Renaissance Capital

A so-called “Magnitsky amendment” was passed by the Commons in February, allowing the Government to seize the assets of suspected human rights abusers. The Government said it was acting after the death of Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage, the British investment firm that was the victim of a £155m fraud in Russia. Another companies lawyer,Alexander Perepilichnyy aslo died, aged 43, while jogging near London in 2012, after fleeing Russia in 2009.(he investigated the case as well) Renaissance Capital is a Moscow-based investment bank now controlled by billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. Top positions were or still occupied by agents of KGB/FSB. The company’s deputy general director until at least 2005 was Yuri Sagaidak, a KGB spy expelled from Britain in 1989, while in 2006 Vladimir Dzhabarov, former acting head of financial intelligence at its successor the FSB, was appointed vice president. Yuri Kobaladze, a former KGB general, was Renaissance’s managing director from 1999 until early 2007. Igor Sushchin, until recently the organisation’s head of IT security, was one of two FSB operatives accused by the FBI last month of hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. An indictment said it was “unknown” whether the firm “knew of his FSB affiliation”. The fraud against Hermitage, once Russia’s largest foreign investor, took place in 2007. At the time Renaissance Capital was run by Stephen Jennings,known as the “Kiwi oligarch”, who has an estate in Oxfordshire, and Igor Sagiryan, a former Soviet official who owns the Ping Pong chain of restaurants and a £23 million house in west London. Hermitage first uncovered the scheme in 2007 after three of its subsidiaries were stolen in a complicated scam following a police raid on its Moscow offices, when legal documents were confiscated. Individuals who had seized ownership of the companies then fraudulently reclaimed $230 m (£155 m) of capital gains tax. US prosecutors said the scheme was “strikingly similar” to another apparent fraud in 2006 involving two subsidiaries of Rengaz Holdings Limited – a fund run by Renaissance. However, while Hermitage’s companies were stolen, Renaissance’s were willingly sold to a group that had connections with Mr Jennings and another of the firm’s executives, Hermitage said in the 2009 court submission. Magnitsky, who was investigating on behalf of the British victims of the fraud, was found dead on November 17 2009 in a Russian prison, in what the UK government labelled an “atrocious murder”. In 2017 it has emerged that the US Department of Justice has traced proceeds of the fraud to a bank account in Bournemouth held by Renaissance Capital Investment Management Ltd. Since 2012, Renaissance Capital has been part of ONEXIM Group, one of the largest private investment holding companies in Russia, owned by Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov.