Edward Lucas - Deception

Meanwhile Hermitage lawyers filed fifteen more complaints, with every relevant law enforcement and regulatory agency. Mr Browder and his colleagues were sure that the episode would be dealt with properly once higher authorities became aware of it. As ardent advocates of the rule of law in Russia, Prime Minister Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev surely could not ignore evidence that their officials had defrauded taxpayers of $230m? But Mr Magnitsky’s work had the opposite effect. Having already threatened Hermitage lawyers with criminal charges in May, in August 2008 the fraudsters ordered a police raid on the offices of four law firms working for Hermitage. [15] o A farcical but revealing element in this came with the discovery of ‘stolen’ documents brought from Russia to London and then sent back to Moscow from the DHL office in Lambeth, by two men of Slavic appearance (captured on CCTV), falsely giving the address of the Hermitage office in London. Barely forty-five minutes after the package was delivered to a law office in Moscow, the police arrived in search of the documents and confiscated the package, in what looks like a clumsy attempt to frame Mr Khairetdinov, another of the Hermitage lawyers. It is unclear what the package contained. A police protocol lists obviously forged documents, such as a power of attorney issued in the name of a non-existent person (using a surname that had featured in previous lawsuits against Hermitage), official files that would normally be in the custody of the authorities, and ‘documents in foreign language’ with ‘stamps of Belize’. The lawyers at the firms also received summonses, in violation of a Russian law that specifically prohibits lawyers being subject to questioning by the criminal justice authorities for anything relating to their dealings with clients. Undeterred, Mr Magnitsky in October 2008 filed a comprehensive dossier to the State Investigative Committee. If Mr Putin’s claim to have created a ‘dictatorship of law’ in Russia counted for anything, it should make it possible to challenge abuses such as this. But the truth is that the law in Russia is a trap for the brave, not a weapon for the weak. By challenging the authorities in court, you leave yourself open to their retribution. The idealistic Mr Magnitsky was about to learn this the hard way.

The next stage of intimidation came when the authorities opened criminal cases against the two Hermitage Fund lawyers who had reported the police involvement in the $230m theft. These men, Eduard Khairetdinov and Vladimir Pastukhov, and some colleagues, promptly went abroad. Had Mr Magnitsky followed suit he would be alive today. On 12 November 2008 Kuznetsov and his three subordinates were instructed to investigate possible criminal conduct by Hermitage’s lawyers. On 24 November 2008 four law enforcement officers came to Mr Magnitsky’s home and arrested him in front of his wife and two children. All applications for bail were peremptorily turned down. Russian media have reported that he was planning to go abroad, citing plane tickets to Kiev reserved in his name. But these were booked only by phone, by an unidentified male voice, and never collected. Booking bogus tickets is a tactic commonly used by Russian criminal justice authorities wanting to plant ‘evidence’ that a suspect is planning to flee. The FSB statement said Mr Magnitsky had applied for a visa for the UK. The British consulate in Moscow denies that any such application was made.

The denial of bail meant that Mr Magnitsky never saw his children again; indeed he never heard their voices, as telephone calls to his family were denied. His contact with his loved ones was limited to snatched glimpses at brief and farcically unfair court hearings. Only once, a month before his death, was he allowed a brief meeting with his wife and mother. He died in jail just under a year after he was arrested, eight days before the expiry of the maximum limit for pre-trial detention.

The initial reason given was ‘rupture to the abdominal membrane’, which was later replaced with ‘heart failure’. A fairer assessment would have been death by torture. Mr Magnitsky had been kept in abominable conditions. 10The authorities ignored his complaints and repeatedly denied him medical attention, even when he was in great pain with life-threatening ailments. His body showed signs of direct physical abuse in the final hours of his life. Squeamish readers may wish to skip what follows. 11

Mr Magnitsky was initially locked up in a detention centre, in an unheated cell with an unglazed window, and with just four beds for the eight prisoners. The lights burned round the clock. He was shifted from cell to cell sixteen times, with his belongings often going ‘missing’ amid the move. Here he describes life after court hearings for those in custody:

Prisoners [arriving back] are not taken to their cells immediately and are instead held in a prison box for 3–3.5 hours. Not once have I been returned to my cell earlier than 23:00. This prison box is 20–22 m 2, it has no windows or ventilation and may hold up to seventy people at the same time and this means that there is neither any room to sit nor even to stand. Many of the prisoners smoke in the prison box and this makes it very difficult to breathe… the time in between hot meals can be up to 38 hours (from 18:00 the day before the visit to court when a prisoner receives a hot meal to 8:00 when breakfast is served on the day after the visit to court).

This is a standard tactic in the Russian (and before that the Soviet) jail system, to weaken a prisoner’s resistance. Later he was put in a cell that was flooded with sewage – this extract is from his prison diary on 9 September 2009:

At about midday, in the cell, sewage started to rise from the drain under the sink, and half of the cell floor was flooded straight away. We asked for a plumber to be called, but he only arrived at 22:00 and could not repair the fault. We requested to be transferred to a different cell but were told that we had to stay put until the next morning. On the morning of the following day the plumber did not arrive and by the evening the whole floor was covered in a layer of sewage. It was impossible to walk on the floor and we were forced to move around the cell by climbing on the beds like monkeys.

Throughout his ordeal, Mr Magnitsky made complaints and requests – over 450 in total – on everything from the denial of hot water for washing to demands to meet his family, phone his children, and have medical attention. That is more than one for each day of his imprisonment. They, and his jail diary, make poignant reading.

The reason for the ill-treatment was simple. The authorities wanted Mr Magnitsky to switch sides. If he would retract his testimony against the police officers, and instead give evidence confessing that he was responsible for the fraud and implicating Mr Browder, he could go free. Such tactics were familiar in the Soviet era, when political prisoners were told that they would never see their families again, or that their children would be sent to orphanages, if they did not incriminate their fellow-dissidents. It is shocking to find the same approach in 2009 in a country that is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and is a member of the Council of Europe.

Each time Mr Magnitsky refused to cooperate, the authorities worsened his conditions. By June he had lost 40lb (18kg). He began to experience severe abdominal pain. After an initial stay in an overcrowded and squalid detention centre, Mr Magnitsky had been transferred to the ‘Sailor’s Rest’ prison ( Matrosskaya tishina in Russian) where conditions were marginally less bad, with a mere three prisoners to a 16m 2cell. Medical services were better there too. On 1 July an ultrasound examination diagnosed ‘calculous cholecystitis’, an illness caused by untreated gallstones (choleliths, in medical terminology). The symptoms include pain, anorexia, nausea, vomiting and fever. The prison doctors prescribed a further examination and surgery in a month’s time. But a week before that treatment, Mr Magnitsky was transferred to the notorious Butyrka prison, which has no ultrasound machine and none of the surgical or medical facilities required for his treatment. The ostensible reason for his move was renovation works, though an independent investigation later established that these never took place. In any case it is unclear why Mr Magnitsky, already seriously ill, should be one of the handful of inmates needing to be moved. Questioned later by independent investigators, the prison director, Ivan Prokopenko, said he did not consider Magnitsky sick, remarking: ‘Prisoners often try to pass themselves off as sick in order to get better conditions. We are all sick. I, for instance, have osteochondrosis.’ 12