Russian Interior Ministry opens second posthumous case against dead whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky

Based on recently released court documents(http://followmydata.net/SMRULE/D1017.pdf; http://followmydata.net/SMRULE/D1699.pdf; http://followmydata.net/SMRULE/D1182.pdf), it has now been disclosed that the Russian Interior Ministry has opened a second posthumous case against Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian whistleblower who was killed in police custody four years ago after exposing the largest known theft of public tax funds in recent Russian history.

The second case (No 678540) has been opened on demand from Russian Deputy General Prosecutor Victor Grin, the same high-ranking official who initiated the first posthumous case against Magnitsky. The first posthumous case ended with a guilty verdict last July in Moscow in the first-ever posthumous trial in Russian legal history.

In the new criminal case, Prosecutor Victor Grin accused Sergei Magnitsky as a perpetrator of the $230 million theft that Sergei Magnitsky had in fact discovered and reported to the Russian authorities.

The facts of this second posthumous case are particularly noteworthy. On 3 December 2007, three weeks before the $230 million theft took place, a criminal complaint prepared by Sergei Magnitsky and other lawyers for the Hermitage Fund, described the preparation of the fraud and named those involved in the conspiracy. It was filed with the Russian General Prosecutor Chaika. On instruction from the First Deputy Prosecutor Buksman, this complaint was passed on 5 December 2007, 21 days before the $230 million were stolen from the Russian Treasury, for consideration to Deputy General Prosecutor Grin, but instead of proper review, the complaint was given to the same Moscow Interior Ministry investigator who was named in the complaint, Pavel Karpov, to essentially conduct an “investigation of himself”.

Instead of arresting the perpetrators of the fraud, the Interior Ministry arrested Sergei Magnitsky, tortured him to try to get him to withdraw his testimony until he was killed in police custody on November 16, 2009. “If the Russian authorities are steadfastly prosecuting a dead man four years after they killed him, any talk about a Putin thaw from his well-publicized amnesty should be discarded as the cynical trash that it is. Everything one needs to know about the real state of justice in Russia can be seen in how Magnitsky's killers have all gone free and the state continues to desecrate his memory and terrorize his family,” said a Hermitage Capital representative.

Russian Interior Ministry officers put in charge of the second posthumous case against Magnitsky have included Oleg Urzhumtsev, Ruslan Filippov and Pavel Tambovtsev. All attempts of Magnitsky relatives to gain access to the materials posthumously accusing Sergei Magnitsky of the crime he had uncovered have failed, as the chair of Tverskoi District Court of Moscow Solopova refused their requests as not relevant to their rights. The complaint against this refusal filed in June 2013 has extraordinarily not been yet considered, in spite of the expiry of seven months since its filing.

Share this article: