Magnitsky lawyer hurt in home ‘fall’

MOSCOW: A lawyer representing the family of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian auditor and lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after uncovering a US$230 million (about eight billion baht) fraud targeting a US-born financier, suffered severe head injuries on Tuesday after plunging from his Moscow apartment building.

Russian news organisations said the lawyer, Nikolai Gorokhov, fell while helping movers carry a hot tub up to his fourth-floor apartment. They showed photographs of a shattered tub outside the building. But the financier, William Browder, said Mr Gorokhov was to appear in a Moscow court yesterday to appeal on behalf of Magnitsky’s mother for an investigation into new evidence relating to the fraud scheme first exposed by Magnitsky.

“Basically, there is a trail of dead and seriously injured people leading from the Magnitsky case,” Mr Browder said yesterday. He said Russia’s post-Soviet version of the KGB, the Federal Security Service (FSB) “is doing everything it can to shut down any serious investigation”.

Whether Mr Gorokhov’s injuries were the result of an accident or foul play, the episode became the latest gruesome twist in a story that began when Magnitsky blew the whistle on what he believed was a tax rebate fraud involving official collusion and targeting Mr Browder, who ran an investment company in Moscow, Hermitage Capital, from 1996 to 2005.

The Russians have accused Mr Browder, a British citizen who now lives in London, of orchestrating the fraud that he and Magnitsky attributed to criminals working in collusion with law enforcement authorities. Mr Gorokhov is a major witness in a case brought by US prosecutors against a Cypriot company accused of laundering some of the proceeds from the fraud.