Most officials on U.S.’ Magnitsky list no longer serving in previous capacity
(Interfax – MOSCOW. April 12, 2013) Most of the Russian officials added on Friday to the U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control’s Specially Designated Nationals List (OFAC’s SDN list) under the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 are no longer working in the positions they occupied when an investigation against Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was under way.
Investigator Pavel Karpov has retired from the law enforcement system, and operative Artem Kuznetsov is no longer serving in the Interior Ministry system, either.
Oleg Logunov, who earlier occupied a high position at the Interior Ministry Investigative Committee and then served at the Prosecutor General’s Office, is currently a deputy presidential envoy to the North-Western Federal District.
Andrei Pechegin is no longer head of a division at the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Olga Stepanova and Yelena Khimina, who earlier headed Federal Tax Service inspectorates 28 and 25 in Moscow, are no longer working in this capacity, and Dmitry Komnov is no longer head of the Butyrka detention facility administration.
The list does include Interior Ministry investigator Oleg Silchenko. However, law enforcement sources said earlier that he was not directly involved in the investigation against Magnitsky.
The Magnitsky list also includes four judges, who worked at the Tverskoi Court in Moscow when the investigation against Magnitsky was under way. Two of them, i.e. Aleksey Krivoruchko and Yelena Stashina, are still working there, Sergey Podoprigorov has been promoted to the Moscow City Court, and Svetlana Ukhnalyova is currently working at the Kuntsevsky Court in Moscow.
Ivan Prokopenko, who earlier headed the administration of the Matrosskaya Tishina detention facility for Moscow, currently heads a section at the same facility reporting directly to the Federal Corrections Service.
Kazbek Dukuzov, who is also on the list, has no relation to investigations against Magnitsky. He in fact figured in the case related to the 2004 assassination of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov, the editor-in-chief of the Russian version of Forbes magazine.
It was reported earlier that Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev were tried in the Klebnikov case. The Moscow City Court acquitted Dukuzov and Vakhayev based on a jury verdict in May 2006. The Supreme Court later overturned the verdict at the Prosecutor General’s Office’s protest and ordered a retrial. The Moscow City Court suspended the second trial in December 2011 and placed Dukuzov on the wanted list. After that, the court ordered returning the case to the Prosecutor General’s Office. Dukuzov’s whereabouts is currently unknown. Lawyer Alexander Chernov, who earlier represented Dukuzov’s interests, told Interfax on Friday that he “has not contacted him since then.”
As for Lecha Bogatirov, he has no relation to the Magnitsky case either. The media earlier alleged that Bogatirov could be the killer of Umar Israilov, head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov’s former bodyguard. Israilov supposedly fled to Europe in 2004 and was killed in Vienna in January 2009.