By Jason Corcoran in Moscow
A lawyer jailed on charges of helping William Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management evade taxes has died in a Moscow detention centre’s hospital.
Sergey Magnitskiy, 37, died yesterday at 9.50pm in Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention centre in Moscow of apparent toxic shock and heart failure.
Magnitsky, a 37-year-old partner at Moscow law firm Firestone Duncan, was jailed nearly a year ago on charges of tax evasion related to his work for Hermitage. He was refused bail and had been in detention for over a year without trial.
Magnitskiy gave formal testimonies naming officers of the Interior Ministry and their role in the seizure of Hermitage Fund/HSBC companies. Shortly after his testimony, on 24 November 2008, he was arrested by the team of the same Interior Ministry officers named in his testimony.
According to a press release issued by Hermitage, his lawyers went to see Magnitskiy yesterday at a planned investigative procedure at Butyrka detention center and were denied access to him.
The lawyers were told he could not leave his cell because of his state of health. The investigators were said by Hermitage to have refused to show a medical report about Magnitskiy’s health to his lawyers, stating it was an “internal matter”.
His mother was the first to find out about the death of her son this morning. She came to Butyrka detention centre to give him some personal items and was told that her son had been transferred to a different detention facility, the Matrosskaya Tishina centre, the previous day. When she then went to Matrosskaya Tishina, she was told that her son was dead.
His lawyers were told that Magnitskiy died of a rupture to the abdominal membrane around 9:00 pm on 16 November 2009 and that his body was transferred to the 11th Morgue in Moscow.
Hermitage said Magnitskiy was kept in pre-trial detention for a year and denied by Investigator Silchenko the ability to see his family.
The investment firm said many complaints by Magnitskiy and his lawyers about the physical and psychological pressure exerted on him, the legal breaches during the pre-trial investigation, and the degrading conditions in detention, were left unaddressed.
In a statement, Browder said: “I would like to express my shock and sadness at the passing of Sergey Magnitskiy. Sergey was a brilliant and honourable lawyer known by all whom met him as a diligent professional and a committed family man.”
Magnitskiy, who was married with two children, was apparently targeted for providing accounting advice to two Hermitage Fund entities in 2001 that police claimed underpaid taxes in that year.
His firm Firestone Duncan is a Moscow-based provider of legal, tax, accounting, and audit services. It was established in 1993 by US lawyers to service the specialised legal and audit needs of foreign ventures doing business in Russia or with Russian partners.
Is the entire international blogospere absolutely certain that Sergey Magnitskey was not guilty of helping Hermitage Capital evade paying taxes? Do they have access to the documents held now by the Office of the Prosecutor General of The Russian Federation? If not, surely any assumption of his innocence is misled. The Russian State do possess such documents, and they do believe he was guilty of involvement in a scheme to avoid paying taxes. Whether or not those documents are themselves false is another question. Furthermore, if he was indeed guilty of participation in the tax evasion scheme, along with the CEO of Hermitage Capital, William Browder, his death is a good thing for Hermitage. The Russian State will now not be able to prove his guilt. And they will find it more difficult to prove the guilt of William Browder himself. If on the other hand, he was innocent, I agree that his death is indeed a tragedy and that The Russian State, and those Interior Ministry officials in particular, did indeed kill him to silence him permanently. At the moment, however, it may be misleading, a knee-jerk reaction, for the entire blogosphere to accept as gospel truth that Sergey Magnitskey was innocent.
Whether or not Sergey was innocent is a different matter. Lets put the question of his innoncence aside for the moment. Three points here are clear here. First, until Sergey started raising his voice, he had not been of an interest to the Russian authorities. Second, Sergey should not have been treated in the prison the way he was. He should not have been jailed at all. At best, he should have been released on bail but he was not. Why? – because the authorities were trying to push him into testifying against the fund by beating him and treating him as an animal. Third – no Tax Authority in the world would ever repay $250 million of taxes (and in this case, they have done so without seemingly checking the authenticity of the documents used to reclaim the taxes)…