Thomas Oliphant: Putin’s Corruption
AFTER NEARLY a professional lifetime of legal battles, first against the commissars and now against the current crop of Russian thugs masquerading as a government, Eduard Safronsky has earned the right to his stark observation: “A totalitarian regime is starting again in my country. That is the Russian reality.”
The previous crowd (1917-91) might have been nominally in the service of an ideology, but Safronsky calls what is emerging under Vladimir Putin (whose good soul President Bush claims to have discovered) is the pursuit of power based on economic greed under the always convenient cover of nationalism.
Safronsky, a quietly intense lawyer, has direct experience to support his contention — most recently as one of the principal attorneys involved in the human rights mess known as Yukos — the oil empire that Putin has targeted for confiscation.
If he were in Moscow right now, Safronsky would get tossed in the clink for what he is doing these days — spreading the word about a case straight out of Kafka on behalf of some of Yukos’s bankers. Fortunately, he is safely beyond Putin’s reach and has refused to sign a gag order while he was directly on the case. (He had to drop out to battle cancer.)
For months, Americans have seen the Yukos outrage primarily as a matter for the business pages — a tale of alleged tax crime amidst hints of gangster influence, with possible impacts on the volatile world supply and price of crude oil.
In fact, as the Council of Europe’s human rights monitors keep reminding, Yukos is a classic example of what Putin is doing to Russia in the interests of his increasingly powerful clique. The Yukos case should be seen as an integral part of a disturbing pattern — the brutality associated with the suppression of the Chechnya rebellion, the meddling or worse in Ukraine’s recent election, sharply higher military spending, and escalating anti-US rhetoric in Russia’s public square, press intimidation, and actions against political opponents. Since early last year, Putin’s henchmen have gone after the firm with a purple passion. The reason is officially given as economic crime on a huge scale — specifically tax frauds so fraudulent that they supposedly involved sums of money that greatly exceeded the net income upon which Yukos is alleged to have avoided taxes. The law involved is even being applied retroactively.
Three of the firm’s executives, including founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have been held in conditions bordering on the barbaric. Last weekend, the real purpose of all this was crystal clear, as the Russian government attempted to sell off Yukos’s largest production operation — to itself, no less, in what amounts to nationalization — on the pretext of recovering the evaded taxes.
There should be no doubt that the original disposal of former Soviet assets that resulted in Yukos’s evolution occurred under murky circumstances in the 1990s and that tax evasion is rampant in a society still far from complying with international norms in transparency and the application of a clear rule of law.
However, what the Putin authorities have done in the Yukos case is ridiculous. The European human rights monitors have documented denial of medical care, illegal pre-trial detention, probable administration of drugs, and denial of access to counsel and to the press. The key to the proceedings has been the persecution of a senior executive, Alexei Pichugin, to get him to flip on Khodorkovsky and others. The charges Pichugin is being held on, nearly incommunicado, include two murders and three attempted murders.
In typically understated language, the Council of Europe’s investigator cited several witnesses to the administration of drugs to Pichugin without his knowledge to make him talk and added, ominously: “The criminal proceedings against him are held in secret and exclude the public, despite only 2 percent of the court documents being classified as confidential.”
To this date, there appears to be only one “witness” in his case — a fellow doing life for eight murders and five rapes.
As for the economic charges, the investigator noted that, in advance of the attempted takeover of the production unit, the government had imposed special taxes on a liter of oil at triple the ratecharged other firms — a tax clearly “far beyond the financial possibilities of the company.” Safronsky has defended officials facing trumped-up charges in the former Soviet Union. At the time communism crumbled he had been granted refugee status here, so serious were the dangers associated with his advocacy.
Now, he notes, it is happening again. Safronsky told me that Europeans are closer to what is happening. The current US approach to Russia is in his view naive.
Given that Russia is just about the only subject that incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice actual has expertise in, I would choose a stronger adjective. We are still playing too much footsie with a government that is careening toward serious trouble. Governments like Putin’s that subordinate their justice system to political ends are governments that also end up misbehaving in their foreign policies. The time is long past for the United States to be raising some loud noises about the trend.
Thomas Oliphant is a former columnist for the Boston Globe
Source: Thomas Oliphant, Putin’s Corruption, The Boston Globe, December 21, 2004
