By: Irina Bitkova, Colaborador
Reference: Business Insider
I had not understood evil until I saw what could happen to my family at the hands of criminal elements of the Russian state.
Until 2007, my husband Igor and I had a happy and successful life in Russia. We had established the North West Timber Company, a flourishing pulp and paper business that employed 3,500 people and was investing for the future. We had won numerous awards for turning around loss-making factories and modernizing their industrial processes. We worked with some of the world’s leading companies to import the best technologies and practices.
We also refused to make “donations” to organisations affiliated with people in the Kremlin. In retrospect, our thinking was naïve. We thought we could safely make Russia a better country by developing honest business and not participating in corrupt schemes. We quickly discovered that our “disloyalty” was punishable. In June 2007, a criminal group with FSB connections kidnapped our 16-year old daughter for three days.
They injected her with drugs, and abused her sexually and psychologically. She returned to us after payment of a ransom.
Chillingly, we were told that this was not a question of money. It was a demonstration of what our enemies in power could do to our family. The kidnapping and abuse of our daughter had a profound impact on her. She is a radically changed person today.
Our business was next to suffer. The regulatory authorities suddenly began an endless round of environmental, sanitary and other inspections designed to destabilize our company. Then came the hammer blow.
Three state banks that had made us loans of hundreds of millions of dollars over 15 years demanded their return within 48 hours. We could do nothing but hand over the business to the banks. Our contacts at the Interior Ministry told us that we should leave the country immediately because criminal charges would be shortly filed against us.
The people who had stolen our business were now accusing us of having misappropriated the credits from the banks despite the fact that we had never defaulted on repayments and our books were in perfect order. We hastily left Russia, abandoning everything we owned.
We lived in Europe for several months until Igor received a phone call from a high-ranking individual in Russia who told us that our problems could be sorted out if we paid 10 million euros and returned to Russia. Igor replied that we did not have that kind of money and could not go back to Russia because it was unsafe.
Then came the warning: you cannot escape. We will hunt you down wherever you go and you will pay the price. At this point, we decided that we had no choice but to change our identities and start a new life far away from Russia. Together with our daughter, Anastasia, we obtained Guatemalan citizenship through official channels, learned Spanish and started to re-build our lives.
New happiness arrived with the birth of a son, Vladimir, in 2012. Anastasia was recovering well from her psychiatric problems. Little did we know that VTB, one of the banks that had taken part in the artificial bankruptcy of our company, had tracked us down to Guatemala and tipped off the Guatemalan authorities. On January 15 this year, police swooped on our house and arrested Igor, Anastasia and me, and charged us with offenses related to possession of illegally issued passports and identity documents. We were stunned. As far as we knew, we had obtained our documents legally.
It turned out that the law firm we had hired to provide a legal route to Guatemalan citizenship had been part of a scheme that involved corrupt officials issuing passports to thousands of foreigners. Our treatment by the Guatemalan authorities suggested we were serious criminals worthy of the harshest treatment. Anastasia and I spent five days in sub-human conditions in a holding pen in a parking lot beneath a courthouse.
There was no furniture and no running water. Our jailers provided neither food nor water. Anastasia was denied her medication, which triggered a psychiatric crisis and her transfer with me under armed guard to a hospital. Igor spent seven days in similar conditions before his transfer to a prison. Vladimir, barely three years old, went to live with his two legal guardians, one his nanny of the last three years, the other a close family friend. But not for long. In an act of extraordinary cruelty, a Judge, Maria Belen Reyna Salazar, ruled that for his “security”, he should be removed to an orphanage with no contact with his parents or guardians. He stayed there for 42 days before another judge overruled the earlier decision.
He returned to his guardians a frightened and psychologically scarred little boy suffering from conjunctivitis and carrying parasites. Russia now applied for our extradition and criminal charges were filed against me in Kaliningrad. At the same time, the Russian Foreign Ministry, led by President Putin’s representative for Children’s Rights, Pavel Astakhov, was making statements to the media about the possibility of transferring our son, a Guatemalan citizen, to Russia.
Astakhov and the Russian Embassy in Guatemala have been working hand in hand to create the impression that Russia has a responsibility and right to intervene to secure the safety of our child. The Guatemalan authorities are now preparing to put our son back into the orphanage, alleging that he is not in fact our son — this despite DNA tests and hospital records that prove conclusively that we are his parents. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that certain individuals inside the Russian system are determined to take revenge on Igor and me, and to do so they are prepared to target our children.
The Guatemalan authorities have charged us with a number of offenses related to possession of illegally issued documents and we are awaiting trial. Without a legal basis, VTB has muscled its way into the legal proceedings, arguing that it is has suffered losses caused by us. We will do everything possible to keep our family together. Over the past eight years, we have learned some very harsh lessons about how criminal interests can instrumentalize the Russian state and extend their pernicious influence far beyond its borders.
We hope that our story can help expose these evil practices that are a danger to many other individuals and their families as well as to the rule of law in other countries.
Irina Bitkova is a Russian businesswoman in pre-trial detention in Guatemala City