Following Putin’s Public Attack on Magnitsky’s Colleagues, Russian Authorities Have Opened a New Criminal Case and Threaten Use of “Special Units” against HSBC Bank in Moscow

February 15, 2013

The Russ­ian Inte­ri­or Min­istry has opened a new crim­i­nal case against col­leagues of the late Sergei Mag­nit­sky, who was killed in Russ­ian police cus­tody in 2009. Details of the new crim­i­nal case are not yet known oth­er than that it alleges ‘fraud­u­lent actions’. 

The new case was opened on Jan­u­ary 24, 2013 fol­low­ing pub­lic state­ments by Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin at a Decem­ber 2012 press con­fer­ence that he need­ed to “dig deep­er” into the Mag­nit­sky case.
Under this new crim­i­nal case, the Russ­ian Inte­ri­or Min­istry is now pres­sur­ing HSBC Bank Moscow to pro­vide wide-rang­ing finan­cial and bank­ing infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the com­pa­nies of the Her­mitage Fund and its advis­ers dat­ing all the way back to 1996.

The Russ­ian Inte­ri­or Min­istry has threat­ened to use “spe­cial forces” to obtain the doc­u­ments if HSBC does­n’t cooperate.
“Oth­er­wise, the doc­u­ments which have the force of evi­dence under the crim­i­nal case and are with OOO HSBC Bank RR can be seized by force dur­ing a seizure or search, includ­ing with the prar­tic­i­pa­tion of employ­ees of spe­cial units,” said the request sanc­tioned by major G.Sungurov, head of 4^th sec­tion with­in the Inte­ri­or Ministry’s Inves­ti­ga­tions Department.

Under the Russ­ian law, bank­ing infor­ma­tion can be pro­vid­ed to the police only if it con­cerns spe­cif­ic acts and cir­cum­stances of the inves­ti­ga­tion. The Inte­ri­or Min­istry has failed to iden­ti­fy any cir­cum­stances con­nect­ing the com­pa­nies in ques­tion to their request, yet they demand­ed that bank­ing infor­ma­tion on trans­ac­tions of “each day of oper­a­tions” for 8 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies be pro­vid­ed in Russia.

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