Not only is Russia one of the most quantifiably corrupt countries in the world, but several high-profile businesses have come out with scathing criticism of it in recent years. Swedish businessman Lennart Dahlgren wrote an entire book, Despite Absurdity: How I Conquered Russia While It Conquered Me, on his nightmarish experience running Moscow’s first IKEA. William Browder of Hermitage Capital Management has been an outspoken critic of the country ever since one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison after discovering a corruption scheme involving government officials.

So it was only natural that Browder showed up to burst Russia’s bubble at Davos. As the Moscow Times reports:

William Browder, who once had about $4 billion invested in Russia through his Hermitage fund, spoiled on Thursday a Russian show in Davos meant to woo investors.

Browder said he had to flee Russia after accusing officials of corruption and saw some of his firms being stolen from him by Interior Ministry officials.

One of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, died in jail in 2009 from what Browder says was torture.

The case has shaken investor confidence and drew criticism from Western organizations and governments. President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an investigation into the case and fired several officials, but Browder says the main culprits remain unpunished.

“The president of the country called for an investigation into the people who killed my lawyer,” Browder told a panel chaired by First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and a hall packed with Western executives.

“One year after the investigation, people who killed the lawyer have been promoted higher by state orders. … My question to you, Igor, is what will prevent other investors to have the same experience after my experience in Russia,” he said at the discussion, titled “Russia’s Next Steps to Modernization.”

Shuvalov took more than five minutes to answer Browder’s questions, but his remarks seemed addressed more to the audience than to Browder himself.

“We know this case very well. … Twenty people were fired immediately. … It was not a case which was forgotten the next day,” he said in English.

“Unfortunately, I don’t know the results of the investigation and the end of the case. … The past is always very important, although not always positive, but we need to concentrate on the future,” he added.

“You have to acknowledge the country is changing for the better. If every year we can say that the rule of law is becoming better — not perfect but better — then I think I’m doing my job,” he added. “We need to work together.”

It was just as natural that officials would feel the need to justify the new guilty verdict of Russia’s most famous businessman, former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

President Dmitry Medvedev has compared jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky to the mastermind of the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history in an apparent attempt to present the Yukos case as triumph of justice and highlight the ruling tandem’s unity.

“An investor, Russian or foreign, should observe the law, otherwise they can get a jail term like it happened with Khodorkovsky and Madoff,” Medvedev told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for organizing a Ponzi scheme worth $18 billion. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin also compared him to Khodorkovsky during a televised call-in show in mid-December, shortly before a Moscow court added six years to Khodorkovsky’s previous sentence at a second trial.

Medvedev also said Wednesday that he did not wish to weigh in on the Khodorkovsky case because it would be an “interference with justice.”

He said he would not grant Khodorkovsky a presidential pardon — as supporters have sought — because it would mean that the Russian judicial system was so flawed that “you could ask the president to change the verdict.”

Given the wealth of worldwide criticism that Russia has received because of the Khodorkovsky verdict, it is doubtful that the president’s words will assuage any concerned businesses.

William Browder, CEO of the investment advisory firm Hermitage Capital Management where Magnitsky had worked, said at the hearing that the lawyer’s persecution and death came as a direct result of his testimony against corrupt officials in the Russian Internal Ministry and other federal agencies. While detained, the CEO told the commission, Magnitsky was asked to alter his statements that officials had appropriated $230 million from the Russian government, and was tortured when he refused.

Browder asked the rights commission to support an effort by US Senator Benjamin Cardin to ban 60 Russian civil servants connected with Magnitsky’s death from obtaining visas to visit the United States. As Cardin put it, the officials “remain unpunished and in a position of power,” and said that the State Department reserves the right to deny a visa to anyone “engaging in, or benefiting from, corruption.”

Browder also asked that the United States Treasury freeze all assets kept in American banks by the civil servants in question, and asked that the United States work with other countries to do the same.

While many of the civil servants included in Cardin’s list are high-ranking officials, their names are largely unfamiliar to the Russian public. Among the most notable is Aleksei Anichin, head of the Internal Ministry’s Investigative Committee, as well as Moscow City Police Lieutenant Colonel Artem Kuzhetsov, who oversaw Magnitsky’s case.

In response, committee chair and US Representative Jim McGovern promised that he would introduce legislation that would not only ban the 60 officials from obtaining visas, but would also prohibit them from making US investments.

“One of the things that I would like to do is we’ll not only send a letter to Hilary Clinton, but I think we should introduce legislation and put those 60 people’s names down there and move it through the committee and make a formal recommendation from Congress, pass it on the floor, and say to the administration, ‘This is a consequence. You have to do this. Because if you don’t, nothing’s going to happen,'” said the congressman.

McGovern said that banning visas is the very least the United States should do in response to “serious human rights violations.” “People who commit murder,” he said, “and I think that’s what happened in that case, should not have the right to travel here and invest in business here and make money here and there should be a consequence. If we can’t get the consequence to happen in Russia, well then maybe there’s something we can do here [and] maybe other nations can do the same thing.”

Washington’s discussion of Magnitsky’s case has coincidentally coincided with the death of Russian businesswoman Vera Trifonova in a pretrial detention facility on April 30. Trifonova, who was detained in December on charges of fraud, was reportedly denied medical attention after refusing to plead guilty to investigators. Her lawyer contents that she was “purposefully destroyed” per request of a business partner who owed her a large sum of money. Since Trifonova died in the same facility as Magnitsky – Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina – her case is widely being seen as a repeat offense on the part of the penitentiary service.