// In The Press - English Press
Bloomberg: Interview with William Browder
January 29, 2010
William Browder Says No Country as Corrupt as Russia.
Reuters: The $1.2 billion fraud alleged at Russia’s largest bank
January 22, 2010
Tucked away on page 4 of the Moscow Times today there is a remarkable article which made me wonder whether I wasn’t hallucinating.
The report states matter-of-factly that several branch managers are being investigated for defrauding $1.2 billion from Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank. That’s according to comments made by Sberbank’s regional manager for Moscow. The Moscow Times translated the article from Thursday’s edition of the Russian newspaper Vedomosti, where it appears on page 7.
According to this article, Sberbank suspects managers at three Moscow branches of doling out “thieving” loans, on the basis of “fictitious” documents, to “dubious” companies. The scale of the resulting losses at these three branches? “More than 35 billion roubles” ($1.2 billion).
WalterDuranty: The Sergei Magnitsky Murder: Siloviki Circle the Wagons
January 22, 2010
BROOKLYN, New York — It has been more than two months since the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in police custody after being refused medical attention. Magnitsky represented British investor Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, in a case involving a huge tax fraud allegedly perpetrated by Russian police officials and uncovered by Mr. Magnitsky. He had spent nearly a year in pre-trial detention, imprisoned without charge by the very people he accused of perpetrating the fraud against his clients and the Russian government.
The Spectator: There’s something rotten in the state of Russia
January 7, 2010
President Dimitry Medvedev was supposed to clean up his country but, says Owen Matthews, feudalism, lawlessness and corruption suit all those keen to hold onto money and power.
There is a chilling sequence in Tsar, Pavel Lungin’s dark and brilliant new film about Ivan the Terrible. Ivan, played by the mercurial rock musician Pyotr Mamonov, steps out of his private chapel wild-eyed after a long session of wheedling and bargaining with his God. The Tsar walks, lost in thought, through a series of rooms. As he shuffles along grovelling boyars ceremonially dress him. One group gently places a cloth-of-gold gown over his shoulders. Another group presents an embroidered collar, then cuffs, a crown and staff. Finally the Tsar emerges into the winter sunlight, golden and terrible. The crowd of people who have been waiting for him since dawn prostrate themselves in the slush and the shit of the palace yard. Silence falls. The message is clear: for the grovelling boyars and the grovelling peasants alike, the Tsar is God’s messenger on earth, the sole fount of worldly power and protection.
The Global Graft Report: What Happened To Sergei?
January 5, 2010
Hermitage Capital Management was the biggest foreign investor in Russia. Then in 2005, it all went wrong. CEO William Browder was banned from the country on what he says was a pretext. Two years later, 50 police officers from the Moscow Interior Ministry raided Hermitage’s offices and those of its lawyers. The police took corporate documents and seals. Those same instruments were allegedly used in 2008 to fraudulently obtain $230 million that the Hermitage Fund companies had paid in taxes two years earlier.
Also in 2008, one of Hermitage’s lawyers who didn’t leave Russia or go into hiding, Sergei Magnitsky, above, was thrown into jail. He died in custody in November 2009 at age 37. His jailers first said he ruptured his abdominal membrane; then they said it was a heart attack. Officials have refused his family’s requests for an independent autopsy.
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