Many readers have been following the legal saga of William Browder, Hermitage, and HSBC against Renaissance Capital and certain members of the Russian government alleging a $230 million fraud scheme.  Now we’ve got our hands on a public filing from the case.  As far as I am aware, this blog is the first to track down this declaration by the lawyer Neil Micklethwaite filed in the Southern District Court of New York supporting a foreign discovery claim on behalf of the plaintiffs.  This is a public legal filing containing allegations which have not yet been ruled on in a court of law, which of course bear no relationship whatsoever to this blog or its authors.  Click here to download the document, while below I are some excerpts.

From the Neil Micklethwaite filing:

7.  The criminal conspiracy unfolded in multiple steps. The first overt act in the conspiracy was the seizure of corporate records from Hermitage’s Moscow office and the office of Hermitage’s local law firm. The seizure occurred in June 2007 during a raid by officers of the Russian Interior Ministry. It appears likely that thereafter, during the latter part of 2007, the seized original records were used to fraudulently re-register three of the Hermitage Fund’s Russian investment companies (together, the “Hermitage Companies”) from HSBC, as the Fund’s trustee, to members of the Criminal Enterprise. Subsequently, three members of the Criminal Enterprise – each with previous criminal convictions – fraudulently replaced HSBC executives as the directors of the Hermitage Companies.

8.  The Criminal Enterprise then forged contracts, dating from 2005, in order to create approximately U.S. $1 billion worth of fictitious financial liabilities against the stolen Hermitage Companies. These documents would have been impossible to prepare without access to the corporate records and financial documentation seized from Hermitage and its lawyers during the June 2007 raids by the Russian Interior Ministry. These liabilities were subsequently officially recognized by Russian courts in a number of judgments handed down between July 2007 and December 2007.