The NY Times: Inquiry Stalled in Death of Russian Lawyer
April 22, 2010
Two human rights campaigners said on Thursday that despite personal intervention by Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, officials responsible for the death of a lawyer last year in pretrial detention are facing no substantial punishment.
In November, Mr. Medvedev ordered an inquiry into the treatment of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer who died in a prison hospital after carefully documenting his requests for medical care. Amid public outrage over the case, Mr. Medvedev dismissed around 20 prison officials and prosecutors opened an inquiry into negligence and refusal of medical care.
But five months have passed and no one has yet been charged with a crime. Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, who sits on Mr. Medvedev’s human rights council, said she will recommend the body take control of the case, which she said “is not moving.”
The New York Times: Major Investor in Russia Sees Wide Fraud Scheme.
July 30, 2009
By ANDREW E. KRAMER MOSCOW
William F. Browder, once the largest foreign investor in the Russian stock market, filed court documents in New York this week contending that other Western investors in Russia had colluded with the authorities to steal hundreds of millions of dollars through tax refunds and then laundered the money through New York banks. Mr. Browder has hired the law firm of John D. Ashcroft, the former United States attorney general, to represent him in New York in a request for a subpoena for bank wire transfer and other records that Mr. Ashcroft contends will prove Mr. Browder’s allegations.
The filing is a new twist on Mr. Browder’s case, which began almost four years ago. His lawyers say the wire transfers will show a fraud larger than previously disclosed — remarkable even by the standards of Russia.
In its sweep and scale, the case has echoes of the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal in the late 1990s, though this time there are no allegations that American banks other than the subsidiary of a Russian investment company were involved. Mr. Browder was expelled from Russia in a politically tinged visa refusal in 2005, and relocated his business, Hermitage Capital Management, to London. Later, he said subsidiary companies he had formed in Russia to invest in Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, were used by others to acquire a fraudulent tax refund of $230 million.
The New York Times: Крупный инвестор, вкладывавший деньги в Россию, утверждает, что совершена широкомасштабная афера
July 30, 2009
Перевод статьи The New York Times: Major Investor in Russia Sees Wide Fraud Scheme.
Эндрю И. Крамер
Крупный инвестор, вкладывавший деньги в Россию, утверждает, что совершена широкомасштабная афера
Уильям Ф. Браудер утверждает, что афера с налоговыми выплатами коснулась не только его инвестфонда, но и группы компаний “Ренессанс”, сообщает The New York Times. На этой неделе в Нью-Йорке Браудер подал в суд ходатайство, где утверждается, что несколько западных инвесторов в России в сговоре с властями похитили сотни миллионов долларов в порядке возврата налоговых отчислений, а затем отмыли деньги через нью-йоркские банки, пишет корреспондент Эндрю И. Крамер.
Адвокаты Браудера — фирма Джона Д. Эшкрофта, в прошлом генерального прокурора США, — ходатайствуют о предоставлении им квитанций денежных переводов и других документов. Ранее Браудер утверждал, что созданные им в России дочерние компании были использованы посторонними лицами для мошеннического получения из государственной казны 230 млн долларов в качестве возвращенных налоговых отчислений. Теперь же в ходатайстве Эшкрофта говорится, что для сходной аферы использовались и дочерние фирмы других компаний: “не менее 100 млн долларов, выплаченных иностранными инвесторами “Газпрома” российским властям в качестве налогов за период до 2006 года, позднее были похищены путем возврата налогов под фиктивным предлогом”.
The New York Times: An Investment Gets Trapped in Kremlin’s Vise
July 24, 2008
William F. Browder was one of the most prominent foreign investors here, a corporate provocateur who brought the tactics of Wall Street shareholder activists to the free-for-all of post-Soviet capitalism. Until, that is, the Kremlin expelled him in 2005.
Mr. Browder then focused on protecting his billions of dollars of stakes in major Kremlin-controlled companies, like Gazprom, and on fighting to return to a land where he had deep and unusual family ties. So when he ran into Dmitri A. Medvedev, the country’s future president, at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, he saw his chance.
In a brief conversation at a dinner at the Swiss resort, he pressed Mr. Medvedev for help in regaining his Russian visa. Mr. Medvedev, then a top aide to President Vladimir V. Putin, agreed to pass along his request.
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