Sergei Magnitsky verdict ‘most shameful moment since Stalin’
Miriam Elder, 11 July 2013
The courtroom cage in Moscow stood empty on Thursday as a judge found the late whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky and his London-based employer guilty of tax evasion in a move likened to Stalin-era justice.
The case against the two defendants – Magnitsky, allowed to die an excruciating death in prison in 2009, and William Browder, banned from entering Russia since 2005 – has come to symbolise the brutality of Russia’s system and the penalties incurred by those who uncovering official wrongdoing.
Magnitsky, a lawyer hired by Browder’s London-based Hermitage Capital Management fund, uncovered a $230m (£150m) tax fraud scheme run by a host of Russian interior ministry and tax officials using documents stolen in a raid on Hermitage Capital. Magnitsky and Browder were then charged with running the fraud themselves.
