Magnitsky Act

===

see sanctions

see tulsi gabbard

see trump twr mtg manafort

Sergei Magnitsky, who human rights activists believe was murdered in 2009 after accusing the Russian police of stealing an estimated $230 million from the state treasury.

. The U.S. Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012.

Veselnitskaya was one of the top advocates lobbying to overturn these global Magnitsky laws, which have reportedly absolutely infuriated Putin.

When she arranged to meet Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in 2016, she was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton allegedly given to her by Karapetyan’s general prosecutor’s office, according to the emails of introduction, which have since been leaked. Once inside, we now know that she attempted to lobby the senior Trump officials on the Magnitsky case.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/heres-why-putin-wants-american-businessman-bill-browder-dead/

===

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/newseum-will-host-controversial-magnitsky-film-screening-des

wASHINGTON — The Newseum says it will not cancel a screening of a controversial documentary about Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky despite concerns from Magnitsky's family.

The film, The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes, is scheduled to be shown at the Newseum's Knight Center on June 13. Magnitsky's widow and mother are arguing that the film defames him and are asking that it not be shown.

"As you may know, Sergei Magnitsky was killed in Russian custody in 2009 at the age of 37," reads the letter from Natalia Zharikova, Magnitsky's widow, and Natalia Magnitskaya, his mother, which was obtained by BuzzFeed News on Thursday. The letter was sent to trustees of the Knight Foundation, which is a founding partner of the Newseum. "Those who are scared of the truth that Sergei had uncovered when he testified against corrupt Russian officials and are facing trial in New York in the lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice for laundering corrupt proceeds, have hired Knight Conference Center at Newseum in Washington to desecrate Sergei Magnitsky’s memory and his heroic sacrifice."

"They intend to show a fallacious film which makes a mockery of Sergei’s life and death, and is false and highly defamatory," the women wrote. "Unfortunately, we had an opportunity to preview this film. The intent of those behind this film is to create doubt about Sergei among people who have not had an opportunity to study the case and review the real documents, and to attack the US Magnitsky Act which created some measure of consequences for those responsible for Sergei’s persecution in Russia."

The Newseum said it had received a letter from lawyers for Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder, for whom Magnitsky worked, in addition to the letter from Magnitsky's mother and widow, but that it will not cancel the event. The letter from Magnitsky's relatives was forwarded to the Knight Foundation trustees by a Hermitage executive.

"The Potomac Square Group has rented facilities at the Newseum for a private screening and panel discussion of the film The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes for June 13," said Scott Williams, a spokesman for the Newseum. "We rent our facilities for many purposes, from showings of films and discussions of significant political and press freedom issues, to television productions and press conferences, to weddings and other celebrations."

"We have now received a letter from the UK law firm Carter-Ruck, representing Natalia Magnitskaya and William Browder, demanding that the Newseum cancel the program," Williams said. "The Newseum has a strong commitment to free speech and free expression and we have let Carter-Ruck know that we will not cancel the Potomac Square Group’s screening."

"We believe that free expression is the only approach possible to understanding the complex issues we all face in the world today. That’s also why public and private discussions and screenings of films on all sides of important issues take place at the Newseum, even when some may disagree with the content," Williams said.

The documentary was made by Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov and has set off controversy in Europe, where a showing at the European Parliament was cancelled at the last minute after complaints from lawyers for Magnitsky's widow and Browder. The film reportedly alleges that Magnitsky was not mistreated in the Russian prison where he died, and that he did not actually uncover wide-scale corruption among Russian officials.

Magnitsky died in prison in 2009 after investigating and exposing the alleged $230 million tax fraud. Both Magnitsky and Browder were later convicted of tax fraud in Russia, posthumously in Magnitsky's case. Browder went on to become an activist who worked to pass the Magnitsky Act, which passed in 2012 and sanctioned Russian officials allegedly involved in Magnitsky's death.

Legislation that would create a global Magnitsky Act is currently moving through Congress, and was approved by a House panel last month. Meanwhile, there are legal proceedings underway in the U.S. against a Russian man named Denis Katsyv whom prosecutors allege received some of the laundered money from the tax fraud scheme first uncovered by Magnitsky.

"This film is a crude attempt to cover up the responsibility of the Russian government for the torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky," Browder told BuzzFeed News. "Considering what the Russians have already done to Sergei's family, it's an abomination that they are now spitting on his grave and trying to defame him posthumously. I very much hope the Newseum won't lend their good name to this."

According to RFE/RL, journalist Seymour Hersh is moderating a discussion at the screening and Rinat Akhmetshin, the head of a think tank called the International Eurasian Institute (about which there's very little public information), is also involved. Akhmetshin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The event is being organized by the Potomac Square Group, a firm run by Christopher Cooper, a former journalist.

"It’s the director’s event and the movie people," Cooper said. "I’m not gonna talk about who’s paying for what and all that."

This is the full letter from Magnitsky's widow and mother:

Dear Mr Palfrey, Mr Ibarguen, Members of the Board of Trustees,

We are urgently writing to you to seek your intervention to stop an evil and vindictive attack on our deceased husband and son – Sergei Magnitsky – being planned in Washington on 13 June 2016 in the name of the Knight Conference Center at the Newseum.

As you may know, Sergei Magnitsky was killed in Russian custody in 2009 at the age of 37. Those who are scared of the truth that Sergei had uncovered when he testified against corrupt Russian officials and are facing trial in New York in the lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice for laundering corrupt proceeds, have hired Knight Conference Center at Newseum in Washington to desecrate Sergei Magnitsky’s memory and his heroic sacrifice.

They intend to show a fallacious film which makes a mockery of Sergei’s life and death, and is false and highly defamatory. Unfortunately, we had an opportunity to preview this film. The intent of those behind this film is to create doubt about Sergei among people who have not had an opportunity to study the case and review the real documents, and to attack the US Magnitsky Act which created some measure of consequences for those responsible for Sergei’s persecution in Russia.

Those affected by the US Magnitsky Act have hired agents in the US who plan to show this film at a private event on 13 June 2016 at 6:30 pm at Newseum’s Knight Conference Center.

In the last two months, several organisations in Europe have disassociated themselves from this film, having learned about its defamatory content, and have cancelled its screening.

We understand that the goal of your foundation is to support quality journalism. Shameless lies about dead people have nothing to do with that.

We implore on you to do everything in your power and do so without delay so that your foundation is not lending its name to this despicable event.

Natalia Zharikova, Widow of Sergei Magnitsky

Natalia Magnitskaya, Mother of Sergei Magnitsky

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/10/millionaire-tries-to-shut-down-screening-of-documentary-claiming-to-tell-the-true-story-of-russias-missing-230-million-putin-sergei-magnitsky-bill-browder/

a hedge fund manager’s reputation, U.S. sanctions targeting human rights violations in Russia, and the truth about how Sergei Magnitsky, a tax lawyer caught up in a $230 million dispute, wound up dead. So the story goes in Andrei Nekrasov’s new documentary, “The Magnitsky Act” — a film that’s been pulled thrice by European theaters and broadcasters who bent to legal pressure from the man it seeks to expose as a fraud.

Next Monday, the Russian-born Nekrasov will finally get his chance to premiere it at the Newseum, a journalism history museum in Washington. Nekrasov is showing it to a private audience whose invitees include congressional staffers, State Department employees, members of the White House National Security Council, and journalists.Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh will moderate the screening.

:{The film centers on Sergei Magnitsky, who human rights activists believe was murdered in 2009 after accusing the Russian police of stealing an estimated $230 million from the state treasury.}:

But according to Nekrasov, that narrative is wrong. By his telling, Russian authorities were the victims of a massive theft, not the perpetrators. The film, he told Foreign Policy in a telephone interview, provides strong circumstantial evidence that Magnitsky’s boss, Bill Browder, was possibly involved in the multimillion dollar theft from Russian taxpayers.

Sonya Gavankar, the Newseum’s manager of public relations, told FP in an email that the museum would screen the film despite a letter from Browder’s lawyers demanding that it be cancelled.

Browder was one of the first Westerners to cash in on the fall of communism in Russia, starting Hermitage Capital Management in 1996 with just $25 million in seed capital. Within a few years, he became the largest investor in Russia, at one point managing $4.5 billion in capital, and staying on Moscow’s good side by vocally supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin.

His riches-to-super-riches story came to an abrupt end, however, in November 2005, when Russia blacklisted Browder as a threat to national security for auditing the companies he invested in and leaking details of insider trading and corruption to the press. A year-and-a-half later, police officers raided his firm’s office in Moscow and confiscated paperwork.

Here’s where the accounts diverge: Browder says the police then stole three of his holding companies and used them to claim a $230 million tax rebate; Nekrasov, who previously directed films critical of the Kremlin, argues that authorities were investigating Hermitage Capital over legitimate concerns about large-scale tax evasion.

“I can prove in court that Browder is not telling the truth,” Nekrasov told FP in an interview from Berlin.

His accusation, stunning if true, has alienated friends, enraged Browder, and threatens to tarnish the director’s well-respected career.

His accusation, stunning if true, has alienated friends, enraged Browder, and threatens to tarnish the director’s well-respected career.

It would also undermine the narrative behind the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law passed in 2012 to punish those responsible for the tax lawyer’s arrest, torture, and death in custody. It allows the United States to withhold visas and freeze financial assets of Russian officials involved Magnitsky’s death and other human rights abuses. In retaliation, Moscow banned U.S. adoptions of Russian babies.

Nekrasov told FP he set out to make a film based on Browder’s story that would be “a docu-drama praising Magnitsky.” Instead, he says close to two years of research led him to conclude that the conventional narrative was false. He said funding for the film came exclusively from mainstream western European organizations.

Nekrasov’s film documents how he went from trusting Browder’s word to disbelieving it. The director says he began to doubt the hedge fund manager after reading the actual police reports in Russian. For example, Nekrasov argues that Magnitsky’s first contact with the police was not a voluntary act of whistleblowing, as Browder maintains, but a record of the police questioning him as a key witness in a tax evasion investigation.

Among Russian activists, Nekrasov said, Magnitsky is seen as a hero and Browder as truthsayer. Any revelation that sullies them could be a bitter pill to swallow.

“The worst criticism comes from my Russian friends,” he said. “Most of my friends are completely pro-Browder, and Putin doesn’t have any influence over them. I became like a traitor.”

Browder has thwarted Nekrasov’s previous attempts to show the film with threats of legal action. The first time, he intervened at the last minute to stop Nekrasov, with Blu-ray disc in hand, from showing it to an audience of European Union parliamentarians at the their headquarters in Brussels.

Around the time of that planned screening, Magnitsky’s mother and widow denounced Nekrasov’s film in a joint letter to the European Parliament. Browder’s lawyers also have sent letters threatening to sue the producers and venues that have tried to screen the film, according to Nekrasov.

In a phone call with FP, Browder said he would pursue legal action against the Newseum if he perceived it as backing the movie “in any way.”

“They’re on record now for knowing the libel,” he said, referring to a list of supporting evidence he gave to the Newseum.

“We’ve explained to them that this movie is a fraud and that it contains false information, so if they continue to support it then they’re disseminating this false narrative,” Browder said. “They have a choice. They can stop it.”

Magnitsky’s widow and mother have asked the Newseum to shut down the program. On Thursday, they sent a letter to the board of trustees urging them to “stop an evil and vindictive attack on our deceased husband and son.”

Browder and Magnitsky’s family believe that a Russian implicated in the tax fraud is funding the screening at the Newseum.

Browder said he has evidence that Denis Katsyv, a Russian national under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for taking some of the $230 million, is funding the Potomac Square Group to rent out the room at the Newseum. The Potomac Square Group, a public relations firm in Washington, is also representing Nekrasov.

“This has nothing to do with free speech. It has to do with laying out false information by alleged Russian gangsters who are currently under investigation and being sued by Department of Justice,” Browder said.

In an email to FP, Christopher Cooper, a partner at the Potomac Square Group, denied Browder’s allegation that he was representing Katsyv’s company.

Nekrasov also denied knowledge of this arrangement and said he’d “be very curious to see what this evidence is,” though he did admit to knowing Katsyv.

Nekrasov told FP that his experience dealing with Browder “has been a bit depressing, to be frank.”

“What I discovered is how easy it is — if you have a lot of money — to basically gag somebody,” Nekrasov said.

grassley ltr

Executive Summary

There is an ongoing lobbying campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act (the

“Campaign”) and rewrite the history of the Magnitsky story. This campaign has been

conducted by the following entities

A. Prevezon Holdings Limited (“Prevezon”) - a Russian owned Cyprus registered

company

B. The Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (“HRAGIF”) -

a Delaware NGO created on 18 February 2016.

To assist them in the Campaign, based on information and belief, the following

people have been hired to lobby on their behalf:

A. Rinat Akhmetshin – Russian national living in Washington D.C.

B. Robert Arakelian

C. Chris Cooper – CEO Potomac Square Group

D. Glenn Simpson - SNS Global and Fusion GPS

E. Mark Cymrot – Partner, Baker Hostetler

F. Ron Dellums - Former Republican Congressman

G. Howard Schweitzer – Managing Partner of Cozen O’Connor Public

Strategie

Executive Summary 1. There is an ongoing lobbying campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act (the “Campaign”) and rewrite the history of the Magnitsky story. This campaign has been conducted by the following entities A. Prevezon Holdings Limited (“Prevezon”) - a Russian owned Cyprus registered company B. The Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (“HRAGIF”) - a Delaware NGO created on 18 February 2016. 2. To assist them in the Campaign, based on information and belief, the following people have been hired to lobby on their behalf:A. Rinat Akhmetshin – Russian national living in Washington D.C. B. Robert Arakelian C. Chris Cooper – CEO Potomac Square Group D. Glenn Simpson - SNS Global and Fusion GPS E. Mark Cymrot – Partner, Baker Hostetler F. Ron Dellums - Former Republican Congressman G. Howard Schweitzer – Managing Partner of Cozen O’Connor Public Strategie

===

AN 1119

no lnx many

So is Tulsi Gabbard really a ‘Russian asset’? How would we know for sure?

Tulsi Gabbard/CreativeCommonsTulsi Gabbard/CreativeCommons

Written by Matthew Rozsa November 16, 2019

Is it valid to accuse Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii and a current presidential candidate, of being a “Russian asset”?

It’s a strange question, and one that normally wouldn’t need to be answered. Gabbard has never polled above the low single digits and has no realistic chance of being the 2020 Democratic nominee. Surrounded by controversy and facing a primary challenge from a more conventional Democrat, she has already announced she won’t run for re-election to Congress either.

But in recent weeks, Gabbard has been making news in peculiar ways. Although in most respects she is a left-wing Democrat, Gabbard has lately become something of an icon among Republicans and other conservative-leaning types. She has appeared on Fox News to criticize the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, has claimed that the Democratic presidential primaries are “rigged” and has been praised by far-right pundits, from online troll Mike Cernovich and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

At least some of that praise derived from Gabbard’s war of words with Hillary Clinton, who had seemingly accused Gabbard — an Iraq war veteran and an officer in the Army Reserve — of being a tool for Russian subversion. In this context, it’s important to look at what Clinton actually said during a podcast interview with David Plouffe, onetime campaign manager for Barack Obama:

They’re also going to do third party. I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset, I mean totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.

Clinton’s PR team later clarified that word-salad, saying that she was not accusing the Russians of “grooming” Gabbard as a third-party candidate. Even so, Clinton still referred to Gabbard as “the favorite of the Russians” and appeared to describe her — depending on how you parse the sentence — as a “Russian asset.” Clinton has not retracted either of those claims, and Gabbard responded by labeling Clinton as “queen of the warmongers” and an “embodiment of corruption” and, later, demanding an apology. (Gabbard has also said several times she will not run as a third-party candidate.)

Donald Trump got into the fray by defending Gabbard and describing Clinton as “sick,” while Sen. Bernie Sanders — whom Gabbard supported against Clinton in the 2016 primaries — tweeted that “people can disagree on issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset.” Several other current and former Democratic presidential candidates also defended Gabbard, including former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who served with her in Congress.

This brings us back to the original question: What does it mean to accuse someone of being a “Russian asset” — and does that apply to Gabbard? I reached out first to Bill Browder, an American-born British businessman who spent many years in Russia and became a leading foe of Vladimir Putin. He later pushed Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, which allows the U.S. government to freeze assets and ban visas for human-rights violators around the world.

“All I have is an observation on a number of observable facts about Tulsi Gabbard in connection with Russia or Russian interests,” Browder said. “The first fact is that Tulsi Gabbard had hired a man named Chris Cooper from a firm called Potomac … to help her run interference on people who were doing negative reporting on her. Chris Cooper has an ugly history of having been involved in the anti-Magnitsky campaign,” including work in 2016 intended, Browder says, to discredit him personally along with the Magnitsky Act.

Adding that Gabbard was one of the few members of the House to vote against the Global Magnitsky Act in December 2016, Browder cited as his “next piece of circumstantial evidence” the fact that “Tulsi Gabbard is celebrated on Russian state television.” He also pointed to the “very unpleasant fact” that Gabbard “is a supporter of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator in Syria, and the person responsible for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. And that is a position which is exactly consistent with the position of the Russian government.” (Gabbard has said she does not support the Assad regime, although she has met the Syrian president and has at times expressed skepticism about charges that Assad has used chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.)

Gabbard “may be entirely innocent” of any actual collaboration with Putin, Browder said, “but she may be an asset as far as the Russians are concerned because they may see her candidacy as an opportunity to further spread chaos in the U.S. political process.” He noted that Putin is likely “extremely happy” with the chaotic consequences of his meddling in the 2016 presidential election, noting that Trump’s ascent to power has earned Putin “some huge geopolitical wins,” such as Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

I also reached out to Michael McFaul, who was Obama’s ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and is also despised by Putin, so much so that during the infamous Helsinki summit last year, Putin tried to persuade Trump to hand both Browder and McFaul over to him on charges that could generously be called dubious.

Like the seasoned diplomat he is, McFaul was far more cautious in the language he used about Gabbard. “I do not believe generally that somebody should be suspected of being an agent for a foreign country because of a foreign policy position that they have taken,” he said, adding he had not closely followed Gabbard’s positions and associations. “I think one needs to be very careful about insinuations of working for a foreign government. One should have some firm documentation before saying such matters.”

Gabbard’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding this article. When an NBC reporter asked Gabbard last month about her alleged ties to Russia, she characterized the accusations as a “smear campaign.”

While Browder and McFaul seemed to take very different approaches to the Gabbard controversy, both made valid points. It’s generally not appropriate to make such a serious accusation based only on circumstantial evidence. If Hillary Clinton knows of any such evidence, she did not offer it.

Donald Trump, by contrast, was revealed by special counsel Robert Mueller to have actively sought the Russian government’s assistance during the 2016 election. There have been no investigations that have yielded any comparable evidence about Tulsi Gabbard.

Furthermore, it’s unwise and deeply un-American to suggest that people have been compromised by a foreign power simply because they hold controversial or unpopular views on foreign policy. Although the accusation of “McCarthyism” gets thrown around too freely, it is legitimate here. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s infamous witch hunts against alleged communists often targeted men and women who held unorthodox foreign-policy positions or who spoke out against the U.S. government’s Cold War policies.

It’s also fair to note that America has a mixed record on human rights, at best, and exposing such violations can sometimes be helpful to our global rivals. When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaked information about U.S. human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, that was almost certainly welcomed by the Kremlin. There may be other reasons to suspect that Assange was in league with the Russian government, but releasing evidence of war crimes belongs to a totally different category.

All that said, there’s little doubt that Putin is trying to subvert the governments of other countries to create an “illiberal international.” We can be mindful of that without becoming paranoid. In a conversation I had with McFaul last January, he compared Putin to Vladimir Lenin, revolutionary founder of the Soviet Union.

“Lenin and his comrades created the Communist International,” he explained. “I do think Putin is leading something akin to an Illiberal International, not only in our country, but trying to find like-minded individuals, and movements and parties first and foremost, in Europe, in the United States, and he’s investing in those relationships.”

He added that Putin’s ultimate goal is “the end of the liberal international order. … The breakup of states as you have in the U.K., the breakup of alliances and NATO, the breakup of the European Union — those are all things that Putin thinks are in his national interest.”

Despite Republican claims to the contrary, it is clear that the Trump campaign was eager to work with the Russian government in 2016. Putin has meddled in other nations’ political processes in order to bring about results he sees as favorable to his interests. Just as there really were Communist agents in the West during the Cold War, there are politicians today who serve Putin’s interests in the post-Cold War world.

How do we identify those people and those forces without smearing innocent people simply because of the opinions they hold? If we don’t raise red flags where appropriate, we risk being played for suckers, as happened in the 2016 election. If we’re overzealous in exposing “Russian assets,” for example, purely by identifying people who hold unorthodox or unpopular positions, we risk creating a latter-day McCarthyism. That challenge will persist long after Tulsi Gabbard has faded from the public consciousness, and long after the political tribulations of this decade have entered the history books.

===

no lnx

DOWNED

Russian Official Linked to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Trump Tower Lawyer, Is Dead

Russia’s Deputy Attorney General Saak Karapetyan was exposed this year for running a foreign recruitment operation with Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Nico Hines

London Editor

Updated 03.20.19 4:04PM ET / Published 10.04.18 1:15PM ET

A Russian official accused of directing the foreign operations of Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met senior Trump campaign officials in 2016, has plummeted to his death in a helicopter crash.

Russian Deputy Attorney General Saak Albertovich Karapetyan was exposed in a Swiss court this year for a plot to enlist another nation’s law-enforcement official as a double-agent for the Kremlin.

Media reports in Russia say he died Wednesday night when his helicopter crashed into a forest during an unauthorized flight in the Kostroma region, northeast of Moscow.

Karapetyan, 58, was intimately familiar with some of the most notorious operations carried out under the orders of Vladimir Putin. He worked closely with Veselnitskaya as well as running some of Moscow’s most high-profile efforts to thwart international investigations into Russia’s alleged crimes.

It was Karapetyan who signed a letter from the Russian government refusing to help the U.S. in a civil case it was pursuing linked to the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was trying to expose a $230 million fraud in Russia. Leaked emails have since shown that Veselnitskaya helped to draft the document sent with that letter.

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Karapetyan has been involved in efforts to foil international investigations for more than a decade. The Daily Beast reported that he was present for a meeting in Moscow where British detectives claim they were poisoned during efforts to track down the killers ofAlexander Litvinenko, who died after a dose of radioactive poison in London in 2006.

Despite claims that they were trying to help, the general prosecutor’s office did everything it could to block the Scotland Yard investigation.

Earlier this year, Karapetyan lashed out at Britain in the aftermath of the Novichok attack against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. He linked Skripal, Litvinenko, and Boris Berezovsky, a high-profile critic of Putin who died of suspected suicide in 2013.

“The British authorities have based the anti-Russian campaign surrounding the poisoning of former GRU officer Skripaland his daughter on a provocative scenario. A similar scenario was used in baseless allegations of Russia’s attempt on the life of Boris Berezovsky in London in summer 2003 and the circumstances surrounding the death of Alexander Litvinenko in the U.K. in November 2006,” Karapetyan said, according to Interfax.

On Wednesday night, the wreckage of a helicopter believed to have been carrying Karapetyan was found near the village of Vonyshevo. Video purported to be from the scene shows the chopper mangled and burnt out amid twisted tree trunks.

It is not known why experienced pilot Stanislav Mikhnov, 54, reportedly decided to take off after nightfall in adverse conditions without authorities’ approval. A third man, Arek Harutyunyan, was also killed, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

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Karapetyan’s links to Veselnitskaya emerged this year, when a case in Switzerland exposed the pair’s operation to recruit a high-level law-enforcement official who was supposed to be investigating the Swiss bank accounts of Russian oligarchs and mobsters.

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The top investigator was fired for “unauthorized clandestine behavior,” and allegations of bribery and breaching secrecy laws. The Swiss authorities discovered that the officer—who was identified only as Victor K.—had met Karapetyan in Geneva and Zurich. Before Christmas 2016, Karapetyan telephoned the official and invited him to Moscow, where he was put up in a luxury hotel and asked to attend a meeting with Veselnitskaya.

It is likely that the meeting with Veselnitskaya concerned the fallout from the death of Magnitsky, who had been working to expose a massive fraud that implicated the Kremlin when he was incarcerated, beaten, and left to die.

In the aftermath of his death, the lawyer’s client, Bill Browder, campaigned to enact a series of anti-corruption laws all over the world in his name. The U.S. Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012.

Veselnitskaya was one of the top advocates lobbying to overturn these global Magnitsky laws, which have reportedly absolutely infuriated Putin.

Karapetyan and Veselnitskaya also worked together on another job linked to Magnitsky. The U.S. authorities brought a civil case against a company called Prevezon for its alleged links to laundering proceeds of the fraud that Magnitsky uncovered.

In April, emails obtained by Dossier, an anti-Putin campaign set up by former oligarch MikhailKhodorkovsky, and published by The New York Times, showed that Veselnitskaya had helped to draft a document on behalf of the Russian government that explained why Moscow would not help with the fraud case against Prevezon.

Rather than engage with the allegations against Prevezon, much of the document was a personal attack on Browder. The cover letter that accompanied the document was signed by Karapetyan.

The refusal to help provide documents from inside Russia—orchestrated by Karapetyan and Veselnitskaya—likely contributed to the authorities’ ultimate decision to settle the case. Prevezon agreed to pay $5.9 million, but it did not admit any role in laundering the proceeds of the fraud.

Nico Hines

London Editor

@nicohines

nico.hines@thedailybeast.com

===

https://www.vox.com/world/2018/8/17/17718780/rohingya-us-sanctions-myanmar-security-forces-ethnic-cleansing

https://www.alternet.org/who-hell-bill-browder-and-why-does-putin-want-get-his-paws-him-so-badly

Amid the wailing and rending of garments that filled the air after President Trump’s bizarre press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last Monday, one mysterious name lingered in the air. Who the hell is Bill Browder, and why does Putin want to get his paws on him so badly?

At one point in Putin’s remarks in Helsinki, he appeared to extend a peculiar offer to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller — while standing next to the man Mueller is investigating, of course. Mueller and his team would be allowed to visit Russia and observe the interrogation of 12 military intelligence officers who were indicted last week for their alleged involvement in the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In exchange, Russian investigators would get access to various people living overseas “who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia,” in the inelegant phrasing of Putin’s real-time interpreter.

It turned out later that one of the people Putin was interested in grilling was Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia. (McFaul spoke to Salon's Matthew Rozsa later in the week.) Even by contemporary norm-busting standards that was an extraordinary breach of protocol — although not as astounding as the fact that the White House briefly seemed to entertain the idea. (An “incredible offer,” said our president.) But at the time Putin only mentioned one individual by name: William F. Browder, a 54-year-old investor and financier, originally from Chicago, who reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars in the Wild West marketplace of post-Soviet Russia.

Anyone who has intermittently tried to follow the shadowplay narrative of Russian history and politics during the Putin era heard alarm bells going off, and perhaps felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. This was a plot twist that requires some explication, in a story that quite likely no one will ever fully understand.

Several major publications supplied obligatory “Who is this guy?” articles almost immediately, and Browder himself wrote a piece for Time magazine, offering his own highly truncated version of his history with Putin. None of it was untrue, exactly, but for my money those accounts largely served to obscure the deeper historical currents that flow beneath this implausible tale. Neither man is likely to mention that they were once close allies; Browder was described as among Putin’s “most vocal cheerleaders” in a 2006 Economist article (which has become remarkably difficult to find). Furthermore, Browder becomes slightly more difficult to cast as an American hero once you notice that he renounced his U.S. citizenship 20 years ago, for reasons he has never adequately explained.

I imagine both Browder and Putin would say that their shared connection to the pre-Putin past of Soviet Communism is irrelevant to their present-tense dispute. I’m not so sure: Russia has some of the same mythic qualities as William Faulkner’s Deep South, where the past is not dead and isn’t even past.

Putin was of course a KGB officer during the later years of the Soviet Union, who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall from his post in East Germany. Bill Browder’s grandfather, Earl Browder, was perhaps the most famous American Communist during the decades before World War II. An all-American boy from a farm family in Kansas, Earl Browder became a socialist as a teenager, spent several years in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and was leader of the Communist Party USA for 15 years, even running for president as the party’s nominee in 1936 and 1940. He was also almost certainly a Soviet spy and recruiter, meaning that he worked for the same organization that would educate and employ the young Vladimir Putin some years later.

I should probably explain my personal connection to this story: My mother was a member of the Communist Party, both under Earl Browder and under William Z. Foster, his comrade, rival and successor. I may be deluding myself here, but I always feel some identification with the psychological mechanisms — evasion, secrecy, storytelling — employed by those whose family histories were shaped by American Communism. I call it the legacy of the Red Seed. ..., Earl’s son and Bill’s father, who was not a Communist or a Soviet spy. Instead, Felix was a math prodigy who earned his Ph.D. from Princeton at age 20, chaired the mathematics department at the University of Chicago and become a world-renowned scholar in the field of nonlinear functional analysis, which I will not pretend to understand. (Felix’s two brothers were prominent mathematicians too, while Bill’s brother, Tom Browder, entered college at 15 and is now a particle physicist.) That has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin, but I guess it makes clear that we’re talking about an unusual American family.

Bill Browder went to Moscow in 1996, 75 years or so after his grandfather met his Russian Jewish grandmother there at the apex of post-revolutionary fervor. The younger Browder -- indeed, he was only 32 at the time -- had a $25 million stake largely supplied by the New York banker Edmond Safra, which he multiplied many times over, building enormous wealth for himself and his investors. At first, he did so with the apparent friendship or at least toleration of Vladimir Putin, who during that same period was rising rapidly from regional obscurity to unquestioned domination of the entire country.

According to most accounts, Putin moved to Moscow from his home city of St. Petersburg in the same year Browder arrived. (It is admittedly difficult to feel certain about any aspect of the Russian president's biography.) His first job in the Russian capital was as deputy chief of something called the Presidential Property Management Department, which was responsible for transferring the former assets of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party to the newly organized government of the Russian Federation. Browder's firm, Hermitage Capital Management, became a major investor in many of the semi-privatized companies. Did they do business together at the time? I can find no evidence that they did, but it seems inconceivable that they did not meet.[cpde] Putin's upward trajectory after that was even more startling: In 1998, the year of a major financial crisis in Russia that wiped out a great deal of foreign investment -- and also the year when Bill Browder renounced his U.S. citizenship -- Putin was appointed to head the FSB, the "intelligence and security organization" that succeeded the Soviet-era KGB. By August of the following year, he was acting prime minister of the Russian Federation, and after President Boris Yeltsin's abrupt resignation on the last day of 1999 -- another detail that's slightly too strange for fiction -- Putin became acting president as well. The rest, you might say, is history.

I not proposing any grand theory on how these circumstances fit together. In fact, I think the more you pull this story apart, the more tangled it becomes. In various respects, both Putin and Browder seem more like fictional characters than real people. In the most authoritative English-language account of Putin’s life and career, Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy’s “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin,” the Russian leader is compared to Oleg Komarov, a “pseudo-colorful” Russian émigré in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel “Pnin” who holds an incoherent blend of reactionary, religious, ultra-nationalist and pro-Communist views.

At the risk of derailing a story that is already full of weird tangents even further, here’s another one: Fiona Hill, co-author of that book, is now one of Trump’s principal advisers on relations with Russia. In an extensive interview with the Atlantic during the presidential transition (but before she joined the new administration), Hill predicted that the Trump-Putin bromance wouldn’t last long, adding that since the incoming president wasn’t “exactly the most diplomatic of people,” he was likely to “fall out with his new friend Vladimir pretty quickly.” She also predicted that Trump might pull out of the conflict in Syria, recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and pretty much allow Putin to do as he pleased. Are those things now happening (sort of) because she said that? I told you we were in a work of fiction.

Anyway, Bill Browder comes from another kind of novel altogether. Considering everything we know and don’t know about him, he’s like a character in a John le Carré spy thriller, who seems to be one thing and then turns out to be something entirely different — and then, at the end of the story, turns out to have been driven by personal considerations no one had even noticed.

There are almost too many reasons for Putin and Browder to hate each other’s guts:They have been embroiled in a bitter public feud ever since Hermitage Capital Management, Browder's investment firm, became the target of systematic Russian government harassment beginning around 2005. Browder himself was abruptly barred from entering Russia, forcing him to move to London full-time. His employees and associates in Moscow were subjected to a series of violent assaults and quasi-legal police raids. One of them was a lawyer and accountant named Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in November 2009. He had been arrested after investigating an alleged tax-fraud scheme in which corrupt Russian officials siphoned off $230 million from either Hermitage or the Russian state or both. (Good luck figuring that one out.)

After that, Browder became the principal impetus for the financial sanctions imposed by the United States under the Magnitsky Act, which were meant to punish the Russian oligarchy for its involvement in Magnitsky’s death and similar human rights abuses. Vladimir Putin really, really does not like the Magnitsky Act. Those sanctions were specifically what Natalia Veselnitskaya wanted to talk to Donald Trump Jr. about, in their now-legendary Trump Tower meeting of June 2016. They are not the same sanctions that incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn apparently discussed with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition (in a conversation that Flynn then lied to the FBI about), but those later sanctions could be described as successors to or amplifications of the Magnitsky sanctions.

Browder told the Senate Judiciary Committee in his testimony last July that he believes Putin has amassed an illicit personal fortune of perhaps $200 billion during his years in power — several times more than even a high-end estimate of Donald Trump’s wealth —but that most of it is invested in the West. That means Putin is “potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation,”Browder said, and “has a significant and very personal interest in finding a way to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.”

"Putin is apoplectic about my success getting Magnitsky Acts passed in seven countries around the world," Browder told Salon's Matthew Rozsa this week. "This puts his entire offshore fortune, which is gigantic, at risk."

That’s all highly plausible, although we are not likely to find the receipts. Until recently, Putin’s counter-charges against Browder have pretty much been complaints about the change under the sofa (at least by comparison). Browder has twice been convicted in absentia on tax-evasion charges by Russian courts, and was sentenced to nine years in prison both times. (In one of those cases, his co-defendant was Sergei Magnitsky, who had been dead for several years. Even for Russian jurisprudence, that was breaking new ground.) Russian authorities have repeatedly tried to get other countries to arrest and extradite Browder. Spanish police briefly detained Browder when he visited Madrid in May, but were told by Interpol to disregard the Russian arrest warrant.

This week Putin upped the ante considerably, claiming at the Helsinki press conference that Browder’s “business associates” had somehow spirited $1.5 billion out of Russia without paying taxes and then “sent huge amounts of money, $400 million, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.” Maybe this was meant to refer to Michael McFaul, who says he knows Browder but has never done business with him. At any rate, it's such a Trumpian allegation — a wild falsehood, supposedly supported by specific but completely invented statistics — that one wonders if it’s something Trump told him to say, or a laddish troll-move they cooked up together.

So we have established that Bill Browder and Vladimir Putin are not pals, and that healing and hugs seem deeply unlikely. From the Western media’s perspective, the story looks clear enough: One of them is a crusader against corruption and abuse, the other is a foreign despot with a trail of bodies. OK, fine: Except that the story was quite a bit different once upon a time. As with Putin and Donald Trump — as with almost everything about Putin, in fact — the past is full of unanswered questions.

In 2006, that Economist article I mentioned earlier (which I could only track down, in incomplete form, through the Internet Archive), sneeringly referred to Browder as a “loyal Putinista” and suggested that he had defended the Russian leader’s human rights record against foreign critics. Whatever had recently happened to turn Putin against Browder, the article suggested, had taken the Hermitage Capital head by surprise. As a major stakeholder in numerous Russian companies close to the Putin government, he had believed he was a trusted friend to the Kremlin.

Documentary evidence about Browder’s years in Moscow before 2005, and his early relationship with the Putin government, is remarkably sparse. A lengthy but notably lightweight New York Times profile from 2008 reports that after Browder arrived in Russia in 1996 he rapidly positioned Hermitage Capital as a way for Western investors to get “a piece of the action” in the wide-open Russian economy. He became a “colorful figure” in Moscow, with a reputation for being “abrasive and headstrong.” Despite his family background, he admitted, he had relatively little contact with everyday Russians and didn’t speak the language.

Browder’s support for Putin is dispensed with in a single paragraph:

After Mr. Putin became president in 2000, Mr. Browder became a vocal supporter of the Kremlin, saying that Russia needed an authoritarian leader to establish order and calling Mr. Putin his “biggest ally” in Hermitage’s effort to reform big business. Mr. Browder thrived, and the funds managed by Hermitage grew to more than $4 billion.

Browder told Times reporter Clifford J. Levy that he didn’t know why he fell afoul of Putin in 2005. I don’t believe that for a second, but in fairness, there are a lot of things about this saga we don’t know. As mentioned above, we don't know whether Putin and Browder knew each other personally during that period, although it seems unlikely that they never met. (Until this week Putin had avoided saying Browder’s name in public, and frequently denied knowing the details of his case. Not exactly an authoritative source.) We don't know whether Browder's rise and Putin's rise were simply contemporaneous factors in the chaotic equation of late-'90s Russia, or whether there was a connection between them we now cannot see.

Browder’s firm survived the Russian financial collapse of 1998 that drove many foreign investors out of the country with empty pockets, and then rebounded stronger than ever. That was the same year Browder renounced his United States citizenship, a decision he has explained in various different ways. The Times article from 2008 mentions that fact only genially, and in passing: Browder “became a British citizen, not out of antipathy toward the United States, he said, but because he felt comfortable there.”

Browder’s Wikipedia page says he gave up his citizenship “to avoid paying taxes related to foreign investment,” but the only source for that is a 2012 CBS News item that includes at least two unrelated factual errors (about his birthplace and the founding of his company). In an interview with Newsweeklast October, Browder framed it quite differently, suggesting that he felt a grievance because his family had been “viciously persecuted” during the McCarthy era. When his Russian-born grandmother — whom Earl Browder originally met in the Soviet Union — was dying of cancer, Browder said, the U.S. government “wanted to deport her back to Russia. It just left a legacy of bad feeling about the rule of law.”

There’s a tremendous richness and irony to that, am I right? The same government that wanted to ship Browder's grandmother back to Russia has recently, perhaps, contemplated doing the same to him. We have a president who wants to deport people for all kinds of bad reasons and has no respect for the rule of law, but he can’t sell out Bill Browder to the Russians even if he wanted to because Browder is not a U.S. citizen. Is the McCarthyite hangover a convincing explanation for Browder's 1998 decision? Not really — it strikes me as a fiction cooked up two decades later to fit changing circumstances. That’s a Red Seed move if I’ve ever seen one.

I have no overarching conspiracy theory to offer here, except the one about history being full of echoes and coincidences. Is it a coincidence that Bill Browder’s grandfather and Vladimir Putin were both Communist Party members who worked for the KGB, albeit in different eras? Yeah, sure, although it might have made for some interesting conversation. Is it a coincidence that Browder and Putin rose to prominence, wealth and influence in Russia at exactly the same time, with remarkable speed and under mysterious circumstances, first as allies and then as bitter enemies? I dunno, guys — I would put the answer to that one somewhere between “depends what you mean by coincidence” and “definitely not.”

I’m not trying to turn Bill Browder into the villain of this story, and still less Vladimir Putin — a blend of the most depressing ingredients of Soviet conformity and Russian nationalism — into its hero. My sympathies will always be with the guy who can sell a sentimental tale about his dying Commie grandma being hounded by Joe McCarthy, whether or not it’s true. I’m kind of hoping Browder will call me up to explain everything I’ve gotten wrong. We’d have a lot to talk about.

Maybe the larger point is that human beings want to create and consume simplistic narratives about heroes and villains that often tend to conceal the more interesting and tangled stories behind them — the stories that are actually true and might have something to teach us. Every article ever written about Bill Browder, as far as I can tell, deliberately avoids the most ambiguous aspects of his story, which are almost certainly the parts most worth noticing.

Browder’s story connects two centuries, two great nations, two especially odious world leaders and an entire epoch of history, from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War to the global triumph of capitalism to the rise of a new authoritarianism. It’s a story full of secrets we will never know. It’s our story too, told in the present tense, which is always frustrating. We don’t know how much of it is true, or whether it has a moral, or how it’s going to end.

===

no links see don jr

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/world/europe/rinat-akhmetshin-donald-trump-jr-natalia-veselnitskaya.html

nyt

Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016, had one consistent message for the journalists who met him over the years at the luxury hotels where he stayed in Moscow, London and Paris, or at his home on a leafy street in Washington: Never use email to convey information that needed to be kept secret.

While not, he insisted, an expert in the technical aspects of hacking nor, a spy, Mr. Akhmetshin talked openly about how he had worked with acounterintelligence unit while serving with the Red Army after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and how easy it was to find tech-savvy professionals ready and able to plunder just about any email account.

A journalist who visited his home was given a thumb drive containing emails that had apparently been stolen by hackers working for one of his clients.

On another occasion, at a meeting with a New York Times reporter at the Ararat Park Hyatt hotel in Moscow, Mr. Akhmetshin, by then an American citizen, informed the journalist he had recently been reading one of his emails: a note sent by the reporter to a Russian-American defense lawyer who had once worked for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the anti-Kremlin oligarch.

In that instance, the reporter’s email had become public as part of a lawsuit. But the episode suggests Mr. Akhmetshin’s professional focus in the decades since he immigrated to the United States — and the experience that he brought to a meeting last June in New York with President Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the then-head of the Trump presidential campaign, Paul J. Manafort.

The meeting was arranged on the claim that a Russian lawyer, NataliaVeselnitskaya,would provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, though in the end, Mr. Trump and his son have insisted, neither Mr. Akhmetshin nor Ms. Veselnitskaya provided anything of value.

But Mr. Akhmetshin, a gregarious, fast-talking man with a sharp sense of humor, was askilled practitioner in the muscular Russian version of what in American politics is known as opposition research. From his base in Washington, Mr. Akhmetshin has been hired by an ever-changing roster of clients, often Russians, to burnish their image and blacken those of their rivals. Some clients were close to the Kremlin. Others were its bitter foes.

Mr. Akhmetshin often warned his friends and contacts: “Nothing is secure.” It was a conviction that emerged from the chaotic and often violent corporate battles that convulsed Russia in the 1990s, when “chyorny P.R.” or “black public relations” based on stolen or fabricated documents became a powerful weapon for businessmen seeking to damage their rivals without resorting to physical threats, another frequently used tool.

The practice was rooted in the Soviet techniques of “kompromat,” the collection of compromising information by the K.G.B. against foes of the Communist Party, but reached its full flowering after the 1991 collapse of Communism and the privatization of the dark arts formerly dominated by the K.G.B.

Instead of simply examining old media reports, court records and other public documents to try to dig up dirt or embarrassing gossip, Russian-style “chyorny P.R.” has often focused on pilfering private information through hacking and physical intrusion into offices and filing cabinets.

In his own investigations over the years, Mr. Akhmetshin has acquired a reputation for obtaining email records, information from spyware and other data that appeared to be drawn from Russian hackers.

He has denied that, insisting that he conducted research for his clients and relayed accurate information to the press. A 2011 case illustrates his style.

Andrey Vavilov, a former Russian deputy finance minister and owner of an oil company, hired him to discredit a longtime adversary, a former Russian lawmaker named Ashot Egiazaryan. Mr. Vavilov had learned that Mr. Egiazaryan was seeking political asylum in the United States, and was “disgusted by this,” Mr. Akhmetshin later said in a court deposition.

At the time, Mr. Akhmetshin was described as the Washington director of a pro-democracy think tank called the International Eurasian Institute, although United States corporation records show it had been dissolved two years earlier for failure to pay taxes. He was also lobbying against the Magnitsky Act, the law which bars Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses from entering the United States.

...

===

Magnitsky Act| [](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Seal_of_the_United_States_%28obverse%29.svg) |

Long title	Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012
Nicknames	Magnitsky Act
Enacted by	the 112th United States Congress
Citations	Citations
Public law	Pub.L. 112–208
Statutes at Large	126 Stat. 1496
Legislative history	Legislative history
Introduced in the House as "Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal Act of 2012" (H.R. 6156) byDave Camp (R-MI) on July 19, 2012 Committee consideration by House Ways and Means Passed the House on November 16, 2012 (365–43) Passed the Senate on December 6, 2012 (92–4) Signed into law by President Barack Obama onDecember 14, 2012	Introduced in the House as "Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal Act of 2012" (H.R. 6156) byDave Camp (R-MI) on July 19, 2012 Committee consideration by House Ways and Means Passed the House on November 16, 2012 (365–43) Passed the Senate on December 6, 2012 (92–4) Signed into law by President Barack Obama onDecember 14, 2012

The Magnitsky Act, formally known as the Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, is a bipartisan bill passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Obama in December 2012, intending to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009. Since 2016 the bill is applied on a global scale by the US government.

Background

In 2009, Russian tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison afterinvestigating a $230 million fraud involving Russian tax officials.^[1] Magnitsky was accused of committing the fraud himself and detained.^[1]While in prison, Magnitsky developed gall stones, pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis and was refused medical treatment for months. After almost a year of imprisonment, he was beaten to death while in custody.^[2][3][4] Bill Browder, a prominent American businessman and friend of Magnitsky, publicized the case and lobbied American officials to pass legislation sanctioning Russian individuals involved in corruption. Browder brought the case to Senators Benjamin Cardin and John McCain who proceeded to propose legislation.^[5]

Law:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In June 2012, the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs reported to the House a bill called the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 (H.R. 4405).^[6] The main intention of the law was to punish Russian officials who were thought to be responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky by prohibiting their entrance to the United States and their use of its banking system.^[7] The legislation was taken up by a Senate panel the next week, sponsored by Senator Ben Cardin, and cited in a broader review of the mounting tensions in the international relationship.^[8][9]

In November 2012, provisions of the Magnitsky bill were attached to a House bill (H.R. 6156) normalizing trade with Russia (i.e., repealing the Jackson–Vanik amendment) and Moldova.^[10] On December 6, 2012, the U.S. Senate passed the House version of the law, 92-4.^[7] The law was signed by President Barack Obama on December 14, 2012.^{[11][12][13][14][15]}

In 2016, Congress enacted the Global Magnitsky Act which allows the US Government to sanction foreign government officials implicated in human rights abuses anywhere in the world.^[16]

Individuals affected:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Obama administration made public a list of 18 individuals affected by the Act in April 2013.^{[17][18][19][20]} The people included on the list are:

Artem (aka Artyom) Kuznetsov, a tax investigator for the Moscow division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Pavel Karpov, a senior investigator for the Moscow division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Oleg F. Silchenko, a senior investigator for the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Olga Stepanova, head of Moscow Tax Office No. 28
Yelena Stashina (ru), Tverskoy District Court judge who prolonged Magnitsky's detention
Andrey Pechegin, deputy head of the investigation supervision division of the general prosecutor's office
Aleksey Droganov
Yelena Khimina, Moscow tax official
Dmitriy Komnov, head of Butyrka Detention Center
Aleksey Krivoruchko, Tverskoy District Court judge
Oleg Logunov (ru)
Sergei G. Podoprigorov, Tverskoy District Court judge
Ivan Pavlovitch Prokopenko
Dmitri M. Tolchinskiy
Svetlana Ukhnalyova
Natalya V. Vinogradova
Felix Bautista, senator for the province of San Juan, Dominican Republic.
Angel Rondon Former Commercial Representative of Odebrecht, Dominican Republic.
Kazbek Dukuzov, Chechen acquitted of the murder of Paul Klebnikov
Lecha Bogatyrov, implicated by Austrian authorities as the murderer of Umar Israilov
Ramzan Kadyrov, Head of the Chechen Republic
Roberto J. Rivas, head of the Supreme Electoral Council of Nicaragua, accused of electoral fraud in at least six elections. Rivas is considered one of the wealthiest person in the second poorest country in the western hemisphere.
Francisco "Chico" Lopez treasure of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas Party and Head of Albanisa, a holding of companies made out of the Venezuelan aid
Fidel Moreno, de facto Mayor of Managua
Francisco Diaz, Head of the Nicaraguan Police.

Russian government reaction:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In response to the adoption of the Magnitsky Act, the Russian government denied Americans adoption of Russian children, issued a list of US officials prohibited from entering Russia, and posthumously convicted Magnitsky as guilty.^[21] In addition, the Russian government reportedly lobbied against the legislation acting through a public relations company led by Kenneth Duberstein.^[22][23]

Ban on U.S. adoption of Russian children:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main article: Dima Yakovlev Law

On December 19, 2012, the State Duma voted 400 to 4 to ban the international adoption of Russian children into the United States. The bill was unofficially named after Dmitri Yakovlev (Chase Harrison), a Russian toddler who accidentally died of heat stroke in 2008 when his adoptive American father forgot he was in the back seat of his SUV.^[24][25] Other recent developments include the proposition of a law to prevent US citizens from working with political NGOs in Russia and a proposition of a law, recently abandoned, preventing any foreigner from speaking on state television if they discredited the state.^[26]

Banning some U.S. officials from Russia:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main article: Guantanamo list

On April 13, 2013, Russia released a list naming 18 Americans banned from entering the Russian Federation over their alleged human rights violations, as a direct response to the Magnitsky list.^[27] The people banned from Russia are listed below:

US officials involved in legalizing torture and indefinite detention of prisoners:

David Addington, Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney (2005–2009)
John Yoo,Assistant US Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice (2001–2003)
Geoffrey D. Miller, retired US Army Major General, commandant of Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), the organization that runs the Guantanamo Bay detention camps (2002–2003)
Jeffrey Harbeson, US Navy officer, commandant of JTF-GTMO (2010–2012)

The Russian lawmakers also banned several U.S. officials involved in the prosecution and trial of Russian arms smuggler Viktor Boutand drug smuggler Konstantin Yaroshenko, both serving prison time in the United States:^[28][29]

Jed Rakoff, Senior US District Judge for the Southern District of New York
Preet Bharara, former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York
Michael J. Garcia, former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York
Brendan R. McGuire, Assistant US Attorney
Anjan S. Sahni, Assistant US Attorney
Christian R. Everdell, Assistant US Attorney
Jenna Minicucci Dabbs, Assistant US Attorney
Christopher L. Lavigne, Assistant US Attorney
Michael Max Rosensaft, Assistant US Attorney
Louis J. Milione, Special Agent, US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
Sam Gaye, Senior Special Agent, US DEA
Robert F. Zachariasiewicz, Special Agent, US DEA
Derek S. Odney, Special Agent, US DEA
Gregory A. Coleman, Special Agent, US Federal Bureau of Investigation^[27]

Trump campaign–Russian meeting:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main article: Trump campaign–Russian meetings

In June 2016, a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was hired to lobby against the Magnitsky Act in the US, set up a Trump campaign–Russia meeting with Donald Trump, Jr., purportedly to discuss altering the Russian Duma's sanctions against American adoption of Russian children along with other alleged illegal activities. On July 11, 2017, Reuters US reported that at the meeting "[Russia] offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to [Trump Jr.'s] father".^[30] Donald Trump Jr. insisted that Veselnitskaya did not reveal any damaging information about Secretary Clinton, contrary to what his correspondence had suggested. Trump Jr. subsequently released to the public via Twitter his personal records and correspondence between the Trump campaign team and Rob Goldstone, a longtime business partner and friend of Trump Sr. who actively represents several Russian interests and who had first pitched the meeting to Trump Jr.^[31]

Reception:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

This section is incomplete.(January 2013)

Australian expatriate jurist Geoffrey Robertson, who is representing some of the Magnitsky campaigners, has described the Act as "one of the most important new developments in human rights". He says it provides "a way of getting at the Auschwitz train drivers, the apparatchiks, the people who make a little bit of money from human rights abuses and generally keep under the radar".^[32]

State Duma deputy Yevgeny Fedorov argued that the real purpose of the Magnitsky bill was to manipulate key figures in big business and government, with the aim of pro-American policy in the Russian Federation.^[33]

The Ministry of Internal Affairs Directorate for Special Affairs in the U.K. stated that it is aware of those on the list. The U.K. bans travel of those on the list under existing legislation which prohibits entry for those implicated in cases of human rights violations.^[34]

The World Socialist Web Site condemned the United States for only invoking human rights as a cover for realpolitik, stating that Washington had supported "far greater crimes, [such] as when Boris Yeltsin in 1993 ordered bombardment of the Russian White House, the seat of the country’s parliament, killing 62 people".^[35][36]

In March 2015, the parliament of Canada passed an initial motion towards passing such a law.^[37]

In July 2017 on Fareed Zakaria GPS by CNN, Fareed Zakaria interviewed Bill Browder, who discussed the Magnitsky Act, and topics such as why Putin is directly threatened by it, the money given by Russia government to more than 10,000 Russian human-rights abusers, the June 2016 Trump campaign–Russian meeting, and the power and influence of Russian money in Washington DC at present.^[38]

January 2017 blacklisting:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

On January 9, 2017, under the Magnitsky Act, the United States Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its Specially Designated Nationals List and blacklisted Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, Andrei K. Lugovoi, Dmitri V. Kovtun, Stanislav Gordievsky, and Gennady Plaksin, which froze any of their assets held by American financial institutions or transactions with those institutions and banned their travelling to the United States.^[39][40]

Implementation oversight in 2017:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

President Donald Trump gave a memorandum to Congress on the implementation of the act on April 21, 2017.^[41]

In May 2017 US authorities settled a case against Prevezon Holding, one of the companies used for laundering the money exfiltrated from Russia as result of the fraud discovered by Sergey Magnitsky. The settlement dismissed the case, and the real-estate company agreed to pay a $5.8 million fine.^[42][43]

Also in May 2017 an investigation was started on £6.6m that was allegedly transferred from the fraud scheme into a banking firm in the UK.^[44]

On September 8, 2017 President Trump, in a memorandum, delegated authority to alter the financial sanctions in this act to the Secretary of the Treasury, and the issue of visas to the Secretary of State.^[45]

Internationalization of the Magnitsky Act:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In December 2016, Congress enlarged the scope of the Magnitsky Act to address human rights abuses on a global scale. The current Global Magnitsky Act (GMA) allows the US Government to sanction corrupt government officials implicated in abuses anywhere in the world.^[16]

In September 2017, a group of NGOs and anti-corruption organizations identified fifteen international cases where alleged crimes were committed. Individuals from countries, including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mexico, Panama, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, were nominated for sanctions.^[46]

On December 21, 2017, 13 additional names were added to the list of sanctioned individuals. This included Yahya Jammeh, former president of The Gambia and Roberto Jose Rivas Reyes, the president of Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council.^[47]

On June 12, 2018, Félix Bautista, a member of the Senate of the Dominican Republic and five companies owned or controlled by him were sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury under the Global Magnitsky Act due to his involvement in significant corruption. ^[48] Bautista has reportedly engaged in bribery in relation to his position as a Senator, and is alleged to have engaged in corruption in Haiti, where he used his connections to win public works contracts to help rebuild Haiti following several natural disasters, including one case where his company was paid over $10 million dollars for work not completed.

On July 5, 2018, 3 additional names were added to the list. These belonging to the same country, Nicaragua. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Nicaraguan National Police Commissioner Francisco Javier Diaz Madriz (Diaz) and Secretary of the Mayor’s Office of Managua Fidel Antonio Moreno Briones (Moreno) for being responsible for, or the leaders of entities involved in, serious human rights abuse in Nicaragua.

Additionally, OFAC designated Jose Francisco Lopez Centeno (Lopez), the Vice President of ALBA de Nicaragua (ALBANISA) and President of Petronic, for engaging in corrupt activities. ^[49]

Magnitsky Acts in other countries:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Legislation similar to, and inspired by, the December 2016 US Global Magnitsky Act has subsequently been enacted in other countries.

Estonia:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

On December 8, 2016, Estonia introduced a new law, inspired by the Sergei Magnitsky case, to ban foreigners deemed guilty of human rights abuses from entering the country. The law, which was passed unanimously in the Estonian Parliament, states that it entitles Estonia to forbid entry to people if, among other things, "there is information or good reason to believe" that they took part in activities which resulted in the "death or serious damage to health of a person".^[50]

United Kingdom:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

On February 21, 2017 the UK House of Commons unanimously passed an amendment to the country's Criminal Finances Bill inspired by the Magnitsky Act that would allow the government to freeze the assets of international human rights violators in the UK.^[51] On May 1, 2018, the UK House of Commons, without opposition, added the “Magnitsky amendment” to the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill that would allow the British government to impose sanctions on people who commit gross human rights violations.^[52]

Canada:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In May 2017, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned Canada that its anticipated new law, known as The Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Bill (Sergei Magnitsky Law), was a "blatantly unfriendly step", and that "If the Canadian Parliament approves this sanctions legislation, the relations between our countries, which are already experiencing difficult times, will suffer significant damage". CBC News in Canada also reported that Russia has placed Canada's Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, and twelve other Canadian politicians and activists on a Kremlin 'blacklist' and has barred them from entering Russia because of their criticism of Russian actions in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea.^[53]

On October 19, 2017, the Canadian Parliament passed the Bill into law,^[54] after a unanimous vote in Canada's House of Commons, with 277 for, and none against.^[55] Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, accused Canada of "political games" over its new Magnitsky law.^[56]

Canada's Magnitsky Act also targeted 19 Venezuelan and 3 South Sudanese officials, along with the original 30 Russian individuals under sanctions.^[57]

Lithuania:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

On November 9, 2017 the Parliament of Lithuania approved for discussion relevant amendments to the law, with 78 votes in support, one against and five abstentions. Finally, on November 16, 2017 (the 8th anniversary of Sergei Magnitsky’s death) the Parliament of Lithuania passed the law unanimously.^[citation ^needed]

Latvia:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

On February 8, 2018, Parliament of Latvia (Saeima) accepted attachment of law of sanctions, inspired by the Sergei Magnitsky case, to ban foreigners deemed guilty of human rights abuses from entering the country.^[citation ^needed]

Dominican Republic:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In the Dominican Republic the law has been applied to two Dominican citizens who are Angel Rondon and the senator for the province of San Juan Felix Bautista.^[citation ^needed]

References

Magnitsky Act - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act

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:{The :{Magnitsky Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, formally known as the Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei:{Magnitsky:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Rule of :{Law:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Accountability :{Act:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: of 2012, is a bipartisan bill passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Obama in December 2012, intending to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian tax ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Sergei Magnitsky · ‎Bill Browder · ‎Dima Yakovlev Law · ‎Magnitsky Act

What is the Magnitsky Act, the focus of so many powerful Russian ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/.../the-magnitsky-act-explained/

Jul 14, 2017 - The law is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer and auditor who in 2008 untangled a dense web of tax fraud and graft involving 23 ...