Lawyer for major Russian investor dies in jail

A 37-year-old lawyer for William Browder, once Russia's biggest foreign portfolio investor, has died in jail, the FT reports.

Browder has been banned from entering Russia in 2005 on national security grounds, but he  says the ban is politically motivated, as he had worked to expose corruption inside of some of Russia's largest corporations, including Gazprom.

For the past year, his London-based fund, Hermitage Capital Management, has been battling charges of tax evasion. Browder says interior ministry officials are the ones who stripped the company -- and the Russian state -- of assets and tax payments, in a complicated story  laid out in the glitzy video below. His lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested about a year ago after giving testimony against a Russian interior ministry official who helped carry out a raid on Hermitage's Moscow office.

Magnitsky died of pancreatitis that he developed in prison, after failing to receive treatment despite repeated appeals, people close to him told the FT.

The case of Browder, one of the country's highest profile investors, highlights one of the more insidious possible stumbling blocks to investing in the Russian economy. The death of Magnitsky, meanwhile, highlights the horrific conditions in Russian jails. (For more on the latter, take a look at this week's Al Jazeera report on physical abuse in Russian jails.)

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/russia-and-its-neighbors/091117/lawyer-russia-foreign-investor-dies-jail