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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