Time: The Danger of Doing Business in Russia
December 19, 2009
On Oct. 13, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, imprisoned on tax evasion charges, told Russian Interior Ministry investigators that he was being denied medical care and subjected to “inhumane and humiliating conditions” in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka jail. The treatment, he said, resulted from his refusal to give false testimony against himself and others. A month later, Magnitsky, 37, was dead. The Interior Ministry, which had charged the lawyer with conspiring to help William Browder, head of the London-based investment firm Hermitage Capital, allegedly evade more than $3 million in taxes, said it had not been aware that he had been ill. In prison notes released by his attorneys, however, Magnitsky repeatedly complained about being refused treatment for pancreatitis, a condition his friends and colleagues say led to his death.
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