OREANDA-NEWS. In Belgium, two Russian citizens — Sergey Medvedev and Irina Terkina — have been charged with money laundering, the «EUobserver» newspaper reported on Monday, May 31. According to media, the charges were filed last year. As the representative of the Hermitage Capital Management fund told the publication, the court also confiscated from the accused 400 thousand euros received in 2019 from the sale of an apartment in the center of Antwerp. It was purchased in 2008.

The fund suggests that this money could be part of the amount of 4 million euros, which was stolen from it and laundered in banks in Belgium by «henchmen of Russian officials and mafiosi», «EUobserver» points out. In addition, according to media, at the end of May, an apartment worth 230 thousand euros, purchased by a Russian citizen, was confiscated in the capital of Latvia, Riga. This was also due to the suspicion that the money was stolen from Hermitage Capital Management.

From 1995 to 2006, Hermitage Capital Management, founded and headed by British businessman William Browder, was one of the largest foreign investment funds on the Russian stock market. In 2007, the prosecutor's office suspected it's subsidiaries of tax evasion, but the case did not go to court. After the searches in the company, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky accused officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor's Office of using the materials they received to steal more than $230 million from the state.

After that, the prosecutor's office accused Magnitsky himself of tax evasion. He was arrested and a year later, in November 2009, he died in a pre-trial detention center in Moscow at the age of 37. In 2012, the United States adopted the «Magnitsky Act», which first applied to those involved in the death of a lawyer in a pre-trial detention center, and then to other persons responsible for gross violations of human rights.