Bill Browder

Yesterday, I watched an in-depth interview between the South African journalist, Richard Poplak and Bill Browder in which they were extremely critical of the absolute excesses of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Personally, I believe he is a war criminal like Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic who was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for war crimes in connection with the Bosnian War.

I have read a fascinating book by Bill Browder, called Red Notice before we went to Russia with our friends, Henning Pieterse and his wife and their young daughter.

William Felix Browder is an American-born British financier and political activist who was born on 23 April 1964. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which, at one time was the biggest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. The Hermitage Fund eventually grew $4.5 bn of assets under management. In 1979, the Hermitage Fund was the best-performing fund in the world, having increased by 238%.

He attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Chicago and got an MBA from Stanford University. He’s married to Elena Molokova and they have three children.

Browder took on large Russian companies such as Gazprom, Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco. In retaliation, on 13 November 2005, Browder was refused entry into Russia, deported to the UK and was declared a threat to Russian national security. Gazprom was eight times the size of Exxon-Mobil and twelve times the size of BP, yet it traded at a discount of 99.7% to those of the rest of the world’s oil companies.

Eighteen months after he was deported, on 4 June 2007, Hermitage Capital’s offices in Moscow were raided by 25 officers of the Russian Interior Ministry. Twenty-five more officers raided the office of Browder’s American law firm, Firestone Duncan, seizing the corporate registration documents for Hermitage’s investment holding companies.

Browder assigned Sergei Maginitsky, head of tax practice at Firestone Duncan to investigate the purpose of the raid. Maginitsky discovered that while those documents were in the custody of the police, they had been used to fraudulently re-register Hermitage’s holding companies to the name of an ex-convict. The perpetrators used those companies to apply for a fraudulent $230 m tax refund which was awarded on 24 December 2007.

In response, in June and October 2008, Maginitsky testified against the perpetrators of the fraud. Five weeks after his last testimony, on 24 November 2008, Maginitsky was arrested at his home. While he was in custody, Maginitsky was mistreated and began complaining of severe back pains in May 2009. He became increasingly ill over the next several months and died.

After Maginitsky’s death, Browder lobbied for Congress to pass the Maginitky Act, a law to punish Russian human rights violators, which was signed into law by US President Barack Obama. In 2013, both Maginitsky (post mortem) and Browder were tried in absentia in Russia for tax fraud. Both men – Maginitsky has passed away four years earlier were sentenced to imprisonment and Interpol rejected Russian requests to arrest Browder, saying the case was political. In 2014, the European Commission voted for sanctions against 30 Russians believed to be complicit in the Maginisty case – the first time it has taken this action.

This blog was taken largely from Red Notice and some of the details were added to by Wikipedia.

Bill Browder speaking to the media

Tot Vrydag, till Friday, á Vendredi, bis Freitag, Paz, Arriverderci and cheers for eers!!!

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