Sobeys Pulls Sponsorship for Wellness Expo Featuring Father Convicted in Son's Meningitis Death

David Stephan was found guilty of failing to provide the necessaries of life to his toddler son, Ezekiel, who died in 2012. (Canadian Press/Facebook)

By Ashleigh Mattern, CBC News 

The owner of Health and Wellness Expos of Canada is defending his decision to invite David Stephan to speak at events in Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton.

Sobeys has withdrawn its sponsorship of the events after drawing criticism online over Stephan's participation.

Stephan and his wife Collet were convicted in 2016 of failing to provide the necessaries of life to their son Ezekiel, who died in 2012. The Stephans attempted to treat their 19-month-old son with natural remedies when he fell ill with meningitis.

David Stephan was sentenced to four months in jail, while Collet Stephan was given three months of house arrest, with each also ordered to complete 240 hours of community service. The conviction was appealed and has made it to the Supreme Court of Canada docket, where arguments are expected to be heard in May.

Cynthia Thompson, a spokesperson for Sobeys Inc., confirmed with CBC the sponsorship has been withdrawn. Thompson says Sobeys Inc. was not aware Stephan was a keynote speaker when the company decided to sponsor the event.   

"Supporting the well-being of Canadians is essential to our purpose as a company and we entered this sponsorship with the best intention of advancing our focus on eating well, but we can't support the choice that Health and Wellness Expos of Canada has made on the selection of David Stephan as keynote speaker," she said.

Thompson also said Sobeys Inc. will be taking a closer look at events they sponsor in the future. "All I can say on the front of making the decision is that we're conducting a review of our process and governance on these types of sponsorships," she said.

"This really should not have happened," Thompson added.

Russian Ex-Governor Belykh Convicted of Large-Scale Bribery

Corruption is Everywhere - Certainly in Russia

A court in Moscow has convicted Nikita Belykh, a former governor of Russia’s Kirov Region, of large-scale bribery over a 2016 incident, in which he was detained while accepting €400,000 in cash from businessmen.

The ruling on Belykh’s conviction was announced in Presnensky District Court on Thursday afternoon. The sentence is expected to be pronounced later in the day, with prosecutors demanding 10 years in prison and a 100 million ruble fine ($1.75 million) for the ex-official.

The case against Belykh began in June 2016, after the then-governor was detained in the process of receiving a €400,000 ($500,000) cash bribe in a Moscow restaurant. Investigators suspected the bribe was intended as payment for including two local companies – a ski factory and a forest-management firm – in a federal investment program as priority projects. During the investigation, more instances of bribery were uncovered, bringing the total amount of received funds to €600,000 ($745,000).

Shortly after the incident, Belykh was relieved of his duties as a governor due to lack of trust.

During the investigation, the former official insisted that the money he received was not a bribe, but a contribution towards a charity project. In his final plea on January 26, he again said he was not guilty of the charges and added that some unnamed forces were interested in creating and maintaining “the myth that all civil servants are corrupt.”

Belykh had previously been involved in at least one other corruption scandal - the so-called ‘Kirovles case,’ in which the now-famous anti-corruption activist, Aleksey Navalny, received a five-year suspended sentence after a court found him and two local businessmen guilty of embezzling funds from a state-run timber company.

Navalny worked as an aide to Governor Belykh at the time of the crime, and the timber firm would later become part of the forest-management company mentioned in Belykh’s bribery charges.

Navalny, if you don't know, is a political activist and has tried to run for President of Russia on an anti-corruption platform. He has accused Vladimir Putin and PM Dmitry Medvedev of massive corruption. He has been refused permission to run in the up-coming Presidential election because of his corruption conviction. Russians are nothing if not ironic.

Corruption is not an impediment to holding high office in Russia, getting caught is the impediment. And it doesn't matter whether you have actually committed bribery or not, you can still be caught if it is expedient for the current oligarchs to ensure the continuance of their reign of corruption.

It's almost funny that the only people being convicted of corruption in Russia are people who are, or are associated with, those who are a threat to the current, corrupt regime.

Moscow Court Sentences US-Born Investor Browder to 9 Years for Massive Tax Fraud

There is no way of knowing if these charges are real or (pardon the pun) trumped-up. Putin has a hatred on for Browder after Putin's oligarchs stole Browder's businesses in Russia, murdered his tax accountant, Sergey Magnitsky, and, for some reason, Browder complained loud and long. Browder also was instrumental in getting the Magnitsky act passed in the US which sanctioned several officials in Moscow deemed responsible for Magnitsky's death. Courts are very political in Russia.

This report comes from RT

A court in Moscow has sentenced US-born financier William Browder in absentia to nine years in a penal colony, after convicting him of a $79 million tax fraud.

Browder, who is now a UK citizen, is known as the main lobbyist behind the anti-Russian ‘Magnitsky Act’ sanctions.

The court also ordered Browder to pay a fine of 200,000 rubles (US$3,400). His business partner, Ivan Cherkasov, was also sentenced in absentia to nine years behind bars and handed a 200,000-ruble fine in the same case.

In addition, the judge ruled that the pair must compensate the Russian state to the amount of 4.6 billion rubles ($79 million).

Russian investigators have established that between 1995 and 2007 Browder and Cherkasov, alongside unidentified others, planned and executed a tax evasion scheme in which they registered several joint stock companies in Russia with Cyprus-registered shareholders and started transferring profits abroad, disguising them as dividends.

The scheme allowed the pair to illegally decrease income tax from 15 percent to 10 percent, or even as low as 5 percent, resulting in estimated damages to the Russian budget of about 3.4 billion rubles (more than $50 million).

In addition, Browder, Cherkasov and their unidentified accomplices were convicted of committing bankruptcy fraud in which they cheated the state of a further 1.2 billion rubles (over $20 million).  

Defense attorneys representing Browder and Cherkasov said on Friday that they planned to appeal the sentence, alleging that the judges “did not listen to and did not hear their arguments.”

Browder is a founder of the Hermitage Capital investment firm, which made billions in profits on Russian securities in the late 1990s – early 2000s. At the end of that period, Russian authorities took a closer look at the investor’s activities, which resulted in a criminal case and the arrest of Browder’s legal adviser, Sergey Magnitsky.

Magnitsky died in pre-trial custody in 2009, after which Browder started a massive PR campaign alleging that the late lawyer had been attempting to reveal financial crimes committed by Russian officials, and had died as a result of this.

That did not stop the Russian authorities from handing Browder a nine-year sentence in absentia in 2013, after finding him guilty of evading $16 million in tax and illegal operations with shares of the Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom which cost Russia another $100 million.

In the US, the scandal took a completely different turn, and in December 2012 the US Senate passed the so-called Magnitsky Act – the regulation that imposes sanctions on Russian individuals and companies over alleged violations of human rights. The adoption of the Magnitsky Act led to reciprocal sanctions by Russia and contributed to a major cooling in Russia-US relations that continues to this day.

Russian Activist Navalny Guilty of Embezzlement in Retrial

Eliminated as threat to Putin's presidency

Navalny said the verdict was copied word-for-word from his previous conviction

By Ed Adamczyk  

A Russian court convicted Alexai Navalny, anti-corruption activist and possible contender for the Russian presidency in 2018, Wednesday in a retrial of an embezzlement case, making him ineligible for the election. File Photo by Yuri Gripas/UPI | License Photo

Feb. 8 (UPI) -- A Russian court found opposition leader Alexei Navalny guilty Wednesday in a retrial of his embezzlement case, barring a 2018 presidential run.

The court in Kirov, Russia, retried Navalny after the European Court of human rights found procedural violations in an earlier trial. Navalny and colleague, Pyotr Ofitserov, were convicted in 2013 of embezzlement involving funds of the Kirovles timber company. Some saw the trial as a means of silencing Navalny, an anti-corruption activist believed to be interested in running against Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 2018 election, The Guardian reported.

As the judge read the guilty verdict Wednesday, Navany's associates released pages of the verdict on social media, implying the verdict was copied word-for-word from the earlier conviction. During a break in proceedings Wednesday, Navalny said, "The judge will return and read the same thing [as in 2013], which says a lot about this trial."

As the verdict was read, Navalny's lawyer, Olga Mikhailova, said the conviction would prevent Navalny from running against Putin.

Although his first conviction barred Navalny from running for public office, he was allowed to run as candidate for the mayoralty of Moscow in 2013. He received 30 percent of the vote but lost to a Putin-backed candidate.

Prosecutors will ask for suspended sentences for Navalny and Ofitserov, the Russian news agency Tass reported.

After all, they got what they wanted - Navalny eliminated as a threat to Putin and corruption in general.

It's a pity such a great country cannot rise above apparent criminal activity in government, business and the judiciary.

Blade-Runner Sentenced to Six Years

SAfrica - Pistorius jailed for six years

for murdering girlfriend

AFP


SAfrica - Pistorius jailed for six years for murdering girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp  (AFP Photo/MARCO LONGARI)

- South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius was sentenced to six years in jail for murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at his home three years ago. High Court judge Thokozile Masipa listed several mitigating factors for sentencing him to less than half the minimum 15-year term for murder, including the athlete's claim he believed he was shooting an intruder. "The sentence that I impose on the accused... is six years imprisonment," she said.

It seems Judge Masipa sentenced Pistorius for culpable homicide, even though his conviction was upgraded to murder.

Pistorius, 29, hugged his family before being taken out of the court in Pretoria to begin serving his term. The double-amputee Olympic and Paralympic sprinter was freed from prison last October after serving one year of a five-year term for culpable homicide -- the equivalent of manslaughter. But an appeals court upgraded his conviction to murder in December. Pistorius shot Steenkamp, a model, in the early hours of Valentine's Day in 2013, saying he mistook her for a burglar.


Reeva Steenkamp