Posts Tagged ‘browder’
Sweden Won’t Guarantee Russia Critic Against Extradition
London-based investor William Browder cancelled a trip to brief Sweden’s parliament on his sanctions campaign against Russia after the justice ministry refused to protect him from Russian charges Interpol says are politically motivated.
Sweden’s parliament has cancelled a briefing on potential sanctions against Russian officials accused of corruption after the campaign’s leader, London-based investor William Browder, was refused safe passage by the country’s justice ministry.
Browder, once a major foreign investor in Russia, was sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison by a Moscow court this summer on charges widely seen as politicall motivated. Russia continues to seek his extradition.
He accused Sweden of bowing to pressure from Moscow by refusing him safe passage as he lobbies European governments to sanction officials involved in the prison death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, four years ago.
“This is a Russian appeasement strategy,” Browder told BuzzFeed. “They don’t want to do anything that will upset Russia. They’ve chosen the ease of diplomacy over the right thing to do.”
In a letter to Browder’s lawyers dated September 11 and seen by BuzzFeed, Sweden’s justice ministry said that Russia had not requested it extradite Browder and that it could not legally intervene prior to a request being filed. “Neither is the Government authorized to instruct an authority on how to act on individual cases,” State Secretary Martin Valfridsson wrote. Sweden restated its refusal last Monday after Browder appealed.
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Sweden declines safe passage to Magnitsky campaigner
Sweden has declined to guarantee the safety of a campaigner for EU sanctions on Russian officials despite Russian threats.
Bill Browder, a London-based businessman who is calling for EU countries to blacklist Russian officials suspected of fraud and conspiracy to murder, asked the Swedish government to promise him “safe passage” back in June.
He did it in order to speak at a Swedish parliament hearing in the context of Russian threats to have him arrested, extradited and jailed.
But a senior official in the Swedish justice ministry, Martin Valfridsson, in a letter in June and in a second letter on 23 September said No, leading Browder to cancel his trip.
Valfridsson hinted that Sweden would not help Russia to get its hands on Browder.
He spoke of the “appalling … lack of respect for human rights and rule of law in the Russian Federation.”
He also said Sweden “takes due note” of a decision by Interpol, the international police body based in Lyon, France, not to honour Russia’s request for a Browder arrest notice because it was made for “political” motives.
But he added that under Swedish law, he cannot promise to decline a Russian request before it has been made and he cannot instruct the police not to arrest people.
For Browder, the real reason is fear of upsetting Russia.
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The Power of the Magnitsky Act
In early September, American Interest publisher Charles Davidson spoke with Hermitage Capital co-founder and CEO William Browder about the origins, impact and future of the Magnitsky Act.
Charles Davidson: Welcome, Bill; we appreciate you talking with us. Our timing is good, given the news out of New York two days ago.
William Browder: Yes, the timing couldn’t be better.
CD: Why don’t we start by having you introduce yourself to our readers?
WB: I come from a strange American family. My grandfather was the general secretary of the American Communist Party. As often happens in American families, in my teenage years I went through a rebellion. I figured the best way to rebel against a family of communists was to become a capitalist and ended up going to Stanford business school. I graduated in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. After graduation, as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, I had an epiphany. I figured that if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, it would be perfectly symmetrical that I become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.
CD: That seems logical.
WB: So I moved to London in 1989 and tried to get involved in Eastern Europe. I ended up at Salomon Brothers at the beginning of the Russian privatization program. When Yeltsin became President, he thought the best way to go from communism to capitalism in the country was by giving away state property for free to all Russians; then they’d all be capitalists by virtue of owning property. The program was very ill thought-out and badly designed, so instead of creating 150 million capitalists, it created 22 oligarchs and left most Russians living in destitute poverty.
Having said that, there were opportunities for non-oligarchs to buy shares of these newly privatized Russian companies. When the program first started, the shares were trading at a 99.7 percent discount to the value of similar companies in the West. And as a newly minted Stanford MBA, I did the math and thought if you’re going to be an investor, why not invest in companies trading at a 99.7 percent discount to their Western comparables? So I initially convinced Salomon Brothers to invest some of the firm’s own money in Russia. We invested $25 million and very quickly turned it into $125 million.
On the back of that success for Salomon Brothers I decided to set up my own company. I founded Hermitage Capital in 1996 and moved to Moscow full time to invest in the Russian stock market. My investments initially did very well. In the first 18 months, my portfolio went up more than 800 percent, and then in 1998 it went down 90 percent, basically back to square one.
After that, I discovered that the oligarchs had no incentive to behave themselves after Russia defaulted and devalued, because Wall Street was effectively closed for business for them. At the same time, there was no disincentive to misbehaving because the laws that exist in other countries didn’t exist in Russia. So the oligarchs embarked on an orgy of stealing that was unprecedented in the history of business.
I had to choose whether to allow everything to get stolen or to try to stop the stealing in the hope of recovering some of the lost money. Even though I was in completely uncharted territory and very dangerous, I decided to fight the stealing and become the first shareholder activist in Russia. I did so by researching how the thefts were occurring in big companies like Gazprom, Unified Energy Systems, and Surgutneftegaz, and then I shared my research with the international media.
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Crusade against the Kremlin
Bill Browder has a stark warning for western investors eyeing opportunities in Russia. “They are not only taking a financial risk – they are taking a very serious personal risk of being arrested or dying,” he says. The same applies to educated Russians: “Even Russians who have the ability and language skills should get out of Russia, because it is only going one way and that is in a very horrible direction.”
Browder should know: his experience over the past two decades provides a spectacular example. During that time, the head of Hermitage Capital Management – at one point one of the largest foreign investors into the country – has gone from staunchly rejecting what he once called western myths about Russia to being a crusader against President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
In return, the Russian authorities have branded him a criminal. In July, a Moscow court found Browder guilty of tax evasion in his absence, a charge he denies. Russia has also twice requested that Interpol provide it with information on his whereabouts. The second time around, it was with a view to extradition in relation to a charge of “qualified swindling”. Both times, the international police organisation rejected the requests on the grounds that they were predominantly politically motivated.
Browder’s story is as convoluted as a classic Russian novel. However, there are broadly two ways to read it. His critics point out he avidly supported Putin until the regime turned against him. Browder accepts he once backed the Russian leader, who he saw as bringing necessary order, but argues it was Putin who did the U-turn. In Browder’s view, Putin moved from campaigning against the oligarchs to becoming the biggest oligarch of all.
Whichever interpretation is preferred, Browder has taken on a dual life as a hedge fund manager and campaigner against Russian corruption. He has taken British citizenship and runs Hermitage from London. The firm long ago became a general emerging markets specialist rather than having a particular focus on Russia.
The story begins with Browder’s grandfather. Earl Browder, born in Kansas, was the head of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and early 1940s, and twice ran for president. Earl Browder spent several years in the Soviet Union, where he met and married Raisa Berkman, a Russian Jewish intellectual. Together they had three sons, including Bill Browder’s father Felix, all of whom became top-flight mathematicians.
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Thieves of Putin’s gang ‘FSB of Russia’ thriving in London
The Daily Mail reported in two issues (here and on this link) about a gang of Putin’s thieves from the “FSB of Russia”, attempting to buy up Britain. A documentary film about these Russian criminals will be shown on Sept. 25 on channel Fox:
An early evening party is taking place in a trendy Mayfair boutique in London. Champagne flutes are raised as platinum blondes in skin-tight Cavalli coo over sparkly Swarovski clutch bags and shiny Jimmy Choos. Everyone is speaking Russian. For everyone is Russian. Guests, owners, staff, even the drivers hovering outside in their armour-plated Maybachs.
The article’s author writes that he understood the head-master of an elite prep school who refused to take Russians, calling their parents “thugs”.
Indeed, there are so many Putin’s thieves in London that, rather than just outspending everyone at British establishments, they’ve set up their own ultra-bling city within a city. It all started with a few well-known oligarchs who moved to London in order to escape tax or bloody retribution from the regime or their business rivals.
Now, more rich Russian KGB thugs are coming, as the country that boasts the youngest millionaires in the world – with an average age of 46 to our 55 – has decided London is the world’s most fashionable city. There are said to be 300,000 Russians here, though some put the figure nearer 400,000.
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Fraud and the City: Russia’s Manhattan Money Laundering
Pussy Riot goes to prison while a gang accused of murder and mugging in Mother Russia gets luxury apartments in lower Manhattan. One federal prosecutor is calling Putin out.
Even as the United States and Russia were nearing an agreement over Syria’s chemical weapons, a federal prosecutor was filing papers that effectively accuse the Putin regime of tolerating, if not abetting, an organized gang of government officials and criminals who looted $250 million from the Russian treasury.
The immediate intent of the official complaint filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on September 10 was to seize several high-end Manhattan properties. The two multimillion-dollar commercial spaces as well as four luxury apartments—these across from where George Washington was inaugurated as our first president—were allegedly purchased to launder proceeds from the Russian gang’s diabolically brilliant scheme involving corporate identity theft and a fraudulent tax refund.
The prosecutor’s effort can be seen as at least a small measure of justice for the 37-year-old Moscow lawyer who died in horrific circumstances after uncovering the massive fraud. The lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, reported the theft imagining that his government would be sure to act when the victim was the Russian people themselves, even if the crooks allegedly included senor law-enforcement and tax officials.
Instead, Russian authorities put those same law enforcement officials in charge of the investigation. Magnitsky was arrested in November 2008 by some of the very men he had accused. He resolutely resisted all efforts to make him withdraw his allegations against them and their alleged co-conspirators. He had been held without legal proceedings for just short of a year when he died in an isolation cell from causes that were subsequently listed as untreated pancreatitis, rupture of the abdominal membrane, and toxic shock.
“He was beaten by eight guards with rubber batons on the last day of his life,” the main prosecutor’s complaint says. “And the ambulance crew that was called to treat him as he was dying was deliberately kept outside of his cell for one hour and 18 minutes until he was dead.”
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How London turned into Richistan
The city with more super-rich than anywhere else proves Putin had a point when he taunted PM about losing his capital to oligarchs.
It is 3am on a warm Tuesday in Cadogan Square, Belgravia, and a £200,000 orange Maserati screeches to a halt.
The driver revs the engine for several minutes, and the car – with Arab script on its registration plate – roars off into the night. By the time the sleepless residents reach their windows to peer out, the car has long gone.
For the next month the streets of the capital will be dominated by Ferraris and Maybachs in often garish colours, driven by the over-indulged sons of the Emirates aristocracy.
Sometimes the cars come straight from the Park Lane showroom. Sometimes the playboy owners fly their favourite vehicles – heavily customised, from gold-plated interiors to velvet-covered bodywork – more than 3,000 miles for a few weeks of fun in the London traffic.
It is an annual sojourn, delayed this year by Ramadan. With temperatures reaching 110F in Kuwait, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, the ruling families have flocked to the temperate if polluted air of Knightsbridge for shopping and leisure.
And for the younger men – nights of boozing and ostentatiously bad behaviour impossible back home.
Welcome to super-rich London, the city with the highest number of multi-millionaires in the world, according to the respected Wealth Insight analysis – more than 4,000 individuals with more than £20 million per head, placing London ahead of Tokyo, Singapore and New York.
Last week, speaking at the G20 Summit, Vladimir Putin described Britain as ‘a small island’. Nobody, said his spokesman, pays attention to it – except of course the Russian ‘oligarchs who have bought Chelsea’.
To that list he might have added the Khazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Malaysians, Chinese, Indians and even Greeks and Italians who are all scrambling to buy up London in ever greater numbers.
The tide of foreign wealth seems unstoppable. ‘Super-prime’ homes, usually defined as the top 5 per cent of the most valuable properties, are being sold to international buyers at a rate of almost 85 per cent, while 60 per cent of newly built property in London is bought by overseas investors, mainly from the Far East.
Greek and Italian investors are said to be buying £500 million of British property a year.
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What’s at stake for Russia in Syria
The gridlock at the UN Security Council between the U.S.and Russia is dragging on, due to a gamut of competing interests in Syria.
The Russia-Syria axis is rooted in a strong political and economic relationship that has been cultivated since the late 1950s. The bond has a deep cultural element: many Syrians go to Russia to study, while Russians go to Syria as holidaymakers, advisors or investors. Over the years, Russia has also played an essential role in restructuring the Syrian economy, and wrote off roughly 70 percent of Syria’s $13.4 billion debt in 2005.
While reliable numbers are hard to come by, The Moscow Times estimated Russian investments in Syria at $19.4 billion in 2009, covering infrastructure, energy and tourism. But with outstanding projects ranging from a nuclear power plant to oil and gas exploration, the number today may be considerably higher.
Either way, Russia’s trade with Syria is fairly insubstantial. According to Daniel Treisman, professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, Russian exports to Syria amounted to$1.93 billion in 2011, or only 0.4 percent of Russia’s total exports. That’s less than its trade with Tunisia and Estonia.
Still, what stands out is that Russia-Syria trade is concentrated in the defense and energy industries. “The vast majority of Russian exports to Syria are armaments, which makes Syria relatively more important as an export destination for the Russian defense industry,” Connolly said.
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Interpol open to abuse by ‘criminal states’
When Petr Silaev, a Russian journalist, got political asylum in Finland in April 2012 after escaping a crackdown in his home country, he felt safe and began a new life.
But in August the same year, he found himself handcuffed and shoved face-down on the floor of a police car on a seven-hour trip from Granada, Spain, where he went on holiday, to a detention centre in Madrid, where he risked extradition.
“The Spanish police treated me in a mind-breaking way … They kept saying: ‘You’ll be deported.’ They kept abusing me, saying: ‘You’re a Russian terrorist’,” he told EUobserver.
When Ales Mihalevic, an opposition candidate in Belarus’ presidential elections in 2010, fled his home country, he found himself, in July 2011, detained by Polish airport police and risking a similar fate.
The link in both cases was Interpol, the international police body based in Lyon, France.
Belarus and Russia had filed requests for their capture using Interpol systems and two of Interpol’s 190 fellow member states, Spain and Poland, took action.
Mihalevic and Silaev are not freak examples.
In January last year, Eerik Kross, an Estonian politician and a former director of Estonia’s intelligence service, also became a wanted man after Interpol issued a “red notice” on Moscow’s say-so.
Kross is a known adversary of the Kremlin.
He was a leading proponent of Estonia’s Nato membership. In the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, he helped Georgia to fight off Russian cyber attacks.
But Russia used the long arm of Interpol to reach out for him on different grounds.
It filed the notice saying Kross masterminded the hijack of a Russian ship, the Arctic Sea, off the coast of Sweden in 2009, a claim which Kross calls “idiotic.” It did so on grounds that a witness in an Arctic Sea trial had mentioned his name.
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