I was troubled, watching Fareed Zakaria’s GPS (Global Public Square) on CNN yesterday. He was interviewing Bill Browder the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management. Browder revealed how Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky who was a Russian attorney died in police custody generating international media attention and launching an investigation into allegations of abuse. Magnitsky, who had alleged wide-scale tax fraud sanctioned by officials before being himself arrested, died days before the one year limit that he could be held without trial would expire.
According to Browder, Magnitsky was an attorney representing his firm on charges off tax evasion and tax fraud. Browder was expelled from Russia as a national threat, though he indicated that the only threat he represented was "to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats", believing that the ouster was conducted to leave his company open for exploitation.
Magnitsky who had testified that police, members of the judiciary, tax officials, bankers and the Russian mafia had been involved in a $230m tax fraud against the Russian treasury, was illegally arrested and imprisoned in November 2008 after being accused of colluding with Hermitage.
During this time he was shifted very rapidly from one prison to another, and was deprived of even the basic amenities like water boiler. The authorities tried to break him physically and psychologically, but in a show of tremendous strength and integrity, he never cracked.
Held for 11 months without trial, he developed gall stones, Pancreatitis and calculous cholecystitis, for which he was given inadequate medical treatment during his confinement.
Surgery was ordered in June, but never performed; a week before he was to be released if he were not brought to trial, he died for reasons attributed first by prison officials as a "rupture to the abdominal membrane" and later to heart attack. Browder says that it later was discovered that Magnitsky had complained of deteriorating stomach pain for five days before his death and that he was vomiting every three hours, with a visibly swollen stomach.
On the day of his death, the prison physician, believing he had a chronic disease, sent him by ambulance to a medical unit equipped to help him, but the surgeon there — who described Magnitsky as "agitated, trying to hide behind a bag and saying people were trying to kill him" — prescribed only a painkiller, leaving him for psychiatric evaluation. He was found dead in his cell a little over two hours later. He was 37 years old.
That is authority, corruption and power for us.
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