Found Culpable, Posthumously
"It shows the endemic corruption and cruelty of President Vladimir Putin's regime. I am still pushing for a British version of the Magnitsky Act to create a presumption against dictators' henchmen being allowed to waltz into Britain."
Dominic Raab, British Conservative MP
Imagine a country with a government where corruption is so pervasive, so entrenched, so valuable to its leading elite that a campaign to shame the government in revealing the extent of corruption, and who is involved, ends with the whistle-blower being imprisoned, effectively tortured, and dying in prison in great physical agony. That imagined place could be in quite a few places. There is no shortage of countries where corruption has become part of the political-social culture.
But it's Russia, we're talking about, and it too has a grand old tradition of corruption. Under Vladimir Putin, corruption is thriving. He has personally amassed a great fortune, and enabled his supporters in government, along with his former KGB colleagues to become rich beyond even their imaginations, controlling government assets, earning untold wealth, and depriving the country and its citizens of their just due.
Bill Browder, who now lives in London, England, lived for a while in Russia where he established a very rewarding business. He also discovered while there the astonishing depth of endemic corruption when he found himself on the losing end of his investments. He retained a Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose investigative work discovered details that proved most inconvenient to Mr. Putin and his allies.
His reward for revealing a $250-million fraud that involved state tax officials and senior Russian police; arrest, prison. He died there, his pleas for medical intervention ignored. His former employer, Mr. Browder, began a campaign to alert and inform Western governments. And he succeeded in persuading the U.S. administration to honour Mr. Magnitsky's memory by establishing something called the Magnitsky Law.
A list of Russian gangster capitalists who would not be permitted entry into the U.S.
Canada has not yet passed its own Magnitsky Law, but it was introduced in the House of Commons by MP and human rights activist Irwin Cotler and awaits action.
Vladimir Kara-Murza (right) and William Browder
(left) made the case for the Magnitsky sanctions in the Canadian
Parliament, where Liberal MP Irwin Cotler (center) is the principal
champion of the legislation. December 2012
In Moscow, however, Judge Igor Alisov conducted a trial on the third floor of Tverskoy Court under a law introduced two years earlier to allow 'dead defendants' an opportunity to have their reputations exonerated. In Mr. Magnitsky's case the trial was an opportunity for the Kremlin to show its detractors that they make the decisions about such matters, not the United States, or dissident opposition members of Russian society.
Sergei Magnitsky was held to be guilty of tax evasion, and so was his former employer, Bill Browder. It is a charge familiar to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian billionaire who dared contest Vladimir Putin politically and who now rots in prison.
"Guilty", said the judge, with perhaps just a hint of embarrassment.
Labels: Britain, Canada, Controversy, Corruption, Human Relations, Justice, Political Realities, Russia, United States
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, July 13, 2013
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