Why Does the Kremlin Care So Much About the Magnitsky Act?

[CousinIT]

Let’s get something straight: The Magnitsky Act is not, nor has it ever been, about adoptions.

The Magnitsky Act, rather, is about money. It freezes certain Russian officials’ access to the stashes they were keeping in Western banks and real estate and bans their entry to the United States. The reason Russian (and now, American) officials keep talking about adoption in the same breath is because of how the Russian side retaliated to the Magnitsky Act in 2012, namely by banning American adoptions of Russian children. The Russians vowed they were punishing Americans who violated the human rights of Russians, after an adopted Russian toddler died of heat stroke in a Virginia family’s car. But the only Americans the bill directly targeted were the ones involved in putting the Magnitsky Act together.

At the time the adoption ban was passed, the Russian Federation had more orphaned and abandoned children than it did after the end of World War II, which claimed the lives of 27 million Soviets. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev bemoaned the 95 Russian orphans whose American adoptions fell through just as the law was signed in 2012, 95 Russian orphans whom Russians didn’t want to adopt. There was a massive outcry in Russia and thousands protested in Moscow against a bill that made no sense: If the Kremlin is so angry about the Magnitsky Act, why was it punishing … Russians? And the most vulnerable Russians at that?

It was such an angry and nonsensical response that it’s worth looking at why the Magnitsky Act made Putin and the Russian elite so upset in the first place.

The Magnitsky Act—or the “Majinsky” Act, as the president’s lawyer and his recently departed press secretary tended to pronounce it—is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor. One of his clients, William Browder, was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, until the Russian authorities kicked him out of the country and allegedly began pilfering his investment fund, Hermitage Capital. Magnitsky uncovered what he alleged to be a complicated scheme by which officials from the Russian Interior Ministry and the courts used forged Hermitage documents to claim ownership of Browder’s fund, and then sued the Russian government, saying that they, the new pseudo-owners of Hermitage, had overpaid their taxes by $230 million. The courts and the Russian tax system, by Magnitsky’s account, speedily obliged, shelling out $230 million to the new owners, who then invested in luxury apartments in Moscow and abroad.

...

Last June, Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner to discuss restarting adoptions (in her telling). In reality, she was there to talk about undoing the Magnitsky Act. Speaking on a Russian political talk show in 2014, she railed against the sanctions being imposed on Russian elites for the Kremlin’s actions in Ukraine. The sanctions, she said, “are just pretext to continue what they started in 2010, when legislation was first developed to impose sanctions in relation to the death of Magnitsky,” to whom she referred as “that poor boy.” The Magnitsky Act was the blueprint, in other words, for the big sanctions that came in 2014.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/magnitsky-act-kremlin/535044/

[voteearlyvoteoften]

1. Read this!

[Thinkingabout]

2. It is about getting sanctions lifted on Russia, it is not the "adoption" crap

[mr_lebowski]

3. 'Adoptions' ... such an obvious 'code word' ... just in case they were being recorded ... (n/t)