Bill Browder on High Finance, Murder and Justice (Podcast)

is just astonishing. Bill Browder, founder CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and the author of Red Notice, A true story of high finance, murder and one man's Fight for Justice, has a new book out about what's been going on with the Russians and the Magnitsky Act that he helped to pass in order to get justice for his Russian attorney who was tortured and murdered by the Russian government while in their custody in prison. This is just really astonishing stuff. I read all of Red Notice. It was

like a spine novel. You plow right through it on the weekend. And then I did the same thing with Freezing Water, which is what's taken place in the five years since Red Notice came out out. So I felt like I knew everything he was gonna say, and even still he astonished me. I I spoke to him for nearly two hours, most of the time my job was on the desk. I just was shocked at how um just barbaric and you can't even call it corrupt. It's just next level illegality that seems to take place in Russia.

Browder describes that nation as a country that doesn't have laws. It's the wild West, and it is a as he describes it, a kleptocracy and a fascist state, which doesn't sound like it's the sort of place where anybody would want to live. Uh. This is not just bad, it's bad and getting worse. Uh. And he describes both uh the invasion of Ukraine as a giant distraction um by Putin again people who would challenge his rule. Really just I don't even know what to say. A fascinating, shocking,

horrifying conversation. Even if you read both the Browder's books, you will find something to be amazed at. With no further ado, my conversation with Bill Browner. So, so let's start out just with a little bit about your your background. You have a b a. In economics from Chicago and NBA from Stanford. You begin in Solomon Brothers in the ninety nineties early in your career, and you kind of successfully stumble into some privatization of government entities in Poland

while you're at Solomon. Tell us a little bit about that early experience. Well, I should just back up one step further, which is a little bit on my family background, which is what got me interested in all this Eastern European stuff. And my grandfather was was an American communist who was head of the American Communist Party from ninety two.

And so in my teenager and I decided to become a catalyst, which at Stanford Business schools you mentioned, and I finished business school in nineteen nine, the year the burn Wall came down, and I thought to myself, if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the Berlin Wall has come down, I'm going to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And so I ended up in London on the East European desk of Solomon Brothers.

And and this was at the right around the time that that all the countries of Eastern Europe or privatizing. And um, my, my very first experience was actually before I joined Solomon Brothers. UM, I had another job at the Boxing consulting group. They sent me out to Poland in um to work on a failing Polish bus factory, and I noticed my interpreter had a newspaper under his

arms with a bunch of financial fig years. I asked him what those were and he said, these are the very first Polish privatizations, and I was I was kind of intrigued, and so I said, can we discuss it? And he laid it out on a conference table and I said, what's this number? He said, this is the number of shares outstanding of this one company that's being privatized. And I said, what's this numbers at the share price?

I multiplied the two numbers together and that got you to a market cap of this company of eighty million dollars. And then I said, what's this number down here? And he said this is the last year's earnings. I said, no, that couldn't be right, so could just retranslating it, and it's the last year's earnings and that number was a hundred and sixty million dollars. So, but here's a company

that's valued at eighty million dollars. The previous year's earnings were a hundred and sixty million dollars, so it's trading at one half a pe of one half and and uh, and I thought, well, this isn't this what I went to business school for, it to like invest in this kind of stuff and I had a total life savings at the time with two thousand dollars, and I converted my total life savings of two thousand dollars into Polish body, which is their currency, went down with my translator to

the post office, and subscribed to the very first privatization in Poland. And over the course of the next twelve months it went up ten times. That's my two thousand turned into twenty and and there's a certain feeling that you get if you make ten times your money. It's like the financial equivalent of crack cocaine. And I just wanted to repeat the experience. And so I now knew what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't want to be a consultant. I wanted to be investing

in these privatizations in East Europe. And that's what led me eventually as Solomon Brothers, and I was working on their proprietary trading desks, and that's when I discovered Russia. Yeah, the story in the book is quite fascinating. How really Solomon Brothers is a shark tank. They throw everybody in the pool. You either sink or swim, and you kind of stumbled and to Russia. By accident. They were not especially supportive until you found one champion who managed to

get you a nice pool of capital. Invest tell us how that that progressed. What happened was my very first assignment at Solomon Brothers um was to advise the management of a of a fishing fleet in Mirmanskill on their privatization. And so I um uh fly up from Romance, which is two d miles north of the Arctic circles, the most farthest north place in the world. I go up there and the head of the fishing fleet meets me at the airport. He takes me down to the docks

and he shows me one of their ships. And this ship was like four feet long. It was on five stories, and the top story they collected that they had the nets where they caught the fish, and they separate them and they worked their way down and eventually at the bottom story of the of the boat they have canning machines. And so it wasn't just a fishing boat, it was an ocean going factory. Very impressive. And I asked how much is one of these things cost? And he said

twenty million dollars. New how many do you have in your fleet A hundred million times a hundred gets you to two billion dollars of the ships, and said, what's the average age of your fleet head? Seven years? So I don't know much about shipping or fishing or anything, but I figured that makes it maybe have to appreciate it.

So a billion dollars with the ships. And these guys had hired me, the management of this troller fleet, to advise them on whether the management should exercise their legitimate right under the privatization program with Russia to buy and so I said, at what prices of government selling? And he said two and a half million dollars. So let me just repeat the math. A billion dollars of the ships for two or two and a half million dollars.

And that's when I realized that that something really crazy was going on Russia, and if and if that situation in Poland had gotten my juices flowing, my god, this is even crazier. And so then I went to Moscow. I thought, I I said to myself, is this just something some weird anomaly with the fishing industry or is this something going on more widespread? And I went to Moscow, and I as I was going through the airport in Moscow.

They were selling a little English language yellow page directory, and so I m I kind of didn't know anyone in Russia didn't speak the language, and so I bought this English language yellow page directory, and I just started cold calling people who might be able to explain to me what was going on. And over the course of

a week I had about forty meetings. I met with all different types of people, and I was able to figure out what was going on more widespread, and this was the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my my professional life. But basically they be in order to go from communism to capitalism, the Russian government had given every citizen in the country a thing called a voucher, a physical certificate called voucher. And at the time, there's

about hundred and fifty million people in the country. And these vouchers were freely tradeable, so you could you could buy them, you could sell them, and you can burn them, you can trade them, you can do anything he wanted with them, and so the vouchers developed a sort of secondary market, and they traded for about twenty dollars each and so again I went through the simple math. There's a hundred fifty million vouchers times twenty dollars gets you

three billion dollars of vouchers in circulation. And these three three billion dollars of vouchers in circulation were exchangeable for thirty percent of the shaff capital of all Russian companies, which meant that the market cap of the entire country of Russia, everything, every every asset in the country was

ten billion dollars. This is the country with the world's natural gas, and percent of the world's royal ti, percent of the world's aluminum, steel, fertilizer, car companies, telephone company, electricity company, banks, etcetera. The entire country ten billion dollars. At the time, you couldn't buy a mid sized Oklahoma oil company for ten billion dollars. Here, you could buy

the whole country of Russia. So I rushed back to Solomon and I said, guys, we've got to stop doing everything else we're doing, and we've got to invest in Russia. They're like literally giving money away for free. And and the moment I met and mentioned Russia, people like just immediately just switched off. And I wasn't very good. I wasn't very good at at politics. Inside an organization. So if one person said no, I just went to the

next person, and I'm just wide eyed and crazy. He said, We've got to stop doing everything in invest in Russia. And by the time I was done, I had completely burned my reputation with everybody in the whole company. Even the young guys who I was hanging out with stopped inviting me to lunches and drinks because nobody wanted to be seen with that crazy guy who was obsessed with

investing in Russia. And and Solomon was a place where if you didn't earn five times when they were paying you within a year, fired And I wasn't earning anywhere near five times anything, and I was going to be fired. And so not only was I not gonna be able to invest in all this great stuff in Russia, I wasn't gonna be able to pay my rent. And so I was just sitting They're just totally demoralized. And one day my phone rang and it was the most one of the most senior guys in New York office of

Solomon Brothers. I was in London, and he said, I hear you might be having some career troubles, but you've got something interesting to say about Russia. Can you come over and explain to me what's going on. So I spent a couple of days all night putting together the best power point presentation I could come up with explaining how cheap everything was in Russia. I go over to Solomon,

I sit down with this guy. I take him through the presentation and he's he's not a very um uh sort of friendly or or community guy, and he sort of stares blankly. I mean, as I'm going through this presentation, and the halfway through the presentation, he just gets up and leaves, and I thought to myself, I'd like blown my chance and saving my career and um And I'm sitting there tapping my foot trying to figure out how long and retrieved this meeting. When he comes back and

he's gone for ten minutes. He comes back like fifty two minutes later, and I'm about to blurt something out to try to save the meeting. But before I have a chance to say anything, he said, I just, uh, those slides you show me are the single most impressive thing I've ever seen in my investment career. I've just gone to the risk management committee I've got you twenty million dollars to invest in Russia. I want you to stop doing everything else you're doing and get over there

and get this money invested. This is unbelievable. And that's what that's what, that's what's set me off of my career. I'm investing in Russia. Wow, amazing, amazing story. Um So, so now you set up this funds and it does really well, and you circle back to Sally and say, hey, let's really expand this, and suddenly everybody wants a piece of you. Tell us a little bit about that. So so I go into so this guy get sending me after Russia. I invest the million and for a while

it's doing nothing. It's just sitting there, totally, tiny, little elquid market. Nobody knows anything about it. It's just starts sitting there. And I invest his money in in like the fall and going into December of and then the Economist magazine in England writes an article called Sale of the Century in which they described the same math that I've just shared with you. And all of a sudden, it's in that now it's in black and white and

ink um. You know, all sorts of people reading it, and all of a sudden, I about twenty serious like major Western investors, hedge fund managers, billionaires, proprietary training desks all say all in unis and say, wow, how how come I didn't know? Why didn't I know about this? We gotta get involved. And so you know, when you take twenty huge investors and you try to go into a tiny, a liquid, almost untraded market and all at once try to buy it, what happens? Share price goes

up and so over. In the course of a couple of weeks after this economist article, the Russian stock market goes up and our million dollars turns into a million dollars. And I should point out that this was back in the days when a hundred million dollars profit was real money, and so so so all of a sudden, I go from a total zero to like a hero on the

trading floor. And all those guys who had stopped inviting me to lunch his drinks were all camped out around my desk when I had arrived in the morning, all just desperate for tips on how they can make five times their money on the on the Russian stock market. And then all of a sudden, some of the older fellows started coming around to my desk, and and old at Solomon was like forty years. You know, you couldn't survive past forty without having a heart attack or something

like that. At Solomon, so forty was like the maximum age. But I was in my late twenties. So these older guys will come around, and Solomon is a very disrespectful place, and people were not very nice to each other. But they'll come by very and very deferentially saying, you know, excuse me, Mr Browder. I know you're very busy, but is there any chance I could convince you to come and spend a few minutes to brief my clients. Mr Soros, he would be so grateful for just a tiny bit

of your time. Another guy came by, uh, Sir John Templeton, the founder of Templeton, which just he'ld be so appreciative if you could just be with him for a little bit of your time. And I was getting these invitations to like the the Royalty of Wall Street. Everybody wanted to meet me because nobody knew anything about investing in Russia. There is this one die and Renews and the Land of the Blind the one eyed man who was king.

And so I went on this world tour of of of the Royalty of Wall Street and and they were much smarter than my colleagues as Solomon, And within moments when I showed them the data, they were saying, this is unbelievable. Can we give you some money to manage? So I don't know at the moment, we're just doing this for ourselves. But but let me go back to the bosses and see what I can I can do

for you. And so I go back to the head of the trading floor in London and I say, you know, I was just with George Sorrows and he wants to give us some money to manage. What do you think and the and the guy said, I think that's a brilliant idea. Let's form a task force to study it. And say okay. So the first task force meeting was a week later. I show up in this room and there's like forty people in this room, like thirty five

of them I've never seen in my life before. There was the vice chairman of the company, the senior managing directors, managing directors, senior directors, directors, vice presidents, and me I was the lowest ranking guy in the whole room, and within moments of the meeting starting, a fight broke out among all these different people about which who is going to get the economic credit for the business, and and investment bankers have an unbelievable skill and capacity for making

plausible arguments for why they deserve money that they don't deserve, and and and these people were just I was watching, like like multidimensional Tennis is like the asset management group that had made an argument, and then the investment banks so he worked here, and then emerging markets people say what about us? And and it was going on on and on, and I didn't know who was going to win this argument, but I was a d percent sure of who wasn't going to get any economic credit for

the business, and that was going to be me. And so I after three days of like not being able to sleep, I I walked into the head of the trading floor. I gave him my security badge and I say, I'm quitting. I'm going to start my own fund. And I went I moved to Oscow. This was early what what was became the Hermitage Fund. He told me, you're never going to succeed. But off I went and I ended up getting I went back to one of those guys from from those meetings that I went to on

Wall Street. It was it was a guy named Edmund Saffra, who was the owner of Republic National Bank of New York and he was one of the largest and most successful private bankers in the world. He gave me twenty five million dollars to invest, he started the fund and it just went like unbelievably up within moments of starting. Amazing, really quite amazing. So it's a fascinating story, but it raises so many interesting questions, starting with you know, the

companies you're investing in in Russia? Are these all formally state owned companies? Sort of the way things are up earning in China today? Um, did they still retain any sort of state ownership? And and and who were the private owners of these farms and so so, Um, what would happen is in most cases the companies became completely privatized. UM, and and the people who owned them. And these are big companies. And you've heard of these companies Luke Oils,

Spare Bank Gas from UM through good Naphgace. These are companies than anyone who trades Russian stocks would know the names of these companies, big state company, big formerly state companies. Most of them were fully privatized, and the people who became the majority shareholders were these people who we now know as the oligarchs. A couple of them, like gas from the Spare Bank, remained um partially state owned or in some cases the majority stay owned, but the shares

the would trade on the stock market. Um. But the big problem that we discovered and and um and this this was one of the reasons everything was so cheap, was that you might have owned a share of a Russian company, but you didn't really have a share of any thing because the oligarchs or in some cases the corrupt managers, we're basically stealing all the money out the

back door there was. You might have had a share of company, you had no share of the economics because they were just literally stealing billions in every possible way. You can imagine that the kind of corruption that that that we got to see with our own eyes was just mind boggling. It was the biggest theft in the history of the world was being done that of these companies.

And these companies are generating tens of billions of dollars of profits, but if you look at the financials, they were nonprofits and and so so it presented a terrible dilemma for me, because you know, I got out to the world and convinced all sorts of famous people to come and invest with me. I showed them all these graphs and charts about how cheap everything was, and it was on paper, but it wasn't in reality, because these guys were just stealing all the money out the back door.

And it was and it created a real album. And it was also really infuriating, like why would these it was mostly these oligarchs doing it. Why would these people feel so entitled that they could do that and just at the expense of everybody else cheap for a reason? Right, So, so that raises a question. Russia is a unique place. Corruption is endemic. It's well known for a century. It's not the sort of geography that you really think of when you think of shareholder activism. What led you to

that sort of approach in that sort of place. Well, so it was a combination of circumstances. So um I started out with twenty five million dollars of staffers of money, and and then it started going up and up and up. And this was this was a hedge fund structure where you could put your money in at any point in time.

And everybody said, oh my god, this is unbelievable. So they'd started adding more and more money to the fund, and and by UM I had more than a billion dollars invested in the Russian stock market, which was you know, this is a tiny little market, so billion dollars was like the It was like the equivalent of fidelity in Russia, and in terms of the size of assets. And then all of a sudden, and for anyone listening to this is who's you know, my age or near um happened?

This was the year that Russia defaulted and devalued their currency, and so they defaulted on the domestic bonds, the currency devalued by s and and and my portfolio, which was above a billion dollars went down. And so there I was nursing a loss. I lost nine hundred million dollars in my clients money. And these are people that I've gone around and tried to convince, to convinced to invest in Russia. I went and went around meeting all sorts

of people all over the world. You know, if every twenty people I would meet, nineteen said no, you're crazy, I'm not giving you any money, and one person would say yes, and that one person who was with me, who like you know, who had given me their confidence. Um, I lost of their money. And I was just mortified.

And I was totally totally ashamed of myself that I had been so emphatic saying what a great opportunity this was, and I lost people so much money, and and I just couldn't look at myself in the mirror unless I did something to try to try to get their money back. And so as I was trying to get there, so I was sitting with my last ten cents on the dollar.

The market had crashed, and the oligarchs, and this was a particularly poignant moment in their lives that they had up until that time kind of behaved themselves, not as much. I mean, there was a lot of stealing going on before this, but but after this crash, they realized that Wall Street was closed for business for them. They could never borrow a penny on Wall Street. Nobody was ever going to touch them in any way, shape or form, and that was the only thing sort of moderating their

behavior at all. And so when when they saw this, that that that nobody was returning their calls from Olden Sacks and Morgan Stanley, who had been all, you know, wining and dining them a year before, they said to themselves, whether there if there's no incentive to behave And there's never been any disincentives against misbehavior because in the laws existing in Russia, we might as well steal everything that's not nailed down, and and and they went from stealing

cash flow, which is what they had stolen before, to stealing assets and and and there were assets stripping and and organizing huge delusive share issues and embezzlement and all sorts of crazy stuff. And and so I was they were going to try to steal the last ten cents on the dollar that I had right at the moment that I was that I had sort of vowed to try to get that money back. And so I kind of felt like I was forced into this because I wasn't.

I just couldn't imagine just dusting myself off and leaving, and you know, just leaving everybody in such a terrible state of among my clients, and so I said, okay, well, how how do I stop them from stealing? And it's not like you could go to the regulator and say, you know, there's a stealing going onto my company, could you please investigate? Because regulators don't regulate. You couldn't go to the courts or the police, or or the parliament or anything. But the one thing, the one thing I

could do is go to the media. And and so we started to do um what I what is now known as stealing analysis of Russian companies, where we would go into these companies and we would do an analysis and of like how they're stealing, how they were stealing, who was stealing, what they were stealing, where the money was going. And and you might think that that, well, how do you do is stealing analysis and a Russian company?

And and the answer is pretty interesting, which is that that these companies and the country, it's just everything is total bureaucracy there. You can't even go the bathroom without like putting your writing, your name down on a form, and then those forms get filed with four different ministries and quadruple kate and and all that information about everything in the country was effectively for sale, you could basically

buy a disc with the information about everything. And and so we started buying these discs with all this information and and and people also weren't very tight lipped about it. Everybody was really upset that that all the stealing was going on because only a very few people participated in but a lot of people got to see it with it and see it themselves. And so we started to put together these really detailed, um, you know, summarison analysis

of how the stealing was happening. And any other big benefit that I had was that all the foreign correspondents all pretty much hung out at the same restaurants and bars that I did. And and so I got to know all these guys and and and they loved me because here I was showing up with like work that would have taken them three months to do, which I just did myself with my team. I'm showing like these massive defts going on in these big important Russian companies

like gas problems, Bare Bank and so on. And so I would I would um, I would do these naming and shaming campaigns, and they would write up the stories of the Wall Street Journal with Financial Times and Your Times, etcetera. And then the most interesting thing happened, which is that it was just at the same time that Vladimir Putin had come to power, and and Putin was fighting with the same guys I was fighting with. When he came to power um in the year two thousand, he wasn't

powerful like he is today. All these oligarchs had had basically informally usurped the power of the presidency, and he was really keen on getting it back. And so and I should point out that I've never spoken or met Vladimir Putin, but when I would put these expose a s out there, it created this opportunity for him to go after his enemies. And there's there's an expression your

enemy's enemy as your friend. And so he would I would put out a big expose on gas From and then all of a sudden he'd step in and he would fire the CEO gas From using the state's shares, or he would issue issue a presidential decree about spare or whatever. And this had an unbelievably positive effect on

the value of my portfolio. And so if you so basically, I remember I started with twenty million dollars, it goes up to a billion it goes down to nine to million, and as a result of the naming and shaming campaigns, it goes from a hundred million to four and a half billions, and I became the largest foreign investor in the country. So so, shareholder activism is usually a pretty um,

bare knuckles sort of um strategy. And in a country like the United States or even the UK or Europe, there is the rule of law and respect for property rights and and regulation and law enforcement. There's really not a whole lot of that in the U. In Russia. At what point do you start to think, Hey, you know, I could be really pissing off some pretty powerful and dangerous characters. Well, I was, on one hand, I was scared to death doing this and literally scared to death.

Um uh. And and it wasn't like I was doing this, you know, enthusiastically. I was doing this in reactions to the fact that I was they were going to try to take everything away from me. And and when I did it, I I hired bodyguards. I had one particular

fight that I had, I had literally fifteen bodyguards. I had When I would go from the office to home, I had my car with with three armed guys and then there'll be three other cars, a lead car, a lag car, a sidecar, and I get home and we were the lead car would go ahead to get there faster, and they would scope out for for snipers and look up the stairwells and make sure there's no bombs, and then there'll be a guy sitting in my apartment was

like automatic weapon loaded sitting in my living room. Um. It was pretty horrifying and scary. Um. And you know that these guys do a lot of a lot of a lot of terrible things. Um. But the one thing that I had going for me, and this is it's kind of a a joke, but it was very serious, is that in Russia, nobody, um, everything is a conspiracy.

That nothing is as it seems on the surface. And and so everybody looked at me and saying, there's no way that some guy from the South side of Chicago, American guy shows up in Russia and takes on the most powerful, dangerous oligarchs in the country on his own volition. Somebody must be standing behind him. This must be a project. And everybody looked at the whole pattern and they said, well, okay,

Browder does this stuff. And then all of a sudden, Putin steps in and any attacks the people right afterwards. This must be a how clever of Putin to come up with this weird strategy, and and and they were kind of scared of Putin and so um like that they thought. And I wasn't going to correct them and tell them that that this is like totally my doing,

it has nothing to do with him. And so I let them believe that this was some type of Putin project because that that gave me some some protection, this misunderstanding, um and and and so you know here I am now sitting here telling the story, so that nobody got to me. But it was of course a very scary, you know, thing to do, extremely scary thing to do, and everybody was scratching their hands and wondering how I

can do it and get away with it. So so you and Putin's interests appear to be aligned, at least in the beginning in the nineties. Then a few years go by and suddenly you're declared a national security threat. Tell us a little bit about what that experience was like, uh, not being permitted back into the country and denied a visa.

So Putin had this problem with the oligarchs. They were stealing power from him, and he um, you know, and so every time I would be doing this stuff, he would come come in and do you know, come down on them. And that wasn't enough for him. He had to solve this problem once and for all. And he came up with with a plan in late two thousand and three to solve this problem with the oligarchs. And what he did was there was one oligarch in particular

who was the richest oligarc. His name was Mikhail Hoardakovski. At the time, it was worth about twenty billion dollars. He was the owner of an oil company called Yukos. And so Putin decided that he was going to win his war with the oligarchs by arresting the richest oligarch. And so hardakovskis on his private jet. His jet his land from some air airport in Siberia, and Putin organizes for his private jet to be surrounded by the FSB,

which is the successor organization of the KGB. They surround the jet, they arrest him, they put him on a government plane back to Moscow. They put him in jail, and then they put him on trial. In Russia, when you go on trial, there's a seven percent conviction rate, and so there's no presumption of innocence. And so when you're on trial, they put you in a cage because that's where you're going to be when the trial is over.

So they put Mikhail Khordakovsky, the richest man in Russia, on trial, in a cage, and they allowed television cameras to come in and film them. And so imagine you're the seventeenth richest oligarch in Russia. You're on your yacht. It's parked off the Code Desur in France. You can just finished up with your mistress in the bedroom. You go out to the the living room, you click on CNN, and you see a guy far smarter, far more powerful, far better than you, sitting in a cage. What's your

natural reaction going to be? You don't want to sit in that cage. And so, one by one by one, these some oligarchs went to Prudent after Ordakovski was convicted and sentenced to ten years, and they say to Putin as a summer of two thousand four, Vladimir, what do we have to do so we don't sit in the cage and and prudent says, real simple, not for the Russian government or for the presidential administration of Russia, for

Vladimir Putin. And at that moment in time two thousand and four, Vladimir Putin becames becomes the richest man in the world. And at that moment in time, all of my activities exposing the oligarchs are no longer exposing his enemies, but exposing his personal interest. And they must have struggled to figure out what's what to do with me, but they figured it out. And in early November two thousand and five, I was flying back to Moscow from London. I was I've been living in Moscow for ten years.

I was largest foreign investor in the country. And I get arrested at Sharon Matevo Airport by four heavily armed border guards. They take me down to the detention center of the airport. They locked me up overnight, and I'm sitting there, cursing myself for having been so stupid for doing this, and wondering whether I'm going off to Siberia

like Kordakowski, or whether I'm going to be deported. I was sitting there for fifteen hours and then they finally marched me back onto a air Flouts flight, stick me in the middle of seat, and to court me back to London. And I'll tell you something, I was so so happy that it was if you've ever watched that movie Argo, when they take off from Iran, I was

so happy that I wasn't being sent off to Siberia. Um. But so I get back to London, um, and and and then I get an official letter from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that I've been banned entry into Russia because I was a threat to national security and and and I was really surprised, actually, because I thought I'd been doing them a favor by exposing all this corruption. But you know, as I figured out Putin,

Putin was now the beneficiary of this whole thing. And so at this point I was pretty scared because, okay, yes, um, being kicked out it's not a great thing if you're specialized in investing in Russia. But you know, when the Russians decide to go after you, they don't intend to do it mildly. They usually do it with extreme prejudice. And so I said to myself, where else to do? You know, where else am I exposed? And there is

two places where I was exposed. I had a bunch of people, A bunch of people were for me and their family members that they could arrest um in Russia. And I had a hell of a lot of money invested in the country. And so I organized an emergency evacuation in my entire staff, all of the people who were for me and their and their dependence. And I got them all out and got them all to London.

And once I got everybody safely out, we then organized. Uh. We we quickly and quietly liquidated every last year we held them in the country. So let's talk a little bit about the raid. Russian officials, while you're in Paris, decide to raid the remnants of what was Hermitage. You would already essentially wound down operations, removed everybody um except for one secretary, and and gotten all of the cash out of out of Russia. Uh, tell us how this progressed?

What what was this raid about? So they they seize these documents that the stamp seals and certificates for investment holding companies, which were at this point, we're empty. So they seize these documents and and then we discover that the document that the companies no longer belong to us.

They have been frauduably reregistered into the name of a man who had been convicted of manslaughter and let out of jail early um he became the new owner of these of our of our empty investment holding companies, which and the only way he could have done that it was in collusion with the police. And so at this point I don't have any money at stake in Russia,

because all the money is safely out. But I'm terrified, not from a financial perspective, but from a legal perspective, because I know that if the police are working with killers steel companies, I'm gonna be walking through some airport somewhere and then I'm gonna be arrested in some future data. And so I am. I call up the smartest lawyer I know in Russia, the young man named Sergei Magnitsky.

Sergey was at the time thirty five years old. He worked for an American law firm, and he was one of these people who could literally do ten things in the time it takes another lawyer to do one. It's just a genius, hard working, unbelievably good lawyer, and I say to Sergey, I don't know what's going on here, but I need you to figure it out and I

need to stop it. As a Surge goes out and he investigates, and he goes and sends letters of request, information documents, all stufferent people, and he goes to registries and he goes to courts, he goes everywhere. And he comes back and he said, I figured it out. There were two parts of this scam, he said. The first part of the scam didn't succeed. The first part of the scam was they wanted to steal all of your money, but because I've gotten all my money out before they

got to us, they didn't get it. He said. However, the second part of their scam did succeed. And what he explained was that after we had liquidated all of our holdings in Russia in the previous year, when we got all our money out, we had a profit of a billion dollars, and on that profit of a billion dollars, we paid to the Russian government million dollars of capital games tax. What Serge had learned through his investigation was that after our companies were stolen, the people who stole.

Our companies went back to the tax authorities on the December two thousand and seven, and they said, there was a mistake made in the previous year tax filing. Instead of these companies earning a billion dollars, they're in zero. This is what they said. And they came up from complicated way of trying to explain that, and they said, as a result of them earning zero, the two million dollars of taxes that was paid in the previous year is paid an error, and we'd like that money back.

And so on December two thousand seven, two days before Christmas, they applied for a two thirty million dollar fraudulent tax refund. It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia. Applied for it on the two days before Christmas, and it was approved and paid out the next day on

Christmas Eve, and so pretty shocking. Well, I mean, if you if so, let's just say you overpay taxes legitimately by five thousand dollars, you know you'd be fifteen years later and you still not to get that money back from the Russians. You don't think you get it the next day, even if it was Christmas Eve. It was like a lovely Christmas present. Two million dollars near nearly a quarter of a billion dollars paid out on a

fraud in one day on Christmas Eve. So Sergey and I were looking at this and this was just a monumental discovery and we and we said to each other, this couldn't possibly be authorized, because this wasn't this wasn't not my money that was being stolen. This was the Russian government's money being stolen. And we thought, you know, Putin, he might be a nasty guy, but he's he's a nationalist, he's a patriot. This is his this is his own

money that's being stolen. He couldn't have authorized this. And so we figured that the best way of dealing with it is to bring it to the attention of the highest authorities in Russia. As we wrote criminal complaints to the head of the General of the General Prosecutor of Russia, to the head of the Russian State Investigative Committee, to the head of the Internal Affairs Department of the Interior Ministry. I then went to the newspapers, to the radio television

telling the story of what had happened. And then Serge went and gave formal testimony to the Russian State Investigative Committee, which is their FBI. And we sat back and we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. Well, it turns out that in Vladimir Pruten's Russia there are no good guys. Five weeks after Surge testified against the officials, these cops and so on who did the raid. The same people he testified against came to his home on

November two thousand and arrested him. They put him in pre child attention, where he was then tortured to withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with fourteen inmates and eight beds and less lights on twenty four hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat and now window panes. In December, moscows and nearly froze to death. To put him in cells and no toilet, just a hole in the flower where the sewage would bubble up. They moved him from

cell to cell to cell. And the purpose of all this um was was to get him to withdraw his testimony against these corrupt police officers. And they wanted to get in to sign a false confession to say that he stole the two thirty million dollars, and he did so in my instruction, and Serge he looked at them like, just like a soft guy. Here's a guy who you know, wears a gray suit and a white shirt and a red tie, goes to a fancy American law firm and

buy Starbucks coffee in the morning. You know, a week of this is the old buckle. But what they they completely misunderstood Sergey Magnitsky. Sergey was this man of unbelievable principle and integrity, and for him, the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more more painful than the physical pain they were subjecting to, and he just refused. And as a result of his refusal, they just upped

up to up the pressure in the torture. And after about six months of this, his health started to deteriorate. He started to develop terrible pains in his stomach, couldn't eat, He lost forty pounds, and he eventually went to the prison doctor and they diagnosed and as having pancreatitis and gallstones and meeting an operation which was scheduled for the first of August two thousand nine. Um. A week before

the operation. He um that the the the bad guys come to him again again demand him to sign the false confession. Again he refuses, and in retaliation they move him from the prison where he was where that which had this medical facility, to a maximum security prison in Moscow called Boutyrka, and Boutyrka is considered to be one of the most horrible prisons in Russia. It's like a medieval prison, but but worse than that for Sergey is that there was no medical facilities there and at Brutyirka

has helped completely broke down. And when in a terrible downward spiral, constant agonizing pain, and all medical attention and was refused, he and his lawyers wrote twenty different desperate requests to every different branch or the criminal justice system, begging for medical attention, and every different letter was either ignored or denied in writing by so many different parts of the criminal justice system. Things got worse and worse than On November sixty two tho nine, Sergey went into

critical condition. On that night, the Bluecherka authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore, and so they put him in an ambulance and sent him to another prison across town and had a medically wing. When he gets to the new prison, has been of putting him in the emergency room. They put him in an isolation cell. They chained him to a bed, and then eight riot guards with rubber baton's come into the cell and beat Sergei Magnitsky to death. He was thirty seven years old.

That was November six, two thousand nine, a little more than twelve and a half years ago. He left a wife, him, two children. He was killed. Ibelieve the most unbelievable, horrifying, traumatizing, shocking, horrific thing I've ever had anything to do with in my life. The guy who worked for me was killed because he worked for me, was effectively killed as my proxy.

And when I was finally able to clear the fog of hysteria and heartbreak and shock, I think clearly I made a vow to his memory, to his family, and to myself that I was going to put aside everything else I was doing in my life, and I was going to devote all of my time, all of my resources, and all of my energies going after the bastards have killed him, to make sure they faced justice at the last twelve and a half years. That's what I've been doing.

So you had previously discussed how effectively the Russian government had had Sergey beaten to death in their custody. At this point you decide you want um, you want payback, You want to make the people who did this pay tell us how the idea of the Magnitsky Acts came about and what was it like shepherding that through Congress. So after Sergey was killed, I said to myself, well, how do we get justice? And Serge had done something unique when he was in jail, which is that he

wrote everything down that happened to him. Every every time they did something bad to him, he wrote a criminal complaint about who did it, what they did, where they did it, what law was violated when they did it. And that was his way of dealing with the adversity of being in jail. And so over the course of three days and attention, he had written four hundred and fifty complaints documenting his mistreatment, and once a month or so he write these complaints out. Once a month or

so he would hand them to his lawyer. His lawyer would then five of them and we would get copies and although none of these complaints were ever acted on, we because we had copies, we had the most well documented, granular, detailed, firsthand account of human rights abuse have to ever come out of the Russian system. And because these were so articularly written, um they made horrifying caps for you know, Russia was like this is this is not Nobody could

imagine that this was the Russia. You know, Russia of the years of two thousand and nine. They thought this was stalling when they read these letters and complaints, and we thought that that would be enough. It's released have them throw some of the low level people under the bus. But I was completely wrong. Instead of prosecuting anybody wide, recruitin got personally involved. He circled the wagons. He made public statements that nobody had done anything wrong. He has

honorated every single individual. Some of the most complicit people even received state honors and promotions. And in the most unbelievable miscarriage of justice, three years after they murdered Sergey Magnosky, they put him on trial, in the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia. They put me on trial as his co defendant. We were both found guilty. They couldn't do anything more to Surgey than they had already done of killing him. Um, they

sends me to nine years and months sentia. It became obvious well before that that this that that that we weren't going to succeed in getting justice in Russia. So we said, well, how do we get justice outside of Russia? And this is when I came up with an idea, which is that the people who killed Sergey didn't kill him for ideological or religious reasons, as many things have happened in the past. They killed him for money. They

killed him very simply for two million dollars. And the people who still let to enter thirty million dollars don't keep that money in Russia. There's as easily as they

stole it, it could be stolen from them. They keep that money in America, in the in the UK, they buy fancy apartments in London, they buy houses in South Beach and Miami, they buy villas on the on the front line in santra Pe and the s and their kids the Swiss boarding school and their girl girlfriends on shopping trips to Milan, and so we we it's it would be very difficult to prosecute somebody for for torture and murder in the West for a crime that was

committed in Russia. But we certainly don't have to let them travel to the West, or that we can certainly don't have to let them use our banks from the West. We can freeze their assets in the West. And so that's when I came up this idea of freezing their

assets and banning their visas. And so I took this idea to Washington and I met two senators and the Senator Benjamin Carton, who was a Democrat from Maryland, and Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, and I shared the story which I just shared with you now, and I said, can we freeze their assets and ban their visas? And these two senators were so moved by the story, they said, yes, we can, as we do here in Congress, we can make a law, and they made something called

the Magnetsky Act. And so they put this idea of the Magnifski Act on the books. And it was originally just to go after the people who killed ser Gay Magnetsky, but as soon as other other people victims had heard of this story. The holmes in these two senators offices started lighting up with calls from Moscow and other parts of Russia, saying, you found me Achilles heel of the Putin regime. This is what they do. They commit terrible crimes in Russia and they keep their money in the West.

Can you possibly um sanctioned the people who killed my husband, my brother, my sister, my aunt. And after about a dozen of these calls, these two senators realized they are, but they weren't just something much bigger in just one case that and so they added sixty five words to the law to include all human rights abusers in Russia, not just the people who killed Magnifsky. And all of a sudden, all sorts of victims fanned out across Capitol

Hill telling their stories. I was trapped telling Surrogey's story. And in November of two thousand twelve, it went for a vote in the Senate and it passed ninety two to four. The Magnifici Act passed two to four, and asster representatives had passed with eight m and on December fourteen, two thousand twelve, President Obama signed the magnet Ski Acts into the federal law, and Vladimir Putin went out of his mind. He got so angry that in retaliation he

banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. And that that may sound bad, there's actually much worse than it sounds, because the orphans that the Russians put up for adoption were the unhealthy ones, the ones with with down syndrome, with fetal alcohol syndrome, with HIV, with all other cerebral things. And Americans would come with open hearts and open arms and take these six children back to

America and nurse them to help. And in Russia, the orphanages didn't have the resources, and these kids would die. And so basically Putin was sentencing his own orphans to

death as a way of retaliating the Magnifici Act. He then made it a single larger foreign policy priority to try to repeal the Magnidski Act, and and he even went so far as the sending his own representative, a female lawyer named the Natalia vessel Midskaya to Trump Cower after Trump was nominated before before he was elected president two thousand sixteen nine two thousand sixteen, with a specific request one just one simple request that if he becomes president,

he should repeal the Magnitski Act. Now happy to say that it didn't work, that no Magnitski Act has ever been repealed. In fact, it was not just not repealed, but it was broadened. The Magnetski Act in two thousand sixteen became the Global Magnanski Act, which doesn't just go after the people who do terrible things in Russia, but in China and Iran and Venezuela and all other countries. The Magniski Act now exists, not just in the United States.

We've got it passed in Canada in two thousands steven a team in the UK and two thousand eight team in the European Union in two thousand twenty, in Australia in two thousan. They're now thirty four countries that have the Getsky Acts around the world. And this is actually the tool, the template, which is being used to go after all the bad guys in Putain's regime that are involved in the war in Ukraine. So let's let's put some flesh on those bones a little bit and talk

about the dollar amounts involved. So so Surgey discovered a two hundred and thirty million dollar tax fraud. And then courtesy of investigative journalism like the Panama Papers and a number of other items, UM, just one bank alone, dank Ski Bank in sin the Navy was discovered to have laundered two hundred and thirty four billion, not million billion in in Russian money. What do you think the total amount of dirty, corrupt, stolen money out of Russia adds

up to that's been laundered through Western banks. Well so so yeah, so so. One of the big things that after the Magnitsky Act has passed was to figure out where where all the money was. And so we we that became like my primary life mission was to figure

it out. And I had a bunch of people working for me, and we collaborated with a lot of these journalists and UM, and we ended up getting a lot of information in different countries and and and what we discovered was that UM, in order to get the money out of Russia, they never atended directly from Russia to like buy an apartment in London or France, because the banks in London and France would be suspicious. And so what they did was they found these countries that were

members of the European Union. Um, but we're still sort of not up to par with the European Union as far as you know must and laws and and the The countries that were really sort of that category were these three countries of the Baltics, Stonia, Latvia and Lithuania

and Cyprus. And as we started digging and digging and pulling and threads and getting more data and leaks and and working with journalists, we discovered that million of the two million that that that was stolen had all gone to one bank, the Estonian branch of Danski bank a

Danish banks all gone through this one branch. And we had all this great data and these journalists that we were working that we knew in Denmark, we're really interested in the data we had because identified the names of the holding companies and the account numbers and all those kind of stuff. Because they had a huge database themselves

called the Russian Laundermat database. But they couldn't make sense of the database, but they they could if if they could take our our our analysis of the two million, So they get our analysis, they get are all of our analysis and they compare it to this big sort of unstructured database, they have this Russian launderman, and they come back and say, actually, it wasn't two hundred million, there's eight and a half billion that was laundered through

this bank. So they write this story and it was just like a blockbuster story, and it was a particular blockbuster story because Denmark is supposed to be like this honest country. If you look at the Transparency International Index, it's supposed to be the second most honest country in the world after New Zealand. And so here you've got this Danish bank, the major bank in Denmark, laundering eight

and a half billion of dirty Russian money. And at this point, the Dame, the Dame, the CEO of the bank, he can't just sit back and do nothing, and so he orders a like full external investigation of everything they went on in this bank, and they bring in accounting firms and law firms, data, a little analytics firms and so on, and they finished their analysis and they discover it wasn't just eight and a half billion, as you mentioned, it was two thirty two billion of money was laundered

to this bank. And so here I am, I'm looking at this thing, and I'm saying, okay, this is just one Danish bank that's laundered two hut two billions. If if we could lift the hood on Rifeisen Bank in Vienna, on Deutsche Bank, on ubs and credit swifts, I think that number. You could multiply that number by four easily and you'd still be on the low end. And so I estimate that a trillion dollars of money has been stolen out of Russia Bibe Prutin and the thousand people

around him and lauded into the West. A trillion dollars, a thousand billion dollars. So let's talk a little bit about that. You know, you know, we've we've taken to calling London London stand because it's been so blatant. You mentioned places like Miami and Santrope. How was this just allowed? Why why were Russians allowed to act with such impunity in the West. Well, the reason that Russians have been allowed to act with such impunity is because so many,

so many people are getting rich off of this. There's so many bankers. I think that like Danski Bank, Estonian branch had a return on equity so um, but so many people are getting so rich out of doing this that that there. And these are not just nobody's These

are like highly placed influential people. And in London, the Russians are are were sprinkling this money around like confetti like every you know, all lawyers were getting this money, and the bankers and account hunting firms and concierge's and real estate agents and and these are all people who had friends in high places. And as a result of this, and this is this has been a huge problem for

the world. Everybody was financially incentivized to look the other way when Putin was doing terrible things at every step of the way. Let's get a little more explicit with some of that. In in Freezing Order, you specifically name names and call certain people Putin's us enablers. You mentioned a couple of attorneys by name, John Moscow and Mark Simrock, former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, even Congressman Dana Roarbeck. What it has to be more than just money or

or am I making it too complicated? Is it just that simple? These folks are all for sale? Well, let me tell you the story of John Moscow, because it's one of the most shocking stories and such a great name. It's it's wild. Yeah, exactly, It's like it's straight out of Central Casting this guy. So I'm looking around as after Surrogey is murdered, I'm looking around for for somebody

to help me find the money. And I ask everybody I know who's the best like anti money laundering, the lawyer in the world, and like four people tell me, go to this guy, John Moscow, and I had to laugh, like John Moscow. So so I go to this guy John Moscow. He's a former New York d A who is responsible for prosecuting all these big money laundering cases

in New York. And he's the real deal. This guy is like, you know, he went into private practice after after his life as a prosecutor, and he knows his way around all the different tools of finding dirty money. And he gave us a whole bunch of We hired him, we could pay him a bunch of money, and he gave us all sorts of like good ideas and and help us draft all these subpoenas and all this interesting stuff.

And then one day he just like proofs, disappears into into the ether, stops returning my calls, and and effectively just stops working for us. Anyways, I thought that was pretty weird, But you know, I've encountered so much horribleness in my life, that's hardly the worst horribleness. And we found some other lawyers and took all of John Moscow's ideas and implemented them. And we found the money in

New York. And we found a bunch of money going to purchase luxury apartments in New York, twenty million dollars with the luxury apartments coming and which was trade, which was linked to to the to the fraud that ser Game Magnificy was killed over. So I take this to the New York authorities and they pass it up to the federal authorities and the US government. The Department of Justice issues a federal forfeiture over all these properties. And when you read the complaint, it's just like, you know,

just the most damning thing you've ever seen. And I couldn't imagine that that anyone would ever show up to try to defend it. I thought the Russians would just like slither into the slither away and then and just let their apartments get seized. But when as soon as the government files it, the next day, a lawyer appears on behalf of the Russian Uh could prince Um, who is the lawyer John Moscow? So the lawyer who's who? My lawyer? The guy I'm the victim? Um, we surrogates

the victim, I'm the victim. Were the victims? Um a lawyer for the victim, Um switched his side and becomes the lawyer for the alleged perpetrator. UM. So Uh, I mean, I'm not I didn't go to law school. I went to business school. But I know that you can't do that. Lawyers can't switch sides. I mean, that's what it's surd and uh. And I should point out that that that he didn't just do this by himself. He did this with this. He mentioned other lawyer named Mark sim Rot.

And it wasn't like they were just like to the bucket shop, the lawyers working out of a shopping mall. They were working for Baker Hosteller. This is one of the most prestigious law firms in America. They have like thousands of lawyers. They representing Microsoft and Ford Motor also's other prestigious companies. And this firm basically went from from uh working for for you know, the the agents of

the Russian government and uh and switching sides. And the first thing he did when he switched sides is he then issues the subpoena against me looking demanding all of my personal security details, all of my travel information, all the information about my colleagues and their families. I mean, just shocking the you know what, where is this information going to go? It's going to go to his Russian client, who was an agent of the Russian government to kill me.

And Uh, Baker Hosteller, let me just say that a couple more Baker Hosteller, major American law firm, just working, you know, effectively working as an arm of the Russian Intelligence Services UM in America. And you say, why are they doing it? They're doing it for money, plain and simple, for tens of millions of dollars. You you filed UM a number of motions to have them disqualified. You had kind of an old daughtering eighties something year old federal

judge who really didn't understand the case. How did you ultimately get them kicked off the case? Uh? I was fascinated by that in in freezing water that they had previously made some motions saying this has nothing to do with Browder. We didn't represent him that we this is a completely different entity. And then they kind of shot themselves in the foot tell us about that. So so, um, the first thing we did was when this happened, I said, well,

this is not right, this is not legal. We should we So we filed a motion to have them disqualified because it was a conflict of interest. And I mean, it just seems like plain as day. And if you were to survey, you know, a hundred legal professionals, a hundred of them would say this is a conflict of interest.

So we show up and I think it's just a no brainer, and it's a quick, quicken, simple procedure, and we'll get rid of him and and no longer be at risk of him, you know, uh, knowing all of my personal details and being able to share them with the Russian government. And so we file it and we we got the most unlucky draw you could ever get in the history of draws in the court, and we

get this judge. His name is Judge Thomas Grisse, and this Brisse at the time was eight three years old, and um, and he had a long ago lost his you know, he was just you know, old age does terrible things to people. And I know it for my own family and my own father when he got really old. My father was a genius mathematician, one of the top mathematicians in the world, and things, you know, weren't so

great when when he got into his mid eighties. And this guy, there's no mandatory retirement age for a federal judge, and we've got in front of this guy and he

and he didn't understand. He just didn't understand that there was a conflict of interest, and he was done only that he was sort of angry with me for sort of delaying the case by making this motion, and he granted the subpoena in full and basically, uh, you know, ordered me to hand over all of my information to the effectively to the Russian government, um, which would have

gotten me or people close to me killed. And and we went through hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal expenses fighting this thing off, and finally we we we sort of did a Hail Mary, and we appealed it. There's a special type of legal challenge you can do called the rid of mandamos, which almost never succeeds, where you basically saying that the judge has gone off

the reservation. And we filed and like these things never succeed, but we filed it, and and we went again, and we went to the appeals court and the judges of the appeals court said, this is the most unbelievable thing they've ever seen, and they disqualified John Moscow and Baker Hosteller Um and and interestingly the judge was sort of quietly put put out to pasture um and we got

rid of them, what or so we thought. And then we discovered after the whole case was over, when when when the case finally came to fruition, the Russians paid the US government six million dollars instead of going to trial. And then we discovered afterwards that even after John Moscow and Baker Hofsteller were disqualified, they continued to secretly work for the Russians. Now, if you're working for the Russians um a foreign entity, don't you have to register as

a lobbyists tell us a little bit about that. Well, So what was interesting was they weren't just doing this case. They were running all around Washington Baker Hosteller and they also hired a guy named Glenn Simpson who was the author of the Trump dossier so well, so the hired Glen Simpson to basically run a smear campaign against me and the Magnetski Act in Washington as we were lobbying for the Global Magniski Act to be passed in summer

of two thousands sixteen. And so you've got this guy Mark Simrott who was going around briefing members of Congress saying that Magnitsky was a crook, Bill Browder's a crook. Don't do the Magnifski Act, don't name it after Magnitsky, don't do it. Glenn Simpson was was was trying to

get journalists write these articles. He was feeding in misinformation and nonsense to different journalists and desperately trying to create this this appearance that Prudent was good and me and Surrogaate Magnitsky were bad and the Magnifski Act was something wrong and terrible and and when you do that, and so they came up with this thing a long time ago, during during the Second World War, when the Nazis were doing similar types of stuff, they came up with a

law called the Foreign Agent Registration Act in Washington, and the Foreign Regent Agent Registration Act says that if somebody is working for a foreign government or or entity connected to a foreign government, they have to declare do a public declaration with the Department of Justice to say that they're working for as a foreign agent for Russian or

for a foreign government. And so this is a clear example when Mark Simrod from Baker Hoste learned glem Simpson should have been doing that and why why is it important? Because then you understand that this is the Russian government's agenda, and then all sorts of people would say, Okay, well, actually I'm not so interested in getting involved in this thing. But they they didn't do that, and so they violated the Foreign Agent Registration Act by just basically running rough

shot over the whole thing. We made a complaint to the Department of Justice, um and unfortunately to this day there has not been a prosecution in this case. That's shocking, that's that's absolutely shocking. So so last question in this segment has to be given, all this money that's been laundered not just through danks Key Bank, but all these Western banks that you are estimating conservatively at a trillion dollars, what is Vladimir Putin's net worth. Is he the wealthiest

person in the world, No question. Vladim Reprutin is the wealthiest person in the world by by a huge amount. Um. I haven't done the calculations recently, but like you know, five six years ago, I think he was worth more than two dollars. That numbers has probably multiplied by now. He's an extremely rich man. And and his wealth, I believe is the source of all the problems that we're facing today. The fact that he's so rich. He's stolen

so much money from the people. He bought so many yachts and villas and all this kind of stuff, um. And that's all money that should have been spent on healthcare and education and all the stuff that people and RuSHA deserve, and it's been stolen by him and his cronies. And I believe, and I think that if you were to pull anybody who really understands Russia, Lexi the Balnat, the guy in jail, Michael Hohrdokovsky, the guy I was telling you about it has been ten years in jail,

or any of these other Russian dissidents. Gary cast brought the former chess champion, any and every one of them will tell you that that the reason why Putin has started this war in Ukraine is that he was worried about people in Russia rising up against him eventually because they were so angry at the corruption and all the money that's been stolen, and they needed to create a foreign enemy. And that's what this war is about. It's

not about the Greater Russian Empire or NATO. It's about Putin being a corrupt, sick, corrupt man who needed to create a major distraction so that the people in Russia didn't rise up against him. And and it succeeded that the war in Ukraine has has had led to an are enthusiastic approval rating of Ladyman Putin. So let's let's talk a little bit about this invasion of Ukraine, which you've described as really a wagged the dog, you know,

sort of situation. He Putin is trying to distract the Russian populace from the state of their economy and all the corruption that's taking place. To tell us your thoughts about what's going on now, so so that Putin has to um divert the anger that Russian people have for that that that you can't get a doctor to prescribe medicine. Your children aren't being educated, the potholes in the roads

aren't being filled. He has to distract from that anger because he knows that one day it's like you know, tinder in the forest, like all dry leaves, that it all takes one match set it on fire. And you know, he can put ten people in jail, he can put a hundred people in jail, he can put a thousand people in jail, but if a million people mark up march on Red Square, he's finished. And he's so scared

of that. And he's created such a pressure cooker type of situation by stealing all this money over such a long period of time that he knows that that's going to that that that that kind of thing is going to come for him at some point, and and that's why he started this war and and and so it's really important to understand this because as everybody is looking at this terrible war in Ukraine and all the tragedy and all the implications in the West, everybody is desperate

for this thing to end. And a lot of people, a lot of very learned people in Washington and other Berlin and London are all looking at this thing and saying, well, you know, if we give him this or we give him that, then maybe he'll stop. And first of all, appusement never works. But beyond that, that that that that shows that the fundamental misunderstanding, which is that that it's not about NATO, it's not about something wanting some piece of Ukraine. It's about wanting to be at war so

that he can stay in power. So the end game for him is being at war. And if that's the case, there's nothing we can offer him, even if we if even if we wanted to be appeasers, and and and a lot of people are saying this war is going badly for him, and it is going badly. We can see the military defeats and the number of dead Russian soldiers and all the terror, and that the fact that he succeed in getting to Kiev and all this kind

of stuff. But the one thing that's going really well for Prutent is that he doesn't have to worry about being overthrown in Russia. And that's a very happy place for him to be. That he can sit there confidently know that he's securely in power, and and and and and so as we're all sitting here thinking of that. He must be really upset and the oligarchics are upset. Well, no, he's pretty happy right now because at least he knows

he's not going to be overgrown. Build just unbelievable, incredible stuff. You you really are are doing, um God's work. It it's just the story you tell in Red Notice is just astonishing. It it reads like a spy thriller. UM. I'm very pleased that you managed to get so much legislation passed in the United States and and around the world. And and good luck with your campaign. UH, we're rooting

for you. We really it's really just an amazing set of UM achievements that you've you've completed under the most trying possible uh conditions, and and all of the global recognition and human rights awards that that you've UM garnered are are are well deserved. And and thank you for all the things you're doing. Thank you. If you enjoyed hearing this conversation, be sure and check out all of

our previous four hundred or so interviews. You can find those wherever you get your favorite podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, Google, a cast, wherever. We love your men's feedback in suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can sign up for my daily reading list at Ridholts dot com. Follow me on Twitter at Ridolts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. John

Wasserman is my audio engineer. Attica val Brunn is my project manager. Paris Wald is my producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters and Business on Bloomberg radioa