Arrest of US Lawyer Related to “Berezovsky’s Case?”

An arrest of a well-known US lawyer, a specialist on money laundering and organized crime Emanuel Zeltser, could be related to Berezovsky’s case”, believes a US citizen, a court interpreter Valery Schukin, whose client was Zeltser.

“I know Zeltser long ago, and I know from the words of Zeltser himself that he was closely connected to Boris Berezovsky. His arrest cou;d be related to that,” Schukin said in an interview to RIA Novosti.

Emanuel Zeltser was detained on March 12 in Minsk by the KGB (State Security Committee) of Belarus together with his secretary, a Russian citizen Vladlena Funk (Bluzkova). He hasn’t been presented charges yet; however some mass media report that he was detained on request of Russian law-enforcing agencies.

At the moment Berezovsky lives in the Great Britain. He had been granted a status of a political refugee there. Russian authorities many times sent requests for his extradition, as several criminal actions had been brought up against him in Russia, but haven’t received positive reply still. A trial in absentia in Moscow accused Berezovsky of embezzling money from the Russian airline carrier Aeroflot in the 1990s. He was sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment.

As informed by BelaPAN agency with a reference to Oxana Adler, a board member of the American Russian Law Institute who is a colleague of the lawyer, Zeltser, the director of the Institute, was grabbed when he was exiting a plane from London.

Emanual Zeltser had flown from London to Minsk, possibly to visit a Russian client with business in Minsk.

Officials from the US embassy in Minsk confirmed uniformed police grabbed Zeltser as soon as he stepped off a London-Minsk flight, but declined to provide further details, citing a need to protect Zeltser's privacy.

Schukin believes that another reason for arrest could be once high-profile case of Inkombank. In 1995, Zeltser sued Inkombank, once Russia's second-largest bank, in a U.S. federal court, accusing it of misappropriating funds from depositors in collaboration with the Bank of New York. He previously worked for the bank, but claimed he was dismissed from his post after initiating an investigation into evidence of theft and fraud. Inkombank collapsed in 1998 amid Russia's financial crisis.

Schukin said that a very experienced federal judge was confused studying details of financial affairs of this bank after 5 days of hearings.

In 1999 Zeltser was Schukin’s client when he testified before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services regarding the estimated $10 billion money-laundering scheme at the Bank of New York. He also sued the bank for $2 billion on behalf of depositors who had lost money in an affiliate.

Mr. Zeltser emigrated from the Soviet Union in the mid 1970s. He is an expert in regulations governing money laundering and organized crimes in Russia and the former Soviet states.