Deception (7 page)

I believe that [Interior Ministry Lieutenant Colonel Artyom] Kuznetsov and other law enforcement officers in conspiracy with him could be involved in the theft of Rilend, Makhaon, Parfenion and the subsequent theft of
5
.
4
bn roubles from the State Treasury and were extremely interested in suppressing my activity relating to assisting my client in investigating the circumstances connected with these criminal offences. This was the reason for my unlawful criminal prosecution being carried out by investigator Silchenko. I believe that with Silchenko's participation or with his tacit approval, inhuman conditions were created for me in the detention centre, which humiliate human dignity. While in custody, I have been transferred five times to four different detention centres. I am tired of counting the cells to which I have been transferred innumerable times. I am denied medical assistance. On many occasions, for artificial and unjustifiable reasons, my mother's and wife's visits were prohibited, as well as telephone conversations with my little children. While in custody, situations have been created for me where I was deprived of the right to have a weekly shower, to watch television, to use a refrigerator, and simply to live under normal conditions, to the extent they can be ‘normal' in a detention centre. I am convinced that such intolerable conditions are being created for me with my investigators' full knowledge. I am convinced that the only possibility to stop this humiliating treatment is for me to accept false accusations, to incriminate myself and other persons.
^p

 

Far from being intimidated by his treatment, on
16
October
2009
Mr Magnitsky reiterated his allegations in greater detail. That sealed his fate. On
12
November another farcical pre-trial hearing brought a curt dismissal of his appeal for bail, on the grounds that the time to file it had elapsed. This was a big psychological blow, perhaps aggravating his physical woes. By
13
November he was vomiting constantly, with a visibly swollen stomach. Even at that stage, a simple medical intervention could have saved his life. On
16
November Mr Magnitsky was transferred from Butyrka to the ‘Sailor's Rest' for ‘emergency medical treatment'. But the doctor there prescribed only a painkiller. When that failed, he had Mr Magnitsky put in a straitjacket and referred him for psychiatric evaluation. Eight guards from a special disciplinary squad arrived. They handcuffed the dying man, beat him with rubber batons and took him to an isolation cell, where he lay handcuffed on the floor by the side of a bed. He was found dead an hour and a half later by a doctor and nurse who had been kept waiting outside his cell for one hour and eighteen minutes.

Around this time, Mr Browder's staff in London started receiving terse, threatening text messages in Russian on their mobile phones. Copies they have supplied to me make chilling reading. One read: ‘What is more frightening, I don't know . . . death or prison?' A later one used a quote from
The Godfather
to try to intimidate the recipient: ‘If history tells us anything, it is that anyone can be killed. Michael Corleone.' One after his death said mockingly: ‘A lawyer dies in investigative detention, in the framework of an interesting criminal case. An emblematic case. Paid-for articles won't work. Extradition etc.'

Even in Russia, where public opinion is hardened to news of official misconduct, Mr Magnitsky's death caused a public outcry. He was not some marginal figure from the political opposition, nor an investigative journalist who had clearly been asking for trouble, neither was he from the country's troubled and violent southern fringe, where many Russians think tough treatment by the authorities offers the only hope of quelling terrorist insurgencies by violent Islamist extremists. Mr Magnitsky fell into none of these categories: he was just a middle-class Russian lawyer trying to do his job. Belatedly, some of the wheels in the system began to turn. Pressure groups and official watchdogs made the first moves. Within weeks an independent group, the Moscow Public Oversight Commission, blamed his death on ‘psychological and physical pressure'. One member termed it ‘premeditated murder.'
¹³
The Moscow Helsinki Group, headed by Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the doyenne of the Soviet dissident movement, submitted a powerfully argued criminal complaint. It said that the death

 

did not occur accidentally. It did not occur merely through the oversight or negligence of some particular prison officials. Sergei Magnitsky died from torture that was wilfully inflicted upon him.

 

As pressure grew, Mr Medvedev ordered an official investigation. He signed a law prohibiting the detention of suspects in tax crime cases. Though twenty prison officials, including the deputy head of the federal prison service, were fired, nineteen of them had nothing to do with the Magnitsky case. The only figure directly involved in the case was Major-General Anatoli Mikhalkin, who had headed the Interior Ministry's tax crimes department in Moscow, and had been named by Mr Magnitsky in one of his complaints. The official reason for his dismissal was ‘retirement'. On
25
June
2010
the internal security department of the MVD started an investigation into Kuznetsov, following an appeal by Mrs Clinton. It has brought no result. On the contrary, several of the people directly involved in the case have received medals and promotions. Kuznetsov moved from the Moscow City tax crimes office to a job in the federal economic-security division of the MVD. Karpov also moved to a job at the federal level. An official inquiry by the Investigative Committee exonerated Silchenko, the investigator ultimately responsible for Mr Magnitsky's death, of all wrongdoing. One week before the anniversary of his death, the MVD held an annual awards ceremony recognising the thirty ‘best investigators' among its million-plus officers. Five of the awards went to people directly involved in the Magnitsky case, including Silchenko and Karpov. Growing international condemnation of the case has brought largely ineffective and token responses in Russia. A commission set up by Mr Medvedev's Human Rights Council said that Silchenko ‘bears serious responsibility for [Mr] Magnitsky's death' and that he might have died as a result of a beating by medical orderlies.
¹⁴
A report by the State Investigative Committee in July
2011
accepted that Mr Magnitsky died because of failures in his medical care. But the Interior Ministry said it saw ‘no reason' to investigate the action of its officials. Instead Russian prosecutors said they would reopen the case against Mr Magnitsky (oddly, cases against dead people can be tried in Russia). They even summoned his mother as a witness.

Meanwhile, the perpetrators were getting rich. Official Russian documents show that cars and real estate worth $
3
m were registered to Kuznetsov, his wife and his pensioner parents in the period between the raid on Firestone Duncan and Mr Magnitsky's death. An investigation by Hermitage claims that Olga Stepanova, a senior official in the Moscow tax inspectorate, her subordinates and their families suddenly gained $
43
m in offshore property and other assets following the phoney tax refund.
¹⁵
Nobody has established so far that this has anything to do with the Magnitsky case. But there would be those who would find the coincidence striking. Nor is it proved where the bulk of the money stolen from the Russian taxpayer went. Mr Browder's investigators believe that the finger points to the higher reaches of the FSB, and still more senior figures in the Interior Ministry, in the tax authorities and in the prosecutors' office.

Had they known five years ago the result of their scheming, the perpetrators would surely have decided to pick another target. It is hard to see now what will stop Mr Browder's formidable campaign against the sixty people he accuses of benefiting from the fraud, or of complicity in Mr Magnitsky's death.
¹⁶
The European Parliament has voted to ban them from the European Union; Canada's parliament has proposed a similar resolution and it has passed in the Netherlands. More than twenty American senators have backed legislation banning these individuals from the United States, provoking a furious response from the Russian authorities.

While Mr Browder has shed his reputation as a grandstanding wheeler-dealer for that of an inspirational leader of a moral crusade, the Russian authorities' response to the case has been a textbook study in how not to handle a tricky issue. As in so many episodes, from the mysterious apartment-block bombings in
1999
¹⁷
to the looting of Yukos, they have made their case spectacularly poorly, with a mixture of paranoid silence, bluster and deceit. The best place to test all these claims would be in court, with proper lawyers on both sides and a fair judge in the middle. That does not seem likely to happen. Overall, while some officials have condemned Mr Magnitsky's treatment, others have implied that he deserved it, and others still have made counter-allegations. When, prompted by Mr Browder's researchers, the Swiss authorities opened a money-laundering investigation into accounts at Credit Suisse, the bank that handled many of the transfers benefiting those implicated in the case, the Russian authorities launched a clumsy attempt to summons Mr Browder for questioning in Moscow (understandably, he has declined to go). Credit Suisse says it is co-operating with the investigation.

The genesis, course and aftermath of this case exemplify the weakness of the bits of the Russian system that should constrain the powerful and protect the innocent. Appeals to politicians either went unanswered or brought ineffective responses. Russian voters clearly care about the case and believe that an injustice was done. But the political system offers no way to resolve their concern. Attempts to use the parts of the state machinery that offer redress to wronged citizens got nowhere. Civil-society organisations tried to raise the case, but without success. The media barked – bravely in some cases – but could not bite. Only external pressure, belatedly, has inconvenienced the people behind the fraud and murder, who are now (in some cases) unable to travel freely to the West.

The case is a concentrated episode in a much wider story: the ex-KGB's abuse of power, including murder and looting. The FSB – its main successor organisation – has tried and trusted tools for intimidating individuals and for misusing the instruments of state power to create an alternative reality, in which the innocent are the guilty and justice serves the state's interest, not the public one. The FSB acts as the Russian regime's enforcers, punishing the brave and bullying the cowardly in order to head off any credible political or economic challenge. In return, it has a licence to loot, using both the tools of espionage and a veneer of legality in which criminal actions have the force of law. It has placed its trusted officers in parts of the state apparatus that are supposedly independent: public, governmental, or judicial bodies. Hermitage researchers are convinced, for example, that Kuznetsov, nominally an official of the Interior Ministry, is in fact an FSB officer, making sure that his masters' interests are served there; also in the FSB, they believe, are the people in the Moscow city tax department who supervised the bogus refund (which was by no means the first of its kind). The ultimate blame for Mr Magnitsky's death reaches even higher than those named here. At the head of the scam, says Hermitage, were top Russian officials including a government minister with a close friend who is a senior official. An analogy comes from the real-estate business: the most senior official is the ‘landowner'; he cuts in a ‘property developer' to construct the scam, who then buys in whatever brain and muscle-power is needed. The profits from this ‘project' pay off any troublesome outsiders.

The system that perpetrated the crimes described in this chapter is the epitome of the Russian state machine today. The story of Sergei Magnitsky is not just a human tragedy; it is a political parable. His fate may help calibrate the reader's moral compass in the pages ahead, which deal with events past and present outside Russia. The people responsible for his death in prison are the heirs of the Soviet KGB, and colleagues of Russia's present-day spymasters.

Many find it easy to be blasé about Russian spies. Espionage is a grubby business always and everywhere. Spies' political masters in many countries deploy them for bad reasons as well as high ones. Why are the Kremlin's lot worse than anyone else's? For all its undoubted flaws, Russia today is not a totalitarian superpower with ambitions for world domination. Its intelligence agencies are decades away from the mass murderers of the old KGB. Even the Cold War did not deserve the moral clarity that some of its Western protagonists liked to maintain. Indeed, as I myself show in later chapters, cynicism and incompetence blot the record of British and American intelligence in Eastern Europe. For all these reasons, many would argue, it is surely time to grow up, and keep the tiresome but ultimately anachronistic phenomenon of Russian espionage in proper proportion?

A proportionate response is indeed merited. But it should be tougher, not softer, than the West's current stance. As Sergei Magnitsky's story shows, the dark threads of murder and mayhem that started with Lenin's Red Terror after the Bolshevik revolution in
1917
continue to the present day in the heart of Russia's bureaucracy, with officials swindling their own taxpayers out of a fortune, and then killing the man who tried to expose their misdeeds. The next chapters explain the origins of the corrupt autocracy that rules Russia's mafia state, its aims, and then its activities in our midst.