.style8 { font-size: small; } .style9 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; } .style10 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; color: #800000; } .style8 { font-size: small; } .style9 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; } .style10 { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small; color: #800000; } February 23:
Police corruption and fears of detention have prompted the colleague of deceased anti-corruption attorney Sergei Magnitsky to flee Russia. Magnitsky died in prison back in December, after being arrested while representing a client in a case against the Interior Ministry. Now, Jamison Firestone, Magnitsky’s partner, tells Moscow News that he fears he is being framed by Russian police and worries about his safety. “I'd been a little too loud protesting police corruption, and now the police have a ‘present’ for me, so to speak,” Firestone said after learning that someone had forged a tax refund for $21 million in his name. He has vowed to continue his fight against the “Russian police mafia” from London.
February 25:
Firings have hit the upper ranks of Russian police forces as the Kremlin clamps down on the nation’s rampant corruption problem. The Moscow Times reports that the Moscow police department has dismissed two supervisors who had been in command of the officers implicated in the kidnapping and ransom of a Belarussian businessman and his son. Since October, the Kremlin has moved to hold superior officers responsible for their subordinates in an effort to clean up corruption. Some, however, think the steps do not go far enough. “It is a solution but not the right one,” says Mikhail Pashkin, the head of Moscow’s police’s independent trade union, pointing out the 5,000 crimes involving police across Russia that occurred in 2009. “It is the system itself that needs to be changed.”
March 2:
Prime Minister Putin has scolded several of Russia’s top business leaders for failing to invest in Russia’s energy sector. According to Moscow News, the government had reached an unofficial agreement with the country’s leading private investors in which the investors would purchase parts of the state’s electricity monopoly in return for the liberalization of markets. Putin criticized some of Russia’s best-known business leaders for breaching this unwritten agreement and failing to invest in the electricity industry after receiving funds from the government sale. “The message to the oligarchs is that… the Putin government is determined that power sector reform will be played out according to the rules,” according to analyst David Weaving.
Igor Sutyagin, a former researcher at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow imprisoned in 2004 for espionage, has been denied early release. According to the Barents Observer, Sutyagin began serving his 15-year sentence after a controversial conviction for transferring secrets to the U.S. He argues that information that he allegedly shared was publicly available and appealed his case to President Vladimir Putin in 2007. At that time, Putin denied his request for a pardon. The European Court of Human Rights will take up the case this year.
March 3:
Lawyers for Yukos are demanding in the European Court of Human Rights that Russia pay the company $98 billion in compensation for illegal tax investigations which ultimately resulted in the embattled energy firm’s financial ruin. Business Week reports that Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky continues to blame his opposition to former President Vladimir Putin for his personal misfortunes, as well as those of his company.
The stakes for the Kremlin are high. Moscow has made much of its adherence to European standards of justice in recent weeks. But a court victory for Yukos would serve to undermine Russia’s economic competitiveness, making the case what Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center has called a “political hot potato.” A ruling against Russia would be “painful” for both “international investors coming into Russia and the political standing of Russia,” Shevtsova says.
March 4:
Leonid Tyagachev, the head of Russia’s Olympic Committee, has resigned from his post. The Associated Press reports that Tyagachev’s resignation comes as a result of Russia’s dismal performance at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, in which its athletes brought home just 15 medals – the country’s worst-ever medal count at the Winter Olympics.
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