Question: What unites the fourth child of the late President George Bush, the wife of former U.K Prime Minister Tony Blair and the youngest daughter of the late former Russian President Boris Yeltsin?
Answer: they’re all engaged in the international effort to secure the release of Marsha Lazareva, the Russian wealth manager serving ten years imprisonment with hard labour after being found guilty of embezzlement by a Kuwait court.
I wrote about this case here last year after interviewing Lazareva shortly before she was jailed.
In the post-Salisbury world of Novichok poisonings and strained Anglo-Russian relations, it seemed an interesting test case of whether the international community would stir to defend a wealthy Russian expatriate who had fallen foul of Middle East justice.
Legal Eagles
Fortunately, the $496m that Lazareva was accused of embezzling was located and distributed to its stakeholders, another $33m was found for bail before she was locked up and enough funds apparently remain to attract an international Who’s Who of famous lawyers campaigning for her freedom.
As well as Neil Bush, her legal advisers now include human rights specialist Cherie Blair, former FBI director Louis Freeh and the strategy consultancy of British peer Lord Carlile and Sir John Scarlett, a former head of British secret intelligence service MI6.
Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Yumasheva, stepmother to the former wife of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and a close friend of multi-billionaire, Roman Abramovich, has written pledging her support.
Lazareva is also receiving support from former U.S Congressman Ed Royce and Jim Nicholson, a former U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov has raised the case in Moscow and Kuwait.
Lazareva, 44, was vice-chairman and managing director of KGL Investment, managing The Port Fund, whose investors included the Kuwait Ports Authority and the Kuwait Public Institution for Social Security.
Over ten years, the fund doubled the value of its original $188m investment to $380m and was in the process of distributing the returns when its funds were frozen in a Dubai bank in 2017.
Those funds were finally released in February 2019, after a protracted and expensive legal battle, and The Port Fund’s creditors, investors and stakeholders have now received amounts due to them.
Release Refused
However, despite two subsequent hearings, a Kuwait court is continuing to refuse Lazareva’s release.
The next day in court is an appeal on April 21 - Easter Sunday - when her battery of lawyers will ask again for her freedom.
Washington DC law firm Crowell & Moring has filed an “application for interim measures” claiming that Kuwaiti officials have been holding Lazareva in violation of international law and requesting her immediate release pending resolution of ongoing arbitration proceedings.
Lawyers acting for Lazareva, a Russian citizen and former U.S. Green Card holder whose five-year-old son is an American citizen, claim the charges against her are part of a coordinated campaign by Kuwaiti government officials and others to damage her reputation as a successful business leader and diminish the value of her investments.
“Show Trial”
They say she was convicted in a show trial based on the testimony of a single witness who relied on forged documents and that the court issued its verdict without allowing her lawyers to present a defense.
Bush, Blair and Freeh have already visited Kuwait to formally request that Lazareva be released pending her appeal.
Bush believes Lazareva has been kept behind bars because “unscrupulous forces" in Kuwait wanted to freeze funds that were otherwise to be distributed to The Port Fund’s investors in that organization.
“There are a number of nefarious guesses for why that was happening,” he says.
“The money was frozen, and she was charged in Kuwait with embezzlement of those very same funds. So it was a clear fraud and faked-up charges."
Motivation
Bush admits that part of his motivation for assisting in the campaign is the role his late father played as Kuwait’s “liberator” in the 1991 Gulf War.
“I, as a member of this family, would hate to see a blemish on Kuwait's record,” he said.
“I'd hate to see U.S-Kuwaiti relations damaged by this incident. But there are forces within the government that are creating this horrible situation."
“They charged her with embezzlement of the very funds that they ordered to be frozen outside of Kuwait. So it's a ridiculous charge.”
Freeh, FBI director from 1993-2001, says: “Very regrettably, the continued prosecution of Ms. Lazareva has deteriorated from a criminal case where her due process has been repeatedly denied, to a serious human rights matter, highlighted by her imprisonment on charges where the relevant facts have been disproven, and key evidence used to convict her has proven to be forged.
“Due process and fundamental fairness demand that the Kuwaiti government grant Marsha's immediate, temporary release while her international arbitration plays out."
Lord Carlile adds: “It is astonishing that the Kuwait prosecutor has not withdrawn all cases against Ms Lazareva.
“The evidence against her has collapsed in tatters, but she remains in custody.”
In America, meanwhile, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi says: “This is a basic human rights issue regarding the release of a wrongly-accused single mother of a five year-old American child. I am very passionate about fighting for Marsha’s release.”
It remains to be seen whether these leading legal eagles can successfully navigate the powerful forces keeping Lazareva in custody.
However, they have already ensured that the world is watching and judging.
In the end, that may turn out to be even more powerful than the combined clout of some of the world’s leading political families.
