Edward Lucas - Deception

2 An accurate but unflattering account of Mr Browder’s approach comes from my successor in Moscow, Gideon Lichfield. ‘A Russian Odyssey’, Stanford Business, November 2006. http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0611/feature_browder.html

3 http://hermitagefund.com/about/hermitageeffect/

4 http://hermitagefund.com/about/hermitageeffect/Harvard%20Business%20School%20—%20Hermitage%20Case%20Study.pdf

5 An excellent account of this comes in Putin’s Oil: The Yukos Affair and the Struggle for Russia by Martin Sixsmith (Continuum, 2010). Yukos was bankrupted by bogus tax demands and its assets handed over to Kremlin cronies; its owner was sentenced to lengthy jail terms after successive farcical court hearings, at which he has denounced the regime and the lawlessness it stokes and thrives on, for example in the statement he and his co-defendant Platon Lebedev issued during their trial, on 2 November 2010 http://www.khodorkovskycenter.com/mikhail-khodorkovsky-full-transcript-his-final-words

6 ‘Bewilderment As Browder Barred As Security Threat’ by Catherine Belton, St Petersburg Times, 21 March 2006. http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=17062

7 The clip can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcnF0Cu8Wtc‘ Putin ne smog obyasnit, pochemu v Rossiyu ne puskayut samogo predannogo zarubeznnogo invevestora’ (‘Putin can’t explain why Russia won’t let in the most successful foreign investor’), unsigned article, 17 July 2006 http://www.newsru.com/arch/finance/17jul2006/browder.html

8 The attorneys’ names are Ekaterina Maltseva, and a husband and wife team: Andrei Pavlov and Yulia Mayorova. In other cases related to the same fraud, this couple has represented claimants against Hermitage. But on this occasion they were claiming to represent it. http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/240m-theft-from-budget/

9 A video giving an account (critical – and to me unconvincing) of Hermitage’s activities can be found (in Russian) here http://www.mk.ru/video/politics/1013-skeletyi-uilyama-braudera-.html

10 http://www.assembly.coe.int/documents/workingdocs/doc09/edoc11993.pdf

11 An excellent account of Mr Magnitsky’s treatment in prison can be found here in Russian http://www.rb.ru/inform/127947.htmland here in English ‘Report of the public oversight commission for human rights observance in Moscow detention centers: Review of the conditions of the detention of Sergei Magnitsky in the pre-trial detention centres of the City of Moscow’ http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJ-20091229-MagnitskyReport.pdf. The extracts from Mr Magnitsky’s own writings can be found here: http://russian-untouchables.com/docs/Prison-Diaries-Magnitsky-General-Prosecutor-Complaint.pdf

12 Ibid. Medical care in Russian prisons is generally lamentable, but high-profile prisoners seem to have a particularly bad time. A lawyer for Yukos, Vasily Aleksanyan, contracted HIV and tuberculosis while in prison, lost his sight and got cancer, before he was released thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights.

13 http://russian-untouchables.com/docs/Alekseyeva-Complaint-Eng29Mar2010.pdf

14 http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/2011/07/russia-blames-medics-for-hermitage-lawyer-death/

15 The video is available on Mr Browder’s website http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/or at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7yBOEPYJTc

16 A list of all sixty can be found here http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Files.Download&FileStore_id=1744. The criteria for inclusion on the list is that the person signed a document associated with the case.

17 These purported terrorist attacks created a climate of panic in which the then unknown new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, rapidly became the most popular politician in the country thanks to his seemingly tough response. A botched attack on an apartment block in Ryazan turned out to have been the work of the FSB, which explained its actions, deeply unconvincingly, as an anti-terrorist drill. Those brave Russians who have tried to investigate this mysterious affair have ended up dead. See The New Cold War , chapter 2.

1 A thorough and lively account of these and other abuses is in Luke Harding’s Mafia State (Guardian Books, 2011). It also details the persistent harassment campaign mounted against him and his family.

2 World Report 2011: Russia http://www.hrw.org/en/world-report-2011/russia

3 See my article ‘Licence to Loot’, The Economist , 17 September 2011 http://www.economist.com/node/21529021

4 See ‘Frau Fixit: Germany, Central Europe and Russia’ The Economist, 18 November 2010 http://www.economist.com/node/17522476

5 The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev by Daniel Treisman, (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, London, January 2011), published in America by Free Press.

6 ‘Neo-Feudalism Explained’ by Vladimir Inozemtsev, The American Interest , March–April 2011. http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=939

7 http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/02/10PARIS170.html

8 http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/10/08LONDON2643.html

9 http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/11/09MOSCOW2749.html_. A similarly worded but slightly different version of the cable can be found at http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=09MOSCOW1051

10 http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=10MOSCOW317

11 ‘The Concealed Battle to Run Russia’ by Amy Knight, New York Review of Books , 13 January 2011 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/concealed-battle-run-russia/

12 The New Nobility, The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (Public Affairs Books, 2010). The authors run the www.agentura.ruwebsite, a magpie’s nest of news and analysis, mostly in Russian, all of it well-informed, about the inner workings of the secret state.

13 Ibid. p. ix.

14 Quoted in ibid, p. 5.

15 The draft ‘de-Stalinisation’ programme from the President’s Human Rights Council can be found here http://www.president-sovet.ru/structure/group_5/materials/the_program_of_historical_memory.php

See for example Natsionalnoye primireniye nevozmozhna bez suda i pamyati (National Reconciliation is impossible without a trial and memory) http://www.rg.ru/2011/04/08/repress.html

16 ‘Stalin against Putin’ (unsigned) Vedomosti, 28 April 2011 http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/259344/stalin_protiv_putina

17 ‘Reading Russia: The Siloviki in Charge’ by Andrei Illarionov. Journal of Democracy , Vol. 20, no. 2, April 2009 http://www.cato.org/pubs/articles/andrei_illarionov_the_siloviki_in_charge.pdf

18 Inozemtsev, op. cit.

19 ‘The mindset of Russia’s security services’, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, 29 December 2010 http://www.agentura.ru/english/dossier/mindset/

20 An English version can be seen here http://www.viddler.com/explore/Eastculture2009/videos/4/. The script (in English) can be found here. http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/80211155439.htm

21 Soldatov and Borogan, ‘The mindset’.

22 See for example: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/8244470/Gazprom-held-back-by-its-corrupt-nature.html; http://www.iie.com/ppublications/papers/aslund508.pdf; and http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/data/docs/Viewpoints/Putin%20and%20Gazprom_Nemtsov%20en%20Milov.pdf

23 Mr Navalny’s site is www.navalny.ru; Mr Nemtsov’s is www.nemtsov.ru; Mr Milov’s is http://www.milov.infoAll are in Russian only at the time of writing.

24 ‘ Olga Kryshtanovskaya: Putin vernetsya kak don mafii’ (‘Olga Kryshtanovskaya: Putin returns like a mafia don’) by Andrei Polunin, Svobodnaya pressa , 8 February 2011 http://svpressa.ru/politic/article/38451/