The Huffington Post: Open Season on Lawyers in Russia

February 19, 2010

Rus­sia has become a pret­ty scary place for lawyers to work, and not for any lack of pow­er lunch­es, major deal­mak­ing, or lux­u­ry retail­ers. While we most often hear about the scores of jour­nal­ists who pay a high price for their crit­i­cism of the Krem­lin, the legal pro­fes­sion has come under attack as well, in both polit­i­cal cas­es as well as run-of-the-mill cor­rup­tion. In recent years, dozens of lawyers have been forced into prison, out of the coun­try, or worse.

The most famous lawyers to fall vic­tim to these prey­ing forces would be Stanislav Markelov, the human rights lawyer who was shot dead on a Moscow side­walk; Vasi­ly Alex­anyan, the Yukos gen­er­al coun­sel who was refused med­ica­tion for AIDS and tuber­cu­lo­sis; and Sergei Mag­nistky, the cor­po­rate lawyer who most recent­ly died in prison fol­low­ing abu­sive treat­ment in rela­tion to the Her­mitage case.

The most recent name to make the head­lines is Jami­son Fire­stone, the 44-year-old Amer­i­can found­ing part­ner of the law firm Fire­stone Dun­can in Moscow, who has been forced to flee Rus­sia for his own safe­ty. Fire­stone was the for­mer employ­er of Mag­nit­sky, and rep­re­sent­ed Her­mitage in their recent tra­vails against state corruption.

his after­noon I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to catch up with Mr. Fire­stone for a tele­phone inter­view, which is avail­able in full over on my blog.

It is some­what com­pli­cat­ed to explain to the aver­age read­er the com­plex­i­ty of the fraud schemes that have been per­pe­trat­ed against Fire­stone’s firm, his employ­ees, and their clients by ele­ments of the Russ­ian Inte­ri­or Min­istry (MVD), but in sum­ma­ry it involves the theft of impor­tant cor­po­rate char­ters, seals, and sig­na­tures in order to forge a “cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty theft” to ille­gal­ly trans­fer own­er­ship of busi­ness­es to third par­ties, and then have them apply for his­tor­i­cal­ly unprece­dent­ed tax rebates from the state bud­get. Fire­stone real­ized that he had to flee Rus­sia imme­di­ate­ly when a sec­ond theft attempt of $21 mil­lion was being made against anoth­er com­pa­ny under his direction.

So not only do the for­eign investors get robbed of their com­pa­nies, but the Russ­ian peo­ple them­selves are also robbed from the trea­sury by their own police. Yet despite these out­rages, even con­sid­er­ing the nation­al and inter­na­tion­al scan­dal that was the mur­der by tor­ture of Sergei Mag­nit­sky, not a thing is being done to stop this.

“As far as pro­tect­ing lawyers, it’s open hunt­ing sea­son on us right now,” Fire­stone told me today in our phone inter­view. “It used to be that when you want­ed some­thing in Rus­sia, you grabbed the guy who owned it and put him in a ter­ri­ble posi­tion, giv­ing him the choice of free­dom for hand­ing over the assets, and he’d usu­al­ly hand over the assets. Now it has expand­ed to the legal team. So now they grab the lawyers and say, ‘alright, we need some bad stuff on your client,’ and the lawyer may say ‘I don’t have any bad stuff on them’ or ‘I have it but I can’t give it to you.’ So then they throw you in prison, and tell you that you have to make up some bad stuff, and until you do, you aren’t going to see your fam­i­ly, that you are going to live very bad­ly, and then you are going to die.”

Fire­stone point­ed out to me just how far things had gone … he used to feel safer than his Russ­ian col­leagues, because as a for­eign nation­al with 20 years expe­ri­ence work­ing in the coun­try, and six years spent on the board of the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of Com­merce, he used to be polit­i­cal­ly pro­tect­ed — but now all bets are off.

What has hap­pened to both Mag­nit­sky and Fire­stone are not iso­lat­ed cas­es, but rather reflect anoth­er symp­tom of the nation­al sys­temic dis­ease Rus­sia is suf­fer­ing from with its near total lack of rule of law. This is dif­fer­ent from law­less­ness, mind you, as these thieves are very fond of using and abus­ing the courts to paper over their thefts. But soon­er or lat­er, Fire­stone com­ments, Rus­sia is going to have to start tak­ing this prob­lem seri­ous­ly before even more dam­age is done to her eco­nom­ic future. Just how much longer will peo­ple con­tin­ue to put mon­ey into devel­op­ing busi­ness and eco­nom­ic growth in Rus­sia when they can nev­er be sure they will be allowed to keep their invest­ment or even their lives?

Per­haps the worst out­come will be proven cor­rect — that it is already too late for Medvede­v’s Krem­lin, if he has any real pow­er after all, to assert any con­trol over the pro­lif­er­a­tion of fief­doms which have con­sumed the var­i­ous insti­tu­tions of the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment. Nev­er­the­less, I cer­tain­ly hope that they try.

Pub­lished on The Huff­in­g­ton Post.

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