Translated material
Bertossa stings last
Leonid Velekhov
Pavel Borodin confused Western justice with Russian - and fell victim to this mistake
Pavel Borodin confused Western justice with Russian - and fell victim to this mistake
And the hard times carried the former “Kremlin supply manager” abroad! After all, for almost a year Pavel Pavlovich Borodin refrained from this temptation after in January last year the Swiss investigator Daniel Devaux issued a warrant to summon him to court to testify. And then suddenly he went to the USA last week. Right upon arrival at New York's Kennedy Airport, Borodin was detained by American police on the basis of the same warrant issued by a Swiss investigator a year ago. As the famous Russian aphorist Chernomyrdin said with indignation, he went to a dinner party and ended up in prison.
Not only Chernomyrdin - almost the entire Russian political elite is outraged. As has become the custom, only President Putin remains silent. Many Russian politicians call Borodin's arrest a "provocation" aimed at discrediting Russia and a challenge posed by the new Washington administration to the Kremlin. Really, if this is a provocation, it is so strange that one can even assume - as a paradox, of course - that it comes from Russia or even Borodin himself personally. Because none of the people familiar with the principles of Western justice and simply sane could have doubted that Borodin would be arrested as soon as he left Russia. The warrant issued by Deveau at the same time, in January 2000, was accepted for execution by Interpol. And no one canceled this order. So Borodin went abroad, directly provoking his arrest and subsequent scandal.
The “sins” of which Borodin is suspected are too serious to hope that they will be forgotten or forgiven. The investigation has been going on for three years. Let us remind the reader of the essence of the events, otherwise behind the cries of “provocation” and “spitting in the face of Russia,” it somehow faded into the background.
In January 1999, Carla del Ponte, then the Swiss prosecutor general, ordered a search of the offices of the Swiss company Mabetex in Lugano. This order, in turn, was inspired by an official appeal to the Swiss prosecutor's office signed by the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Skuratov, which dealt with bribes allegedly given by Mabetex to Borodin and other high-ranking Russian officials in exchange for receiving colossal contracts for construction work in Russia.
Since 1990 alone, a Swiss company led by an emigrant from Kosovo, Albanian Begget Pacolli, has completed construction work worth $1.4 billion in Russia. "Mabetex" rebuilt the White House in Moscow after the defeat in October 1993, erected the five-star Golden Ring-Swiss Diamond hotel on the site of the Moscow Belgrade Hotel, and built a new presidential residence "Shuiskaya Chupa" in Karelia. The crowning achievement of the collaboration between Borodin and Pacolli was the reconstruction of the Kremlin. Mabetex earned $300 million from this contract.
Among other documents, according to some information, during a search from the Mabetex office, photocopies of credit cards issued by the Swiss Banco di Gottardo under Pacolli's guarantees in the name of Boris Yeltsin and his two daughters were seized. Shortly after the Swiss search, a television premiere of a videotape with the participation of “a man similar to Skuratov” took place in Russia, and Skuratov himself was removed from the post of Prosecutor General. Following him, Primakov was dismissed from the post of Prime Minister, who gave the go-ahead to send a request to the Swiss prosecutor's office and patronized the development of a case about corruption in the Kremlin.
But the Swiss investigators were not frightened by the cold shower that was poured on their Russian colleagues, quite the contrary. The case against Borodin was separated into separate proceedings; it was taken up by the investigator of the Geneva canton, Daniel Devaux. Cantonal Prosecutor General Bernard Bertossa took the case under his personal custody.
Under Swiss law, neither giving nor receiving a bribe is a criminal offense. Borodin was suspected by Swiss justice of money laundering. According to investigators, payment for work on the reconstruction of the Kremlin was made according to a “double” system; part of the money was stolen by Kremlin officials from the Presidential Administration and transferred to Swiss banks. According to Devo, about 50 bank accounts were blocked in the names of Borodin, his wife, daughter, son-in-law, Borodin’s deputies Lyulkin, Savchenko, Kozelko, Golovaty and their children and household members.
Continuing the investigation into the cases of Borodin and Pacolli, the Swiss prosecutor's office took over the accounts of Mabetex's partner, the Mercata Trading company, headed by Borodin's son-in-law Andrei Siletsky and Chernomyrdin's former adviser Viktor Stolpovskikh. And here an interesting story emerged. In 1999, the company received a contract to reconstruct and equip an airliner for the President of the Russian Federation. $39 million was transferred from Borodin’s Kremlin “economy” to the company’s accounts. However, for some reason only 13 arrived.
Cooperation between the Russian prosecutor's office and their Swiss colleagues did not develop very effectively. Investigator Volkov, who was involved in the Mabetex and Mercata Trading cases on the Russian side, was retired last summer, and a few months later, in December, the Prosecutor General’s Office completely presented Borodin with a New Year’s gift, closing his case. The Swiss “connectors” were not going to close anything. And the open cynicism of the Russian prosecutor's office and the simply mocking argumentation it resorted to probably only annoyed Bertossa and his colleagues. Senior investigator of the Prosecutor General's Office Tamaev closed the case, citing, in particular, "the unsatisfactory quality of photocopies of bank documents presented by Swiss colleagues." The copiers in Geneva turned out to be so bad that Russian investigators could not understand anything in the copies printed on them. And on this basis the case was closed.
Borodin himself was not only lifted up by this turn of events, but downright stared. Then, in December 2000, he announced that he was suing his offenders, Bertossa and Deveau, accusing them of libel, bias, disclosure of judicial secrets and illegal methods of conducting economic intelligence.
On this wave of inspiration, he apparently decided to ride abroad, showing the whole world that his conscience was clear and he had nothing to fear. It is simply impossible to explain Borodin’s appearance at the New York airport with anything other than the loss of a sense of danger and self-preservation.
And now it will not be easy for him to get out of this mess, no matter how Russian officials insist that this is a misunderstanding that is about to be settled. Borodin will spend this week in a New York prison, and on January 25 the court will only begin to decide whether he can be released on bail.
His Moscow defenders cannot present any serious arguments in favor of Borodin’s release. They claim he received a formal invitation to Bush's inauguration, signed by Vincent Zenga, a member of the organizing committee. However, Zenga himself has already called the invitation sent to Borodin over his signature a “misunderstanding.” He had never seen Borodin in his life, and the signature on the invitation, as Zenga said, was electronic.
Borodin's defenders insist on his immediate release on the grounds that Borodin has a diplomatic passport and no one had the right to detain him. Professional lawyers confuse two different concepts: diplomatic passport and diplomatic immunity. Many people have the first one, but the second one, according to the Vienna Convention of 1961, is granted only to diplomatic representatives. And not all, but only those accredited in a given country. At one time, Pinochet slipped on this, who also thought that a diplomatic passport would protect him from possible troubles when traveling abroad, to the UK. Pavel Pavlovich Borodin, of course, is not a dictator or a murderer, but Western justice also has a lot of questions for him. Now we have to answer them.