Click to download the Magnitsky Bill (HR 4405) in PDF
Click to download Russia's Magnitsky Federation Council report in PDF
Central to fairness, American style, is an opportunity to be heard before judgment is pronounced, innocence until guilty is proven and the proof of guilt by actual evidence and not an alleged propensity to do wrong. This is why the unseemly rush to move the Magnitsky Act through the Congress ultimately is at least as damaging to America as it is to Russia. The proposed Act demands that Russia conducts a "thorough and unbiased investigation of the case" and the Russian prosecutors, albeit slowly, and even the parliament are in the process of doing just that.
The Russian parliamentarian report should be read in its entirety by those wishing to be fair and with an appreciation that it is just preliminary, but among other things, it makes the point that the legal context for the arrest of Sergei Magnitsky may be more complicated than Congress was informed by a British citizen William Browder who, it argues, had a motive to distort the facts to cover up his own activities.
According to this report William Browder implemented a scheme involving the use of Russian corporations he controlled to gain a larger interest in the Russian corporation Gazprom than was allowed by Russian law. The report further alleges that Mr. Browder developed a scheme to evade the payment of profit taxes by claiming a deduction for having a large component of special needs workers in their workforce which resulted in the substantial tax evasion.
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