The Dossier Center and The Daily Beast have new information revealing that lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya was attempting to make her client, who is believed to have laundered billions from the Russian budget, appear innocent.
We are discussing the misappropriation of 5.4 billion rubles from the Russian treasury. Last summer, the Swiss prosecutor’s office ended the investigation into this matter.
The method for transferring Russian funds through Swiss banks was exposed by lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who passed away in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center. In the course of investigating this story, it was found that the company Prevezon Holding LTD, led by Denis Katsyv, who is the son of the former vice-president of Russian Railways and the Minister of Transport of the Moscow Region, Petr Katsyv, was engaged in deceit. The company’s Swiss accounts were frozen and, as is customary, lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya offered to defend Katsyv.
On August 24, 2015, Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Artem Ranchenkov instructed an economic audit to determine the origin of the funds that were transferred to the Swiss account of Katsyv’s company Prevezon Holding LTD. Eduard Shakirov was responsible for the examination. The analyst was unable to determine the source of the transferred funds due to their depersonalization on the current account. This consisted of 447,353.82 US dollars, which were transferred to Prevezon Holding LTD from the current account of SC Bunicon-Impex SRL (Banka de Economy Branch, Republic of Moldova) on February 13, 2008.
The content of the document indicates that a certain Natalia Mitusova was involved in its creation and editing. It turned out that Natalya Alexandrovna Mitusova is the daughter of the deputy regional prosecutor Alexander Mitusov, as well as the stepdaughter of Natalya Veselnitskaya. Mitusova is a member of the law firm of the Moscow region “Kamerton Consulting”. In early 2020, Mitusova, like her stepmother Natalya Veselnitskaya, left the founders of the law firm. Veselnitskaya and Mitusova, in addition to family ties, were connected by the MOKA structure Veselnitskaya, Mitusova and Partners, which ceased operations in 2011.
The Swiss police received the document from the experts two months after Mitusova made edits. Law enforcement personnel did not have reason to suspect that the document contains elements that are grammatically identical to Mitusova’s version. However, for the Swiss security officials, this examination provided significant grounds to terminate the investigation and return 99% of the frozen funds to Denis Katsyv.
The Swiss Themis is expected to soon decide whether to return the case to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation.
