Bill Browder

Sergei Magnitsky. Serge was killed in a Russian prison in two thousand nine after he exposed a massive government corruption scheme and he testified against the officials involved, and in in retaliation, they had arrested him, put him in jail, tortured him for three or fifty eight days, and as I mentioned, they killed him on November six nine. I then went after the the Russian government and all of

their officials who were involved in his murder. And the result of my efforts was this piece of legislation, which was past four and Congress in the Senate and the House of Representatives and signed into law on December four, two thousand and twelve by President Obama. Okay, now, are there Magnetsky Acts in other countries around the world. Indeed, after the US past the Magnetsky Act, Vladimir Putin went out of his mind and he banned the adoption of

Russian orphans by American families. Um he made it his single largest foreign policy priority to repeal the Magnetskay Act. And it was clear that we had hit the Achilles heel of the Putin regime. So I then went out and tried to get it past in all other countries that I could. And so there's Magnetskay Act in Canada, there's one in Britain where I live. There's one in the European Union. Twenty seven members of the EU have Magnetsky Acts. When in Australia, one in Norway, one in Montenegro,

when in Kosovo. We even have it in the all the British off overseas and offshore territories like the British Virsion Islands and the Cayman Islands and Jersey and Gibraltar, which may sound insignificant, but that's where a lot of the a lot of the bad guys stash their loot.

As a practical matter, hottest Magnitsky Act work. Well, what happens is if somebody has done uh torture, murder like the what they've done to Serge magnitsky Um and the government, you can prove it to the government to a high standard of evidence, then they put that person on the Magnitsky List, and the Magniski Act will then freeze their assets,

banned their visas, and publicly name their names. And it's quite devastating because anybody who gets put on the Magnisky List effectively can't open a bank account anywhere in the world. If you're on the U. S. Sanctions list, nobody wants to mess with you, as government makes it almost impossible

for these people to get visas anymore. And in my mind, probably the best part about the whole thing is that all these regimes eventually crumble at one point or another, and all these people then can't go and flee to a civilized country when Russia gets taken over by the next guy, because all the civilized countries are gonna say, wait a second, you're on the Magniscy list, you're a

human rights biler. We don't want you. So how often is someone on the list where it's just the fact that it exists a disincentive to try to go to another country. Well, I think that that it's it's a disincentive the moment that they get put on the list to try to go to another country because they know

that they won't be welcomed. I mean, there's another interesting angle to the whole thing, which is that if somebody is put on the Magniscy list, there's probably a hundred other people who are terrified that they're going to be put on the Magniscy List. And so it creates almost like a reign of terror on all these bad guys in these dictatorships because they're all worried abou this is going to happen to them. Now, how much let's just call the illegal Russian assets are in the US? Can

that be quantified? Can that be reached in light of the war going on in Ukraine? Should the US government attach and seize those assets? Well, the answer is absolutely yes. Um, the US government is trying. It's um, it's a tough it's a tough tough thing for them to do because the Russians who have m accumulated all these assets, has

spent years, if not decades, preparing for this moment. So all these assets are held in the names of shell companies and trust companies and shell companies owning trust companies, and then trust companies looking after nominee arrangements and so on and and so forth. And so there's a whole layer and layer and layer of stuff that needs to be gone through. And so I think we're just getting started

in this whole process right now. But that' the objective is to is to freeze the assets and seize the assets of these oligarchs and people close to Laderma and Putin, and they have a lot of assets. These people are extremely rich. The kleptocracy was really revealed to the general person in ten with all the graft and other expenses with the socio Olympics. So what don't we know Putin took power, he has a dominimous salary, yet he's considered

to be the wealthiest person in the world. Explain how this works, how he and his cronies get the money, how he distributed to the understandings that it's his money, even though in name it may not be. So. The way it works is this. When you go into government in Russia, um, nobody does it to serve the public. If you if you're an American and you go into government, you want to do it to serve the people. In Russia, the only reason a person goes into government is to

steal money. Um And the more the higher you are in the government, the more money you can steal. And the person who gets to steal the most money is the most powerful person, which is the President of Russia. And so over a long period of time, Vladimir Putin has stolen an enormous amount of money. I estimate these

worth well north of two billion dollars personally. And if we had to quantify the amount of money that's been stolen in his twenty two years in power, he and all the people around him, the thousand or so other people who are involved in this thing, I would estimate they've stolen a trillion dollars a thousand billion dollars from

the Russian state, from the Russian people. That's money that should have gone to how build hospitals and schools and phil potholes in the road, but instead it's gone to uh pay for villas and yachts and Swiss bank accounts and private jets. And and that's really the sort of tragedy of the whole thing, is that it's the definitely lots of victims of this crime, which are the people

of Russia. Now we hear that these oligarchs who are named in the papers and other news media are really holding Putent money and trust it's really not their money, or most of it is not. Is that true? That's exactly right. And so the way it works is that there's no such thing as an independently wealthy person in Russia. Anybody who's wealthy is dependently wealthy, and they're dependent on

Vladimir Putin and so um there. Their their whole arrangement with him is that he allows them to keep some of the money that they have stolen from wherever as long as they give him a cut. And I I estimate that he's a fifty shareholder and all this stuff. So when you see an oligarch who's worth billion dollars on paper, the reality is that he's only worth ten

because the other ten belongs to Vladimir Putin. And and that's how the whole system works, is that these oligarchs, when you when you see them all out there and you want to go after Putin's money, you go after the oligarch's money. So drilled down a little bit deeper. Exactly how do they steal the money? Well, do we have about twelve hours, because I can tell you twelve hours worth of ways in which they steal the money. But let me give you a couple of good examples.

There's the example of what Sergei Magniski discovered and what he was killed over. My company paid two million dollars of taxes to the Russian government and we were then my offices were then rated by the police, who then seized all of our corporate documents and those documents were then used to fraudulently reregister my companies that have paid

the taxes. And then they went and applied for a illegal to thirty million dollar tax refund and it was approved by the tax authorities overnight and paid out the next day, and it was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia. UH. As one example, so you know complex scheme, and it's it's actually ten times more complicated than I've just explained it. Um. But that's one way. And then I mean I could give you so for example another one. UH they build a pipeline, an oil

pipeline from Russia to Turkey. Normally, if you go out to a contractor and say how much does it cost to build a pipeline? That contractor will say a million dollars per kilometer, and of course the contractor is probably even giving you a high price so they can make

a big margin. And then you look on the on the balance sheet of gas prom and they've spent ten million dollars per kilometer to build a pipeline, so they spent ten times the real the cost to the contractor um so nine million dollars per kilometer then goes as kickbacks to the people who organized the construction project for State Gas company. How do you get in on the action? The only way you can get in on the action

is to be part of the criminal enterprise. And so it's like, how do you become a member of the New York mafia. You know, you have to be a made man. There's some special ways that people have become made men there, but the main ways you you work in government, and generally you work in part the part of the government that's the has the power to arrest people,

to take people hostage. So you work in one of the security services, you work in the FSB, which is their secret police, or you work in the Interior ministry or which is the regular police, or you work in the prosecutor's office. And then what you do once you're in those places is you go around and arresting people until they hand over stuff to you, until they become

a sort of client. And and so there's many many people in jail who shouldn't be in jail and Russia who are they put there so that all these crimes could be committed without any questions being asked? So what is the head space of the average Russian citizen? Are they aware of this? Do they go along? We have Nivali who's resisting, But generally what's the mindset? The mindset is this happens at every level of Russian society. It happens down to the local mayor and the local policeman

right up to the President of Russia. Everybody accepts it. They know it happens, and they only think in wish that they could be so lucky as to be involved in this. And so it's a it's a weird cynical, almost defeatist attitude. And of course people at the same time are pretty piste off by it, because you know that somebody is getting something that they're not, and so that they they they wish they had it, but it's

not like they're morally outraged. There's outraged that they're not, you know, the recipients when somebody else is what is the average quality of life in Russia? We have gross incommittee quality. In the United States, there's somewhat of the social safety net. What's the situation in Russia. It's just dramatic, worse than than any any place in the world in

terms of incoming inequality. There's a thousand people that control like and I don't know the exact number, but like more than of all the assets in the country, and everybody else lives and lives in destitute poverty. It means a very very small middle class. And the average Russian is like, you know, living in a in a shack on an unpaved dirt road and they have to use an outhouse. I mean, it's just horrible. If we were to quiz these people were old enough to remember, would

they say things were better or worse under communism? I think the average Russian would say that things were better under communism because at least in that period of time, there wasn't this whole sort of criminal regime running the country. It was you know, the people who are running the country were dictators and oppressive and and not not agreeing

to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But but it wasn't a criminal organization where they were taking all the money and spending on on on santrope villas. So how did you personally decide to move to Russian invest in Russian companies? So that's an interesting story. My grandfather was the general secretary of the American Communist Party between ninety and and so my family sort of followed in his footsteps. And we're extremely before you go there,

where was he originally born? Was he American? Were there any roots here? So my grandfather was from Wichita, Kansas. He was a labor union organizer. In n seven, he was spotted by the Communists in the Soviet Union and they said, if you if you like labor unionism, you're gonna love communism when you come over here and check it out. So my grandfather moved to Moscow and he did what most other single, red blooded American men do when they get to Moscow. He found a Russian girl

who became my grandmother. They had three sons, My father was one of them, who was born in Moscow, and then he returned to America to Yonkers, New York, and he became head of the American Communist Party. He ran for president against Roosevelt in nineteen thirty six and nineteen forty on the Communist ticket. He was actually imprisoned by

Roosevelt in nine and then pardon in nineteen two. Eventually kicked out of the Communist Party in ninety five for being too much of a capitalist, and then persecuted viciously during the McCarthy era in the nineteen fifties. And so this was my family legacy. I was born in nineteen sixty four, fifty eight years old, and when I was going through my teenage rebellion, I tried to come up with a good way of rebelling from this family of communists,

and I tried several things out. I grew my hair along can't you can't tell because we're in a podcast, but actually don't have any hair anymore. But it grew into an afro um. But that, strangely, that didn't upset my family. I followed the grateful dead around for a couple of months. That didn't upset my family. Then I came up with a perfect way of upsetting my family, which was to put on a student tie and become a capitalist, and that really upset them very much. So

I became a capitalist. I went to Stanford Business School. I graduated business school in nine which is the year of the Berlin Wall came down. And as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, I had this epiphany one day, which is that of my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, and the Berlin Wall has just come down. I'm gonna try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And that's what

I set out to do. And I originally moved to London, and then I moved to Moscow and I set up an investment fund called the Hermitans. A little bit slower. You graduated from Stanford, Is this your first employment situation? What are the companies you work for before you become a dependent? So at first I went to the Boston Consulting Group. I was the My first job was in the East European practice of the Boston Consulting Group in London, and my very first assignment was to go out to Poland.

They sent me out to a bus company, a failing bus company on the Polish Ukrainian border in a little town called Sanak, And the only there was a very low paying assignment. The World Bank was paying the fees and they could only afford to send out a first year associate like myself. So I go out to this little town, um and this bus factory is just in

a horrific condition. The main problem was that the state company, state bus company that buys the buses from the factory, stopped their orders and they were responsible from their sales, and so all of a sudden they were down. And so it was kind of painful assignment because the main, uh, the obvious thing to do. If you've lost your sales, you've got to cut your costs, and that meant firing a lot of people in a town, which was effectively

in one company town. So it was very depressing assignment. But while I was walking around sort of making lists of people that probably should be fired, I had this translator. His name was Lesk, and I noticed, and he was always following me around and translating wherever I need to be, wherever I need a translation, And he had this newspaper under his arm, and I noticed that all these financial figures on his newspaper and I I asked him what are those and he said, ah, these are the very

first privatizations. I thought that that kind of piqued my interest, and I said, can you explain them to me? And so we went into a conference room and he laid out the paper on the table and I said, what's this number and he said, that's the number of shares outstanding of the company. And I said what's this number? He said, that's the the share price that the government's selling the shares. And I'm multiply the two numbers together and it got got to eighty million dollars, which is

the value of the company. And then I said, what's this number, the one right below that? Uh? And he said this is the net income of the company, the earnings. I said, no, no, no, that that that must not be right. He said, I said, just read it, read it word for word, and it's like net income of company. And that number was a hundred and sixty million dollars.

So you don't have to be a Stanford NBA or even a financial professional to understand that if you can buy a company for eighty million dollars and it earned a hundred and sixty million dollars in the previous year. Um. Then basically all you have to do is hold the shares for half a year and you've already got your money back. And so and this was this was not the bus company we're working at. It was another company. And so I said, well, how do we buy shares

of it? And he said, oh, it's very easy. We we we can go to the post office and and fill out an application form. And I thought, God, this is like crazy. I I mean, I was very young, I didn't have much money, but I had I think I had like two thousand dollars of savings total life savings. And I converted my two thousand dollars of life savings to Polish lotty. UM. I went down to the post office with Leschek and I subscribed to the very first privatizations and and over the next year I made ten

times my money. And there's this uh, weird chemical that gets released in your stomach when you make ten times your money on an investment. It's like crack cocaine. You want to you want to have, you want to do it again and again and again, And that was the moment I just I didn't. I didn't. I didn't want to be a consultant anymore. I wanted to be an investor in all this stuff. So what was the next step? Fast forward a little bit. UM. I ended up at

Solomon Brothers. Solomon Brothers um is used to be one of the big investment banks made made famous by liars poker. You have a Michael Lewis book exactly. So I joined the East European investment banking team at Solomon Brothers. And my very first assignment at Solomon Brothers was to advise a fishing fleet called the Mermants Trawler Fleet located in mermantsk which is a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. I think it's the furthest north population center in the world.

So I go up to murmansk Um to advise this management of this fishing fleet. And I get up there and the head of the fishing fleet meets me at the airport and he says, before we have our business meetings, so I just want to take you on a little tour so you can see what one of our trawlers looks like. So we go down to the docks, and

in front of me is this enormous vessel. It's like four or five feet long and on the and it's on all multiple decks, and on the top deck there's this uh nets to catch the fish, and then the next level there's they separate the fish. Then the next level they treat the fish, and all the way down to the to the lowest level where they have these canning machines which they put the fish into cans. And so this wasn't just a fishing vessel. This was like

an ocean going factory, ocean going fish factory. And I am I asked the guy, the management, the manager, the CEO of this of this fleet. I said, how much is one of these things cost? And he says twenty million dollars new? And then I say, how many do you have in your fleet? A hundred, So twenty million dollars times a hundred, because he has two billion dollars. And I said, what's the average age of your ships?

He is his seven years. Now. I don't know anything about ships for fishing, but I figured that makes them maybe half depreciate it. So billion dollars with the ships, and the reason that this guy had hired me was to um advise him, revise him and his management team on whether to exercise their legitimate right under the privatization program of Russia to buy of the shares of this company. And so I asked him, at what price is the government selling you? And he said two and a half

million dollars. So let me just repeat the math. So there's a billion dollars with the ships, and you can buy for two and a half million dollars. So I got that feeling in my stomach, you know, the one I had from the ten bagger in Poland. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't want to be advising on this stuff. I want I want to uh, I want

to own this stuff. And so instead of going back to London, which was where I lived, I am flew to Moscow and I got a I bought a very thin English language yellow page directory that they sell at the airport, and I went to my hotel room at the Metropol Hotel and I started cold calling people in the yellow pages to see whether someone could explain to

me how the Russian privatization program worked. And so I started having these meetings and over the course of a week, I had forty or so meetings, and from those four or so meetings, I figured out that the Russian privatization program was and always will be the single most compelling investment opportunity that's ever existed in the history of financial markets.

And what I had learned was that the main way in which the Russian government was privatizing everything was through something called the mass privatization program, and the mass privatization program they gave away a physical certificate, a voucher they called them, to every person in the country. So they spread these vouchers out for free to everybody in the country. And these vouchers were tradeable, sellable, givable, takeable, whatever you

wanted to do with your voucher. You could do whatever you want, there's no restriction. And as a result, a secondary market emerged for these vouchers. And again, to do a simple math, they traded for about twenty dollars each dred and fifty million of them in circulation because that was the population of Russia. So multiply twenty times a d fifty million, that gets to three billion dollars worth

of vouchers that were in circulation. And those three billion dollars with vouchers were exchangeable for the shares of every single Russian company. So what that meant was that the total value of the entire country of Russia was ten billion dollars. Now that's for the whole country. This is a country with thirty five of the world's natural gas, ten percent of the world's oil, ten percent of the

world steel, ten percent of the world's aluminum. There's fertilizer companies, car companies, and telephone companies, you name it, they had it. I means it's a full economy all For ten billion dollars. You couldn't buy it like one midsized Oklahoma oil company. For ten billion dollars, you could buy the entire country of Russia. And so I just got crazy with with excitement. This was just the best thing I had ever seen. I go back to Solomon Brothers and I try to

convince them that we should invest in Russia. And it took a while before I was able to overcome all the doubt, but I eventually got twenty five million dollars put that money to work, and about six months after I invested that million dollars, the Economist magazine wrote an article called Sale of the century where they just went

through the same math that I've shared with you. And on the back of that article, a whole bunch of people, big investors, billionaires, hedge fund managers, etcetera, all wanted to

get in on the action. And it was a tiny, little, thinly traded, a liquid stock market, and all of a sudden, all these big eighteen pound guerrillas um start filtering in in a tiny through a tiny little door, and over a three week period, the stock market went up and our million dollars turned into five million dollars, and all

of a sudden everyone wanted to know me. They started taking me around to all the big investors on Wall Street, and one of them, a man named Edmund saffra Uh, said he would give me tillion dollars to start my own fund. And so I moved to Moscow. And this is no set up. A company called Hermitage Capital Management started a fund called the Hermitage Fund with dollars from

saffra and it was just an incredible launch. Over the next eighteen months we were up eight Okay, you were an individual, and now after this Economist article, everybody is in. Was everybody doing that well or was something you knew that nobody else did. And what accounts for that huge increase. Well, what happened was that all the other investors were sitting in New York, in London and Geneva and other places,

and I was on the ground in Moscow. And there's an expression in the Land of the Blind, the one eyed man as king, and and so it's one of these weird things where like you could get the most unbelievable information just by showing up. So all the guys in in New York, we're having to rely on other people to tell them what was going on, And so they would tell them about one oil company called Luke

Oil that's a famous Russian oil company. And they did a lot of research on Luke Oil because there was a lot of shares trading, and they get big commissions the brokers. And I'm thinking, okay, yeah, that's interesting, But what about this other oil company. It's almost as big as Luke Oil, and it trades it about a discount of Luke Oil because nobody has bothered to show up and ask a few questions at the company, which I did.

So I'd buy shares of the of the one that was much cheaper and and so I ended up doing phenomenally well for a period of time. Did you speak Russian not a word? Did you go into a brilitche program or you just said I'm never gonna know it. I tried to learn it, but the things we're moving so fast in the business world that I just, you know, I couldn't take two hours out of my day to do it. I mean, I just I didn't even have a minute to to rest or, to think or do anything.

I was It was like riding a dirt bike. You just had to keep your hands on the handlebar the whole time or else you get thrown off. So I didn't speak Russian. I had some good Russians working for me. I ended up marrying a Russian who spoke perfect English, and so somehow I was able to manage without speaking the language amazingly. Okay, how many Bill Browders were there in that era? Just one Bill Browder? Me? Really, no one else followed your half? Well, how do there were?

There are a few guys who are trying to but nobody ever could pull it off. It was I mean, yeah, I mean, there was like there was one, you know, one couple of guys that were like, you know, sort of nipping at my heels and stuff like that. But but for the most part, I was like sort of you know, there was it was an incredible, um you know, incredible to be the sort of king of this little sandbox. Now. Needlet's say you went to business school and you're sophisticated,

but everybody is. And if you take this twenty five million dollars and you invested, it is not your money, Mr Saffros, how much of that do you get? Well, what happens is if it goes up, I got and so um as things started going up, I started making a lot of money. And did you keep that money? In Russia? It's like, you know, when your company is going up in silicon value, most people take some money off the table just in case it crashes, or did

you keep all your money in the game. What what happened was eventually started to piss off the Russian government by complaining about corruption because all the companies. I discovered that all the companies I was invested in were corrupt, and and I would do these naming and shaming campaigns where I had researched the corruption and then expose it, which were very successful. These campaigns. But eventually they got angry with me and they expelled me from the country.

And when they expelled me from the country, I sold everything. And when I sold everything, I crystallized my profits. And so there's an expression better lucky than smart um. But they kicked me out like ten percent below the top of the market, and I was able to crystallize the profits from my clients and take my own money off the table. And so it was an extraordinary um sort of turn of events, which I don't think anyone intended it to be the way it was, but worked out

financially very well for me. Now this late date, Hermitage Capital still exists. What does it invest in? Hermage Capital doesn't invest in anything. I gave up investing a long time ago after Sergaymagnitsky was killed. I still have a website and a business card and a and a company formation that's called Hermitage Capital. But basically what I do day in, day out now is is a fight for justice for my murdered lawyer, s Gaymagnitsky. Okay, but you

do have employees, what are they doing? They're helping me find out who's committed what crimes, where help me do the research into the money laundering connected to the Magnitsky murder. It's like a It's like a sort of h Batman type of operation where we have ah an operation to go after the bad guys. And who is managing your money and how actively today? I've managed my money as sort of an afterthought and not very actively at all. Okay, let's go back, and as I say, Americans tend to

be unsophisticated, even about their own country. So tell us what is happening in Russian history and Russian government concomitant ly with your enterprise when you moved there, et cetera. When I moved to Russia in it was total chaos. It was Yelson was the president of Russia. Um he had done a deal with the oligarchs where basically he allowed them to steal forty pc of the country. There's twenty two of these guys in exchange, they would use all of their resources to support him and make sure

he stayed in power. As a results of this massive theft and compromise that Yelson made, the life expectancy of a male in Russia was like fifty seven years. Just a terrible place to live. Everything didn't work. It was just horrific and humiliating and horrible. And then at the as Jelson was looking particularly frail and and like he was going to die of a heart attack or some other thing, he decided to put in his successor, and his successor ultimately was Vladimir Putin. Let's stop there for

a second. Some people say that Yelsen was impressed with how Putin got another criminal. I think it was a mayor out of the country, and he put Putin in with the understanding that he would make sure he wasn't prosecuted. Is that true? To what degree is that known by the public. Untrue, That's very true. It's the crux of the whole situation. Well, let me back up. Yelson needed to have somebody who would pardon him as the first act of being the new president of Russia. Um, why

did Yelson need that? Because he had done so many compromises and the illegal things that he was worried about being indicted so and he was also knowing for sure that he couldn't last being president that much longer. So his goal was to find somebody who was strong enough to be to become president, stay as president, not lose it so that the pardon with stick, and he actually

went through three other candidates who became prime minister. They had three different prime ministers who, for one reason or another he chose badly didn't work out, and so he

would fire one and replace them with another. And so Putin was actually Yelson's fourth choice, so and and and it was almost like you know, when you're kind of like running out of options, and and what everybody thought Putin would be good for was that he was very sober um, sort of kept his cards close to the chest, but it seemed like a technocrat, and it was extremely loyal. And you mentioned his story about how his boss who was the mayor, he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg.

Putin was and his boss kind named Subcheck was the mayor and there was some corruption scandal and he got Subcheck out of the country um and put him in a like hospital in Paris or something like that where they couldn't get get hold of him. And so that was a good sign for Yelson. And so when he finally picked his fourth choice Putin, he did so on that basis and and uh, probably a few other criteria as well. Now being in the country. Obviously it's corrupt.

Could you feel a difference with the transition of power? Now, supposedly they jinned up a war crisis to help the transition, But what was like for you and the people during this transition? So the transition, well, it wasn't clear how this transition was going to work because the big problem with Putin so he seemed you know, not and not, he wasn't drunk and all that kind of stuff. But the problem, um is that nobody had ever heard of this guy. He was a total enigma. And um that

Putin had to be elected president. So what happened was they appointed him Prime Minister. Yelson resigns as president. Putin becomes acting president, but he has to be in three months time, there's gonna be an election and he has to be elected president. And this was back in the days when democracy still existed in Russia. So what did

Putin do? Putin, Um, he had this organization under him called the FSB, which used to be called the KGB, the secret police, and the secret police started planting apartment bombs inside Moscow and then blowing up apartment buildings with people inside of them. And I was there at the time, and so one building would blow up, and and everybody

in the entire city of Moscow would be horrified. And you see these pictures and the mangled bodies and the destroyed buildings, And then the next couple of days, another building would blow up, more mangled bodies, and and like, there wasn't a single person in Moscow, including myself, that could sleep peacefully through the night because you're all thinking. Everyone thought they were going to be in an apartment

that blows up. And eventually um Putin and his guys planted a bomb in in a in a provincial city outside of Moscow. Uh, but the local police, who weren't in on the scam, caught them in on the act, and uh, and it became obvious that this was not uh, so it was Putin doing the bombs. But Putin blamed the whole thing on Chechens. Chechen. The Chechens are a

group of people that live in southern Russia. They look darker than the average Russian and they were kind of blamed for all Russia's problems, and so Putin blamed it on the Chechens. And and everybody was so angry and upset and insecure because of all this U all these apartment bombs going off and thinking they'd be in them. Everyone wanted revenge and blood and reaction and something somebody tough, and so Putin then says, it's the Chechens who did this.

I'm gonna bomb them wherever they are, even in the ship house. He said. That was a famous quote from Putin, and all the Russians cheered. Putin started the war against Czechnia and literally flattened Grozni, which is their capital, to the ground. There wasn't like a building left standing, killing tens of thousands of Chechens. And guess what his approval ratings went through the roof. And so Putin learned at that moment in time how valuable wars were in solidifying

his support. And that's not a lesson that was lost on him, because he's fought a few more wars at times when he was feeling insecure. Okay, you're using your American values in Russia, you're fighting corruption. Do you ever think I'm a fish out of water here? This is gonna end, There's gonna be trouble or were you so caught up in your capitalistic ways that you felt no, no, this is numbers. This is gonna work. Well, it's a

bit of a lot of things. So in order to go to Russia, a normal person wouldn't have gone to Russia. A normal person would have said, this is crazy. They're killing people in the streets, They're doing all sorts of stuff. So in order to go to Russia, you kind of have to have your risk sensors sanded down. In the first place. You can't be thinking all these bad things are gonna happen to you, because there's too many bad things that you can think about that might happen to you.

And so let's say that my risk sensors were sanded down. And then when I got there, I started small and started making money for my clients. For myself, I started making more money, and after a while I had a big business there, and so I had a lot to lose if I ever were to like leave. And then the first rip offs started to happen. And the first big rip off was was a guy named Vladimir Batannan. He's a famous oligarch. Tried to steal my shares in

an oil company called Sedanco A little bit slower. What year resist and how did he try to steal them? So this was in nineteen I think I owned two percent of Sedanko, and Sedanco was an oil company that was um trading at a huge discount to the other big oil companies, and I brought into it, and this guy, Vladimer Britanon owned and I can't remember the exact numbers,

but but I am. I think I paid twelve million dollars for my two percent, and about a year later, Vladimir Britannon sold ten percent of his to British Petroleum at a price that would have valued my hat like a twenty million. So I had made like ten times my money, and I was feeling just like the best guy in the world. I mean that was I was. I would think I was barely even thirty years old, and I just made this enormous fortune for my clients. Remember I got of that myself, and so I'm feeling

just the king of the world. And then Batanon comes along, and this is a really interesting Russian phenomenon where he wasn't celebrating the fact that he owned forty times more shares of Sedanco and he was immensely rich based on this BP transaction. Somehow it bothered him. It really bothered him. That that I made money on this deal, Like, why

was I allowed to make the money? Somehow, he felt like that was just wrong, and so he organized a machination where he would sell himself in his cronies more shares of the company at a huge discount to the normal price and not allow me to invest, which meant meant basically that they were going to steal. I think they were gonna try to steal the equivalent of seventy million dollars from me in terms of this machination. And so at this point I had a lot to lose,

and so uh, I decided to fight him. And nobody had ever fought an oligarch before in Russia. It's certainly not some guy from the south side of Chicago. And so I fight him. And the way that I fought with him was first, first I went to him, it's just asked him to stop it. Of course he laughed at me. I didn't go to him personally. I went to one of his representatives. Uh. Then I went to all the other Western investors who had done business with him and showed them what they did, what he had done.

Then I went to the newspapers and went public with the whole thing. And then I eventually went to an obscure government official was involved in securities regulation and immense amazingly and this has rarely ever happened in Russia before or after this regulator canceled this this financial uh uh scam that he was organizing, and I was brought back to normal. And and my success in this for crisis, this first approach and first stealing thing, um gave me

such confidence that I decided to do it again. And I did it at the national gas company gas BROM and then I did it again at the National Savings Bank Spare Bank, and and then at one of the oil company is called Circo deft to Gas. And I was just doing this over and over and over again and and and the thing about it is sort of it's all incremental. You start these fights and then you do another one, and and so you ask like, why was I doing it? Wasn't it was it wasn't crazy.

And I had just gotten such a sense of confidence and somehow I could get away with it that I just kept on doing it. And of course anyone who google's my name will know that that didn't turn out so well. So what was the triggered exile. Well, that's a good question, one that there's no definitive answer. It was either going after gas Prom, which is the largest company in Russia, or going after this company called Sir good neft to gas which is a very murky and

criminalized oil company. Either way. Um, In November of two thousand five, as I was flying back to Russia from a business trip abroad from London, I was stopped at the border. I was arrested, I was put in the airport detention center. I was kept there for fifteen hours, and then I was deported back to London and declared

a threat to national security. Okay, if you read the second book, especially Freezing Order, which is relatively new book came out two months ago, the case is made that Putin literally knows who you are, and it's after you as an individual. You know that doesn't happen in America to that degree. What's going on? Hey? Is that true? Would be? What's the backstory? It's true? Um? And UM?

I can prove it by by showing you a clip of the Putin Trump summit in Helsinki where you can hear Putin uttering my name and asking Trump to hand me over and in response, you can hear Trump saying,

I think that's a great idea. But the backstory to that is that after I was expelled ah from Russia, UM, my offices were rated and the police seized all of my documents corporate documents for investment holding companies, and those documents UM were then used to fraudulently reregister our investment holding companies out of our name into the name of a guy who had been convicted of manslaughter and let

out of jail. Early at this point I hired the smartest lawyer I knew in Russia, a young man named Sergey Magnitsky. I asked Sergey to investigate. Serge went and investigated, and he came back and he said, the reason that they stole your companies was to steal twoty million dollars of taxes that you paid to the Russian government in the previous year. They came up with a very complicated

machination to do that. And when we discovered this, Serge was particularly shocked because he thought that Putin was a nationalist and that he wouldn't have allowed nearly a quarter of a billion dollars of government money to be stolen, and he figured, if we just wrote complaints to the highest level of the Russian government, then the good guys will get the bad guys and that would be the end of the story. And so Serge wrote criminal complaints

to every different branch of Russian law enforcement. I went to the TV radio newspapers highlighted the story, and then Surge gave swegn testimony to the Russian State Investigative Committee, which is their version of the FBI. And then we sat back and we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. Well, it turns out, then Vladimir

Putin's Russia, there's no good guys about uh. Five weeks after Surge testified, the same police officers he testified against came to his home on November two eight and they arrested him. They put him in pre trial detention and then they tortured him to get him to withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with fourteen inmates and eight beds, left lights on twenty four hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat

and no window panes. In December and Moscow, so he newly froze to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. They moved him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night. And the purpose of all this was to get him to withdraw his testimony against the corrupt police officers and again him to sign his false confession, to say that he's told the two thirty million dollars. And he did so

on my instruction. And Sergey was a man of such incredible integrity and principle that for him the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness it was more awful than the physical pain they were subjecting him to. And he refused, and in retaliation they then up to the torture and went after him even further. And after about six months of this, his health started to digterior. He

got terrible pains in his stomach. He lost forty pounds, and he was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones and needing an operation, which was scheduled for the first of August two thousand nine. A week before the operation, they

came to him again again uh asked him again. He refused to do the false confession, and in response, they moved him to a maximum security prison called Boutyrka, which is considered to be one of the most horrible prisons in Russia, and most significantly for Sergey, there was no medical facilities there. At Boucherka's health completely broke down. He

went into constant, agonizing, ear piercing pain. He and his lawyers wrote twenty different desperate requests for medical attention to every different branch of the criminal justice system, and every one of those letters was either ignored or denied in writing, and on the night of November six thousand nine, Sergey Magnisky went into critical condition. On that night, the Butcherka

authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore. They put him in an ambulance sent him to a different prison across town that had a medical wing. When he arrived there, instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell. They changed him to a bed, and eight riot guards with rubber baton's beat him until he died. He was thirty seven years old. He left a wife and two children. Since that moment, I've been on a mission to go after the people

who killed him. To make sure they faced justice. And for the last twelve years, that's what I've been doing. And it's that mission of getting justice for Surgey, which is what's caused Putin to get so mad at me. Okay, let's stay with Putin, Let's pull the lens back. Is Putent the strong man anomaly? Or is he a harben jur for what's going to happen in the rest of the world. I don't think anyone could be as horrible

as Vladimir Putin's. He sits in a class by himself of depravity, of evil, of of he's really as he's a psycho psycho killer. And you have a lot of people that are authoritarians in different parts of the world, a lot of people that ignore a rule of law, but nobody is as sort of sadistic and unbelievably mass

murdering as Putin is right now. Um, And so I would I would like to think that he's special and that we don't have a lot of other Vladimir Putin's percolating and and get gathering their strength to do what he's doing. I think that he's he's unique. What do you believe his motivation for the invasion of Ukraine was well. A lot of learned political scientists and others have all sorts of fancy h and analysis which which where they suggest that he wants to recreate the Russian Empire or

the Soviet Union. UH. Some people say that Putin was humiliated by the by the fact that we added other countries to NATO. UM. There's some people that are saying that he's mad because Ukraine want to join the European Union. I actually don't believe any of those theories. I think the main theory of why he's done what he's done is that he's stolen a trillion dollars he and the

people around him in the last twenty two years. And Russia's supposed to be a democracy, and at some point people start getting angry that they have bad lives and a few, very small number of people have really good lives, and that's all taken from the from the other, from the population, and so I believe that this is a

war of distraction. I think the war is purely to be at war so he can get all the people rebbed up into a flurry of of UH nationalism and patriotic fervor, and by the way, you know, whatever disasters are going on in Ukraine right now for the Russian military, the one big success for Putin is that his approval rating skyrocketed. To what degree do you believe those rating

skyrocketed because of a crackdown on contrary news. I think that the crackdown on contrary news actually came after the skyrocketing, not before. I think that Scott rocketed literally the day he went in. And of course he's always delivering misinformation and fake news and all this kind of stuff. But but I believe that that this is kind of a genuine feeling. Of course, you're right and your question that you imply that if people knew the truth, they wouldn't

be so supportive, and I think that's true. But there's something weird going on there where where people almost stopped stop ignoring, start they start to ignore the facts, stop paying attention to what's true, and they kind of just become, uh, you know, sort of their guy is Putin and the enemy is the other guy. It almost doesn't matter what their guy did anymore. Okay, But on the other side, you have Navalni, you have his YouTube videos. Is he

just appealing to a minority or a growing minority. Alexei Navolney started out by appealing to just the young group of YouTube users and instagrammers and and Twitter followers and so on. But and he did so by by exposing corruption of Putin and his cronies, which was very interesting and very attractive. But it's it's one of these interesting

things that that Navalny has risen well beyond that. And and the way he rose well beyond that was by getting by by basically being victimized when Putin tried to kill him with with Nova Chalk in Siberia. All of a sudden, the whole world and all people in Russia were paying attention and the fact that he survived, and everyone loves an underdog, and so he survived the killing attempt.

He's an a coma for a month, he comes out of a coma, he rehabilitates himself back to life, and then he returns to Russia, even though they told him he would be arrested if he returned to Russia, and that elevated him to a presidential level. That the fact that a guy would risk his life and his freedom for his country put him on par with Putin. And

so there's a chance. I wouldn't put it too high a chance, but there's a chance that if Putin missteps badly enough and the whole thing goes up in flames and everyone is looking for who should lead Russia next, Alexie volney Is is the perfect person who has the profile, who could do it. He's like the Russian version of Nelson Mandela. Forget the war. If the war wasn't happening, would Putin's government ultimately implode or would ultimately pass the

baton to someone else in the cleptocracy would continue? Well, of course, the main objective of everybody who is part of the cleptocracy the status quo, to keep it going. And that's their game plan. If Putin were to die of a stroke tonight, uh, they'd want to get the head of the KGB or the head of the g r U or some other sort of strong man to step in and do the same thing. That's there perfect plan. But the trouble with with a place like Russia, it's a big country, there's a lot of people, a lot

of different things can happen. It's very difficult to control. And that's one of the reasons that that Putin has been so successful as he's figured out the levers of control. When it is a successful I means successful and staying in power, And so nobody really knows what's going to happen. There's some chance that it could be a you know, a widespread popular uprising and then navalny comes in. There's some chance that it could be a palace coup um

and some new KGB guy comes in. Um. The most likely thing I think is more of the same, as that Vladimir Putin doesn't leave power and that he sticks around for a very long time. Let's go back to the war. How does the war end? If it ends, well, there's three ways the work and end well, I mean, I know there's two ways to work and end and one much more probable outcome, so that they're either Ukraine wins the war and that you know, if we had talked about this eight weeks ago, nine weeks ago, um,

nobody everyone would have laughed at that idea. But I think there's a not insignificant chance that Ukraine could win this war. How do they win the war? Because they have now very good equipment coming from the West, Stinger Javelin missiles, they've got drones, Turkish drones. Um, they've got surface to air missiles, they've got all sorts of interesting stuff to help them win the war, and and they're

doing pretty well. They're killing a lot of Russian soldiers, and they're driving Russia back from a lot of places that Russia thought they had absolutely nailed down. If for some reason, Ukraine succeeds and wins the war, that's the one scenario where I think Putin wouldn't last. The Russians, I don't think, have a great deal of sympathy for human rights victims and in all the terrible things that we respond to so so emotionally. But the Russians really

don't like a loser. They don't like a weak loser. And if Putin were to lose this war, one that he should absolutely should have won in his mind and the mind of the Russian people, they would get rid of him. The problem is that even though this this scenario um as a chance, it's not a huge chance.

It's like the other way this war could end is something really horrible and unthinkable, which is that Putin wins in Ukraine and then he moves on to Moldova or more likely Estonia, lat Via, Poland, and he goes to these countries and he points his guns at the countries, and he points a couple of nukes at Washington and Lynn in London and he says, Okay, do you really

want to have a war with me? And and then all of a sudden, the pundits on MSNBC and Fox News are all saying, wait a second, why would we risk losing twenty million people for the sake of a country that most people can't locate on a map. And and even worse, um uh, why why do we even

care about this whole NATO thing? And if Putin were to achieve that feeling, then he ends up getting some huge peace treaty with a whole bunch of countries that never were part of the you know that that have been free for the last thirty years, and all of a sudden they come under Russia's orbit. That's the that's his sort of good case scenario. I put a fift chance on that one. So that's that's rough to so far, the most likely thing. The scenario. It's just more of

the same. You know, the Russians don't back down, and the Ukrainians don't back down, and they just keep at it. But theoretically, could Putin say oh I took part of Ukraine and declare victory and in the war. Theoretically yes, but probably no, because the remember Putin is at war because he wants his approval ratings to be high. If he does peace, his approval ratings go back down. I think that the whole purpose of this war is for

him to stay in power. So in terms of the death rate the economic cost, you believe that the public is so behind Putin that those are ultimately irrelevant. I think I think that's that's the case. What do Tucker Carlson and the other people on the right not understand that they're either supportive of Putin or they say it's not our battle to fight. Well, I have no idea what's in the head of Tucker Carlson. Um. I think that sometimes people say stuff, outrageous stuff, just so they

get noticed. And I have no idea why Tucker Carlson would say these things. And um uh, you know, it's it's very offensive to hear him saying it. But but there's absolutely no basis for any anybody in America who knows the facts to support Vladimir Putin. So needless to say, misinformation, disinformation. It's hard to get the truth and people facts are fungible. Could this happen in America? Could we have a strong man in America? How closer far we away from this?

We had a strong man from two thousands sixteen to two thousand twenty in the form of Donald Trump, and he tried to do a whole bunch of stuff. But in America, the institutions held. And that's the difference between American and Russia's. We have institutions, we have courts that still function, we have a free press, we have a democratic process. And when when that stuff was challenged, it

didn't it didn't break. However, in the ensuing four years and the loss of Donald Trump at the Supreme court level, the judge level, the right side agitation, it's unclear whether those institutions would hold in the future. That's true. But at the same time, there wasn't a single journalist arrested for challenging Trump. Nobody, no political opponents were killed, Um, nobody was poisoned. Uh. You know, and you know, there's a long way to go before we have a world

like the one that I know in Russia. Is there a tipping point? Where are people boiled in hot water like a lobster or frog? I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question. UM. I think that it's uh. We've seen the frog scenario play. It's out out in Russia. I mean it didn't start this way. It got worse and worse and worse. The same thing in Hong Kong.

You know, the Chinese slowly turned up the temperature. And so hard to say what's going to happen in America? Now you live in London, which was certainly the European financial at center, and Brexit happened. Many people believe online misinformation, disinformation from Russia swung that election. Do you believe that hogwash too or possible? Well? So what I what I know for a fact is that Vladimir Putin, UM, he didn't want this. Um. He doesn't like the European Union.

He doesn't like the European Union because he likes to pick off one country versus another. And so when he saw the British arguing UH to get rid of the European to get out of the European Union, he loved that and he loved that, and surely he participated using trolls and bots and all that kind of stuff to make this thing happened. Did was that enough to tip the balance or was it just on the margin. I

don't know the answer. A number of people have called for a Mueller type of investigation here, not that Mueller actually succeeded in doing anything in America. Um, but that never happened. And so to this day we have no no definitive facts about whether, ah, whether it was the Russians maturely affected the outcome of this, of this referendum.

And what I can say, and I know this very clearly living here, is that there are some people that are very passionate about wanting to leave that had nothing to do with Russia. They just didn't like the European Union. Okay, this is you know, there are all sorts of issue just today with Northern Ireland and visas also related to the Ukraine crisis. Does the UK ultimately find its feet and clear sailing or is this the beginning of the large decline? Well, I'm I don't write off any of

our great democracies. Um. I mean, there's all sorts of problems in in the UK, there's problems in the United States, problems in France, problems in all sorts of places. But um, I'm so far away from writing off the idea that we have. Um, you know that that are that are systems are all gonna break down and implode. I think that there's there's ugliness, but at the same time, UM,

a lot of stuff that still works pretty well. Now, there are many commentators say that economically, despite the posing of Putin, it is a very small country that ultimately has problems paying bills. Now we have the sanctions. Will these economic pressures affect Russia and possibly lead to the downfall of Putin? Or is the fact that he has such a grip on the government it could never happen. Well,

it becomes a much more brittle situation. And the way he's managed in so I believe that that you know, he's a specialist in avoiding coups, he's a specialist in in repressing his society and more likely than not his

skills that staying in power will succeed. Having said that, the situation that he's created with this invasion, with the sanctions, with the economic collapse, it's like being in a in a forest after a really hot summer, and there's all sorts of dry leaves on the ground, and at any point, you know, if if a match hits the right place, the whole forest could go up in flames. And I think that that's the situation he's facing right now, and he's hoping that doesn't happen and taking all sorts of

precautions trying to prevent it from happening. But at the end of the day, it's hard to predict. And he's created, you know, a lot of a lot of fuel to burn um with all this unhappiness and hardship that he's that's coming from all that his his terrible behavior. They just mentioned the economy and the rest of the world. We think we know what's going on. The Thirteen Times

owns that this and that. What does the rest of the world not understand about Russia and putin Well, the main thing that people don't understand is that he is a criminal. This is not the actions of a of a leader of a sovereign state. Too many people treat him like he's got some kind of national interests, that he's he that he somehow is doing this for some pride or legacy. He has no interest in pride or legacy. All he is trying to do is keep his money,

stay out of jail, and stay alive. And the best way to do that is by distracting people. And the best way of distracting people is by being in war. Not just starting a war, but being in a war. You've listening to Bill Browder, author of Red Notice and Freezing Order. I highly recommend those books. They're riveting in their own right, never mind being so timely in light of what's going on in Russia and Ukraine. Girl, I want to thank you for taking the time speak to

my audience today. Thank you until next time. This is Bob Leftstads