The Dossier Center and The Daily Beast have new data showing that lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya was whitewashing her client, who is suspected of laundering billions from the Russian budget.
We are talking about the stolen 5.4 billion rubles from the Russian treasury. Last summer, the Swiss prosecutor’s office closed the investigation into this case.
The scheme for laundering Russian funds through Swiss banks was revealed by lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center. During the investigation of this story, it turned out that the company Prevezon Holding LTD Denis Katsyv, the son of the former vice-president of Russian Railways, the Minister of Transport of the Moscow Region, Petr Katsyv, was involved in fraud. The firm’s Swiss accounts were frozen. By tradition, lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya volunteered to defend Katsyv.
On August 24, 2015, Lieutenant Colonel of Justice Artem Ranchenkov ordered an economic audit to find out the source of the funds that were transferred to the Swiss account of Katsyv’s company Prevezon Holding LTD. Eduard Shakirov was in charge of the examination. The analyst was unable to establish the source of the transferred funds, due to their depersonalization on the current account. This is an amount of 447,353.82 US dollars, which was 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 text of the document says that the data of the file indicate that a certain Natalia Mitusova was involved in the creation and editing of it. 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”. At the beginning of 2020, Mitusova, like her stepmother Natalya Veselnitskaya, left the founders of the law firm. Veselnitskaya and Mitusova, in addition to family ties, were united by the MOKA structure Veselnitskaya, Mitusova and Partners, which ceased operations in 2011.
The document from the experts was received by the Swiss police two months after Mitusova edited it. Law enforcement officers did not arouse suspicions that the document contains elements of grammatical identity with Mitusova’s version. Meanwhile, for the Swiss security officials, this examination gave serious grounds for terminating the investigation and returning 99% of the frozen funds to Denis Katsyv.
The Swiss Themis should soon decide whether to return the case to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation.