Sergei Magnitsky, Lawyer for Bill Browder’s Hermitage Fund, Murdered in Moscow Prison

Butyrskaya prison, Reuters

A tragic followup on the post Edmond Safra, Bill Browder, Hermitage Fund and doing Business in Russia. Sergei Magnitsky has died in prison. The Telegraph – Russian authorities have refused to release the body of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer campaigning against fraud and corruption who died in a Moscow jail this week, for an independent autopsy:

“His death also came just days before he was due to be released. Under Russian law, defendants can not be held in custody for longer than a year without bringing them to trial – a deadline that expired on November 24. He died on Monday, November 16.

Mr Magnitsky, a 37-year-old married father of two, was charged with participating in R500m (£10m) tax evasion at two subsidiaries of Hermitage Capital Management, the hedge fund managed by Bill Browder.

However, in evidence in court, he claimed to have been the victim of a “personal vendetta” for testifying against a senior police officer, whom he argued was central to an alleged $230m (£140m) tax fraud he had uncovered that implicated the police, members of the judiciary, tax officials, bankers and the Russian mafia.”

Sergei Magnitsky wrote on prison Conditions:

“Rats run freely along the sewer system… and at night you can hear them squeaking. The toilet was “simply a hole in the floor in a corner of the cell” and “in order to use a toilet without exposing yourself to the others you had to use the bed sheets”. On one occasion, “sewage started to rise from the drain under the sink” until the “floor was covered with sewage several centimetres thick”. “It was impossible to walk on the floor and we were forced to move around the cell by climbing on the beds like monkeys …”for the 10 months I have been under arrest, the investigator has not let me meet with my wife, mother or any other relative. Isolation from the outside world exceeds all reasonable limits.”

WSJ - Murder by Natural Causes:

“The slow-motion assassination of the young lawyer marks a new low in Russia. The families of Estemirova, Politkovskaya, Markelov, Baburova, and Litvinenko at least get no argument that their loved ones were murdered, even if the official “investigations” into those crimes will likely prove useless.

With this new milestone, Moscow consummates the marriage of brutality and revisionism. Contemporary Russia is almost comically weak when viewed from the West, which once feared Moscow would destroy the world. But that doesn’t mitigate the merger of Stalinism with Putinism, nor the tragedy that means for the Russian people.”

The Times – Sergei Magnitsky, lawyer for Hermitage Capital in Kremlin case dies in prison:

“Mr Magnitsky’s mother was told of her son’s death when she arrived at Butyrka detention centre to deliver some personal effects and was told he had been moved to Matrosskaya Tishina. On her arrival there, she was told her son had died the previous day.”

Jamison Firestone is an attorney and managing partner of Firestone Duncan, which has offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Sergei Magnitsky worked in the office of Jamison Firestone who writes in the Moscow Times – Licensed to Kill:

“Magnitsky testified against a group of Interior Ministry officers who we believe stole more than 5 billion rubles from the Russian treasury. One month later, those same officers arrested Magnitsky on completely false charges that made no legal sense. They held him in prison in horrible conditions. When Magnitsky’s health deteriorated, they denied him access to doctors, medicine and a routine but critical operation. He died Monday evening.

Magnitsky did not die by chance. He died because corrupt Interior Ministry officers killed him: They knowingly imprisoned an innocent man, destroyed his health and denied him access to medical treatment. Maybe the ministry just wanted to put pressure on him. But when detained people are tortured, they sometimes die, and in this case the people applying the pressure become killers.

Magnitsky’s story is all the more terrible because it is now routine. Let’s be honest, the so-called law enforcement agencies are detested by everyone and respected by no one. Corrupt officers routinely open criminal cases against the innocent, imprison people, kill people and steal with impunity. They are not above the law: They are the law. They are in effect licensed to kill.”