Den Haag, 10 juni 2011

Voortouwcommissie: vaste commissie voor Buitenlandse Zaken

Activiteit:
Datum:
Tijd:
Openbaar/besloten:

bijzondere procedure
woensdag 15 juni 2011
17.00 - 18.00 uur
besloten

Onderwerp:

Dood Russische advocaat in gevangenis

Agendapunt:

Het lid Ferrier ontvangt in het kader van de bijzondere procedure de heer Bill
Browder over Sergei Magnitsky, een Russische advocaat die onder dubieuze
omstandigheden in een Russische gevangenis om het leven is gekomen.
Het lid Ferrier nodigt u van harte uit hierbij aanwezig te zijn.

Zaak:

Brief van lid/fractie/commissie - - 21 april 2011
verzoek gesprek Bill Browder - 2011Z08588

Griffier:

T.J.E. van Toor

Activiteitnummer:

2011A02434

The Sergei Magnitsky Case:
Testimony to the
Dutch Parliament, Human Rights Committee
By William Browder
Chief Executive Officer, Hermitage Capital Management
15th June 2011

Madam Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Human Rights Committee.
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today about the case of Sergei Magnitsky. The
devastating fate of this young Russian lawyer, and the cover-up orchestrated after his murder
in police custody, truly exemplifies the corruption, graft and lawlessness that rules Russia
today. Moreover, it is a terrible human rights tragedy that, if ignored, will set a new precedent
for corrupt officials the world over, who continue to act with impunity while prisoners of
conscience suffer in silence.
Allow me to first give you some background, about myself and about how I got to know
Sergei Magnitsky.
I was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia between 1996 and 2005, with 6000
investors from 36 countries totalling $4 billion under management. The core of my fund’s
work was built around anti-corruption activism. When I discovered that high-level,
government-sanctioned fraud was taking place in the large, state-owned companies I invested
in, my team and I would conduct detailed forensic audits of the people committing the fraud,
sharing our research with international news organizations such as The New York Times, the
Financial Times of London, and The Washington Post.
The public outrage our exposés often triggered usually worked to halt the fraud or, at the very
least, minimize it greatly. This, in turn, would improve the overall health and viability of the
company in question, as well as its share price. As a result, I became as much an anticorruption
activist as I was an investor, establishing a reputation in Russia for improving
minority shareholder rights, promoting corporate governance, and fighting graft.
But I was going up against very powerful people, who had strong vested interests and
government connections. In 2005, after my fund exposed the details of several multibilliondollar
corruption schemes, the Russian foreign ministry expelled me from the country,
declaring that I was a “threat to national security.” Then the regime turned its massive
resources towards persecuting my colleagues and me.
On June 4th, 2007, twenty-five police officers raided our Moscow office and the office of our
law firm, Firestone Duncan, seizing two vanloads of documents and computers. The
documents were than used to fraudulently transfer ownership of our three investment holding
companies and to steal from the government $230 million that we had paid in taxes the
previous year.
While all of this was going on, I hired one of the smartest men I knew – a young Russian
lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky – to help us conduct an independent investigation into the
massive crime taking place right before our eyes. He was 36 years old, worked for Firestone
Duncan, an American law firm, and was highly respected by his clients and colleagues as a
trustworthy expert on tax law.
Sergei conducted an independent forensic investigation, diligently following the money trail
of the stolen $230 million. He discovered that government officials had participated in the
fraud and that our company had fallen victim to an organized criminal syndicate that had
already established a reputation in Russia for “corporate raiding.”
After he testified about the involvement of Interior Ministry officers, going on the record in
October 2008 to identify them, the same officials came to his home one month after his
testimony and arrested him on fabricated charges. It was a clear retaliation, not to mention a
cynical and highly organized attempt by officials to cover-up the traces of their crimes.
Sergei was imprisoned without a trial. He was methodically tortured for one year in an effort
to force him to retract his incriminating testimony. Every time he refused to perjure himself,

his captors applied more pressure: he was thrown into a cell flooded by raw sewage, then into
a freezing cell with open windows at the height of Russian winter. He was denied heat and hot
water. He was refused medical care. His prison cell was dark, overcrowded and infested with
rats.
At the time of his arrest, Sergei was a robust young man; in detention he grew emaciated,
dropping forty pounds and developing painful pancreatitis and gallstones. And all the while,
his captors continued trying to break him into signing a false confession.
But despite the physical and psychological pain he endured, Sergei Magnitsky refused to be
coerced into implicating himself and me, his client, in a fictitious crime. He stood up for
justice while suffering through the most unimaginable, inhumane treatment until his physical
state was completely broken down by his captors. But his spirit was unshakeable. He died on
November 16, 2009, having spent his final hours in pain, vomiting, being handcuffed by eight
prison guards, beaten by a rubber baton and writhing in agony. He never signed a false
confession nor did he withdraw his testimony against the corrupt officials who kept him
hostage for 12 months without trial.
The Wall Street Journal described Sergei’s death as a “slow-motion assassination.” Russian
human rights activists called it a premeditated murder. He was only 37 years old. He left
behind a wife and two young children, who buried a wasted body marked by bloodied
wounds, a painful reminder of the torture of his last hours.
What sets apart Sergei’s story from the shocking multitudes like it in Russia today is the
uniquely clear mind and spirit with which Sergei Magnitsky diligently catalogued every abuse
inflicted upon him while he was in police custody. During the 358 days of his detention he
filed 450 official complaints. And although the authorities never acted on any of them, we
were able to obtain the copies of his detailed diary. Indeed, it reads like a modern-day Gulag
Archipelago, as Sergei describes in granular detail the mistreatment and abuse meted out to
him by his sadistic captors.
A small subset of these documents was released in the first week after his death. The Russian
newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, published them under the headline “Sergei’s Prison Diaries.” It
was especially disturbing for the Russian people, as the language and details within this
document echoed with eerie similarity the repressive horrors of Stalinism and the Great Purge.
One week after Sergei Magnitsky’s death, public outrage at the scandal swelled with such
vehemence that President Medvedev – who has propagated his presidency as a fight against
“legal nihilism” – announced that he would launch an investigation into Magnitsky’s death.
But the so-called investigation was narrowly focused on “medical negligence” and ignored the
most substantial evidence around the actual crimes: namely, the illegality of Sergei
Magnitsky’s arrest; the involvement of officers in his persecution who had a clear conflict of
interest; the torture he was subjected to in custody; and the denial of any legal rectification
despite ample and undeniable evidence that his natural human rights, his freedom and his life
were unjustly and illegally taken away while he was in pre-trial detention.
Moreover, the official investigation ignored the massive financial fraud perpetrated by
Russian officials that Sergei had uncovered and for which he was arrested, tortured, and
killed.
Meanwhile, eighteen months since his death, Russian government officials, law enforcement
agents and cabinet ministers conceal from prosecution and vehemently protect the corrupt
officials who carried out the theft of $230 million from the Russian people, the torture and
murder of Sergei Magnitsky. Several key events that took place after Sergei’s death
undeniably point to an organized institutional cover-up at the most senior levels of the
Russian government.
First, the Russian Prosecutor’s Office denied the Magnitsky family’s request for an
independent pathologist to attend the official state autopsy on the grounds that all experts are
independent. When the family requested permission to conduct an independent autopsy, this
request was also denied. In fact, Sergei Magnitsky’s family was not even allowed to see his

body until it reached the burial site. At the burial site, the family discovered bruises,
abrasions and broken fingers. The family request to open a murder inquiry was ignored by the
Russian authorities.
On November 25th, nine days after Sergei died, which according to Russian tradition is a
special day of mourning for the deceased, the Interior Ministry held a press conference. In
breach of the principle of the presumption of innocence, Interior Ministry officials speaking at
the press conference posthumously declared Sergei Magnitsky guilty of crimes for which he
was never tried or convicted. Had he lived to see a fair and open trial, these accusations would
have immediately fallen apart under public scrutiny.
One month after his burial, Alexei Anichin, the Russian Deputy Interior Minister and head of
the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee, held another press conference to pronounce
Sergei posthumously “guilty” of the crime that had been used to justify his detention.
Anichin denied having had any knowledge of Sergei’s deteriorating state of health in pre-trial
detention, despite the fact that Sergei had filed over twenty requests calling attention to his
deteriorating condition, including several requests filed with the Interior Ministry’s
Investigative Committee, and despite the fact that all of these requests were formally rejected.
Anichin claimed that he had reviewed 111 of Sergei’s complaints and “not a single complaint
contained anything to do with the health or conditions of detention.”
In June of 2010, Oleg Logunov, the head of the legal department in the General Prosecutor’s
Office (who at the time of Sergei’s detention was deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s
Investigative Committee) gave an interview to a local Moscow radio station in which he
claimed that he was not aware of Magnitsky’s medical condition and that Magnitsky had
never filed any complaints about his health. Echoing the Investigative Committee’s December
rhetoric, he pronounced Magnitsky “guilty.”
One month later, Anichin told the Echo of Moscow radio station that he and his officers had
“suffered most” from Sergei Magnitsky’s death.
In September of 2010, Alexander Bastrykin, chairman of the Russian Investigative
Committee, and the most senior Russian official in charge of the on-going official inquiry into
the negligence in Magnitsky case, dismissed any notion that officials had been involved in his
death, though it seems inconceivable that a year after Sergei perished behind bars – and with
ample evidence that his requests for medical care were repeatedly and systematically denied
while he was in pre-trial custody – high-ranking officials with direct knowledge of the case
would continue to deny the facts.
Moreover, Russian authorities have summarily continued to reject all petitions from
Magnitsky’s family, his colleagues, independent human rights activists and journalists seeking
to open a real probe into the crimes and cover-up.
On December 28, 2009, the Moscow Public Oversight Commission (MPOC), which is
mandated by Russian law to monitor human rights compliance in detention centers, concluded
following a five week independent investigation that Sergei Magnitsky had been subjected to
torturous conditions while in custody, that physical and psychological pressure had been
exerted upon him, and that his right to life had been violated by the Russian state.
After conducting a series of interviews with detention center officials, the MPOC also found
substantial discrepancies and contradictions in the accounts of detention center officials, and
concluded that it indicated a cover-up of what had happened to Sergei Magnitsky on his last
day. The MPOC sent its conclusions to the General Prosecutor’s Office, the Investigative
Committee, the Ministry of Justice, the Federal Penitentiary Authority, and the Presidential
Administration. To date, they have not received any official response to their findings.
In March of 2010, Ludmila Alexeeva, Chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, an
independent Russian human rights organisation, petitioned for the opening of an investigation
into Sergei’s false arrest, torture and murder while in custody. She named police officers and
submitted evidence gathered by the MPOC and Sergei’s family, as well the official
complaints Sergei Magnitsky had filed while in detention.

In June of 2010, the Russian Investigative Committee rejected her petition. They claimed to
have questioned the police officers involved and found no sign of criminal wrongdoing. The
public responded with a massive outcry, demanding that the criminals responsible for Sergei’s
murder be brought to justice. The Investigative Committee made vague promises to reevaluate
Alexeeva’s petition, but no inquiry has been opened to date.
In July of 2010, Jamison Firestone, Sergei Magnitsky’s boss at the law firm Firestone Duncan
in Moscow, submitted evidence to the Russian Investigative Committee that several
government officials involved in the detention and torture of Sergei Magnitsky had acquired
massive and irregular wealth following the theft of the $230 million, which Sergei had
uncovered. In particular, Lt. Col. Artem Kuznetsov and his family acquired assets worth $3
million, which would amount to 467 years of his official police salary, and Major Pavel
Karpov, acquired $1.3 million, an amount equal to 202 years of his official Interior Ministry
salary.
All of Firestone’s complaints and petitions for an investigation were denied or ignored.
During 2010, Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny also filed a series of petitions
asking authorities to investigate the circumstances around Magnitsky’s arrest, including the
involvement of the Federal Security Service and the alleged payment of $6 million to organize
his detention. His petitions have all been rejected.
Alexei Navalny also filed a petition asking authorities to investigate the abundance of
evidence that suggests officers Kuznetsov and Karpov, along with their families, profited
from the theft of $230 million from the Russian treasury uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky. That
petition was also rejected.
The result of all of these efforts to bring the criminals to justice resulted in further cover-up of
the crimes. The officials in question, meanwhile, have been promoted and honored with state
medals.
It has become clear that justice will not be served inside Russia without pressure from the
outside. Given the involvement of the most senior government officials in the persecution of
Sergei Magnitsky and in the cover-up after his death, it is inconceivable that an investigation
by Russian authorities alone could produce a fair and unbiased investigation free from the
interference of the highest ranking officials complicit in the mistreatment and torture of Sergei
Magnitsky. The only chance we have to impose measured consequences on those who
committed these crimes is to appeal to countries where the rule of law serves to protect
ordinary citizens.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I come before you today as one of those ordinary citizens. I am neither
politician nor lawmaker: my only agenda is to ensure that the criminals who killed Sergei
Magnitsky – and who continue to roam free, spending their ill-gotten gains – are brought to
justice in a fair and open trial, by which they will surely be found guilty.
My team and I have helped to introduce legislation in parliaments around the world that
would impose visa and economic sanctions on the Russian officials involved in the Magnitsky
case. At the time of this testimony, the legislation is being considered in the United States and
Canada. On December 16th, 2010, the European Parliament passed a resolution to allow EU
member states to effectively do the same.
It is a short-term measure whose aim is not to punish the horrendous crimes at hand, but to
send a message that state-sponsored corruption will not be tolerated by free civilizations who
respect and honor democratic governance.
We are emboldened in this call for measured justice by the strong voices of prominent
Russian human rights activists and former Soviet dissidents who see the Magnitsky case as
clear evidence of the impunity. They have independently appealed to the EU leadership to
enact these sanctions to show that human rights are not empty words for the EU, as they are
for Russian officials, and to specifically impose sanctions on the 60 Russian officials
identified by the US Helsinki Commission for their specific involvement in the false arrest,
torture and death of Magnitsky and the embezzlement of $230 million that he had uncovered.

It is evident from the immediate reaction of Russian officials that these visa and asset
sanctions initiatives have already been highly effective. The Russian parliament may have
ignored the news that an innocent lawyer had been tortured and killed in pre-trial detention, or
the fact that a quarter of a billion dollars had been stolen from the Russian treasury, but as
soon as it was understood that government officials might be barred from vacationing at their
European villas or accessing their EU bank accounts, Russian lawmakers held an emergency
session of the Duma to consider how to block this legislation.
A special team of Russian Parliamentarians even traveled to Strasbourg to aggressively lobby
the European Parliament (EP) against the moves. However, as history now shows, the Russian
Parliamentarian’s attempts to pressure the European Parliament in burying the traces of their
crimes was completely futile.
Since the beginning of this year, I have visited individual EU member states, speaking to
public officials and administrators about implementing the EP resolution. Today, I testify
before you in hope that the Dutch Parliament will join this initiative.
Ignoring what happened would certainly make it easier to do business with Russia, but I
believe that in addition to the moral imperative associated with the Magnitsky case, there is an
important business imperative to consider as well. Russia remains a country ruled by
lawlessness, where Western companies are in real and constant danger of having their assets
expropriated and their employees harassed, arrested and killed. Likewise, if the corruption is
to be stopped from seeping beyond Russia’s borders, it is vital that action be taken to strip
state-sponsored abusers of basic human rights and freedoms of their impunity.
So I call upon you to act. I call upon you to take the necessary steps to create real
consequences to those specific officials in Russia who reign free in their corrupt ways and in
full contempt of the rule of law, human dignity and life itself. Your action will not be in vain,
for surely there is no better message of hope for the thousands of innocent prisoners of
conscience in the world who continue to suffer in silence. I call upon you to give them a
prospect of justice.