Representatives of Hermitage Capital expressed outrage at how Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has overseen the handling of the cases related to Magnitsky’s untimely death in a Moscow detention facility. Magnitsky himself had complained that Chaika’s actions violated his constitutional rights, says the press release.

Over the course of three and a half years, says Hermitage Capital, the Prosecutor General’s office and Yury Chaika personally actively impeded the investigation into unlawful actions by civil servants in Magnitsky’s case. Now they are trying unconvincingly to mask their criminal negligence, as well as, possibly, notorious actions that lead to the theft of more than 11 billion rubles ($393 million USD) from the treasury and the death of Magnitsky, who uncovered these crimes, say his colleagues.

“It is bewildering that the supervision of the investigation of Magnitsky’s case has been charged to the person bearing direct responsibility for the criminal inactivity and lack of supervision and proper reaction to Sergei Magnitsky’s numerous appeals about violations of his rights…a person whose actions themselves ought to be checked out first of all,” says Hermitage Capital.

On May 31, Yury Chaika received an order from President Medvedev “to intensify control over the course of investigation of the criminal cases connected with lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.”

Sergei Magnitsky was arrested in November 2008 after uncovering a tax fraud scheme that allegedly involved members of the Russian government, judiciary, mafia, and others. He spent 11 months in a pretrial detention facility on trumped-up charges of tax evasion. On November 16, 2009, Magnitsky died of apparent heart failure. His colleagues say the lawyer was denied medical treatment and that his death was directly brought about by the actions of Russian law enforcement officials.

Just past midnight on Saturday, Oleg Kashin was beaten by unknown assailants on a street close to his rented apartment. The attackers left the journalist with two broken shins, fractures on the upper and lower jaws, skull lesions, and broken fingers. However, they did not take Kashin’s money, tablet computer, or cell phone.

According to a janitor who witnessed the incident, Kashin was beaten by two people “not with their fists, but with some kind of object.”

The journalist is currently in an artificial coma and hooked up to an artificial lung in a Moscow hospital, where doctors fear that he may develop pneumonia. An operation on the victim’s skull revealed that his brain was undamaged. As of Saturday night, doctors said his condition was “extremely critical.”

Editors at Kommersant say the attack was most definitely connected to the journalist’s professional work.

“It is totally obvious that this was a planned action, naturally, connected with Oleg’s professional work,” said Editor-in-Chief Mikhail Mikhailin. “They broke his fingers, legs; they wanted to cripple him. This wasn’t some kind of hold-up.” Mikhailin said he plans to “put the maximum amount of pressure on the investigation in order for it to be solved.”

Kashin’s recent articles have focused on a number of controversial topics, including political youth movements, the Khimki Forest, and high-ranking government officials.

Moscow city police filed a criminal suit early on Saturday for attempted murder, after reviewing security camera footage and interviewing witnesses of the attack. Later that morning, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered that the investigation be transferred to the direct control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.

“There has also been an order to take all measures to solve this crime,” reads a Kremlin press release.

A statement posted late Saturday on Kommersant’s website decried the fact that the murders of so many journalists in Russia often go unsolved:

The attack on Oleg Kashin is outrageous, but far from the only manifestation of the growing violence in the civil and political life of the country. Unfortunately, we only see the victims: the attackers go uncaught, and the ones who ordered it – unknown. The impunity stimulates further violence.

If the investigation of Oleg Kashin’s monstrous beating, despite the demands of Russian Federation President Dmitri Medvedev and the personal control of Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, ends in nothing, as has already happened with murder and beating investigations of other journalists in past years, it will effectively legalize the use of force.

Activists working to prevent the destruction of the Khimki Forest say that the attack on Kashin could be connected with another beating that occurred just a day earlier, when unknown assailants attacked environmental activist Konstantin Fetisov with a baseball bat late on Thursday night.

“My personal opinion is that Kashin suffered because of his journalistic work,” Khimki Forest activist Yaroslav Nikitenko told Gazeta.ru. “In our country, attacks don’t just happen. If I’m not mistaken, Kashin was the first correspondent to write a large article about the Khimki Forest in the newspaper Kommersant.”

Russia is widely considered one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work in the world. The press watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranks Russia as 140th out of 178 countries on its 2010 Press Freedom Index, and has called Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin a “predator of press freedom.” The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Russia as the 4th deadliest country for journalists in the world, with 52 killings with confirmed motives since 1992.

According to Chaika, all seven of Russia’s state-owned corporations were found to “fail to comply with their statutory functions” or to “engage in activities not envisaged” in their founding.

Particularly problematic was the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies (Rusnano), which spent only ten of the 130 billion rubles allocated to the company in November 2007. Most of the funds had instead “been placed in bank accounts as idle money.”

Konstantin Chuychenko, head of the Presidential Control Directorate, said in the same meeting that the government should be required to submit proposals that would consider privatizing the corporations. “Where there is no competition,” he said, “the Cabinet should set a lifetime for the corporations…determined by the particular purpose of each.”

Chuychenko went on to say that the government should appoint state representatives to the supervisory boards of these corporations because of a current lack of transparency. He also proposed making them accountable to the Audit Chamber and other supervisory bodies by March 2010.

President Medvedev’s call for an audit in August was preceded by widespread criticism of state corporations earlier this past summer. A leaked report by the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service called state corporations a main threat to economic competition, and representatives of the Audit Chamber and Anti-Monopoly service were among politicians calling for their elimination altogether.

Government control over Russian business increased dramatically under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The current seven state corporations – the bank Vnesheconombank, the industrial firm Rostekhnologii, the Deposit Insurance Agency, Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation, the Sochi 2014 Olympic management firm Olympstroy, the Housing and Utilities Reform Fund, and the Rusnano nanotechnology firm – were created to perform specific state functions, and a separate set of regulations allows them to function under significantly less transparency and supervision than their public counterparts. As a result, they have been repeatedly criticized as prone to corruption and harmful to competition.

“Every year, as result of overt flaws in the work of investigative authorities, the amount of persons unlawfully put on trial numbers in the thousands,” he said, speaking before an meeting of high-ranking legal and security officials. Thus, 5265 people were fully exonerated of charges wrongly filed against them in 2007.

“It’s self-evident that the reason for this lies in negligent investigation of criminal cases, instituted without sufficient grounds, while charges are often based only on testimonies of witnesses,” Chaika continued.

As the Prosecutor General explained, illegal prosecutions are costing the country millions of rubles. In 2007, in just 32 regions, some 94 million rubles ($4.08 or €2.59 million) were paid from the federal budget to claimants seeking compensation from the government for unlawful imprisonment and prosecution. “If we take Russia as a whole, the figure will be higher by an order,” Chaika said. Additionally, the European Court of Human Rights deemed that 4.3 million euros must be paid back in Russia for similar compensation lawsuits in 2007.

To combat the problem, Chaika said that prosecutors and investigators “must be held responsible” for unprofessional behavior and mistakes. He also explained that the authorities responsible for false prosecutions must be made to apologize.

“Violations in this sphere may entail the greatest harm to a man’s destiny,” he noted.