An eye-opener …
Interview: Bill Browder Comments on Mikhail Khodorkovsky
As part of the Decade of Injustice interview series marking the upcoming 10th anniversary of the arrest of Russian “political prisoner” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, businessmen Bill Browder speaks about the landmark legislation of the Magnitsky Act, his changing views on the meaning of the Khodorkovsky case, and the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia. For more information about the case, please visit Khodorkovsky.com and DecadeOfInjustice.com.
Also visit or read about the anti-Putin establishment of The Interpreter.
So the West is now on a war footing with Russia to break-up the European economic alliance with Russia..
Continued below the fold …
Russia’s unorthodox exile | The Guardian – March 2006 |
On this occasion, after a 45-minute wait, he became so desperate that he summoned his Russian driver, who was getting agitated waiting outside, to ask the staff the problem. A row developed. Then the officials told Browder his visa had been revoked. He should get straight back on the plane that took him, and head back to Heathrow.
Browder did so, but then embarked on a campaign to regain his visa that has put his name in front of many leading politicians. He is the largest foreign investor in Russian equities, running a hedge fund called Hermitage Capital Management that runs $4bn worth of business. Browder, a naturalised Briton who was born in America, has long pioneered the Russian markets, riding the rollercoaster of Russian markets over the past 10 years.
His background is remarkable – and completely at odds with his present desire to make money. For Browder’s grandfather was the leader of the American Communist Party and stood for election to the Presidency of the United States against Theodore Roosevelt. He was later imprisoned in the McCarthyite period. Browder says he came to Russia in 1995 to regain his roots. He has ended up among its highest profile investors.
Now this fund manager is at the centre of what sources close to Hermitage say is a diplomatic incident between Russia and Britain. ‘How can the British government expect its businessmen to visit and do more business with Russia, when the Russian government treats foreign businessmen like this?’ one says.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, are said to be lobbying their Russian counterparts to get to the bottom of the visa issue. ‘The British government takes this extremely seriously,’ says Browder. US politicians in the departments of State and Treasury are also lobbying on his behalf.
And Browder’s lobbyists in Russia are banging at Vladimir Putin’s door. They expect a fair hearing, as Browder has long espoused Putin’s cause, arguing that the two men share the desire to root out administrative and corporate abuse. They also share a dislike for the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
‘Khodorkovsky was doing an enormous amount of asset stripping and transfer pricing,’ says Browder. ‘We found him to be our toughest opponent. That is one of the reasons I am so sympathetic with President Putin. Khodorkovsky had pretended he had reformed, but in fact was trying to do the same kinds of dirty tricks politically that he was doing in business.’
A Hedge Fund Manager’s Crusade against Putin | Der Spiegel – 2012 |
An Issue at the Highest Level
In his previous life, Browder headed one of the most powerful foreign hedge funds in Putin’s realm. In its heyday, Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, managed investments worth $4 billion (€3.3 billion), mostly in the lucrative energy sector, for clients such as American investment bank Goldman Sachs and wealthy private individuals.
But since then, Browder has shut down his operations in Russia and brought his employees from Moscow to London. From his unadorned office in London’s Soho district, he now wages his campaign against the same country whose predatory model of capitalism made him a multimillionaire in the first place — and has proven just as successful in his new pursuit as he was as a businessman in Russia. The Browder case has become an issue at the highest levels of politics.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) recently issued a recommendation to its 56 member states to impose harsh sanctions against Russia, suggesting that those officials responsible for Magnitsky’s death be forbidden from entering OSCE member nations and that their bank accounts in Western countries be frozen. The US Senate had already introduced a bill prior to the OSCE recommendation that would implement similar measures. Putin, meanwhile, has hinted darkly that there will be “countermeasures.”
In his expensive suit and rimless glasses, Browder doesn’t look like the typical human rights activist. He arranges a dinner meeting at one of London’s finest Chinese restaurants; there are Rolls-Royces waiting outside his door.
Yet Browder is just as obsessed with his current battle as he once was with the hunt for lucrative investment opportunities. He almost has less free time now than he had then. What he does do in the few hours that remain after he finishes his workday he prefers to keep a secret, so as not to open himself up to attack.
This financial professional with the surprisingly shy gaze often seems agitated. He says he feels responsible: “If Sergei had never known me, he wouldn’t have had to die.”
‘Porridge with Insect Larvae’
Browder has compiled an enormous amount of material from both public archives and secret informants. He has prison commission reports, entries in real estate registers and bank account information, and says he’s identified 60 officials, some of them high ranking, who were involved in his lawyer’s death.
When Browder wants to win over allies for his cause, he quotes from some of around 450 complaints Magnitsky filed during the 358 days he was imprisoned. “At breakfast, we get porridge with insect larvae, and at dinner, rotten boiled herring,” one complaint reads. These drastic accounts — of insufficient food, filth, isolation and a lack of medical treatment — make a farce of Putin’s promises to create a modern constitutional state.
Browder didn’t get a hold of these records until after Magnitsky’s death, but they showed him a side of Russia he claims he never knew before.
For years, Browder was one of the stars of the Russian financial scene. The grandson of an American Communist Party leader who was also an admirer of Stalin, the financial manager came to the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. He was in his late 20s then, learning his lessons in Wall Street Darwinism at the Salomon Brothers investment bank, which sent him to Russia to consult on the privatization of a fleet of fishing vessels.
It didn’t take extraordinary math skills to recognize that the business was being sold at a give-away price: $2.5 million for 51 percent of the company. Many of the 100 or so ships in the fleet were worth 10 times that amount — each.
That was the last time Browder was willing to settle for an investment banker’s consulting fee in the business of Russia’s large-scale privatization. In 1996, he founded his own hedge fund in Moscow and called it Hermitage. “It was only me, a mobile phone and a briefcase,” he says. That and $25 million in start-up capital from a sufficiently hard-boiled investor.
‘Like the Wild West’
In his first 18 months, Browder generated yields of 850 percent. To this day, he raves about the deals that were possible during those years. “Any of my customers who invested with me in Russia made 30 times their money. This was the sale of the century,” he says.
“Browder was someone who definitely couldn’t leave a single ruble untouched,” recalls Eric Kraus, a Moscow-based fund manager from France. Like Browder, Kraus set out young to seek his fortune in Russia.
To save on taxes, Browder established companies in remote regions of Russia, such as Kalmykia. He employed disabled veterans from the Soviet War in Afghanistan because that also gave him a tax break. Yet he truly seems hurt when he’s portrayed as a having been purely a profiteer. “It was exciting and crazy, like the Wild West,” is his strange explanation for his Russian adventure.
Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No 1 Enemy by Bill Browder – review | The Guardian – March 2015 |
Magnitsky’s case was to become the most notorious and best-documented example of human rights abuse in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That this happened was down to one man: Bill Browder, a US-born financier and the CEO of a successful asset management company. Once a Putin fan, Browder found himself in trouble in 2005 when he was deported from Russia. He hired a team, including Magnitsky. When the Kremlin got nasty, most of the lawyers fled. Magnitsky – a family man with two small boys, who liked Beethoven – refused to leave. He believed the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic misjudgment.
Red Notice is a dramatic, moving and thriller-like account of how Magnitsky’s death transformed Browder from hedge-fund manager to global human rights crusader. Its title refers to the extradition request served by Russia on Interpol, demanding Browder’s arrest. (A Russian court later jailed him in absentia for nine years.) In truth, there are quite a few pretenders to the exalted post of “Putin’s No 1 Enemy”, as he describes himself. They include Michael Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch whom Putin (pictured) jailed and sent to Siberia. There is the late Boris Berezovsky, another tycoon who fell out with Russia’s grudge-bearer-in-chief and decamped to London, playing Trotsky to Putin’s Stalin. Or Alexei Navalny, the Moscow opposition leader, currently under house arrest. Or the murdered Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in a Mayfair hotel with radioactive green tea.
Bill Browder: Conflict in Ukraine has purely to do with the fact Putin is a kleptocrat | VOA |
Oslo Freedom Forum: the place where “the world’s dissidents have their say
2013
The 2013 Oslo Freedom Forum was themed “Challenging Power” and centered on a range of topics, such as the art of dissent, asymmetric activism, new tools for rights advocates, the power of media, women under Islamic law, and the threat of authoritarian regimes with façade capitalism.2013 speakers included Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng; recently escaped blogger Bahraini Ali Abdulemam; Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa; Zimbabwean artist Owen Maseko; Tibetan prime minister Lobsang Sangay; creator of the Magnitsky Act Bill Browder; Palestinian journalist Asmaa al-Ghoul; Malaysian lawyer and democracy advocate Ambiga Sreenevasan; and Serbian nonviolent resistance leader Srdja Popovic.
The conference culminated with the presentation of the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent. The 2013 laureates were Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat, North Korean democracy activist Park Sang Hak, and Cuban civil society group Ladies in White–represented by their leader Berta Soler.
The conference was chronicled in VICE, BuzzFeed, El País, El Mundo, Aftenposten, and Verdens Gang. Speakers were profiled in The Atlantic, CNN, The Economist, The New York Times, CNET, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Dagens Næringsliv, and Finansavisen. BuzzFeed described the conference as “an internationalist networking party where dissidents trade tips on overthrowing authoritarian regimes,” while Al Jazeera characterized it as “an annual conference that gives the people who challenge repressive regimes a platform to speak.”
The forum ended with the presentation of the second Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent to Ali Ferzat, a Syrian political cartoonist, the Ladies in White (from Cuba) and Park Sang Hak, a North Korean democracy advocate.
2014
The 2014 Oslo Freedom Forum included Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef; Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker; Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez; American actor Jeffrey Wright; Ukrainian pro-democracy activist Yulia Marushevska; iconic Turkish protestor Erdem Gunduz1, as well as Marcela Turati Muñoz, Yeonmi Park, Hyeonseo Lee, Iyad El-Baghdadi, Ti-Anna Wang, Suleiman Bakhit, Julia Marusjevska, Jamila Raqib, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Aljokhina and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.The New York Times called the Oslo Freedom Forum the place where “the world’s dissidents have their say.”
UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, “The UK’s Relations with Russia” – Examination of witness Nov. 10, 2016
Witness: William Browder, CEO, Hermitage Capital Management.
Q138 Chair: I invite Mr William Browder to come forward. Mr Browder, can you formally introduce yourself for the record?
William Browder: My name is Bill Browder. I have three roles in the world: I am the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, which at one time was the largest foreign investor in Russia; I am also head of the Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which is a campaign fighting for justice for my murdered lawyer Sergei Magnitsky; and I am also the author of “Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy”.
Q139 Daniel Kawczynski: Obviously, there is a huge amount of increase in tensions between the United Kingdom and Russia. Our companies are losing billions of pounds in trade with Russia as a result of the sanctions we have put in place. British troops are being sent to the Baltic states. Yet, in your written evidence to the Committee, you suggest that our policy towards Russia is “appeasement”. Could you please explain that?
William Browder: Let me just draw your attention to several examples. I think it was six years ago, Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in a hotel in Grosvenor Square, using polonium-210. After a very serious criminal investigation, it was determined that the polonium-210 came from Russia and that it was a state-sponsored assassination that might have been done at Putin’s recommendation. Since then, there has been no consequence whatsoever for Russia. In other words, because of that lack of consequence, we have allowed Russians effectively to get away with the first state-sanctioned nuclear murder in the United Kingdom.
More close to home for me is the inaction of the British Government in relation to the murder of Sergei Magnitsky and the consequences for his torturers and murderers. We successfully got a law passed in the United States, called the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which imposes visa sanctions and asset freezes on the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky and the people who commit other gross human rights abuses.
I am a British citizen and have been one for almost 18 years. In spite of the fact that this is my country and this is my home, and Sergei Magnitsky was my lawyer, since the Magnitsky Act was passed in the United States, the British Government has refused to enact a similar piece of legislation here, effectively allowing people who were involved in the Sergei Magnitsky murder and other terrible abuses to come to this country with impunity.
In relation to the Magnitsky case, we have also identified large amounts of money from the crime that he uncovered and was murdered for. He uncovered a $230 million tax rebate fraud by officials in the Russian Government. We have traced £30 million of that money coming to the United Kingdom and we have found where it went, through which banks it went, who ordered the money to be sent here. We shared that with the police here and, in spite of using the same evidence to open up criminal cases in a dozen other countries, the British law enforcement authorities have refused to open a criminal case.
While Britain may be playing its part in an international consortium in relation to Ukraine, I have seen at the coalface, on the front end, in real life, the appeasement that goes on on a day-to-day basis in relation to Russia.
Q140 Daniel Kawczynski: “Appeasement” is a very strong word. I am surprised that you would actually accuse the United Kingdom of appeasing Russia over the Magnitsky case. Do you not accept that, in order for us to negotiate with the Russians as a fellow permanent member of the UN Security Council, you need to have some form of relationship and dialogue with them, in order to try to facilitate some of the changes that we are after? It seems as if you want us to take even further action against the Russians, to isolate ourselves even more from them. How is that going to be conducive to trying to encourage Mr Putin and others to try to make some of the changes that we are seeking from them?
William Browder: Let us just look at the situation on the Magnitsky case in particular. The United States passed the Magnitsky Act in December 2012. As Secretary of State, John Kerry has engaged in a regular dialogue with Russia from that moment all the way until today. One can’t make the argument that imposing sanctions creates a situation where you can’t have a diplomatic relationship or engagement with Russia. It is possible to have a mature relationship with Russia, where you don’t allow their individual torturers and murderers to come into your country, but you can continue to talk to them about issues of strategic importance.
Q141 Ann Clwyd: Hello; we have met before. In evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in May, you alleged that London is a hub for laundering dirty money from Russia. What specific steps do you think that the UK Government should take to deal with this problem?
