Estonian Authorities Have Traced $10 Million of Stolen Russian Government Money Uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky

January 25, 2013

Eston­ian author­i­ties have dis­cov­ered that $10 mil­lion of the $230 mil­lion of funds stolen from the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment and uncov­ered by Sergei Mag­nit­sky had been trans­ferred through Esto­nia accord­ing to pub­lic pros­e­cu­tor Piret Paukš­tys. The dis­cov­ery of funds was report­ed by Baltic Busi­ness News yes­ter­day (http://balticbusinessnews.com/article/2013/1/24/paper-10m-usd-laundered-in-estonia-in-magnitski-case).

It was also report­ed that the Eston­ian author­i­ties had found that ten dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies have been used to trans­fer the mon­ey, accord­ing to the Busi­ness TASS agency in Tal­inn (http://www.biztass.ru/news/id/55661).

Accord­ing to the Eston­ian author­i­ties, the mon­ey was wired via inter­net bank­ing to var­i­ous per­sons in oth­er jurisdictions.
“The uncov­er­ing of the trail of mon­ey is a sub­stan­tial break­through in the inves­ti­ga­tion of the crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy exposed by Her­mitage and Sergei Mag­nit­sky,” said Her­mitage Cap­i­tal representative.

In total, $230 mil­lion that had been paid in tax­es to the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment by the Her­mitage Fund in 2006 was stolen the fol­low­ing year from the Russ­ian trea­sury by a group of cor­rupt Russ­ian offi­cials work­ing togeth­er with orga­nized crim­i­nals. Sergei Mag­nit­sky dis­cov­ered and tes­ti­fied about the thefts and was sub­se­quent­ly arrest­ed and killed in Russ­ian police cus­tody at the age of 37. Three years lat­er, no one has been con­vict­ed for his death.

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