'Geld van corrupte Russische ambtenaren is in EU gestald' (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - People responsible for the death of Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky have salted away stolen money in EU bank accounts, Magnitsky's former employer has claimed.
Bill Browder, the US-born head of the UK investment firm, Hermitage Capital Management, and five of his staff have spent the past year hunting down the assets of Russian officials exposed in a €175 million tax fraud by Magnitsky shortly before he was jailed and murdered in his cell.
Browder scored a victory last week when Swiss authorities froze a number of accounts in the Credit Suisse bank following evidence brought to light by Hermiatge and broadcast on YouTube.
The YouTube clip shows how Russian tax official Olga Stepanova, her husband, Vladlen Stepanov, and two associates used an offshore firm in Cyprus, Arivust Holdings, and in the British Virgin Islands, Aikate Properties, as well as Credit Suisse, to buy multi-million euro properties in Dubai, Russia and Montengro.
Stepanova is one of 60 people, including officials in the Russian interior ministry and in the FSB secret service, believed by Browder to be involved in the Magnitsky conspiracy.
"We have identified assets in a number of EU countries where they travel and have assets, and bank accounts. Ultimately we want to see the same results as we have achieved in Swizterland - assets frozen and travel curtailed," Browder told this website.
EU diplomats have asked Russian counterparts time and again to look into the case during human rights talks held behind closed doors twice a year in Brussels.
They have never received any real answers. But in a sign that Browder's campaign is making an impact on the EU institutions, EU officials also last week took the unusual step of making a public statement about the content of the latest round of consultations.
"The Russian side ... informed that the formal report from the Investigative Committee should be completed over the next months. The Presidential Human Rights Council's working group should also be completing its independent inquiry into this case soon," the European External Action Service said. "The EU ... trusts that the Russian authorities will ensure that those responsible for the death of Sergey Magnitsky be brought to justice."
Commenting on the EU move, Browder said: "It shows how exceptional the Magnitsky case is and how it has become the most emblematic symbol of corruption and impunity in Russia."
For its part, Russia reacted to the YouTube revelations by issuing an arrest warrant against Hermitage's London-based lawyer Ivan Cherkasov and by again threatening to issue a warrant against Browder.
"The Russian police officers involved in the fraud have been threatening to issue a retaliatory arrest warrant against me for three years [dating back to Magnitsky's initial revelations], but it doesn't worry me. No law-abiding country in the world would honour such a warrant," Browder told this website.
"The more they target whistle-blowers, the more it hardens the position of the West."
On Friday (6 May), Russian human rights groups hailed the jailing of an extreme nationalist and his girlfriend for the murder in Moscow in 2009 of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and a trainee reporter, Anastasiya Baburova.
The vast majority of high-profile political killings in Russia in recent years - such as journalist Anna Politkovskaya and human rights campaigner Natalia Estemirova - continue to go unpunished, however.
Russian interior ministry spokeswoman Irina Dudukina has said the state cannot trace any of the funds in the tax fraud exposed by Magnitsky because a truck containing the relevant documents "exploded."
Russia's mission to the EU was contacted for a reaction to the latest developments but declined to comment.