Bill Browder: The Russians are out to kill me…

Evening Standard

London, A year ago last week, millionaire hedge fund boss Bill Browder received a chilling call at his north-west London home that would change his life for ever. The call was from Russia and it was to say that Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who had been held on trumped-up charges and tortured in a Moscow prison, was dead.

“It was the worst moment of my life,” recalls Browder. “I walked round my bedroom in a daze, full of dread. I’m the head of a $1 billion hedge fund, I always know what to do, but for the first time in my life I felt lost. Sergei was 37. He had a wife and two sons and everything to live for. Yet he had been tortured and died —all because of his refusal to falsely testify against me.

“Every day I wish Sergei had done a deal to save his life — any deal, because it would have made no difference to me now that I live in London,” says Browder. “But he was a man of such integrity. And rather than lie, he gave his life to protect my name.”

Magnitsky, a Russian anti-corruption lawyer, believed he had discovered that Russian police had stolen Browder’s shell companies and used them to embezzle $230 million of public funds in the largest tax-refund fraud in Russian history. Yet instead of prosecuting the crime, the state detained Magnitsky without trial and tortured him to withdraw his testimony. He was held for nearly 12 months in a cell with no toilet and raw sewage spilling everywhere. He was beaten and denied medical care for his acutely painful pancreatitis. And yet all he had to do to be free was testify that his client Bill Browder — once the biggest foreign investor in Russia before his expulsion in 2005 — was the guilty party.

“They only took Sergei because they couldn’t get to me,” says Browder, 46, who grew up in Chicago and became a British citizen 11 years ago. “Every waking moment I’m thinking of Sergei and how to get justice for him. I’ll never stop. Catching those responsible — and we know who they are — is the only thing that will give me comfort.”

Indeed, when I meet Browder at the office of his firm, Hermitage Capital Management, in London’s West End, it is hard to appreciate that this ordinary looking balding man in a pinstripe suit is engaged in a deadly life and death battle with the Russian authorities.

For make no mistake, deadly it most certainly is. Prior to Magnitsky’s death, Browder had received coded death threats which have since intensified. Voicemail messages blatantly warn him: “We’re coming to get you, motherfucker.” Another voicemail message, which runs for 45 seconds, carries the screams of somebody being beaten. And he’s had texts that say: “History tells us anyone can be killed”.

For obvious reasons, Browder won’t talk about his personal security, but he is unflinching when he says that he refuses to look over his shoulder. “I walk looking straight ahead, figuring what I’ll do next to bring his killers to justice. I’m motivated by anger, not fear, and I’ll travel the world to get justice, if that is what it takes.”

With the Russian government not investigating Magnitsky’s death, Browder’s approach has been to seek justice outside Russia. “Because of Sergei’s prison diaries, published by Novaya Gazeta, and 450 complaints filed by him against his torturers, we know exactly who is responsible for what: we have the names of 60 high- and middle-ranking officials who we know were involved in his torture and imprisonment, and in the conspiracy he uncovered.”

They include top Russian policeman Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Silchenko, as well as dozens of “corrupt” judges, prosecutors, prison doctors, jailers and lawyers. The two senior policemen Magnitsky accused of the $230 million fraud are Lieutenant Colonel Artyom Kuznetsov and Major Pavel Karpov. Silchenko rejects all the accusations. He told the BBC’s Newsnight: “The attempt to accuse law enforcement agencies of involvement in this crime is absurd.” Kuznetsov and Karpov also deny all charges of fraud and have launched libel actions in Russia, backed by the state.

Browder wants to ban the 60 officials he claims are involved from having access to the West — a plan that today took a leap forward with news that the foreign affairs committee of the European Parliament has voted 50 to zero to put forward a resolution calling on the EU to ban the 60 officials from entering the EU and to freeze their assets outside Russia. It follows Browder’s trip to Washington DC which resulted in the taking up of a near-identical bill, called the 2010 Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Act, which is currently making its way through the House and the Senate.

Investing in Russia made Browder rich — in 2005 his hedge fund was worth $4.5 billion — but he now wishes he could “turn back the clock”, and that he’d “never set foot in Moscow”.

Browder first journeyed to Russia in the early Nineties as a Stanford MBA graduate working for the investment bank Salomon Brothers. It was the beginning of the great privatisation programme in which 22 people ended up with 40 per cent of the country’s wealth, and Browder found himself 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle advising the management of the Murmansk trawler fleet.

“When I got there, I found that half the fleet of 100 ships, valued at $1 billion, was being offered to management at the ridiculous price of $2.5 million! That was the moment I realised the outrageous opportunities to make money in Russia.”

BY 1996 Browder had moved with his wife (whom he has since divorced) to Moscow and set up Hermitage Capital Management, whose value grew from $25 million to $1 billion in just 18 months. Hermitage was named the “best performing fund in the world” in 1997 and Browder was lauded on the front page of the New York Times, as well as in Newsweek and Time magazines.

But a year later the market crashed and Hermitage lost 90 per cent of its value. Humiliated that he had not seen it coming and that he had lost his clients $900 million, Browder resolved to get it back by taking on the oligarchs and becoming an activist investor — someone who buys into a company to expose corporate corruption and ultimately boosts the share price.

He investigated the gas giant Gazprom, successfully encouraging employees to be whistleblowers, and published a dossier that exposed stealing on a massive scale and which led President Putin to fire the head of the company and the share price to double. By 2004 Browder had probed half a dozen companies and rebuilt his fund to $4.5 billion. But when Putin arrested Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the political climate changed and in 2005 Browder was blacklisted and expelled from Russia.

Browder liquidated his Russian investments, paying off a $230 million tax bill, and relocated his entire staff and their dependants to London, leaving a solitary secretary to manage the office of various shell companies in Moscow. But in June 2007 his Russian office was raided by the police, who seized seals and certificates, and a few months later a court judgement was entered against Browder’s companies for an unpaid debt he knew nothing about.

That was when Browder called in Russia’s smartest tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who with his team of six lawyers uncovered a breathtaking scam. The police who had raided Hermitage had allegedly used the seals to transfer the shell companies into their control and had fabricated losses enabling them to claim a $230 million tax rebate.

“The biggest rebate in Russian history was granted and paid out in one day, on Christmas Eve, no questions asked,” says Browder. “Sergei discovered this in July 2008. We figured that since the crime was against the state, the culprits would soon be rounded up, but instead the state opened a criminal case against
our lawyers.”

Browder decided to get everyone out and asked all seven lawyers to come to London for their safety. All but one agreed. “The only one I couldn’t convince was Sergei — he was confident he’d done nothing wrong, that the rule of law would prevail, and he went ahead and testified against Kuznetsov and Karpov.”

A month later, on November 24, 2008, Magnitsky was arrested in front of his wife and two sons, aged seven and 17. A year later, having endured horrific deprivation and torture, he was dead. “The people who are involved in his detention, torture and death are beyond evil,” says Browder.

His next priority, he says, is to get the British Parliament to agree to propose economic sanctions against the 60 officials. “I listen to our naïve politicians talking about reset buttons’, but these are corrupt people who don’t share any values with us. My goal is to generate such international pressure and outrage that the Russian government will have no alternative but to throw those responsible to the wolves — and bring them to justice.” займ на карту срочный займ https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php https://zp-pdl.com срочный займ на карту онлайн