Russian jailed, tortured to death and put on trial (in that order) for uncovering massive corruption

[DetlefK]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/22/u-s-prosecutors-are-out-to-crack-russia-s-crooked-money-machine.html

Sergei Magnitsky was a tax attorney who discovered and exposed the alleged fraud, only to find himself arrested and defamed by the Putin government before dying in jail in 2009 under suspicious circumstances.

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As laid out in the so-called Magnitsky Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 2011, tax attorney Magnitsky had uncovered an elaborate $230 million tax scam perpetrated using stolen and re-registered subsidiary companies belonging to a client, the investment firm Hermitage Capital, which was co-founded by British financier Bill Browder.

Officers of Russia’s Interior Ministry and Moscow tax bureaus, Magnitsky found, were actually hirelings of the Klyuev Group, which Sen. John McCain has since described as a “dangerous transnational criminal organization.”

Instead of thanking Magnitsky for his dot-connecting sleuthing, however, the Russian authorities first ignored his disclosures, then arrested him on the pretext that he was the perpetrator of the tax fraud himself. He was denied urgent medical treatment during his year-long pretrial detention and was physically tortured for a brief period in a Moscow prison isolation cell where he was left to die in 2009.

In 2011, in Russia’s first and only posthumous trial, Magnitsky was found guilty of tax evasion.

Monitors ranging from Amnesty International to the European Union to Russia’s own Presidential Human Rights Commission have characterized Magnitsky as a victim, even as the Kremlin insists he died of a “heart attack” and was himself a financial criminal.

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Members of the Group, or those seconded by it, worked both sides on each lawsuit, acting on behalf of both plaintiff companies and the defendant subsidiaries in order to seek wildly inflated damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. All of these amounts were duly awarded by the courts in proceedings that sometimes lasted as little as five minutes.

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Fulton was then seconded by Rossiya-1, Russia’s state-owned and most-watched television channel, for its shambolic documentary The Browder Effect. He was tasked with “authenticating” clearly fraudulent documents purporting to show that Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital and now Magnitsky’s chief flame-tender, who campaigns globally to recover the stolen tax money and penalize the gangsters of the Klyuev Group, was actually a longstanding CIA and/or MI6 agent codenamed “Solomon.

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Why were the documents clearly fraudulent? Well, apart from being written in hilariously bad or stilted English, one of the documents claims to identify Browder’s case officer as Valerie Plame, in 2009. The CIA officer, famously outed by the Bush administration during its media war over Iraqi WMDs, resigned from the Agency in 2007