russia With Fear

March 25, 2010

When he opened his law and audit firm Fire­stone Dun­can in Moscow in 1993, Jami­son Fire­stone saw Rus­sia as a land of oppor­tu­nity. Today, he is essen­tially exiled abroad, man­ag­ing his busi­ness from thou­sands of miles away, and afraid of what could hap­pen to him should he return to the city he called home for 17 years.

Fire­stone decamped to Lon­don in Decem­ber after a lawyer from his firm died amid mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances in a Moscow pre­trial deten­tion facil­ity and in the midst of a long-running inves­ti­ga­tion by Russ­ian author­i­ties into one of his firm’s clients, Her­mitage Cap­i­tal Management.

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Radio Free Europe: Is Anarchism Russia’s Solution?

March 22, 2010

A col­umn by Russ­ian TV jour­nal­ist Andrei Loshak is mak­ing waves in Rus­sia, with over 400,000 peo­ple hav­ing read it so far. (Read it in Eng­lish here.)

In the piece, Loshak detects a major change in the pub­lic atti­tude to the state. “Instead of anx­i­ety and apa­thy,” he argues, “wrath comes to the fore.” Fur­ther­more, he answers the two eter­nal, “cursed ques­tions” of Russ­ian think­ing about soci­ety: “Who is guilty?” and “What is to be done?”

Loshak’s answer: the state is to be held respon­si­ble, and the solu­tion, sur­pris­ingly enough, is anarchism.

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OpenSpace.ru: Kafka’s Castle is collapsing

March 19, 2010

Kafka’s Cas­tle is collapsing

You can’t rea­son with the absurd, as IKEA found when it tried to build a model busi­ness in Rus­sia. Insti­tu­tional cor­rup­tion is out of con­trol. Kafka’s Cas­tle is finally col­laps­ing. This is good news, as Rus­sians, ordi­nary Rus­sians are los­ing their fear. Now they’re just angry, says Andrei Loshak.

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The Economist: Cops for hire

March 19, 2010

Reform­ing Russia’s vio­lent and cor­rupt police will not be easy

THEY shoot, beat and tor­ture civil­ians, con­fis­cate busi­nesses and take hostages. They are feared and dis­trusted by two-thirds of the coun­try. But they are not for­eign occu­piers, mer­ce­nar­ies or mafia; they are Russia’s police offi­cers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.

Daily reports of police vio­lence read like wartime bul­letins. Recent cases include a ran­dom shoot­ing by a police offi­cer in a Moscow super­mar­ket (seven wounded, two dead), the grue­some tor­ture and killing of a jour­nal­ist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Mag­nit­sky, a young lawyer for an Amer­i­can invest­ment fund. He was denied med­ical treat­ment and died in pre-trial deten­tion in Moscow hav­ing accused sev­eral police offi­cers of fraud.

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The Global Graft Report: What Happened To Sergey Magnitsky?

March 18, 2010

Her­mitage Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment was the biggest for­eign investor in Rus­sia. Then in 2005, it all went wrong. CEO William Brow­der was banned from the coun­try on what he says was a pre­text. Two years later, 50 police offi­cers from the Moscow Inte­rior Min­istry raided Hermitage’s offices and those of its lawyers. The police took cor­po­rate doc­u­ments and seals. Those same instru­ments were allegedly used in 2008 to fraud­u­lently obtain $230 mil­lion that the Her­mitage Fund com­pa­nies had paid in taxes two years earlier.

Also in 2008, one of Hermitage’s lawyers who didn’t leave Rus­sia or go into hid­ing, Sergei Mag­nit­sky, above, was thrown into jail. He died in cus­tody in Novem­ber 2009 at age 37. His jail­ers first said he rup­tured his abdom­i­nal mem­brane; then they said it was a heart attack. Offi­cials have refused his family’s requests for an inde­pen­dent autopsy.

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