A new complaint filed with the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control alleges that California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and his staff director, Paul Behrends, violated the Magnitsky Act when they tried to get Russia's deputy general prosecutor, Victor Grin, removed from the US sanctions list last year.
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A pro-Putin California congressman has been accused of violating US sanctions on Russia
A new complaint filed with the Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control alleges that California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and his staff director, Paul Behrends, violated the Magnitsky Act.
U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca) gestures as his U.S. Congressional delegation arrives to meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Prime Minister's official residence in Tokyo September 2, 2013.
The complaint was filed by US financier Bill Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, who spearheaded the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to punish Russian officials suspected of being involved in the death of his account, Sergey Magnitsky.
Magnitsky
met with officials from the pApril 2016. The report said he accepted a "confidential" document that Rohrabacher then used to try to undermine the Magnitsky Act on Capitol Hill.
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made personal introductions for lobbyists advocating the Russian government's and Grin's position against the Magnitsky Act." Those people, according to the complaint, include Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin — both of whom attended a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower last June to discuss a possible repeal of the Magnitsky Act.
"These actions constitute services provided to a SDN [specially designated national] by US persons in apparent violation of the Magnitsky Act sanctions which expressly forbid US persons to provide such services," the complaint says of Rohrabacher's activities last summer.
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