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Speaker 1: This is Master's in business with very renaults on Bluebird

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Speaker 1: Radio this weekend on the podcast Strap Yourself In. This

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Speaker 1: is just astonishing. Bill Browder, founder CEO of Hermitage Capital

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Speaker 1: Management and the author of Red Notice, A true story

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Speaker 1: of high finance, murder and one man's Fight for Justice,

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Speaker 1: has a new book out about what's been going on

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Speaker 1: with the Russians and the Magnitsky Act that he helped

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Speaker 1: to pass in order to get justice for his Russian

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Speaker 1: attorney who was tortured and murdered by the Russian government

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Speaker 1: while in their custody in prison. This is just really

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Speaker 1: astonishing stuff. I read all of Red Notice. It was

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Speaker 1: like a spine novel. You plow right through it on

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Speaker 1: the weekend. And then I did the same thing with

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Speaker 1: Freezing Water, which is what's taken place in the five

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Speaker 1: years since Red Notice came out out. So I felt

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Speaker 1: like I knew everything he was gonna say, and even

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Speaker 1: still he astonished me. I I spoke to him for

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Speaker 1: nearly two hours, most of the time my job was

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Speaker 1: on the desk. I just was shocked at how um

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Speaker 1: just barbaric and you can't even call it corrupt. It's

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Speaker 1: just next level illegality that seems to take place in Russia.

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Speaker 1: Browder describes that nation as a country that doesn't have laws.

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Speaker 1: It's the wild West, and it is a as he

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Speaker 1: describes it, a kleptocracy and a fascist state, which doesn't

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Speaker 1: sound like it's the sort of place where anybody would

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Speaker 1: want to live. Uh. This is not just bad, it's

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Speaker 1: bad and getting worse. Uh. And he describes both uh

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Speaker 1: the invasion of Ukraine as a giant distraction um by

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Speaker 1: Putin again people who would challenge his rule. Really just

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Speaker 1: I don't even know what to say. A fascinating, shocking,

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Speaker 1: horrifying conversation. Even if you read both the Browder's books,

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Speaker 1: you will find something to be amazed at. With no

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Speaker 1: further ado, my conversation with Bill Browner. So, so let's

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Speaker 1: start out just with a little bit about your your background.

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Speaker 1: You have a b a. In economics from Chicago and

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Speaker 1: NBA from Stanford. You begin in Solomon Brothers in the

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Speaker 1: ninety nineties early in your career, and you kind of

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Speaker 1: successfully stumble into some privatization of government entities in Poland

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Speaker 1: while you're at Solomon. Tell us a little bit about

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Speaker 1: that early experience. Well, I should just back up one

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Speaker 1: step further, which is a little bit on my family background,

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Speaker 1: which is what got me interested in all this Eastern

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Speaker 1: European stuff. And my grandfather was was an American communist

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Speaker 1: who was head of the American Communist Party from ninety two.

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Speaker 1: And so in my teenager and I decided to become

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Speaker 1: a catalyst, which at Stanford Business schools you mentioned, and

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Speaker 1: I finished business school in nineteen nine, the year the

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Speaker 1: burn Wall came down, and I thought to myself, if

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Speaker 1: my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the

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Speaker 1: Berlin Wall has come down, I'm going to become the

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Speaker 1: biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And so I ended up

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Speaker 1: in London on the East European desk of Solomon Brothers.

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Speaker 1: And and this was at the right around the time

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Speaker 1: that that all the countries of Eastern Europe or privatizing.

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Speaker 1: And um, my, my very first experience was actually before

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Speaker 1: I joined Solomon Brothers. UM, I had another job at

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Speaker 1: the Boxing consulting group. They sent me out to Poland

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Speaker 1: in um to work on a failing Polish bus factory,

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Speaker 1: and I noticed my interpreter had a newspaper under his

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Speaker 1: arms with a bunch of financial fig years. I asked

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Speaker 1: him what those were and he said, these are the

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Speaker 1: very first Polish privatizations, and I was I was kind

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Speaker 1: of intrigued, and so I said, can we discuss it?

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Speaker 1: And he laid it out on a conference table and

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Speaker 1: I said, what's this number? He said, this is the

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Speaker 1: number of shares outstanding of this one company that's being privatized.

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Speaker 1: And I said, what's this numbers at the share price?

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Speaker 1: I multiplied the two numbers together and that got you

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Speaker 1: to a market cap of this company of eighty million dollars.

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Speaker 1: And then I said, what's this number down here? And

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Speaker 1: he said this is the last year's earnings. I said, no,

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Speaker 1: that couldn't be right, so could just retranslating it, and

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Speaker 1: it's the last year's earnings and that number was a

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Speaker 1: hundred and sixty million dollars. So, but here's a company

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Speaker 1: that's valued at eighty million dollars. The previous year's earnings

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Speaker 1: were a hundred and sixty million dollars, so it's trading

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Speaker 1: at one half a pe of one half and and uh,

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Speaker 1: and I thought, well, this isn't this what I went

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Speaker 1: to business school for, it to like invest in this

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Speaker 1: kind of stuff and I had a total life savings

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Speaker 1: at the time with two thousand dollars, and I converted

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Speaker 1: my total life savings of two thousand dollars into Polish body,

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Speaker 1: which is their currency, went down with my translator to

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Speaker 1: the post office, and subscribed to the very first privatization

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Speaker 1: in Poland. And over the course of the next twelve

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Speaker 1: months it went up ten times. That's my two thousand

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Speaker 1: turned into twenty and and there's a certain feeling that

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Speaker 1: you get if you make ten times your money. It's

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Speaker 1: like the financial equivalent of crack cocaine. And I just

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Speaker 1: wanted to repeat the experience. And so I now knew

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Speaker 1: what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't

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Speaker 1: want to be a consultant. I wanted to be investing

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Speaker 1: in these privatizations in East Europe. And that's what led

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Speaker 1: me eventually as Solomon Brothers, and I was working on

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Speaker 1: their proprietary trading desks, and that's when I discovered Russia. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: the story in the book is quite fascinating. How really

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Speaker 1: Solomon Brothers is a shark tank. They throw everybody in

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Speaker 1: the pool. You either sink or swim, and you kind

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Speaker 1: of stumbled and to Russia. By accident. They were not

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Speaker 1: especially supportive until you found one champion who managed to

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Speaker 1: get you a nice pool of capital. Invest tell us

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Speaker 1: how that that progressed. What happened was my very first

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Speaker 1: assignment at Solomon Brothers um was to advise the management

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Speaker 1: of a of a fishing fleet in Mirmanskill on their privatization.

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Speaker 1: And so I um uh fly up from Romance, which

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Speaker 1: is two d miles north of the Arctic circles, the

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Speaker 1: most farthest north place in the world. I go up

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Speaker 1: there and the head of the fishing fleet meets me

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Speaker 1: at the airport. He takes me down to the docks

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Speaker 1: and he shows me one of their ships. And this

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Speaker 1: ship was like four feet long. It was on five stories,

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Speaker 1: and the top story they collected that they had the

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Speaker 1: nets where they caught the fish, and they separate them

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Speaker 1: and they worked their way down and eventually at the

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Speaker 1: bottom story of the of the boat they have canning machines.

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Speaker 1: And so it wasn't just a fishing boat, it was

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Speaker 1: an ocean going factory. Very impressive. And I asked how

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Speaker 1: much is one of these things cost? And he said

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Speaker 1: twenty million dollars. New how many do you have in

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Speaker 1: your fleet A hundred million times a hundred gets you

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Speaker 1: to two billion dollars of the ships, and said, what's

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Speaker 1: the average age of your fleet head? Seven years? So

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Speaker 1: I don't know much about shipping or fishing or anything,

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Speaker 1: but I figured that makes it maybe have to appreciate it.

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Speaker 1: So a billion dollars with the ships. And these guys

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Speaker 1: had hired me, the management of this troller fleet, to

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Speaker 1: advise them on whether the management should exercise their legitimate

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Speaker 1: right under the privatization program with Russia to buy and

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Speaker 1: so I said, at what prices of government selling? And

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Speaker 1: he said two and a half million dollars. So let

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Speaker 1: me just repeat the math. A billion dollars of the

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Speaker 1: ships for two or two and a half million dollars.

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Speaker 1: And that's when I realized that that something really crazy

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Speaker 1: was going on Russia, and if and if that situation

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Speaker 1: in Poland had gotten my juices flowing, my god, this

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Speaker 1: is even crazier. And so then I went to Moscow.

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Speaker 1: I thought, I I said to myself, is this just

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Speaker 1: something some weird anomaly with the fishing industry or is

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Speaker 1: this something going on more widespread? And I went to Moscow,

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Speaker 1: and I as I was going through the airport in Moscow.

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Speaker 1: They were selling a little English language yellow page directory,

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Speaker 1: and so I m I kind of didn't know anyone

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Speaker 1: in Russia didn't speak the language, and so I bought

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Speaker 1: this English language yellow page directory, and I just started

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Speaker 1: cold calling people who might be able to explain to

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Speaker 1: me what was going on. And over the course of

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Speaker 1: a week I had about forty meetings. I met with

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Speaker 1: all different types of people, and I was able to

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Speaker 1: figure out what was going on more widespread, and this

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Speaker 1: was the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my

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Speaker 1: my professional life. But basically they be in order to

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Speaker 1: go from communism to capitalism, the Russian government had given

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Speaker 1: every citizen in the country a thing called a voucher,

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Speaker 1: a physical certificate called voucher. And at the time, there's

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Speaker 1: about hundred and fifty million people in the country. And

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Speaker 1: these vouchers were freely tradeable, so you could you could

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Speaker 1: buy them, you could sell them, and you can burn them,

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Speaker 1: you can trade them, you can do anything he wanted

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Speaker 1: with them, and so the vouchers developed a sort of

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Speaker 1: secondary market, and they traded for about twenty dollars each

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Speaker 1: and so again I went through the simple math. There's

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Speaker 1: a hundred fifty million vouchers times twenty dollars gets you

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Speaker 1: three billion dollars of vouchers in circulation. And these three

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Speaker 1: three billion dollars of vouchers in circulation were exchangeable for

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Speaker 1: thirty percent of the shaff capital of all Russian companies,

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Speaker 1: which meant that the market cap of the entire country

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Speaker 1: of Russia, everything, every every asset in the country was

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Speaker 1: ten billion dollars. This is the country with the world's

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Speaker 1: natural gas, and percent of the world's royal ti, percent

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Speaker 1: of the world's aluminum, steel, fertilizer, car companies, telephone company,

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Speaker 1: electricity company, banks, etcetera. The entire country ten billion dollars.

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Speaker 1: At the time, you couldn't buy a mid sized Oklahoma

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Speaker 1: oil company for ten billion dollars. Here, you could buy

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Speaker 1: the whole country of Russia. So I rushed back to

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Speaker 1: Solomon and I said, guys, we've got to stop doing

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Speaker 1: everything else we're doing, and we've got to invest in Russia.

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Speaker 1: They're like literally giving money away for free. And and

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Speaker 1: the moment I met and mentioned Russia, people like just

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Speaker 1: immediately just switched off. And I wasn't very good. I

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Speaker 1: wasn't very good at at politics. Inside an organization. So

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Speaker 1: if one person said no, I just went to the

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Speaker 1: next person, and I'm just wide eyed and crazy. He said,

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Speaker 1: We've got to stop doing everything in invest in Russia.

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Speaker 1: And by the time I was done, I had completely

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Speaker 1: burned my reputation with everybody in the whole company. Even

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Speaker 1: the young guys who I was hanging out with stopped

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Speaker 1: inviting me to lunches and drinks because nobody wanted to

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Speaker 1: be seen with that crazy guy who was obsessed with

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Speaker 1: investing in Russia. And and Solomon was a place where

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Speaker 1: if you didn't earn five times when they were paying

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Speaker 1: you within a year, fired And I wasn't earning anywhere

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Speaker 1: near five times anything, and I was going to be fired.

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Speaker 1: And so not only was I not gonna be able

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Speaker 1: to invest in all this great stuff in Russia, I

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Speaker 1: wasn't gonna be able to pay my rent. And so

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Speaker 1: I was just sitting They're just totally demoralized. And one

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Speaker 1: day my phone rang and it was the most one

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Speaker 1: of the most senior guys in New York office of

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Speaker 1: Solomon Brothers. I was in London, and he said, I

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Speaker 1: hear you might be having some career troubles, but you've

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Speaker 1: got something interesting to say about Russia. Can you come

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Speaker 1: over and explain to me what's going on. So I

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Speaker 1: spent a couple of days all night putting together the

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Speaker 1: best power point presentation I could come up with explaining

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Speaker 1: how cheap everything was in Russia. I go over to Solomon,

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Speaker 1: I sit down with this guy. I take him through

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Speaker 1: the presentation and he's he's not a very um uh

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Speaker 1: sort of friendly or or community guy, and he sort

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Speaker 1: of stares blankly. I mean, as I'm going through this presentation,

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Speaker 1: and the halfway through the presentation, he just gets up

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Speaker 1: and leaves, and I thought to myself, I'd like blown

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Speaker 1: my chance and saving my career and um And I'm

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Speaker 1: sitting there tapping my foot trying to figure out how

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Speaker 1: long and retrieved this meeting. When he comes back and

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Speaker 1: he's gone for ten minutes. He comes back like fifty

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Speaker 1: two minutes later, and I'm about to blurt something out

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Speaker 1: to try to save the meeting. But before I have

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Speaker 1: a chance to say anything, he said, I just, uh,

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Speaker 1: those slides you show me are the single most impressive

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Speaker 1: thing I've ever seen in my investment career. I've just

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Speaker 1: gone to the risk management committee I've got you twenty

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Speaker 1: million dollars to invest in Russia. I want you to

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Speaker 1: stop doing everything else you're doing and get over there

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Speaker 1: and get this money invested. This is unbelievable. And that's

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Speaker 1: what that's what, that's what's set me off of my career.

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Speaker 1: I'm investing in Russia. Wow, amazing, amazing story. Um So,

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Speaker 1: so now you set up this funds and it does

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Speaker 1: really well, and you circle back to Sally and say, hey,

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Speaker 1: let's really expand this, and suddenly everybody wants a piece

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Speaker 1: of you. Tell us a little bit about that. So

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Speaker 1: so I go into so this guy get sending me

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Speaker 1: after Russia. I invest the million and for a while

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Speaker 1: it's doing nothing. It's just sitting there, totally, tiny, little

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Speaker 1: elquid market. Nobody knows anything about it. It's just starts

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Speaker 1: sitting there. And I invest his money in in like

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Speaker 1: the fall and going into December of and then the

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Speaker 1: Economist magazine in England writes an article called Sale of

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Speaker 1: the Century in which they described the same math that

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Speaker 1: I've just shared with you. And all of a sudden,

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Speaker 1: it's in that now it's in black and white and

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Speaker 1: ink um. You know, all sorts of people reading it,

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Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, I about twenty serious like

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Speaker 1: major Western investors, hedge fund managers, billionaires, proprietary training desks

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Speaker 1: all say all in unis and say, wow, how how

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Speaker 1: come I didn't know? Why didn't I know about this?

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Speaker 1: We gotta get involved. And so you know, when you

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Speaker 1: take twenty huge investors and you try to go into

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Speaker 1: a tiny, a liquid, almost untraded market and all at

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Speaker 1: once try to buy it, what happens? Share price goes

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Speaker 1: up and so over. In the course of a couple

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Speaker 1: of weeks after this economist article, the Russian stock market

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Speaker 1: goes up and our million dollars turns into a million dollars.

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Speaker 1: And I should point out that this was back in

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Speaker 1: the days when a hundred million dollars profit was real money,

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Speaker 1: and so so so all of a sudden, I go

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Speaker 1: from a total zero to like a hero on the

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Speaker 1: trading floor. And all those guys who had stopped inviting

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Speaker 1: me to lunch his drinks were all camped out around

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Speaker 1: my desk when I had arrived in the morning, all

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Speaker 1: just desperate for tips on how they can make five

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Speaker 1: times their money on the on the Russian stock market.

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Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, some of the older

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Speaker 1: fellows started coming around to my desk, and and old

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Speaker 1: at Solomon was like forty years. You know, you couldn't

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Speaker 1: survive past forty without having a heart attack or something

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Speaker 1: like that. At Solomon, so forty was like the maximum age.

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Speaker 1: But I was in my late twenties. So these older

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Speaker 1: guys will come around, and Solomon is a very disrespectful place,

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Speaker 1: and people were not very nice to each other. But

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Speaker 1: they'll come by very and very deferentially saying, you know,

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Speaker 1: excuse me, Mr Browder. I know you're very busy, but

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Speaker 1: is there any chance I could convince you to come

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Speaker 1: and spend a few minutes to brief my clients. Mr Soros,

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Speaker 1: he would be so grateful for just a tiny bit

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Speaker 1: of your time. Another guy came by, uh, Sir John Templeton,

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Speaker 1: the founder of Templeton, which just he'ld be so appreciative

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Speaker 1: if you could just be with him for a little

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Speaker 1: bit of your time. And I was getting these invitations

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Speaker 1: to like the the Royalty of Wall Street. Everybody wanted

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Speaker 1: to meet me because nobody knew anything about investing in Russia.

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Speaker 1: There is this one die and Renews and the Land

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Speaker 1: of the Blind the one eyed man who was king.

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Speaker 1: And so I went on this world tour of of

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Speaker 1: of the Royalty of Wall Street and and they were

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Speaker 1: much smarter than my colleagues as Solomon, And within moments

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Speaker 1: when I showed them the data, they were saying, this

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Speaker 1: is unbelievable. Can we give you some money to manage?

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Speaker 1: So I don't know at the moment, we're just doing

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Speaker 1: this for ourselves. But but let me go back to

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Speaker 1: the bosses and see what I can I can do

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Speaker 1: for you. And so I go back to the head

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Speaker 1: of the trading floor in London and I say, you know,

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Speaker 1: I was just with George Sorrows and he wants to

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Speaker 1: give us some money to manage. What do you think

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Speaker 1: and the and the guy said, I think that's a

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Speaker 1: brilliant idea. Let's form a task force to study it.

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Speaker 1: And say okay. So the first task force meeting was

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Speaker 1: a week later. I show up in this room and

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Speaker 1: there's like forty people in this room, like thirty five

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Speaker 1: of them I've never seen in my life before. There

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Speaker 1: was the vice chairman of the company, the senior managing directors,

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Speaker 1: managing directors, senior directors, directors, vice presidents, and me I

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Speaker 1: was the lowest ranking guy in the whole room, and

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Speaker 1: within moments of the meeting starting, a fight broke out

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Speaker 1: among all these different people about which who is going

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Speaker 1: to get the economic credit for the business, and and

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Speaker 1: investment bankers have an unbelievable skill and capacity for making

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Speaker 1: plausible arguments for why they deserve money that they don't deserve,

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Speaker 1: and and and these people were just I was watching,

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Speaker 1: like like multidimensional Tennis is like the asset management group

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Speaker 1: that had made an argument, and then the investment banks

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Speaker 1: so he worked here, and then emerging markets people say

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Speaker 1: what about us? And and it was going on on

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Speaker 1: and on, and I didn't know who was going to

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Speaker 1: win this argument, but I was a d percent sure

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Speaker 1: of who wasn't going to get any economic credit for

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Speaker 1: the business, and that was going to be me. And

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Speaker 1: so I after three days of like not being able

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Speaker 1: to sleep, I I walked into the head of the

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Speaker 1: trading floor. I gave him my security badge and I say,

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Speaker 1: I'm quitting. I'm going to start my own fund. And

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Speaker 1: I went I moved to Oscow. This was early what

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Speaker 1: what was became the Hermitage Fund. He told me, you're

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Speaker 1: never going to succeed. But off I went and I

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Speaker 1: ended up getting I went back to one of those

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Speaker 1: guys from from those meetings that I went to on

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Speaker 1: Wall Street. It was it was a guy named Edmund Saffra,

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Speaker 1: who was the owner of Republic National Bank of New

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Speaker 1: York and he was one of the largest and most

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Speaker 1: successful private bankers in the world. He gave me twenty

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Speaker 1: five million dollars to invest, he started the fund and

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Speaker 1: it just went like unbelievably up within moments of starting. Amazing,

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Speaker 1: really quite amazing. So it's a fascinating story, but it

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Speaker 1: raises so many interesting questions, starting with you know, the

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Speaker 1: companies you're investing in in Russia? Are these all formally

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Speaker 1: state owned companies? Sort of the way things are up

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Speaker 1: earning in China today? Um, did they still retain any

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Speaker 1: sort of state ownership? And and and who were the

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Speaker 1: private owners of these farms and so so, Um, what

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Speaker 1: would happen is in most cases the companies became completely privatized. UM,

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Speaker 1: and and the people who owned them. And these are

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Speaker 1: big companies. And you've heard of these companies Luke Oils,

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Speaker 1: Spare Bank Gas from UM through good Naphgace. These are

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Speaker 1: companies than anyone who trades Russian stocks would know the

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Speaker 1: names of these companies, big state company, big formerly state companies.

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Speaker 1: Most of them were fully privatized, and the people who

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Speaker 1: became the majority shareholders were these people who we now

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Speaker 1: know as the oligarchs. A couple of them, like gas

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Speaker 1: from the Spare Bank, remained um partially state owned or

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Speaker 1: in some cases the majority stay owned, but the shares

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Speaker 1: the would trade on the stock market. Um. But the

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Speaker 1: big problem that we discovered and and um and this

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Speaker 1: this was one of the reasons everything was so cheap,

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Speaker 1: was that you might have owned a share of a

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Speaker 1: Russian company, but you didn't really have a share of

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Speaker 1: any thing because the oligarchs or in some cases the

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Speaker 1: corrupt managers, we're basically stealing all the money out the

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Speaker 1: back door there was. You might have had a share

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Speaker 1: of company, you had no share of the economics because

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Speaker 1: they were just literally stealing billions in every possible way.

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Speaker 1: You can imagine that the kind of corruption that that

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Speaker 1: that we got to see with our own eyes was

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Speaker 1: just mind boggling. It was the biggest theft in the

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Speaker 1: history of the world was being done that of these companies.

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Speaker 1: And these companies are generating tens of billions of dollars

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Speaker 1: of profits, but if you look at the financials, they

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Speaker 1: were nonprofits and and so so it presented a terrible

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Speaker 1: dilemma for me, because you know, I got out to

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Speaker 1: the world and convinced all sorts of famous people to

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Speaker 1: come and invest with me. I showed them all these

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Speaker 1: graphs and charts about how cheap everything was, and it

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Speaker 1: was on paper, but it wasn't in reality, because these

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Speaker 1: guys were just stealing all the money out the back door.

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Speaker 1: And it was and it created a real album. And

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Speaker 1: it was also really infuriating, like why would these it

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Speaker 1: was mostly these oligarchs doing it. Why would these people

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Speaker 1: feel so entitled that they could do that and just

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Speaker 1: at the expense of everybody else cheap for a reason? Right, So,

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Speaker 1: so that raises a question. Russia is a unique place.

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Speaker 1: Corruption is endemic. It's well known for a century. It's

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Speaker 1: not the sort of geography that you really think of

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Speaker 1: when you think of shareholder activism. What led you to

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Speaker 1: that sort of approach in that sort of place. Well,

384
00:20:37,160 --> 00:20:41,280
Speaker 1: so it was a combination of circumstances. So um I

385
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Speaker 1: started out with twenty five million dollars of staffers of money,

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Speaker 1: and and then it started going up and up and up.

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Speaker 1: And this was this was a hedge fund structure where

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Speaker 1: you could put your money in at any point in time.

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Speaker 1: And everybody said, oh my god, this is unbelievable. So

390
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Speaker 1: they'd started adding more and more money to the fund,

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Speaker 1: and and by UM I had more than a billion

392
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Speaker 1: dollars invested in the Russian stock market, which was you know,

393
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Speaker 1: this is a tiny little market, so billion dollars was

394
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Speaker 1: like the It was like the equivalent of fidelity in Russia,

395
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Speaker 1: and in terms of the size of assets. And then

396
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Speaker 1: all of a sudden, and for anyone listening to this

397
00:21:19,040 --> 00:21:23,840
Speaker 1: is who's you know, my age or near um happened?

398
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Speaker 1: This was the year that Russia defaulted and devalued their currency,

399
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Speaker 1: and so they defaulted on the domestic bonds, the currency

400
00:21:30,800 --> 00:21:36,639
Speaker 1: devalued by s and and and my portfolio, which was

401
00:21:37,240 --> 00:21:41,359
Speaker 1: above a billion dollars went down. And so there I

402
00:21:41,440 --> 00:21:45,280
Speaker 1: was nursing a loss. I lost nine hundred million dollars

403
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Speaker 1: in my clients money. And these are people that I've

404
00:21:47,560 --> 00:21:50,160
Speaker 1: gone around and tried to convince, to convinced to invest

405
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Speaker 1: in Russia. I went and went around meeting all sorts

406
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Speaker 1: of people all over the world. You know, if every

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Speaker 1: twenty people I would meet, nineteen said no, you're crazy,

408
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Speaker 1: I'm not giving you any money, and one person would

409
00:21:58,760 --> 00:22:00,280
Speaker 1: say yes, and that one person who was with me,

410
00:22:00,320 --> 00:22:03,879
Speaker 1: who like you know, who had given me their confidence. Um,

411
00:22:04,160 --> 00:22:06,840
Speaker 1: I lost of their money. And I was just mortified.

412
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Speaker 1: And I was totally totally ashamed of myself that I

413
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Speaker 1: had been so emphatic saying what a great opportunity this was,

414
00:22:14,040 --> 00:22:17,600
Speaker 1: and I lost people so much money, and and I

415
00:22:17,680 --> 00:22:20,000
Speaker 1: just couldn't look at myself in the mirror unless I

416
00:22:20,000 --> 00:22:22,320
Speaker 1: did something to try to try to get their money back.

417
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Speaker 1: And so as I was trying to get there, so

418
00:22:24,760 --> 00:22:26,639
Speaker 1: I was sitting with my last ten cents on the dollar.

419
00:22:27,440 --> 00:22:30,879
Speaker 1: The market had crashed, and the oligarchs, and this was

420
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Speaker 1: a particularly poignant moment in their lives that they had

421
00:22:34,320 --> 00:22:38,840
Speaker 1: up until that time kind of behaved themselves, not as much.

422
00:22:38,920 --> 00:22:40,679
Speaker 1: I mean, there was a lot of stealing going on

423
00:22:40,760 --> 00:22:44,800
Speaker 1: before this, but but after this crash, they realized that

424
00:22:44,960 --> 00:22:47,560
Speaker 1: Wall Street was closed for business for them. They could

425
00:22:47,600 --> 00:22:49,920
Speaker 1: never borrow a penny on Wall Street. Nobody was ever

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Speaker 1: going to touch them in any way, shape or form,

427
00:22:52,600 --> 00:22:54,440
Speaker 1: and that was the only thing sort of moderating their

428
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Speaker 1: behavior at all. And so when when they saw this,

429
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Speaker 1: that that that nobody was returning their calls from Olden

430
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Speaker 1: Sacks and Morgan Stanley, who had been all, you know,

431
00:23:03,600 --> 00:23:07,080
Speaker 1: wining and dining them a year before, they said to themselves,

432
00:23:07,080 --> 00:23:11,880
Speaker 1: whether there if there's no incentive to behave And there's

433
00:23:11,920 --> 00:23:16,680
Speaker 1: never been any disincentives against misbehavior because in the laws

434
00:23:16,680 --> 00:23:18,720
Speaker 1: existing in Russia, we might as well steal everything that's

435
00:23:18,760 --> 00:23:21,280
Speaker 1: not nailed down, and and and they went from stealing

436
00:23:21,600 --> 00:23:23,840
Speaker 1: cash flow, which is what they had stolen before, to

437
00:23:23,880 --> 00:23:27,760
Speaker 1: stealing assets and and and there were assets stripping and

438
00:23:27,760 --> 00:23:31,520
Speaker 1: and organizing huge delusive share issues and embezzlement and all

439
00:23:31,520 --> 00:23:34,840
Speaker 1: sorts of crazy stuff. And and so I was they

440
00:23:34,880 --> 00:23:36,600
Speaker 1: were going to try to steal the last ten cents

441
00:23:36,640 --> 00:23:38,520
Speaker 1: on the dollar that I had right at the moment

442
00:23:38,520 --> 00:23:40,439
Speaker 1: that I was that I had sort of vowed to

443
00:23:40,480 --> 00:23:42,920
Speaker 1: try to get that money back. And so I kind

444
00:23:42,920 --> 00:23:45,800
Speaker 1: of felt like I was forced into this because I wasn't.

445
00:23:45,800 --> 00:23:50,040
Speaker 1: I just couldn't imagine just dusting myself off and leaving,

446
00:23:50,080 --> 00:23:52,200
Speaker 1: and you know, just leaving everybody in such a terrible

447
00:23:52,240 --> 00:23:55,679
Speaker 1: state of among my clients, and so I said, okay, well,

448
00:23:55,720 --> 00:23:58,280
Speaker 1: how how do I stop them from stealing? And it's

449
00:23:58,280 --> 00:23:59,960
Speaker 1: not like you could go to the regulator and say,

450
00:24:00,400 --> 00:24:02,320
Speaker 1: you know, there's a stealing going onto my company, could

451
00:24:02,320 --> 00:24:06,159
Speaker 1: you please investigate? Because regulators don't regulate. You couldn't go

452
00:24:06,160 --> 00:24:09,080
Speaker 1: to the courts or the police, or or the parliament

453
00:24:09,160 --> 00:24:11,679
Speaker 1: or anything. But the one thing, the one thing I

454
00:24:11,680 --> 00:24:15,560
Speaker 1: could do is go to the media. And and so

455
00:24:15,720 --> 00:24:19,360
Speaker 1: we started to do um what I what is now

456
00:24:19,400 --> 00:24:22,920
Speaker 1: known as stealing analysis of Russian companies, where we would

457
00:24:22,920 --> 00:24:26,320
Speaker 1: go into these companies and we would do an analysis

458
00:24:26,440 --> 00:24:29,720
Speaker 1: and of like how they're stealing, how they were stealing,

459
00:24:29,760 --> 00:24:32,040
Speaker 1: who was stealing, what they were stealing, where the money

460
00:24:32,080 --> 00:24:35,479
Speaker 1: was going. And and you might think that that, well,

461
00:24:35,520 --> 00:24:37,919
Speaker 1: how do you do is stealing analysis and a Russian company?

462
00:24:37,920 --> 00:24:41,000
Speaker 1: And and the answer is pretty interesting, which is that

463
00:24:41,000 --> 00:24:45,280
Speaker 1: that these companies and the country, it's just everything is

464
00:24:45,320 --> 00:24:48,359
Speaker 1: total bureaucracy there. You can't even go the bathroom without

465
00:24:48,680 --> 00:24:51,080
Speaker 1: like putting your writing, your name down on a form,

466
00:24:51,119 --> 00:24:53,800
Speaker 1: and then those forms get filed with four different ministries

467
00:24:53,840 --> 00:24:58,800
Speaker 1: and quadruple kate and and all that information about everything

468
00:24:58,800 --> 00:25:02,560
Speaker 1: in the country was effectively for sale, you could basically

469
00:25:02,560 --> 00:25:06,560
Speaker 1: buy a disc with the information about everything. And and

470
00:25:06,640 --> 00:25:09,040
Speaker 1: so we started buying these discs with all this information

471
00:25:09,119 --> 00:25:12,119
Speaker 1: and and and people also weren't very tight lipped about it.

472
00:25:12,160 --> 00:25:16,080
Speaker 1: Everybody was really upset that that all the stealing was

473
00:25:16,119 --> 00:25:18,359
Speaker 1: going on because only a very few people participated in

474
00:25:18,480 --> 00:25:19,760
Speaker 1: but a lot of people got to see it with

475
00:25:19,840 --> 00:25:23,000
Speaker 1: it and see it themselves. And so we started to

476
00:25:23,000 --> 00:25:28,240
Speaker 1: put together these really detailed, um, you know, summarison analysis

477
00:25:28,280 --> 00:25:32,240
Speaker 1: of how the stealing was happening. And any other big

478
00:25:32,240 --> 00:25:35,879
Speaker 1: benefit that I had was that all the foreign correspondents

479
00:25:35,920 --> 00:25:38,719
Speaker 1: all pretty much hung out at the same restaurants and

480
00:25:38,760 --> 00:25:40,840
Speaker 1: bars that I did. And and so I got to

481
00:25:40,840 --> 00:25:43,879
Speaker 1: know all these guys and and and they loved me

482
00:25:44,000 --> 00:25:46,439
Speaker 1: because here I was showing up with like work that

483
00:25:46,440 --> 00:25:48,439
Speaker 1: would have taken them three months to do, which I

484
00:25:48,520 --> 00:25:52,280
Speaker 1: just did myself with my team. I'm showing like these

485
00:25:52,320 --> 00:25:55,640
Speaker 1: massive defts going on in these big important Russian companies

486
00:25:55,640 --> 00:25:59,119
Speaker 1: like gas problems, Bare Bank and so on. And so

487
00:25:59,160 --> 00:26:02,240
Speaker 1: I would I would um, I would do these naming

488
00:26:02,240 --> 00:26:04,280
Speaker 1: and shaming campaigns, and they would write up the stories

489
00:26:04,320 --> 00:26:07,960
Speaker 1: of the Wall Street Journal with Financial Times and Your Times, etcetera.

490
00:26:08,359 --> 00:26:10,560
Speaker 1: And then the most interesting thing happened, which is that

491
00:26:10,880 --> 00:26:12,800
Speaker 1: it was just at the same time that Vladimir Putin

492
00:26:12,880 --> 00:26:17,359
Speaker 1: had come to power, and and Putin was fighting with

493
00:26:17,359 --> 00:26:19,160
Speaker 1: the same guys I was fighting with. When he came

494
00:26:19,200 --> 00:26:22,000
Speaker 1: to power um in the year two thousand, he wasn't

495
00:26:22,040 --> 00:26:25,360
Speaker 1: powerful like he is today. All these oligarchs had had

496
00:26:25,480 --> 00:26:29,760
Speaker 1: basically informally usurped the power of the presidency, and he

497
00:26:29,840 --> 00:26:32,560
Speaker 1: was really keen on getting it back. And so and

498
00:26:32,840 --> 00:26:34,640
Speaker 1: I should point out that I've never spoken or met

499
00:26:34,680 --> 00:26:39,680
Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin, but when I would put these expose a

500
00:26:39,800 --> 00:26:42,639
Speaker 1: s out there, it created this opportunity for him to

501
00:26:42,680 --> 00:26:45,560
Speaker 1: go after his enemies. And there's there's an expression your

502
00:26:45,640 --> 00:26:49,040
Speaker 1: enemy's enemy as your friend. And so he would I

503
00:26:49,040 --> 00:26:51,240
Speaker 1: would put out a big expose on gas From and

504
00:26:51,240 --> 00:26:53,320
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden he'd step in and he

505
00:26:53,320 --> 00:26:56,480
Speaker 1: would fire the CEO gas From using the state's shares,

506
00:26:56,640 --> 00:26:59,840
Speaker 1: or he would issue issue a presidential decree about spare

507
00:27:00,560 --> 00:27:06,679
Speaker 1: or whatever. And this had an unbelievably positive effect on

508
00:27:06,800 --> 00:27:10,600
Speaker 1: the value of my portfolio. And so if you so basically,

509
00:27:10,640 --> 00:27:12,880
Speaker 1: I remember I started with twenty million dollars, it goes

510
00:27:12,960 --> 00:27:16,480
Speaker 1: up to a billion it goes down to nine to million,

511
00:27:17,440 --> 00:27:19,720
Speaker 1: and as a result of the naming and shaming campaigns,

512
00:27:20,280 --> 00:27:23,119
Speaker 1: it goes from a hundred million to four and a

513
00:27:23,160 --> 00:27:26,879
Speaker 1: half billions, and I became the largest foreign investor in

514
00:27:26,880 --> 00:27:33,439
Speaker 1: the country. So so, shareholder activism is usually a pretty um,

515
00:27:33,640 --> 00:27:39,200
Speaker 1: bare knuckles sort of um strategy. And in a country

516
00:27:39,240 --> 00:27:42,400
Speaker 1: like the United States or even the UK or Europe,

517
00:27:43,000 --> 00:27:46,280
Speaker 1: there is the rule of law and respect for property

518
00:27:46,359 --> 00:27:51,560
Speaker 1: rights and and regulation and law enforcement. There's really not

519
00:27:51,720 --> 00:27:55,600
Speaker 1: a whole lot of that in the U. In Russia.

520
00:27:55,880 --> 00:27:58,919
Speaker 1: At what point do you start to think, Hey, you know,

521
00:27:59,040 --> 00:28:02,800
Speaker 1: I could be really pissing off some pretty powerful and

522
00:28:02,920 --> 00:28:07,959
Speaker 1: dangerous characters. Well, I was, on one hand, I was

523
00:28:09,640 --> 00:28:12,560
Speaker 1: scared to death doing this and literally scared to death.

524
00:28:13,240 --> 00:28:17,959
Speaker 1: Um uh. And and it wasn't like I was doing this,

525
00:28:18,800 --> 00:28:21,960
Speaker 1: you know, enthusiastically. I was doing this in reactions to

526
00:28:22,040 --> 00:28:23,360
Speaker 1: the fact that I was they were going to try

527
00:28:23,359 --> 00:28:25,679
Speaker 1: to take everything away from me. And and when I

528
00:28:25,680 --> 00:28:29,480
Speaker 1: did it, I I hired bodyguards. I had one particular

529
00:28:29,960 --> 00:28:33,520
Speaker 1: fight that I had, I had literally fifteen bodyguards. I

530
00:28:33,560 --> 00:28:35,560
Speaker 1: had When I would go from the office to home,

531
00:28:35,720 --> 00:28:38,200
Speaker 1: I had my car with with three armed guys and

532
00:28:38,200 --> 00:28:40,440
Speaker 1: then there'll be three other cars, a lead car, a

533
00:28:40,520 --> 00:28:43,720
Speaker 1: lag car, a sidecar, and I get home and we

534
00:28:43,880 --> 00:28:46,640
Speaker 1: were the lead car would go ahead to get there faster,

535
00:28:46,720 --> 00:28:49,160
Speaker 1: and they would scope out for for snipers and look

536
00:28:49,240 --> 00:28:51,800
Speaker 1: up the stairwells and make sure there's no bombs, and

537
00:28:51,880 --> 00:28:53,600
Speaker 1: then there'll be a guy sitting in my apartment was

538
00:28:53,720 --> 00:28:57,920
Speaker 1: like automatic weapon loaded sitting in my living room. Um.

539
00:28:58,040 --> 00:29:02,040
Speaker 1: It was pretty horrifying and scary. Um. And you know

540
00:29:02,080 --> 00:29:04,000
Speaker 1: that these guys do a lot of a lot of

541
00:29:04,560 --> 00:29:09,120
Speaker 1: a lot of terrible things. Um. But the one thing

542
00:29:09,160 --> 00:29:11,479
Speaker 1: that I had going for me, and this is it's

543
00:29:11,560 --> 00:29:14,280
Speaker 1: kind of a a joke, but it was very serious,

544
00:29:14,920 --> 00:29:19,840
Speaker 1: is that in Russia, nobody, um, everything is a conspiracy.

545
00:29:20,040 --> 00:29:23,760
Speaker 1: That nothing is as it seems on the surface. And

546
00:29:23,760 --> 00:29:27,360
Speaker 1: and so everybody looked at me and saying, there's no

547
00:29:27,480 --> 00:29:30,880
Speaker 1: way that some guy from the South side of Chicago,

548
00:29:31,640 --> 00:29:35,600
Speaker 1: American guy shows up in Russia and takes on the

549
00:29:35,600 --> 00:29:39,960
Speaker 1: most powerful, dangerous oligarchs in the country on his own volition.

550
00:29:40,880 --> 00:29:43,520
Speaker 1: Somebody must be standing behind him. This must be a project.

551
00:29:44,640 --> 00:29:47,360
Speaker 1: And everybody looked at the whole pattern and they said, well, okay,

552
00:29:47,400 --> 00:29:50,000
Speaker 1: Browder does this stuff. And then all of a sudden,

553
00:29:50,040 --> 00:29:53,880
Speaker 1: Putin steps in and any attacks the people right afterwards.

554
00:29:54,400 --> 00:29:57,360
Speaker 1: This must be a how clever of Putin to come

555
00:29:57,400 --> 00:30:01,120
Speaker 1: up with this weird strategy, and and and they were

556
00:30:01,200 --> 00:30:04,080
Speaker 1: kind of scared of Putin and so um like that

557
00:30:04,200 --> 00:30:06,280
Speaker 1: they thought. And I wasn't going to correct them and

558
00:30:06,320 --> 00:30:08,760
Speaker 1: tell them that that this is like totally my doing,

559
00:30:08,800 --> 00:30:10,680
Speaker 1: it has nothing to do with him. And so I

560
00:30:10,760 --> 00:30:12,480
Speaker 1: let them believe that this was some type of Putin

561
00:30:12,560 --> 00:30:17,800
Speaker 1: project because that that gave me some some protection, this misunderstanding,

562
00:30:18,600 --> 00:30:22,160
Speaker 1: um and and and so you know here I am

563
00:30:22,280 --> 00:30:24,920
Speaker 1: now sitting here telling the story, so that nobody got

564
00:30:24,960 --> 00:30:28,720
Speaker 1: to me. But it was of course a very scary,

565
00:30:28,920 --> 00:30:31,239
Speaker 1: you know, thing to do, extremely scary thing to do,

566
00:30:31,320 --> 00:30:34,080
Speaker 1: and everybody was scratching their hands and wondering how I

567
00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:36,200
Speaker 1: can do it and get away with it. So so

568
00:30:36,360 --> 00:30:39,840
Speaker 1: you and Putin's interests appear to be aligned, at least

569
00:30:40,040 --> 00:30:43,480
Speaker 1: in the beginning in the nineties. Then a few years

570
00:30:43,520 --> 00:30:47,840
Speaker 1: go by and suddenly you're declared a national security threat.

571
00:30:48,240 --> 00:30:51,640
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about what that experience was like, uh,

572
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:55,280
Speaker 1: not being permitted back into the country and denied a visa.

573
00:30:56,840 --> 00:31:00,520
Speaker 1: So Putin had this problem with the oligarchs. They were

574
00:31:00,560 --> 00:31:04,120
Speaker 1: stealing power from him, and he um, you know, and

575
00:31:04,160 --> 00:31:05,920
Speaker 1: so every time I would be doing this stuff, he

576
00:31:05,920 --> 00:31:08,440
Speaker 1: would come come in and do you know, come down

577
00:31:08,480 --> 00:31:11,080
Speaker 1: on them. And that wasn't enough for him. He had

578
00:31:11,120 --> 00:31:13,840
Speaker 1: to solve this problem once and for all. And he

579
00:31:13,920 --> 00:31:16,640
Speaker 1: came up with with a plan in late two thousand

580
00:31:16,720 --> 00:31:18,680
Speaker 1: and three to solve this problem with the oligarchs. And

581
00:31:18,720 --> 00:31:22,120
Speaker 1: what he did was there was one oligarch in particular

582
00:31:22,120 --> 00:31:25,480
Speaker 1: who was the richest oligarc. His name was Mikhail Hoardakovski.

583
00:31:26,160 --> 00:31:28,720
Speaker 1: At the time, it was worth about twenty billion dollars.

584
00:31:29,000 --> 00:31:31,320
Speaker 1: He was the owner of an oil company called Yukos.

585
00:31:32,480 --> 00:31:34,440
Speaker 1: And so Putin decided that he was going to win

586
00:31:34,600 --> 00:31:37,240
Speaker 1: his war with the oligarchs by arresting the richest oligarch.

587
00:31:37,320 --> 00:31:41,680
Speaker 1: And so hardakovskis on his private jet. His jet his

588
00:31:42,120 --> 00:31:46,560
Speaker 1: land from some air airport in Siberia, and Putin organizes

589
00:31:46,800 --> 00:31:49,880
Speaker 1: for his private jet to be surrounded by the FSB,

590
00:31:50,040 --> 00:31:53,800
Speaker 1: which is the successor organization of the KGB. They surround

591
00:31:53,840 --> 00:31:57,240
Speaker 1: the jet, they arrest him, they put him on a

592
00:31:57,440 --> 00:32:01,280
Speaker 1: government plane back to Moscow. They put him in jail,

593
00:32:01,760 --> 00:32:04,680
Speaker 1: and then they put him on trial. In Russia, when

594
00:32:04,680 --> 00:32:08,320
Speaker 1: you go on trial, there's a seven percent conviction rate,

595
00:32:08,560 --> 00:32:10,640
Speaker 1: and so there's no presumption of innocence. And so when

596
00:32:10,640 --> 00:32:12,920
Speaker 1: you're on trial, they put you in a cage because

597
00:32:12,960 --> 00:32:14,680
Speaker 1: that's where you're going to be when the trial is over.

598
00:32:15,760 --> 00:32:18,920
Speaker 1: So they put Mikhail Khordakovsky, the richest man in Russia,

599
00:32:19,240 --> 00:32:23,040
Speaker 1: on trial, in a cage, and they allowed television cameras

600
00:32:23,080 --> 00:32:27,000
Speaker 1: to come in and film them. And so imagine you're

601
00:32:27,040 --> 00:32:31,160
Speaker 1: the seventeenth richest oligarch in Russia. You're on your yacht.

602
00:32:31,280 --> 00:32:34,920
Speaker 1: It's parked off the Code Desur in France. You can

603
00:32:34,960 --> 00:32:36,960
Speaker 1: just finished up with your mistress in the bedroom. You

604
00:32:37,000 --> 00:32:40,440
Speaker 1: go out to the the living room, you click on CNN,

605
00:32:40,440 --> 00:32:43,440
Speaker 1: and you see a guy far smarter, far more powerful,

606
00:32:44,120 --> 00:32:47,479
Speaker 1: far better than you, sitting in a cage. What's your

607
00:32:47,560 --> 00:32:50,240
Speaker 1: natural reaction going to be? You don't want to sit

608
00:32:50,280 --> 00:32:53,360
Speaker 1: in that cage. And so, one by one by one,

609
00:32:54,600 --> 00:32:58,120
Speaker 1: these some oligarchs went to Prudent after Ordakovski was convicted

610
00:32:58,120 --> 00:33:01,080
Speaker 1: and sentenced to ten years, and they say to Putin

611
00:33:01,120 --> 00:33:04,040
Speaker 1: as a summer of two thousand four, Vladimir, what do

612
00:33:04,040 --> 00:33:05,280
Speaker 1: we have to do so we don't sit in the

613
00:33:05,320 --> 00:33:12,840
Speaker 1: cage and and prudent says, real simple, not for the

614
00:33:12,880 --> 00:33:17,600
Speaker 1: Russian government or for the presidential administration of Russia, for

615
00:33:17,680 --> 00:33:21,440
Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin. And at that moment in time two thousand

616
00:33:21,520 --> 00:33:24,560
Speaker 1: and four, Vladimir Putin becames becomes the richest man in

617
00:33:24,600 --> 00:33:27,719
Speaker 1: the world. And at that moment in time, all of

618
00:33:27,760 --> 00:33:32,080
Speaker 1: my activities exposing the oligarchs are no longer exposing his enemies,

619
00:33:33,080 --> 00:33:39,600
Speaker 1: but exposing his personal interest. And they must have struggled

620
00:33:39,600 --> 00:33:42,360
Speaker 1: to figure out what's what to do with me, but

621
00:33:42,360 --> 00:33:45,840
Speaker 1: they figured it out. And in early November two thousand

622
00:33:45,840 --> 00:33:48,800
Speaker 1: and five, I was flying back to Moscow from London.

623
00:33:50,120 --> 00:33:52,080
Speaker 1: I was I've been living in Moscow for ten years.

624
00:33:52,120 --> 00:33:55,200
Speaker 1: I was largest foreign investor in the country. And I

625
00:33:55,200 --> 00:33:58,920
Speaker 1: get arrested at Sharon Matevo Airport by four heavily armed

626
00:33:58,920 --> 00:34:02,040
Speaker 1: border guards. They take me down to the detention center

627
00:34:02,080 --> 00:34:04,960
Speaker 1: of the airport. They locked me up overnight, and I'm

628
00:34:04,960 --> 00:34:09,000
Speaker 1: sitting there, cursing myself for having been so stupid for

629
00:34:09,120 --> 00:34:11,600
Speaker 1: doing this, and wondering whether I'm going off to Siberia

630
00:34:12,040 --> 00:34:15,520
Speaker 1: like Kordakowski, or whether I'm going to be deported. I

631
00:34:15,600 --> 00:34:18,479
Speaker 1: was sitting there for fifteen hours and then they finally

632
00:34:18,880 --> 00:34:22,279
Speaker 1: marched me back onto a air Flouts flight, stick me

633
00:34:22,320 --> 00:34:25,719
Speaker 1: in the middle of seat, and to court me back

634
00:34:25,760 --> 00:34:28,320
Speaker 1: to London. And I'll tell you something, I was so

635
00:34:28,320 --> 00:34:30,719
Speaker 1: so happy that it was if you've ever watched that

636
00:34:30,800 --> 00:34:34,840
Speaker 1: movie Argo, when they take off from Iran, I was

637
00:34:34,880 --> 00:34:39,279
Speaker 1: so happy that I wasn't being sent off to Siberia. Um.

638
00:34:39,320 --> 00:34:43,520
Speaker 1: But so I get back to London, um, and and

639
00:34:43,520 --> 00:34:46,280
Speaker 1: and then I get an official letter from the Russian

640
00:34:46,640 --> 00:34:50,080
Speaker 1: Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that I've been banned entry

641
00:34:50,120 --> 00:34:52,600
Speaker 1: into Russia because I was a threat to national security

642
00:34:53,719 --> 00:34:57,880
Speaker 1: and and and I was really surprised, actually, because I

643
00:34:57,880 --> 00:35:00,920
Speaker 1: thought I'd been doing them a favor by exposing all

644
00:35:00,960 --> 00:35:04,520
Speaker 1: this corruption. But you know, as I figured out Putin,

645
00:35:04,840 --> 00:35:06,960
Speaker 1: Putin was now the beneficiary of this whole thing. And

646
00:35:07,000 --> 00:35:11,480
Speaker 1: so at this point I was pretty scared because, okay, yes, um,

647
00:35:12,760 --> 00:35:14,520
Speaker 1: being kicked out it's not a great thing if you're

648
00:35:14,520 --> 00:35:16,840
Speaker 1: specialized in investing in Russia. But you know, when the

649
00:35:16,880 --> 00:35:19,759
Speaker 1: Russians decide to go after you, they don't intend to

650
00:35:19,800 --> 00:35:22,480
Speaker 1: do it mildly. They usually do it with extreme prejudice.

651
00:35:22,520 --> 00:35:25,480
Speaker 1: And so I said to myself, where else to do?

652
00:35:26,160 --> 00:35:28,800
Speaker 1: You know, where else am I exposed? And there is

653
00:35:29,040 --> 00:35:32,000
Speaker 1: two places where I was exposed. I had a bunch

654
00:35:32,040 --> 00:35:33,440
Speaker 1: of people, A bunch of people were for me and

655
00:35:33,440 --> 00:35:38,120
Speaker 1: their family members that they could arrest um in Russia.

656
00:35:38,800 --> 00:35:40,279
Speaker 1: And I had a hell of a lot of money

657
00:35:40,320 --> 00:35:43,840
Speaker 1: invested in the country. And so I organized an emergency

658
00:35:43,880 --> 00:35:46,719
Speaker 1: evacuation in my entire staff, all of the people who

659
00:35:46,719 --> 00:35:48,600
Speaker 1: were for me and their and their dependence. And I

660
00:35:48,640 --> 00:35:51,000
Speaker 1: got them all out and got them all to London.

661
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:57,040
Speaker 1: And once I got everybody safely out, we then organized. Uh.

662
00:35:57,280 --> 00:36:01,880
Speaker 1: We we quickly and quietly liquidated every last year we

663
00:36:01,960 --> 00:36:04,840
Speaker 1: held them in the country. So let's talk a little

664
00:36:04,840 --> 00:36:10,480
Speaker 1: bit about the raid. Russian officials, while you're in Paris,

665
00:36:10,560 --> 00:36:14,560
Speaker 1: decide to raid the remnants of what was Hermitage. You

666
00:36:14,560 --> 00:36:20,840
Speaker 1: would already essentially wound down operations, removed everybody um except

667
00:36:20,840 --> 00:36:24,040
Speaker 1: for one secretary, and and gotten all of the cash

668
00:36:24,239 --> 00:36:28,839
Speaker 1: out of out of Russia. Uh, tell us how this progressed?

669
00:36:28,840 --> 00:36:33,280
Speaker 1: What what was this raid about? So they they seize

670
00:36:33,320 --> 00:36:37,240
Speaker 1: these documents that the stamp seals and certificates for investment

671
00:36:37,239 --> 00:36:39,960
Speaker 1: holding companies, which were at this point, we're empty. So

672
00:36:40,080 --> 00:36:44,520
Speaker 1: they seize these documents and and then we discover that

673
00:36:44,600 --> 00:36:47,600
Speaker 1: the document that the companies no longer belong to us.

674
00:36:48,120 --> 00:36:51,400
Speaker 1: They have been frauduably reregistered into the name of a

675
00:36:51,400 --> 00:36:54,600
Speaker 1: man who had been convicted of manslaughter and let out

676
00:36:54,600 --> 00:36:58,000
Speaker 1: of jail early um he became the new owner of

677
00:36:58,000 --> 00:37:01,440
Speaker 1: these of our of our empty investment holding companies, which

678
00:37:01,920 --> 00:37:03,680
Speaker 1: and the only way he could have done that it

679
00:37:03,760 --> 00:37:07,880
Speaker 1: was in collusion with the police. And so at this

680
00:37:07,920 --> 00:37:11,160
Speaker 1: point I don't have any money at stake in Russia,

681
00:37:11,200 --> 00:37:15,600
Speaker 1: because all the money is safely out. But I'm terrified,

682
00:37:15,640 --> 00:37:18,080
Speaker 1: not from a financial perspective, but from a legal perspective,

683
00:37:18,160 --> 00:37:20,520
Speaker 1: because I know that if the police are working with

684
00:37:20,680 --> 00:37:24,640
Speaker 1: killers steel companies, I'm gonna be walking through some airport

685
00:37:24,760 --> 00:37:27,359
Speaker 1: somewhere and then I'm gonna be arrested in some future data.

686
00:37:27,440 --> 00:37:32,200
Speaker 1: And so I am. I call up the smartest lawyer

687
00:37:32,239 --> 00:37:35,840
Speaker 1: I know in Russia, the young man named Sergei Magnitsky.

688
00:37:36,280 --> 00:37:39,120
Speaker 1: Sergey was at the time thirty five years old. He

689
00:37:39,200 --> 00:37:41,920
Speaker 1: worked for an American law firm, and he was one

690
00:37:41,920 --> 00:37:44,960
Speaker 1: of these people who could literally do ten things in

691
00:37:45,040 --> 00:37:47,759
Speaker 1: the time it takes another lawyer to do one. It's

692
00:37:47,800 --> 00:37:53,600
Speaker 1: just a genius, hard working, unbelievably good lawyer, and I

693
00:37:53,680 --> 00:37:56,080
Speaker 1: say to Sergey, I don't know what's going on here,

694
00:37:57,000 --> 00:37:58,640
Speaker 1: but I need you to figure it out and I

695
00:37:58,760 --> 00:38:02,640
Speaker 1: need to stop it. As a Surge goes out and

696
00:38:02,760 --> 00:38:06,800
Speaker 1: he investigates, and he goes and sends letters of request,

697
00:38:06,920 --> 00:38:10,480
Speaker 1: information documents, all stufferent people, and he goes to registries

698
00:38:10,520 --> 00:38:13,000
Speaker 1: and he goes to courts, he goes everywhere. And he

699
00:38:13,080 --> 00:38:16,480
Speaker 1: comes back and he said, I figured it out. There

700
00:38:16,520 --> 00:38:19,120
Speaker 1: were two parts of this scam, he said. The first

701
00:38:19,160 --> 00:38:22,040
Speaker 1: part of the scam didn't succeed. The first part of

702
00:38:22,120 --> 00:38:24,959
Speaker 1: the scam was they wanted to steal all of your money,

703
00:38:25,640 --> 00:38:28,080
Speaker 1: but because I've gotten all my money out before they

704
00:38:28,120 --> 00:38:31,880
Speaker 1: got to us, they didn't get it. He said. However,

705
00:38:33,080 --> 00:38:36,480
Speaker 1: the second part of their scam did succeed. And what

706
00:38:36,600 --> 00:38:40,680
Speaker 1: he explained was that after we had liquidated all of

707
00:38:40,719 --> 00:38:43,040
Speaker 1: our holdings in Russia in the previous year, when we

708
00:38:43,080 --> 00:38:45,840
Speaker 1: got all our money out, we had a profit of

709
00:38:45,880 --> 00:38:49,480
Speaker 1: a billion dollars, and on that profit of a billion dollars,

710
00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:54,240
Speaker 1: we paid to the Russian government million dollars of capital

711
00:38:54,320 --> 00:38:59,480
Speaker 1: games tax. What Serge had learned through his investigation was

712
00:38:59,600 --> 00:39:04,479
Speaker 1: that after our companies were stolen, the people who stole.

713
00:39:04,520 --> 00:39:07,880
Speaker 1: Our companies went back to the tax authorities on the

714
00:39:08,640 --> 00:39:12,880
Speaker 1: December two thousand and seven, and they said, there was

715
00:39:12,920 --> 00:39:17,040
Speaker 1: a mistake made in the previous year tax filing. Instead

716
00:39:17,080 --> 00:39:20,360
Speaker 1: of these companies earning a billion dollars, they're in zero.

717
00:39:20,880 --> 00:39:22,560
Speaker 1: This is what they said. And they came up from

718
00:39:23,080 --> 00:39:26,600
Speaker 1: complicated way of trying to explain that, and they said,

719
00:39:26,600 --> 00:39:30,239
Speaker 1: as a result of them earning zero, the two million

720
00:39:30,280 --> 00:39:32,520
Speaker 1: dollars of taxes that was paid in the previous year

721
00:39:33,000 --> 00:39:35,759
Speaker 1: is paid an error, and we'd like that money back.

722
00:39:37,160 --> 00:39:40,760
Speaker 1: And so on December two thousand seven, two days before Christmas,

723
00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:46,000
Speaker 1: they applied for a two thirty million dollar fraudulent tax refund.

724
00:39:47,040 --> 00:39:50,200
Speaker 1: It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia.

725
00:39:51,040 --> 00:39:54,560
Speaker 1: Applied for it on the two days before Christmas, and

726
00:39:54,680 --> 00:39:58,080
Speaker 1: it was approved and paid out the next day on

727
00:39:58,239 --> 00:40:04,000
Speaker 1: Christmas Eve, and so pretty shocking. Well, I mean, if

728
00:40:04,040 --> 00:40:07,880
Speaker 1: you if so, let's just say you overpay taxes legitimately

729
00:40:07,960 --> 00:40:11,240
Speaker 1: by five thousand dollars, you know you'd be fifteen years

730
00:40:11,719 --> 00:40:13,960
Speaker 1: later and you still not to get that money back

731
00:40:14,000 --> 00:40:16,279
Speaker 1: from the Russians. You don't think you get it the

732
00:40:16,360 --> 00:40:18,600
Speaker 1: next day, even if it was Christmas Eve. It was

733
00:40:18,680 --> 00:40:25,239
Speaker 1: like a lovely Christmas present. Two million dollars near nearly

734
00:40:25,280 --> 00:40:27,680
Speaker 1: a quarter of a billion dollars paid out on a

735
00:40:27,760 --> 00:40:30,960
Speaker 1: fraud in one day on Christmas Eve. So Sergey and

736
00:40:31,040 --> 00:40:33,040
Speaker 1: I were looking at this and this was just a

737
00:40:33,120 --> 00:40:36,719
Speaker 1: monumental discovery and we and we said to each other,

738
00:40:37,040 --> 00:40:41,879
Speaker 1: this couldn't possibly be authorized, because this wasn't this wasn't

739
00:40:41,920 --> 00:40:45,160
Speaker 1: not my money that was being stolen. This was the

740
00:40:45,280 --> 00:40:48,040
Speaker 1: Russian government's money being stolen. And we thought, you know, Putin,

741
00:40:48,600 --> 00:40:51,400
Speaker 1: he might be a nasty guy, but he's he's a nationalist,

742
00:40:51,480 --> 00:40:53,920
Speaker 1: he's a patriot. This is his this is his own

743
00:40:53,960 --> 00:40:57,000
Speaker 1: money that's being stolen. He couldn't have authorized this. And

744
00:40:57,080 --> 00:40:59,360
Speaker 1: so we figured that the best way of dealing with

745
00:40:59,480 --> 00:41:02,719
Speaker 1: it is to bring it to the attention of the

746
00:41:02,840 --> 00:41:06,560
Speaker 1: highest authorities in Russia. As we wrote criminal complaints to

747
00:41:06,640 --> 00:41:10,440
Speaker 1: the head of the General of the General Prosecutor of Russia,

748
00:41:10,520 --> 00:41:12,719
Speaker 1: to the head of the Russian State Investigative Committee, to

749
00:41:12,800 --> 00:41:15,800
Speaker 1: the head of the Internal Affairs Department of the Interior Ministry.

750
00:41:16,800 --> 00:41:21,640
Speaker 1: I then went to the newspapers, to the radio television

751
00:41:22,080 --> 00:41:25,480
Speaker 1: telling the story of what had happened. And then Serge

752
00:41:25,640 --> 00:41:29,440
Speaker 1: went and gave formal testimony to the Russian State Investigative Committee,

753
00:41:29,480 --> 00:41:32,920
Speaker 1: which is their FBI. And we sat back and we

754
00:41:32,960 --> 00:41:36,160
Speaker 1: waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. Well,

755
00:41:36,160 --> 00:41:39,359
Speaker 1: it turns out that in Vladimir Pruten's Russia there are

756
00:41:39,440 --> 00:41:46,000
Speaker 1: no good guys. Five weeks after Surge testified against the officials,

757
00:41:46,120 --> 00:41:51,120
Speaker 1: these cops and so on who did the raid. The

758
00:41:51,239 --> 00:41:54,480
Speaker 1: same people he testified against came to his home on

759
00:41:55,440 --> 00:42:00,480
Speaker 1: November two thousand and arrested him. They put him in

760
00:42:00,520 --> 00:42:04,680
Speaker 1: pre child attention, where he was then tortured to withdraw

761
00:42:04,800 --> 00:42:09,160
Speaker 1: his testimony. They put him in cells with fourteen inmates

762
00:42:09,200 --> 00:42:11,439
Speaker 1: and eight beds and less lights on twenty four hours

763
00:42:11,480 --> 00:42:15,520
Speaker 1: a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in

764
00:42:15,600 --> 00:42:18,720
Speaker 1: cells with no heat and now window panes. In December,

765
00:42:18,840 --> 00:42:21,759
Speaker 1: moscows and nearly froze to death. To put him in

766
00:42:21,840 --> 00:42:23,719
Speaker 1: cells and no toilet, just a hole in the flower

767
00:42:23,760 --> 00:42:26,480
Speaker 1: where the sewage would bubble up. They moved him from

768
00:42:26,520 --> 00:42:29,319
Speaker 1: cell to cell to cell. And the purpose of all

769
00:42:29,360 --> 00:42:32,600
Speaker 1: this um was was to get him to withdraw his

770
00:42:32,719 --> 00:42:36,480
Speaker 1: testimony against these corrupt police officers. And they wanted to

771
00:42:36,560 --> 00:42:38,719
Speaker 1: get in to sign a false confession to say that

772
00:42:38,840 --> 00:42:42,160
Speaker 1: he stole the two thirty million dollars, and he did

773
00:42:42,200 --> 00:42:46,680
Speaker 1: so in my instruction, and Serge he looked at them like,

774
00:42:46,800 --> 00:42:50,040
Speaker 1: just like a soft guy. Here's a guy who you know,

775
00:42:50,120 --> 00:42:52,480
Speaker 1: wears a gray suit and a white shirt and a

776
00:42:52,560 --> 00:42:56,040
Speaker 1: red tie, goes to a fancy American law firm and

777
00:42:56,120 --> 00:42:58,719
Speaker 1: buy Starbucks coffee in the morning. You know, a week

778
00:42:58,760 --> 00:43:02,000
Speaker 1: of this is the old buckle. But what they they

779
00:43:02,040 --> 00:43:06,399
Speaker 1: completely misunderstood Sergey Magnitsky. Sergey was this man of unbelievable

780
00:43:06,520 --> 00:43:10,080
Speaker 1: principle and integrity, and for him, the idea of perjuring

781
00:43:10,200 --> 00:43:14,080
Speaker 1: himself and bearing false witness was more more painful than

782
00:43:14,120 --> 00:43:16,760
Speaker 1: the physical pain they were subjecting to, and he just refused.

783
00:43:18,080 --> 00:43:21,760
Speaker 1: And as a result of his refusal, they just upped

784
00:43:22,280 --> 00:43:26,480
Speaker 1: up to up the pressure in the torture. And after

785
00:43:26,520 --> 00:43:29,400
Speaker 1: about six months of this, his health started to deteriorate.

786
00:43:29,680 --> 00:43:33,279
Speaker 1: He started to develop terrible pains in his stomach, couldn't eat,

787
00:43:33,880 --> 00:43:37,200
Speaker 1: He lost forty pounds, and he eventually went to the

788
00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:42,520
Speaker 1: prison doctor and they diagnosed and as having pancreatitis and

789
00:43:42,600 --> 00:43:47,040
Speaker 1: gallstones and meeting an operation which was scheduled for the

790
00:43:47,600 --> 00:43:51,959
Speaker 1: first of August two thousand nine. Um. A week before

791
00:43:52,000 --> 00:43:55,800
Speaker 1: the operation. He um that the the the bad guys

792
00:43:55,880 --> 00:43:58,320
Speaker 1: come to him again again demand him to sign the

793
00:43:58,360 --> 00:44:03,239
Speaker 1: false confession. Again he refuses, and in retaliation they move

794
00:44:03,400 --> 00:44:06,480
Speaker 1: him from the prison where he was where that which

795
00:44:06,520 --> 00:44:11,120
Speaker 1: had this medical facility, to a maximum security prison in

796
00:44:11,280 --> 00:44:15,680
Speaker 1: Moscow called Boutyrka, and Boutyrka is considered to be one

797
00:44:15,719 --> 00:44:19,160
Speaker 1: of the most horrible prisons in Russia. It's like a

798
00:44:19,239 --> 00:44:22,920
Speaker 1: medieval prison, but but worse than that for Sergey is

799
00:44:23,040 --> 00:44:27,840
Speaker 1: that there was no medical facilities there and at Brutyirka

800
00:44:28,000 --> 00:44:30,320
Speaker 1: has helped completely broke down. And when in a terrible

801
00:44:30,360 --> 00:44:36,400
Speaker 1: downward spiral, constant agonizing pain, and all medical attention and

802
00:44:36,560 --> 00:44:40,440
Speaker 1: was refused, he and his lawyers wrote twenty different desperate

803
00:44:40,520 --> 00:44:43,880
Speaker 1: requests to every different branch or the criminal justice system,

804
00:44:43,960 --> 00:44:48,000
Speaker 1: begging for medical attention, and every different letter was either

805
00:44:48,080 --> 00:44:52,200
Speaker 1: ignored or denied in writing by so many different parts

806
00:44:52,239 --> 00:44:56,040
Speaker 1: of the criminal justice system. Things got worse and worse

807
00:44:56,080 --> 00:44:59,000
Speaker 1: than On November sixty two tho nine, Sergey went into

808
00:44:59,040 --> 00:45:04,920
Speaker 1: critical condition. On that night, the Bluecherka authorities didn't want

809
00:45:04,960 --> 00:45:06,920
Speaker 1: to have responsibility for him anymore, and so they put

810
00:45:07,000 --> 00:45:10,000
Speaker 1: him in an ambulance and sent him to another prison

811
00:45:10,120 --> 00:45:14,040
Speaker 1: across town and had a medically wing. When he gets

812
00:45:14,080 --> 00:45:16,239
Speaker 1: to the new prison, has been of putting him in

813
00:45:16,280 --> 00:45:19,680
Speaker 1: the emergency room. They put him in an isolation cell.

814
00:45:20,719 --> 00:45:24,399
Speaker 1: They chained him to a bed, and then eight riot

815
00:45:24,480 --> 00:45:28,160
Speaker 1: guards with rubber baton's come into the cell and beat

816
00:45:28,239 --> 00:45:34,279
Speaker 1: Sergei Magnitsky to death. He was thirty seven years old.

817
00:45:34,640 --> 00:45:38,480
Speaker 1: That was November six, two thousand nine, a little more

818
00:45:38,560 --> 00:45:42,600
Speaker 1: than twelve and a half years ago. He left a wife, him,

819
00:45:42,600 --> 00:45:54,040
Speaker 1: two children. He was killed. Ibelieve the most unbelievable, horrifying, traumatizing, shocking,

820
00:45:54,520 --> 00:45:59,120
Speaker 1: horrific thing I've ever had anything to do with in

821
00:45:59,200 --> 00:46:03,200
Speaker 1: my life. The guy who worked for me was killed

822
00:46:03,320 --> 00:46:07,080
Speaker 1: because he worked for me, was effectively killed as my proxy.

823
00:46:09,160 --> 00:46:14,720
Speaker 1: And when I was finally able to clear the fog

824
00:46:14,840 --> 00:46:20,880
Speaker 1: of hysteria and heartbreak and shock, I think clearly I

825
00:46:21,000 --> 00:46:24,920
Speaker 1: made a vow to his memory, to his family, and

826
00:46:25,000 --> 00:46:29,200
Speaker 1: to myself that I was going to put aside everything

827
00:46:29,239 --> 00:46:32,200
Speaker 1: else I was doing in my life, and I was

828
00:46:32,200 --> 00:46:35,839
Speaker 1: going to devote all of my time, all of my resources,

829
00:46:35,920 --> 00:46:39,200
Speaker 1: and all of my energies going after the bastards have

830
00:46:39,320 --> 00:46:42,200
Speaker 1: killed him, to make sure they faced justice at the

831
00:46:42,280 --> 00:46:44,080
Speaker 1: last twelve and a half years. That's what I've been doing.

832
00:46:44,360 --> 00:46:51,280
Speaker 1: So you had previously discussed how effectively the Russian government

833
00:46:51,600 --> 00:46:56,680
Speaker 1: had had Sergey beaten to death in their custody. At

834
00:46:56,760 --> 00:47:01,280
Speaker 1: this point you decide you want um, you want payback,

835
00:47:01,440 --> 00:47:04,240
Speaker 1: You want to make the people who did this pay

836
00:47:04,960 --> 00:47:08,759
Speaker 1: tell us how the idea of the Magnitsky Acts came

837
00:47:08,840 --> 00:47:12,480
Speaker 1: about and what was it like shepherding that through Congress.

838
00:47:13,360 --> 00:47:17,720
Speaker 1: So after Sergey was killed, I said to myself, well,

839
00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:21,280
Speaker 1: how do we get justice? And Serge had done something

840
00:47:21,920 --> 00:47:25,440
Speaker 1: unique when he was in jail, which is that he

841
00:47:25,520 --> 00:47:30,120
Speaker 1: wrote everything down that happened to him. Every every time

842
00:47:30,160 --> 00:47:33,240
Speaker 1: they did something bad to him, he wrote a criminal

843
00:47:33,320 --> 00:47:37,239
Speaker 1: complaint about who did it, what they did, where they

844
00:47:37,280 --> 00:47:39,360
Speaker 1: did it, what law was violated when they did it.

845
00:47:39,880 --> 00:47:42,799
Speaker 1: And that was his way of dealing with the adversity

846
00:47:42,880 --> 00:47:45,600
Speaker 1: of being in jail. And so over the course of

847
00:47:45,680 --> 00:47:49,000
Speaker 1: three days and attention, he had written four hundred and

848
00:47:49,040 --> 00:47:54,279
Speaker 1: fifty complaints documenting his mistreatment, and once a month or

849
00:47:54,280 --> 00:47:56,239
Speaker 1: so he write these complaints out. Once a month or

850
00:47:56,239 --> 00:47:59,200
Speaker 1: so he would hand them to his lawyer. His lawyer

851
00:47:59,239 --> 00:48:03,680
Speaker 1: would then five of them and we would get copies

852
00:48:04,400 --> 00:48:06,640
Speaker 1: and although none of these complaints were ever acted on,

853
00:48:07,880 --> 00:48:13,759
Speaker 1: we because we had copies, we had the most well documented, granular, detailed,

854
00:48:14,880 --> 00:48:18,160
Speaker 1: firsthand account of human rights abuse have to ever come

855
00:48:18,200 --> 00:48:22,239
Speaker 1: out of the Russian system. And because these were so

856
00:48:22,600 --> 00:48:28,600
Speaker 1: articularly written, um they made horrifying caps for you know,

857
00:48:28,719 --> 00:48:31,879
Speaker 1: Russia was like this is this is not Nobody could

858
00:48:31,880 --> 00:48:35,719
Speaker 1: imagine that this was the Russia. You know, Russia of

859
00:48:35,880 --> 00:48:37,759
Speaker 1: the years of two thousand and nine. They thought this

860
00:48:37,880 --> 00:48:43,360
Speaker 1: was stalling when they read these letters and complaints, and

861
00:48:43,760 --> 00:48:47,120
Speaker 1: we thought that that would be enough. It's released have

862
00:48:47,320 --> 00:48:50,359
Speaker 1: them throw some of the low level people under the bus.

863
00:48:52,200 --> 00:48:57,839
Speaker 1: But I was completely wrong. Instead of prosecuting anybody wide,

864
00:48:57,920 --> 00:49:03,160
Speaker 1: recruitin got personally involved. He circled the wagons. He made

865
00:49:03,200 --> 00:49:07,200
Speaker 1: public statements that nobody had done anything wrong. He has

866
00:49:07,239 --> 00:49:11,040
Speaker 1: honorated every single individual. Some of the most complicit people

867
00:49:11,440 --> 00:49:16,319
Speaker 1: even received state honors and promotions. And in the most

868
00:49:16,520 --> 00:49:21,239
Speaker 1: unbelievable miscarriage of justice, three years after they murdered Sergey Magnosky,

869
00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:25,600
Speaker 1: they put him on trial, in the first ever trial

870
00:49:25,680 --> 00:49:28,719
Speaker 1: against a dead man in the history of Russia. They

871
00:49:28,760 --> 00:49:32,120
Speaker 1: put me on trial as his co defendant. We were

872
00:49:32,160 --> 00:49:35,040
Speaker 1: both found guilty. They couldn't do anything more to Surgey

873
00:49:35,080 --> 00:49:38,640
Speaker 1: than they had already done of killing him. Um, they

874
00:49:38,680 --> 00:49:42,240
Speaker 1: sends me to nine years and months sentia. It became

875
00:49:42,320 --> 00:49:46,239
Speaker 1: obvious well before that that this that that that we

876
00:49:46,320 --> 00:49:48,520
Speaker 1: weren't going to succeed in getting justice in Russia. So

877
00:49:48,600 --> 00:49:51,480
Speaker 1: we said, well, how do we get justice outside of Russia?

878
00:49:53,160 --> 00:49:55,160
Speaker 1: And this is when I came up with an idea,

879
00:49:55,719 --> 00:49:59,680
Speaker 1: which is that the people who killed Sergey didn't kill

880
00:49:59,800 --> 00:50:04,960
Speaker 1: him for ideological or religious reasons, as many things have

881
00:50:05,040 --> 00:50:09,360
Speaker 1: happened in the past. They killed him for money. They

882
00:50:09,480 --> 00:50:14,160
Speaker 1: killed him very simply for two million dollars. And the

883
00:50:14,239 --> 00:50:17,560
Speaker 1: people who still let to enter thirty million dollars don't

884
00:50:17,680 --> 00:50:20,680
Speaker 1: keep that money in Russia. There's as easily as they

885
00:50:20,800 --> 00:50:24,120
Speaker 1: stole it, it could be stolen from them. They keep

886
00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:28,719
Speaker 1: that money in America, in the in the UK, they

887
00:50:28,800 --> 00:50:33,680
Speaker 1: buy fancy apartments in London, they buy houses in South

888
00:50:33,760 --> 00:50:39,239
Speaker 1: Beach and Miami, they buy villas on the on the

889
00:50:39,320 --> 00:50:42,839
Speaker 1: front line in santra Pe and the s and their

890
00:50:42,880 --> 00:50:45,600
Speaker 1: kids the Swiss boarding school and their girl girlfriends on

891
00:50:46,160 --> 00:50:51,840
Speaker 1: shopping trips to Milan, and so we we it's it

892
00:50:51,840 --> 00:50:55,600
Speaker 1: would be very difficult to prosecute somebody for for torture

893
00:50:55,640 --> 00:50:58,360
Speaker 1: and murder in the West for a crime that was

894
00:50:58,400 --> 00:51:01,560
Speaker 1: committed in Russia. But we certainly don't have to let

895
00:51:01,640 --> 00:51:04,440
Speaker 1: them travel to the West, or that we can certainly

896
00:51:04,440 --> 00:51:05,960
Speaker 1: don't have to let them use our banks from the West.

897
00:51:06,000 --> 00:51:08,600
Speaker 1: We can freeze their assets in the West. And so

898
00:51:08,719 --> 00:51:10,440
Speaker 1: that's when I came up this idea of freezing their

899
00:51:10,480 --> 00:51:12,480
Speaker 1: assets and banning their visas. And so I took this

900
00:51:12,600 --> 00:51:16,320
Speaker 1: idea to Washington and I met two senators and the

901
00:51:16,520 --> 00:51:21,040
Speaker 1: Senator Benjamin Carton, who was a Democrat from Maryland, and

902
00:51:21,200 --> 00:51:25,479
Speaker 1: Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, and I shared

903
00:51:25,520 --> 00:51:29,400
Speaker 1: the story which I just shared with you now, and

904
00:51:29,520 --> 00:51:33,560
Speaker 1: I said, can we freeze their assets and ban their visas?

905
00:51:35,040 --> 00:51:37,240
Speaker 1: And these two senators were so moved by the story,

906
00:51:37,320 --> 00:51:40,080
Speaker 1: they said, yes, we can, as we do here in Congress,

907
00:51:40,560 --> 00:51:43,359
Speaker 1: we can make a law, and they made something called

908
00:51:43,400 --> 00:51:46,560
Speaker 1: the Magnetsky Act. And so they put this idea of

909
00:51:46,600 --> 00:51:49,280
Speaker 1: the Magnifski Act on the books. And it was originally

910
00:51:49,400 --> 00:51:52,000
Speaker 1: just to go after the people who killed ser Gay Magnetsky,

911
00:51:53,400 --> 00:51:57,799
Speaker 1: but as soon as other other people victims had heard

912
00:51:57,840 --> 00:52:02,760
Speaker 1: of this story. The holmes in these two senators offices

913
00:52:02,800 --> 00:52:06,080
Speaker 1: started lighting up with calls from Moscow and other parts

914
00:52:06,120 --> 00:52:09,239
Speaker 1: of Russia, saying, you found me Achilles heel of the

915
00:52:09,280 --> 00:52:12,480
Speaker 1: Putin regime. This is what they do. They commit terrible

916
00:52:12,560 --> 00:52:15,040
Speaker 1: crimes in Russia and they keep their money in the West.

917
00:52:15,760 --> 00:52:19,760
Speaker 1: Can you possibly um sanctioned the people who killed my husband,

918
00:52:19,840 --> 00:52:23,680
Speaker 1: my brother, my sister, my aunt. And after about a

919
00:52:23,719 --> 00:52:26,000
Speaker 1: dozen of these calls, these two senators realized they are,

920
00:52:26,440 --> 00:52:28,759
Speaker 1: but they weren't just something much bigger in just one

921
00:52:28,840 --> 00:52:31,680
Speaker 1: case that and so they added sixty five words to

922
00:52:31,800 --> 00:52:36,720
Speaker 1: the law to include all human rights abusers in Russia,

923
00:52:36,800 --> 00:52:40,520
Speaker 1: not just the people who killed Magnifsky. And all of

924
00:52:40,560 --> 00:52:44,160
Speaker 1: a sudden, all sorts of victims fanned out across Capitol

925
00:52:44,280 --> 00:52:48,680
Speaker 1: Hill telling their stories. I was trapped telling Surrogey's story.

926
00:52:49,600 --> 00:52:51,560
Speaker 1: And in November of two thousand twelve, it went for

927
00:52:51,640 --> 00:52:54,640
Speaker 1: a vote in the Senate and it passed ninety two

928
00:52:54,680 --> 00:52:58,160
Speaker 1: to four. The Magnifici Act passed two to four, and

929
00:52:58,239 --> 00:53:03,560
Speaker 1: asster representatives had passed with eight m and on December fourteen,

930
00:53:03,719 --> 00:53:07,439
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, President Obama signed the magnet Ski Acts

931
00:53:07,440 --> 00:53:11,680
Speaker 1: into the federal law, and Vladimir Putin went out of

932
00:53:11,760 --> 00:53:16,960
Speaker 1: his mind. He got so angry that in retaliation he

933
00:53:17,080 --> 00:53:21,759
Speaker 1: banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. And

934
00:53:21,840 --> 00:53:23,920
Speaker 1: that that may sound bad, there's actually much worse than

935
00:53:23,960 --> 00:53:26,759
Speaker 1: it sounds, because the orphans that the Russians put up

936
00:53:26,760 --> 00:53:31,239
Speaker 1: for adoption were the unhealthy ones, the ones with with

937
00:53:31,480 --> 00:53:35,840
Speaker 1: down syndrome, with fetal alcohol syndrome, with HIV, with all

938
00:53:36,120 --> 00:53:39,839
Speaker 1: other cerebral things. And Americans would come with open hearts

939
00:53:39,880 --> 00:53:42,320
Speaker 1: and open arms and take these six children back to

940
00:53:42,360 --> 00:53:46,920
Speaker 1: America and nurse them to help. And in Russia, the

941
00:53:47,040 --> 00:53:49,839
Speaker 1: orphanages didn't have the resources, and these kids would die.

942
00:53:50,400 --> 00:53:53,239
Speaker 1: And so basically Putin was sentencing his own orphans to

943
00:53:53,360 --> 00:53:58,520
Speaker 1: death as a way of retaliating the Magnifici Act. He

944
00:53:58,680 --> 00:54:01,880
Speaker 1: then made it a single larger foreign policy priority to

945
00:54:02,000 --> 00:54:07,479
Speaker 1: try to repeal the Magnidski Act, and and he even

946
00:54:07,680 --> 00:54:12,800
Speaker 1: went so far as the sending his own representative, a

947
00:54:12,880 --> 00:54:17,839
Speaker 1: female lawyer named the Natalia vessel Midskaya to Trump Cower

948
00:54:18,480 --> 00:54:21,880
Speaker 1: after Trump was nominated before before he was elected president

949
00:54:22,360 --> 00:54:26,160
Speaker 1: two thousand sixteen nine two thousand sixteen, with a specific

950
00:54:26,239 --> 00:54:29,760
Speaker 1: request one just one simple request that if he becomes president,

951
00:54:30,560 --> 00:54:33,879
Speaker 1: he should repeal the Magnitski Act. Now happy to say

952
00:54:34,000 --> 00:54:38,080
Speaker 1: that it didn't work, that no Magnitski Act has ever

953
00:54:38,120 --> 00:54:41,680
Speaker 1: been repealed. In fact, it was not just not repealed,

954
00:54:41,719 --> 00:54:43,720
Speaker 1: but it was broadened. The Magnetski Act in two thousand

955
00:54:43,800 --> 00:54:46,800
Speaker 1: sixteen became the Global Magnanski Act, which doesn't just go

956
00:54:46,920 --> 00:54:49,560
Speaker 1: after the people who do terrible things in Russia, but

957
00:54:49,800 --> 00:54:53,600
Speaker 1: in China and Iran and Venezuela and all other countries.

958
00:54:54,360 --> 00:54:57,800
Speaker 1: The Magniski Act now exists, not just in the United States.

959
00:54:57,960 --> 00:55:00,000
Speaker 1: We've got it passed in Canada in two thousands steven

960
00:55:00,000 --> 00:55:02,560
Speaker 1: a team in the UK and two thousand eight team

961
00:55:03,280 --> 00:55:05,800
Speaker 1: in the European Union in two thousand twenty, in Australia

962
00:55:05,840 --> 00:55:09,120
Speaker 1: in two thousan. They're now thirty four countries that have

963
00:55:09,280 --> 00:55:12,080
Speaker 1: the Getsky Acts around the world. And this is actually

964
00:55:12,800 --> 00:55:16,279
Speaker 1: the tool, the template, which is being used to go

965
00:55:16,400 --> 00:55:20,200
Speaker 1: after all the bad guys in Putain's regime that are

966
00:55:20,239 --> 00:55:22,880
Speaker 1: involved in the war in Ukraine. So let's let's put

967
00:55:22,960 --> 00:55:25,520
Speaker 1: some flesh on those bones a little bit and talk

968
00:55:25,600 --> 00:55:31,640
Speaker 1: about the dollar amounts involved. So so Surgey discovered a

969
00:55:31,760 --> 00:55:35,719
Speaker 1: two hundred and thirty million dollar tax fraud. And then

970
00:55:36,120 --> 00:55:41,440
Speaker 1: courtesy of investigative journalism like the Panama Papers and a

971
00:55:41,560 --> 00:55:46,319
Speaker 1: number of other items, UM, just one bank alone, dank

972
00:55:46,360 --> 00:55:50,279
Speaker 1: Ski Bank in sin the Navy was discovered to have

973
00:55:50,560 --> 00:55:54,800
Speaker 1: laundered two hundred and thirty four billion, not million billion

974
00:55:55,400 --> 00:55:58,680
Speaker 1: in in Russian money. What do you think the total

975
00:55:58,800 --> 00:56:05,080
Speaker 1: amount of dirty, corrupt, stolen money out of Russia adds

976
00:56:05,160 --> 00:56:09,600
Speaker 1: up to that's been laundered through Western banks. Well so

977
00:56:10,160 --> 00:56:12,400
Speaker 1: so yeah, so so. One of the big things that

978
00:56:12,880 --> 00:56:15,400
Speaker 1: after the Magnitsky Act has passed was to figure out

979
00:56:15,400 --> 00:56:18,160
Speaker 1: where where all the money was. And so we we

980
00:56:18,480 --> 00:56:21,959
Speaker 1: that became like my primary life mission was to figure

981
00:56:22,000 --> 00:56:23,920
Speaker 1: it out. And I had a bunch of people working

982
00:56:23,960 --> 00:56:25,759
Speaker 1: for me, and we collaborated with a lot of these

983
00:56:25,840 --> 00:56:29,680
Speaker 1: journalists and UM, and we ended up getting a lot

984
00:56:29,719 --> 00:56:32,719
Speaker 1: of information in different countries and and and what we

985
00:56:32,840 --> 00:56:37,000
Speaker 1: discovered was that UM, in order to get the money

986
00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:40,080
Speaker 1: out of Russia, they never atended directly from Russia to

987
00:56:40,239 --> 00:56:42,759
Speaker 1: like buy an apartment in London or France, because the

988
00:56:42,800 --> 00:56:46,600
Speaker 1: banks in London and France would be suspicious. And so

989
00:56:46,719 --> 00:56:50,319
Speaker 1: what they did was they found these countries that were

990
00:56:50,840 --> 00:56:55,200
Speaker 1: members of the European Union. Um, but we're still sort

991
00:56:55,200 --> 00:56:58,480
Speaker 1: of not up to par with the European Union as

992
00:56:58,520 --> 00:57:02,400
Speaker 1: far as you know must and laws and and the

993
00:57:03,840 --> 00:57:07,000
Speaker 1: The countries that were really sort of that category were

994
00:57:07,040 --> 00:57:10,520
Speaker 1: these three countries of the Baltics, Stonia, Latvia and Lithuania

995
00:57:11,200 --> 00:57:15,520
Speaker 1: and Cyprus. And as we started digging and digging and

996
00:57:15,640 --> 00:57:19,040
Speaker 1: pulling and threads and getting more data and leaks and

997
00:57:19,280 --> 00:57:25,080
Speaker 1: and working with journalists, we discovered that million of the

998
00:57:25,120 --> 00:57:31,600
Speaker 1: two million that that that was stolen had all gone

999
00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:35,760
Speaker 1: to one bank, the Estonian branch of Danski bank a

1000
00:57:35,880 --> 00:57:39,720
Speaker 1: Danish banks all gone through this one branch. And we

1001
00:57:39,840 --> 00:57:43,080
Speaker 1: had all this great data and these journalists that we

1002
00:57:43,160 --> 00:57:46,360
Speaker 1: were working that we knew in Denmark, we're really interested

1003
00:57:46,520 --> 00:57:48,720
Speaker 1: in the data we had because identified the names of

1004
00:57:48,800 --> 00:57:51,960
Speaker 1: the holding companies and the account numbers and all those

1005
00:57:52,040 --> 00:57:55,480
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Because they had a huge database themselves

1006
00:57:55,560 --> 00:57:58,960
Speaker 1: called the Russian Laundermat database. But they couldn't make sense

1007
00:57:59,000 --> 00:58:01,160
Speaker 1: of the database, but they they could if if they

1008
00:58:01,200 --> 00:58:04,280
Speaker 1: could take our our our analysis of the two million,

1009
00:58:05,200 --> 00:58:08,560
Speaker 1: So they get our analysis, they get are all of

1010
00:58:08,640 --> 00:58:11,480
Speaker 1: our analysis and they compare it to this big sort

1011
00:58:11,480 --> 00:58:15,160
Speaker 1: of unstructured database, they have this Russian launderman, and they

1012
00:58:15,240 --> 00:58:17,600
Speaker 1: come back and say, actually, it wasn't two hundred million,

1013
00:58:18,280 --> 00:58:21,280
Speaker 1: there's eight and a half billion that was laundered through

1014
00:58:21,360 --> 00:58:23,920
Speaker 1: this bank. So they write this story and it was

1015
00:58:24,040 --> 00:58:26,880
Speaker 1: just like a blockbuster story, and it was a particular

1016
00:58:26,960 --> 00:58:29,920
Speaker 1: blockbuster story because Denmark is supposed to be like this

1017
00:58:30,280 --> 00:58:33,880
Speaker 1: honest country. If you look at the Transparency International Index,

1018
00:58:34,320 --> 00:58:36,440
Speaker 1: it's supposed to be the second most honest country in

1019
00:58:36,760 --> 00:58:39,320
Speaker 1: the world after New Zealand. And so here you've got

1020
00:58:39,400 --> 00:58:42,480
Speaker 1: this Danish bank, the major bank in Denmark, laundering eight

1021
00:58:42,520 --> 00:58:46,400
Speaker 1: and a half billion of dirty Russian money. And at

1022
00:58:46,440 --> 00:58:49,640
Speaker 1: this point, the Dame, the Dame, the CEO of the bank,

1023
00:58:49,760 --> 00:58:51,360
Speaker 1: he can't just sit back and do nothing, and so

1024
00:58:51,840 --> 00:58:56,800
Speaker 1: he orders a like full external investigation of everything they

1025
00:58:56,800 --> 00:58:58,520
Speaker 1: went on in this bank, and they bring in accounting

1026
00:58:58,560 --> 00:59:01,560
Speaker 1: firms and law firms, data, a little analytics firms and

1027
00:59:01,600 --> 00:59:06,000
Speaker 1: so on, and they finished their analysis and they discover

1028
00:59:06,680 --> 00:59:09,280
Speaker 1: it wasn't just eight and a half billion, as you mentioned,

1029
00:59:09,320 --> 00:59:12,440
Speaker 1: it was two thirty two billion of money was laundered

1030
00:59:12,840 --> 00:59:16,840
Speaker 1: to this bank. And so here I am, I'm looking

1031
00:59:16,880 --> 00:59:18,920
Speaker 1: at this thing, and I'm saying, okay, this is just

1032
00:59:19,120 --> 00:59:24,520
Speaker 1: one Danish bank that's laundered two hut two billions. If

1033
00:59:24,600 --> 00:59:27,400
Speaker 1: if we could lift the hood on Rifeisen Bank in Vienna,

1034
00:59:28,080 --> 00:59:32,880
Speaker 1: on Deutsche Bank, on ubs and credit swifts, I think

1035
00:59:32,960 --> 00:59:35,600
Speaker 1: that number. You could multiply that number by four easily

1036
00:59:36,200 --> 00:59:38,880
Speaker 1: and you'd still be on the low end. And so

1037
00:59:39,040 --> 00:59:42,800
Speaker 1: I estimate that a trillion dollars of money has been

1038
00:59:42,840 --> 00:59:46,959
Speaker 1: stolen out of Russia Bibe Prutin and the thousand people

1039
00:59:47,000 --> 00:59:50,640
Speaker 1: around him and lauded into the West. A trillion dollars,

1040
00:59:50,680 --> 00:59:54,760
Speaker 1: a thousand billion dollars. So let's talk a little bit

1041
00:59:54,800 --> 00:59:58,000
Speaker 1: about that. You know, you know, we've we've taken to

1042
00:59:58,160 --> 01:00:02,840
Speaker 1: calling London London stand because it's been so blatant. You

1043
01:00:02,960 --> 01:00:11,800
Speaker 1: mentioned places like Miami and Santrope. How was this just allowed?

1044
01:00:11,920 --> 01:00:16,080
Speaker 1: Why why were Russians allowed to act with such impunity

1045
01:00:16,280 --> 01:00:20,240
Speaker 1: in the West. Well, the reason that Russians have been

1046
01:00:20,280 --> 01:00:22,760
Speaker 1: allowed to act with such impunity is because so many,

1047
01:00:22,960 --> 01:00:26,600
Speaker 1: so many people are getting rich off of this. There's

1048
01:00:26,640 --> 01:00:30,840
Speaker 1: so many bankers. I think that like Danski Bank, Estonian

1049
01:00:30,960 --> 01:00:36,920
Speaker 1: branch had a return on equity so um, but so

1050
01:00:37,120 --> 01:00:40,400
Speaker 1: many people are getting so rich out of doing this

1051
01:00:41,120 --> 01:00:44,480
Speaker 1: that that there. And these are not just nobody's These

1052
01:00:44,520 --> 01:00:49,640
Speaker 1: are like highly placed influential people. And in London, the

1053
01:00:49,760 --> 01:00:53,640
Speaker 1: Russians are are were sprinkling this money around like confetti

1054
01:00:54,200 --> 01:00:57,680
Speaker 1: like every you know, all lawyers were getting this money,

1055
01:00:57,760 --> 01:01:02,520
Speaker 1: and the bankers and account hunting firms and concierge's and

1056
01:01:03,080 --> 01:01:05,760
Speaker 1: real estate agents and and these are all people who

1057
01:01:05,880 --> 01:01:08,600
Speaker 1: had friends in high places. And as a result of this,

1058
01:01:08,840 --> 01:01:10,720
Speaker 1: and this is this has been a huge problem for

1059
01:01:10,800 --> 01:01:15,520
Speaker 1: the world. Everybody was financially incentivized to look the other

1060
01:01:15,600 --> 01:01:18,520
Speaker 1: way when Putin was doing terrible things at every step

1061
01:01:18,560 --> 01:01:20,680
Speaker 1: of the way. Let's get a little more explicit with

1062
01:01:20,840 --> 01:01:25,680
Speaker 1: some of that. In in Freezing Order, you specifically name

1063
01:01:25,800 --> 01:01:30,960
Speaker 1: names and call certain people Putin's us enablers. You mentioned

1064
01:01:31,440 --> 01:01:35,360
Speaker 1: a couple of attorneys by name, John Moscow and Mark Simrock,

1065
01:01:36,160 --> 01:01:41,160
Speaker 1: former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, even Congressman Dana Roarbeck.

1066
01:01:42,520 --> 01:01:45,920
Speaker 1: What it has to be more than just money or

1067
01:01:46,160 --> 01:01:48,840
Speaker 1: or am I making it too complicated? Is it just

1068
01:01:49,120 --> 01:01:52,280
Speaker 1: that simple? These folks are all for sale? Well, let

1069
01:01:52,360 --> 01:01:54,000
Speaker 1: me tell you the story of John Moscow, because it's

1070
01:01:54,080 --> 01:01:56,640
Speaker 1: one of the most shocking stories and such a great name.

1071
01:01:56,720 --> 01:02:01,000
Speaker 1: It's it's wild. Yeah, exactly, It's like it's straight out

1072
01:02:01,040 --> 01:02:05,280
Speaker 1: of Central Casting this guy. So I'm looking around as

1073
01:02:05,480 --> 01:02:09,000
Speaker 1: after Surrogey is murdered, I'm looking around for for somebody

1074
01:02:09,040 --> 01:02:11,520
Speaker 1: to help me find the money. And I ask everybody

1075
01:02:11,600 --> 01:02:14,120
Speaker 1: I know who's the best like anti money laundering, the

1076
01:02:14,200 --> 01:02:16,640
Speaker 1: lawyer in the world, and like four people tell me,

1077
01:02:16,880 --> 01:02:18,760
Speaker 1: go to this guy, John Moscow, and I had to laugh,

1078
01:02:18,840 --> 01:02:21,920
Speaker 1: like John Moscow. So so I go to this guy

1079
01:02:22,040 --> 01:02:25,200
Speaker 1: John Moscow. He's a former New York d A who

1080
01:02:25,280 --> 01:02:28,080
Speaker 1: is responsible for prosecuting all these big money laundering cases

1081
01:02:28,120 --> 01:02:31,240
Speaker 1: in New York. And he's the real deal. This guy

1082
01:02:31,360 --> 01:02:33,600
Speaker 1: is like, you know, he went into private practice after

1083
01:02:34,040 --> 01:02:37,320
Speaker 1: after his life as a prosecutor, and he knows his

1084
01:02:37,400 --> 01:02:40,520
Speaker 1: way around all the different tools of finding dirty money.

1085
01:02:41,040 --> 01:02:43,440
Speaker 1: And he gave us a whole bunch of We hired him,

1086
01:02:43,480 --> 01:02:44,920
Speaker 1: we could pay him a bunch of money, and he

1087
01:02:45,000 --> 01:02:48,240
Speaker 1: gave us all sorts of like good ideas and and

1088
01:02:48,440 --> 01:02:51,960
Speaker 1: help us draft all these subpoenas and all this interesting stuff.

1089
01:02:52,560 --> 01:02:55,040
Speaker 1: And then one day he just like proofs, disappears into

1090
01:02:55,160 --> 01:02:58,720
Speaker 1: into the ether, stops returning my calls, and and effectively

1091
01:02:58,800 --> 01:03:01,680
Speaker 1: just stops working for us. Anyways, I thought that was

1092
01:03:01,720 --> 01:03:06,320
Speaker 1: pretty weird, But you know, I've encountered so much horribleness

1093
01:03:06,400 --> 01:03:09,440
Speaker 1: in my life, that's hardly the worst horribleness. And we

1094
01:03:09,480 --> 01:03:12,520
Speaker 1: found some other lawyers and took all of John Moscow's

1095
01:03:12,560 --> 01:03:15,400
Speaker 1: ideas and implemented them. And we found the money in

1096
01:03:15,440 --> 01:03:18,720
Speaker 1: New York. And we found a bunch of money going

1097
01:03:18,840 --> 01:03:22,520
Speaker 1: to purchase luxury apartments in New York, twenty million dollars

1098
01:03:22,560 --> 01:03:25,800
Speaker 1: with the luxury apartments coming and which was trade, which

1099
01:03:25,840 --> 01:03:28,360
Speaker 1: was linked to to the to the fraud that ser

1100
01:03:28,480 --> 01:03:31,240
Speaker 1: Game Magnificy was killed over. So I take this to

1101
01:03:31,360 --> 01:03:34,800
Speaker 1: the New York authorities and they pass it up to

1102
01:03:34,880 --> 01:03:38,080
Speaker 1: the federal authorities and the US government. The Department of

1103
01:03:38,200 --> 01:03:42,320
Speaker 1: Justice issues a federal forfeiture over all these properties. And

1104
01:03:42,800 --> 01:03:45,000
Speaker 1: when you read the complaint, it's just like, you know,

1105
01:03:45,240 --> 01:03:47,960
Speaker 1: just the most damning thing you've ever seen. And I

1106
01:03:48,040 --> 01:03:50,600
Speaker 1: couldn't imagine that that anyone would ever show up to

1107
01:03:50,640 --> 01:03:52,160
Speaker 1: try to defend it. I thought the Russians would just

1108
01:03:52,280 --> 01:03:55,680
Speaker 1: like slither into the slither away and then and just

1109
01:03:55,800 --> 01:03:59,880
Speaker 1: let their apartments get seized. But when as soon as

1110
01:03:59,880 --> 01:04:03,320
Speaker 1: the government files it, the next day, a lawyer appears

1111
01:04:03,360 --> 01:04:07,560
Speaker 1: on behalf of the Russian Uh could prince Um, who

1112
01:04:07,680 --> 01:04:12,440
Speaker 1: is the lawyer John Moscow? So the lawyer who's who?

1113
01:04:13,120 --> 01:04:17,080
Speaker 1: My lawyer? The guy I'm the victim? Um, we surrogates

1114
01:04:17,080 --> 01:04:20,000
Speaker 1: the victim, I'm the victim. Were the victims? Um a

1115
01:04:20,080 --> 01:04:22,920
Speaker 1: lawyer for the victim, Um switched his side and becomes

1116
01:04:23,240 --> 01:04:29,800
Speaker 1: the lawyer for the alleged perpetrator. UM. So Uh, I mean,

1117
01:04:30,120 --> 01:04:31,960
Speaker 1: I'm not I didn't go to law school. I went

1118
01:04:32,000 --> 01:04:34,160
Speaker 1: to business school. But I know that you can't do that.

1119
01:04:34,400 --> 01:04:36,760
Speaker 1: Lawyers can't switch sides. I mean, that's what it's surd

1120
01:04:38,120 --> 01:04:41,120
Speaker 1: and uh. And I should point out that that that

1121
01:04:41,680 --> 01:04:43,560
Speaker 1: he didn't just do this by himself. He did this

1122
01:04:43,680 --> 01:04:45,640
Speaker 1: with this. He mentioned other lawyer named Mark sim Rot.

1123
01:04:46,240 --> 01:04:47,680
Speaker 1: And it wasn't like they were just like to the

1124
01:04:47,720 --> 01:04:49,920
Speaker 1: bucket shop, the lawyers working out of a shopping mall.

1125
01:04:49,960 --> 01:04:52,160
Speaker 1: They were working for Baker Hosteller. This is one of

1126
01:04:52,200 --> 01:04:54,840
Speaker 1: the most prestigious law firms in America. They have like

1127
01:04:54,960 --> 01:04:59,360
Speaker 1: thousands of lawyers. They representing Microsoft and Ford Motor also's

1128
01:04:59,400 --> 01:05:03,200
Speaker 1: other prestigious companies. And this firm basically went from from

1129
01:05:03,560 --> 01:05:08,080
Speaker 1: uh working for for you know, the the agents of

1130
01:05:08,120 --> 01:05:13,200
Speaker 1: the Russian government and uh and switching sides. And the

1131
01:05:13,240 --> 01:05:15,680
Speaker 1: first thing he did when he switched sides is he

1132
01:05:15,800 --> 01:05:19,960
Speaker 1: then issues the subpoena against me looking demanding all of

1133
01:05:20,040 --> 01:05:24,280
Speaker 1: my personal security details, all of my travel information, all

1134
01:05:24,360 --> 01:05:28,000
Speaker 1: the information about my colleagues and their families. I mean,

1135
01:05:28,400 --> 01:05:31,960
Speaker 1: just shocking the you know what, where is this information

1136
01:05:32,040 --> 01:05:34,240
Speaker 1: going to go? It's going to go to his Russian client,

1137
01:05:34,600 --> 01:05:38,520
Speaker 1: who was an agent of the Russian government to kill me.

1138
01:05:41,120 --> 01:05:44,120
Speaker 1: And Uh, Baker Hosteller, let me just say that a

1139
01:05:44,200 --> 01:05:47,440
Speaker 1: couple more Baker Hosteller, major American law firm, just working,

1140
01:05:47,560 --> 01:05:50,600
Speaker 1: you know, effectively working as an arm of the Russian

1141
01:05:50,680 --> 01:05:54,320
Speaker 1: Intelligence Services UM in America. And you say, why are

1142
01:05:54,360 --> 01:05:56,400
Speaker 1: they doing it? They're doing it for money, plain and simple,

1143
01:05:56,560 --> 01:06:01,640
Speaker 1: for tens of millions of dollars. You you filed UM

1144
01:06:01,920 --> 01:06:06,040
Speaker 1: a number of motions to have them disqualified. You had

1145
01:06:06,160 --> 01:06:09,640
Speaker 1: kind of an old daughtering eighties something year old federal

1146
01:06:09,840 --> 01:06:13,720
Speaker 1: judge who really didn't understand the case. How did you

1147
01:06:14,040 --> 01:06:20,000
Speaker 1: ultimately get them kicked off the case? Uh? I was

1148
01:06:20,080 --> 01:06:23,680
Speaker 1: fascinated by that in in freezing water that they had

1149
01:06:23,760 --> 01:06:27,120
Speaker 1: previously made some motions saying this has nothing to do

1150
01:06:27,200 --> 01:06:29,760
Speaker 1: with Browder. We didn't represent him that we this is

1151
01:06:29,920 --> 01:06:34,160
Speaker 1: a completely different entity. And then they kind of shot

1152
01:06:34,200 --> 01:06:38,440
Speaker 1: themselves in the foot tell us about that. So so, um,

1153
01:06:38,600 --> 01:06:40,520
Speaker 1: the first thing we did was when this happened, I said, well,

1154
01:06:40,520 --> 01:06:42,720
Speaker 1: this is not right, this is not legal. We should

1155
01:06:42,760 --> 01:06:45,680
Speaker 1: we So we filed a motion to have them disqualified

1156
01:06:45,800 --> 01:06:48,760
Speaker 1: because it was a conflict of interest. And I mean,

1157
01:06:48,800 --> 01:06:51,160
Speaker 1: it just seems like plain as day. And if you

1158
01:06:51,200 --> 01:06:54,520
Speaker 1: were to survey, you know, a hundred legal professionals, a

1159
01:06:54,600 --> 01:06:56,560
Speaker 1: hundred of them would say this is a conflict of interest.

1160
01:06:57,160 --> 01:06:58,480
Speaker 1: So we show up and I think it's just a

1161
01:06:58,520 --> 01:07:01,240
Speaker 1: no brainer, and it's a quick, quicken, simple procedure, and

1162
01:07:01,240 --> 01:07:03,560
Speaker 1: we'll get rid of him and and no longer be

1163
01:07:03,640 --> 01:07:06,440
Speaker 1: at risk of him, you know, uh, knowing all of

1164
01:07:06,520 --> 01:07:08,960
Speaker 1: my personal details and being able to share them with

1165
01:07:09,000 --> 01:07:12,120
Speaker 1: the Russian government. And so we file it and we

1166
01:07:12,280 --> 01:07:14,720
Speaker 1: we got the most unlucky draw you could ever get

1167
01:07:15,000 --> 01:07:17,520
Speaker 1: in the history of draws in the court, and we

1168
01:07:17,640 --> 01:07:21,840
Speaker 1: get this judge. His name is Judge Thomas Grisse, and

1169
01:07:22,000 --> 01:07:25,919
Speaker 1: this Brisse at the time was eight three years old,

1170
01:07:26,240 --> 01:07:31,080
Speaker 1: and um, and he had a long ago lost his

1171
01:07:31,680 --> 01:07:34,480
Speaker 1: you know, he was just you know, old age does

1172
01:07:34,680 --> 01:07:37,600
Speaker 1: terrible things to people. And I know it for my

1173
01:07:37,680 --> 01:07:40,720
Speaker 1: own family and my own father when he got really old.

1174
01:07:41,400 --> 01:07:44,240
Speaker 1: My father was a genius mathematician, one of the top

1175
01:07:44,320 --> 01:07:46,600
Speaker 1: mathematicians in the world, and things, you know, weren't so

1176
01:07:46,720 --> 01:07:49,600
Speaker 1: great when when he got into his mid eighties. And

1177
01:07:50,040 --> 01:07:53,840
Speaker 1: this guy, there's no mandatory retirement age for a federal judge,

1178
01:07:54,480 --> 01:07:57,360
Speaker 1: and we've got in front of this guy and he

1179
01:07:57,760 --> 01:08:00,080
Speaker 1: and he didn't understand. He just didn't understand that there

1180
01:08:00,120 --> 01:08:02,640
Speaker 1: was a conflict of interest, and he was done only

1181
01:08:02,720 --> 01:08:04,840
Speaker 1: that he was sort of angry with me for sort

1182
01:08:04,880 --> 01:08:07,960
Speaker 1: of delaying the case by making this motion, and he

1183
01:08:08,040 --> 01:08:12,880
Speaker 1: granted the subpoena in full and basically, uh, you know,

1184
01:08:14,560 --> 01:08:16,519
Speaker 1: ordered me to hand over all of my information to

1185
01:08:16,600 --> 01:08:20,400
Speaker 1: the effectively to the Russian government, um, which would have

1186
01:08:20,520 --> 01:08:24,560
Speaker 1: gotten me or people close to me killed. And and

1187
01:08:24,760 --> 01:08:28,200
Speaker 1: we went through hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars

1188
01:08:28,240 --> 01:08:31,160
Speaker 1: of legal expenses fighting this thing off, and finally we

1189
01:08:31,479 --> 01:08:33,320
Speaker 1: we we sort of did a Hail Mary, and we

1190
01:08:33,439 --> 01:08:37,360
Speaker 1: appealed it. There's a special type of legal challenge you

1191
01:08:37,400 --> 01:08:40,639
Speaker 1: can do called the rid of mandamos, which almost never succeeds,

1192
01:08:40,640 --> 01:08:43,080
Speaker 1: where you basically saying that the judge has gone off

1193
01:08:43,120 --> 01:08:47,120
Speaker 1: the reservation. And we filed and like these things never succeed,

1194
01:08:47,200 --> 01:08:50,360
Speaker 1: but we filed it, and and we went again, and

1195
01:08:50,439 --> 01:08:53,160
Speaker 1: we went to the appeals court and the judges of

1196
01:08:53,200 --> 01:08:55,479
Speaker 1: the appeals court said, this is the most unbelievable thing

1197
01:08:55,479 --> 01:09:00,960
Speaker 1: they've ever seen, and they disqualified John Moscow and Baker

1198
01:09:01,040 --> 01:09:05,400
Speaker 1: Hosteller Um and and interestingly the judge was sort of

1199
01:09:05,520 --> 01:09:09,599
Speaker 1: quietly put put out to pasture um and we got

1200
01:09:09,720 --> 01:09:12,040
Speaker 1: rid of them, what or so we thought. And then

1201
01:09:12,080 --> 01:09:14,439
Speaker 1: we discovered after the whole case was over, when when

1202
01:09:14,720 --> 01:09:18,599
Speaker 1: when the case finally came to fruition, the Russians paid

1203
01:09:18,680 --> 01:09:21,360
Speaker 1: the US government six million dollars instead of going to trial.

1204
01:09:22,000 --> 01:09:24,679
Speaker 1: And then we discovered afterwards that even after John Moscow

1205
01:09:24,720 --> 01:09:28,160
Speaker 1: and Baker Hofsteller were disqualified, they continued to secretly work

1206
01:09:28,200 --> 01:09:30,800
Speaker 1: for the Russians. Now, if you're working for the Russians

1207
01:09:31,520 --> 01:09:35,479
Speaker 1: um a foreign entity, don't you have to register as

1208
01:09:35,520 --> 01:09:39,479
Speaker 1: a lobbyists tell us a little bit about that. Well,

1209
01:09:39,560 --> 01:09:42,639
Speaker 1: So what was interesting was they weren't just doing this case.

1210
01:09:43,200 --> 01:09:46,120
Speaker 1: They were running all around Washington Baker Hosteller and they

1211
01:09:46,160 --> 01:09:48,720
Speaker 1: also hired a guy named Glenn Simpson who was the

1212
01:09:49,479 --> 01:09:54,479
Speaker 1: author of the Trump dossier so well, so the hired

1213
01:09:54,520 --> 01:09:58,360
Speaker 1: Glen Simpson to basically run a smear campaign against me

1214
01:09:58,479 --> 01:10:01,559
Speaker 1: and the Magnetski Act in Washington as we were lobbying

1215
01:10:01,640 --> 01:10:03,880
Speaker 1: for the Global Magniski Act to be passed in summer

1216
01:10:03,880 --> 01:10:06,840
Speaker 1: of two thousands sixteen. And so you've got this guy

1217
01:10:06,920 --> 01:10:09,759
Speaker 1: Mark Simrott who was going around briefing members of Congress

1218
01:10:09,800 --> 01:10:12,719
Speaker 1: saying that Magnitsky was a crook, Bill Browder's a crook.

1219
01:10:13,080 --> 01:10:15,840
Speaker 1: Don't do the Magnifski Act, don't name it after Magnitsky,

1220
01:10:15,960 --> 01:10:19,479
Speaker 1: don't do it. Glenn Simpson was was was trying to

1221
01:10:20,560 --> 01:10:23,480
Speaker 1: get journalists write these articles. He was feeding in misinformation

1222
01:10:23,640 --> 01:10:29,559
Speaker 1: and nonsense to different journalists and desperately trying to create

1223
01:10:29,640 --> 01:10:34,200
Speaker 1: this this appearance that Prudent was good and me and

1224
01:10:34,280 --> 01:10:37,160
Speaker 1: Surrogaate Magnitsky were bad and the Magnifski Act was something

1225
01:10:37,600 --> 01:10:41,479
Speaker 1: wrong and terrible and and when you do that, and

1226
01:10:41,800 --> 01:10:44,960
Speaker 1: so they came up with this thing a long time ago,

1227
01:10:45,080 --> 01:10:47,760
Speaker 1: during during the Second World War, when the Nazis were

1228
01:10:47,800 --> 01:10:50,200
Speaker 1: doing similar types of stuff, they came up with a

1229
01:10:50,280 --> 01:10:53,560
Speaker 1: law called the Foreign Agent Registration Act in Washington, and

1230
01:10:53,640 --> 01:10:56,599
Speaker 1: the Foreign Regent Agent Registration Act says that if somebody

1231
01:10:56,720 --> 01:11:00,920
Speaker 1: is working for a foreign government or or entity connected

1232
01:11:00,960 --> 01:11:04,240
Speaker 1: to a foreign government, they have to declare do a

1233
01:11:04,320 --> 01:11:07,760
Speaker 1: public declaration with the Department of Justice to say that

1234
01:11:07,800 --> 01:11:10,519
Speaker 1: they're working for as a foreign agent for Russian or

1235
01:11:10,640 --> 01:11:13,439
Speaker 1: for a foreign government. And so this is a clear

1236
01:11:13,479 --> 01:11:17,040
Speaker 1: example when Mark Simrod from Baker Hoste learned glem Simpson

1237
01:11:17,120 --> 01:11:20,080
Speaker 1: should have been doing that and why why is it important?

1238
01:11:20,160 --> 01:11:23,759
Speaker 1: Because then you understand that this is the Russian government's agenda,

1239
01:11:24,120 --> 01:11:25,920
Speaker 1: and then all sorts of people would say, Okay, well,

1240
01:11:25,920 --> 01:11:28,400
Speaker 1: actually I'm not so interested in getting involved in this thing.

1241
01:11:28,439 --> 01:11:32,040
Speaker 1: But they they didn't do that, and so they violated

1242
01:11:32,080 --> 01:11:36,479
Speaker 1: the Foreign Agent Registration Act by just basically running rough

1243
01:11:36,520 --> 01:11:39,280
Speaker 1: shot over the whole thing. We made a complaint to

1244
01:11:39,320 --> 01:11:42,680
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice, um and unfortunately to this day

1245
01:11:42,720 --> 01:11:45,960
Speaker 1: there has not been a prosecution in this case. That's shocking,

1246
01:11:46,280 --> 01:11:49,280
Speaker 1: that's that's absolutely shocking. So so last question in this

1247
01:11:49,439 --> 01:11:53,400
Speaker 1: segment has to be given, all this money that's been

1248
01:11:53,479 --> 01:11:56,960
Speaker 1: laundered not just through danks Key Bank, but all these

1249
01:11:57,040 --> 01:12:02,719
Speaker 1: Western banks that you are estimating conservatively at a trillion dollars,

1250
01:12:03,160 --> 01:12:07,440
Speaker 1: what is Vladimir Putin's net worth. Is he the wealthiest

1251
01:12:07,520 --> 01:12:11,800
Speaker 1: person in the world, No question. Vladim Reprutin is the

1252
01:12:11,880 --> 01:12:16,439
Speaker 1: wealthiest person in the world by by a huge amount. Um.

1253
01:12:17,040 --> 01:12:19,519
Speaker 1: I haven't done the calculations recently, but like you know,

1254
01:12:19,800 --> 01:12:22,040
Speaker 1: five six years ago, I think he was worth more

1255
01:12:22,040 --> 01:12:27,240
Speaker 1: than two dollars. That numbers has probably multiplied by now.

1256
01:12:27,880 --> 01:12:32,360
Speaker 1: He's an extremely rich man. And and his wealth, I

1257
01:12:32,439 --> 01:12:35,720
Speaker 1: believe is the source of all the problems that we're

1258
01:12:35,760 --> 01:12:39,040
Speaker 1: facing today. The fact that he's so rich. He's stolen

1259
01:12:39,120 --> 01:12:43,160
Speaker 1: so much money from the people. He bought so many

1260
01:12:43,920 --> 01:12:47,240
Speaker 1: yachts and villas and all this kind of stuff, um.

1261
01:12:47,640 --> 01:12:49,240
Speaker 1: And that's all money that should have been spent on

1262
01:12:49,400 --> 01:12:51,720
Speaker 1: healthcare and education and all the stuff that people and

1263
01:12:52,360 --> 01:12:56,160
Speaker 1: RuSHA deserve, and it's been stolen by him and his cronies.

1264
01:12:56,960 --> 01:13:00,720
Speaker 1: And I believe, and I think that if you were

1265
01:13:00,920 --> 01:13:04,960
Speaker 1: to pull anybody who really understands Russia, Lexi the Balnat,

1266
01:13:04,960 --> 01:13:07,400
Speaker 1: the guy in jail, Michael Hohrdokovsky, the guy I was

1267
01:13:07,400 --> 01:13:08,880
Speaker 1: telling you about it has been ten years in jail,

1268
01:13:09,360 --> 01:13:11,760
Speaker 1: or any of these other Russian dissidents. Gary cast brought

1269
01:13:11,840 --> 01:13:14,640
Speaker 1: the former chess champion, any and every one of them

1270
01:13:14,680 --> 01:13:17,519
Speaker 1: will tell you that that the reason why Putin has

1271
01:13:17,560 --> 01:13:19,479
Speaker 1: started this war in Ukraine is that he was worried

1272
01:13:19,479 --> 01:13:23,120
Speaker 1: about people in Russia rising up against him eventually because

1273
01:13:23,200 --> 01:13:25,600
Speaker 1: they were so angry at the corruption and all the

1274
01:13:25,640 --> 01:13:28,160
Speaker 1: money that's been stolen, and they needed to create a

1275
01:13:28,200 --> 01:13:30,880
Speaker 1: foreign enemy. And that's what this war is about. It's

1276
01:13:30,920 --> 01:13:35,200
Speaker 1: not about the Greater Russian Empire or NATO. It's about

1277
01:13:35,320 --> 01:13:41,680
Speaker 1: Putin being a corrupt, sick, corrupt man who needed to

1278
01:13:41,960 --> 01:13:45,360
Speaker 1: create a major distraction so that the people in Russia

1279
01:13:45,640 --> 01:13:48,120
Speaker 1: didn't rise up against him. And and it succeeded that

1280
01:13:48,280 --> 01:13:50,479
Speaker 1: the war in Ukraine has has had led to an

1281
01:13:50,560 --> 01:13:56,479
Speaker 1: are enthusiastic approval rating of Ladyman Putin. So let's let's

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01:13:56,520 --> 01:14:00,840
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about this invasion of Ukraine, which

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01:14:01,080 --> 01:14:05,560
Speaker 1: you've described as really a wagged the dog, you know,

1284
01:14:05,720 --> 01:14:11,640
Speaker 1: sort of situation. He Putin is trying to distract the

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01:14:11,760 --> 01:14:15,599
Speaker 1: Russian populace from the state of their economy and all

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01:14:15,640 --> 01:14:18,120
Speaker 1: the corruption that's taking place. To tell us your thoughts

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01:14:18,160 --> 01:14:23,160
Speaker 1: about what's going on now, so so that Putin has

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01:14:23,240 --> 01:14:29,519
Speaker 1: to um divert the anger that Russian people have for

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01:14:29,920 --> 01:14:33,639
Speaker 1: that that that you can't get a doctor to prescribe medicine.

1290
01:14:33,640 --> 01:14:36,479
Speaker 1: Your children aren't being educated, the potholes in the roads

1291
01:14:36,800 --> 01:14:40,200
Speaker 1: aren't being filled. He has to distract from that anger

1292
01:14:40,720 --> 01:14:44,920
Speaker 1: because he knows that one day it's like you know,

1293
01:14:45,280 --> 01:14:47,840
Speaker 1: tinder in the forest, like all dry leaves, that it

1294
01:14:47,920 --> 01:14:52,280
Speaker 1: all takes one match set it on fire. And you know,

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01:14:52,360 --> 01:14:54,479
Speaker 1: he can put ten people in jail, he can put

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01:14:54,479 --> 01:14:56,000
Speaker 1: a hundred people in jail, he can put a thousand

1297
01:14:56,040 --> 01:14:57,840
Speaker 1: people in jail, but if a million people mark up

1298
01:14:57,920 --> 01:15:01,400
Speaker 1: march on Red Square, he's finished. And he's so scared

1299
01:15:01,439 --> 01:15:03,960
Speaker 1: of that. And he's created such a pressure cooker type

1300
01:15:03,960 --> 01:15:06,519
Speaker 1: of situation by stealing all this money over such a

1301
01:15:06,600 --> 01:15:09,519
Speaker 1: long period of time that he knows that that's going

1302
01:15:09,560 --> 01:15:11,120
Speaker 1: to that that that that kind of thing is going

1303
01:15:11,160 --> 01:15:15,720
Speaker 1: to come for him at some point, and and that's

1304
01:15:15,760 --> 01:15:20,519
Speaker 1: why he started this war and and and so it's

1305
01:15:20,560 --> 01:15:24,400
Speaker 1: really important to understand this because as everybody is looking

1306
01:15:24,439 --> 01:15:26,679
Speaker 1: at this terrible war in Ukraine and all the tragedy

1307
01:15:26,720 --> 01:15:29,920
Speaker 1: and all the implications in the West, everybody is desperate

1308
01:15:29,960 --> 01:15:33,320
Speaker 1: for this thing to end. And a lot of people,

1309
01:15:33,439 --> 01:15:36,240
Speaker 1: a lot of very learned people in Washington and other

1310
01:15:36,880 --> 01:15:40,280
Speaker 1: Berlin and London are all looking at this thing and saying, well,

1311
01:15:40,560 --> 01:15:42,160
Speaker 1: you know, if we give him this or we give

1312
01:15:42,280 --> 01:15:45,400
Speaker 1: him that, then maybe he'll stop. And first of all,

1313
01:15:45,439 --> 01:15:49,080
Speaker 1: appusement never works. But beyond that, that that that that

1314
01:15:49,200 --> 01:15:54,400
Speaker 1: shows that the fundamental misunderstanding, which is that that it's

1315
01:15:54,439 --> 01:15:57,679
Speaker 1: not about NATO, it's not about something wanting some piece

1316
01:15:57,720 --> 01:16:00,560
Speaker 1: of Ukraine. It's about wanting to be at war so

1317
01:16:00,720 --> 01:16:03,280
Speaker 1: that he can stay in power. So the end game

1318
01:16:03,360 --> 01:16:07,240
Speaker 1: for him is being at war. And if that's the case,

1319
01:16:07,720 --> 01:16:09,479
Speaker 1: there's nothing we can offer him, even if we if

1320
01:16:09,600 --> 01:16:15,160
Speaker 1: even if we wanted to be appeasers, and and and

1321
01:16:15,240 --> 01:16:16,680
Speaker 1: a lot of people are saying this war is going

1322
01:16:16,720 --> 01:16:18,439
Speaker 1: badly for him, and it is going badly. We can

1323
01:16:18,479 --> 01:16:21,519
Speaker 1: see the military defeats and the number of dead Russian

1324
01:16:21,560 --> 01:16:23,840
Speaker 1: soldiers and all the terror, and that the fact that

1325
01:16:23,920 --> 01:16:26,439
Speaker 1: he succeed in getting to Kiev and all this kind

1326
01:16:26,479 --> 01:16:29,120
Speaker 1: of stuff. But the one thing that's going really well

1327
01:16:29,200 --> 01:16:31,439
Speaker 1: for Prutent is that he doesn't have to worry about

1328
01:16:31,479 --> 01:16:33,840
Speaker 1: being overthrown in Russia. And that's a very happy place

1329
01:16:33,880 --> 01:16:36,680
Speaker 1: for him to be. That he can sit there confidently

1330
01:16:36,760 --> 01:16:41,120
Speaker 1: know that he's securely in power, and and and and

1331
01:16:42,080 --> 01:16:44,080
Speaker 1: and so as we're all sitting here thinking of that.

1332
01:16:44,160 --> 01:16:46,600
Speaker 1: He must be really upset and the oligarchics are upset. Well, no,

1333
01:16:46,760 --> 01:16:49,400
Speaker 1: he's pretty happy right now because at least he knows

1334
01:16:49,520 --> 01:16:53,840
Speaker 1: he's not going to be overgrown. Build just unbelievable, incredible stuff.

1335
01:16:54,479 --> 01:16:58,720
Speaker 1: You you really are are doing, um God's work. It

1336
01:16:59,240 --> 01:17:03,439
Speaker 1: it's just the story you tell in Red Notice is

1337
01:17:03,520 --> 01:17:07,479
Speaker 1: just astonishing. It it reads like a spy thriller. UM.

1338
01:17:08,040 --> 01:17:11,360
Speaker 1: I'm very pleased that you managed to get so much

1339
01:17:12,040 --> 01:17:16,000
Speaker 1: legislation passed in the United States and and around the world.

1340
01:17:16,240 --> 01:17:19,360
Speaker 1: And and good luck with your campaign. UH, we're rooting

1341
01:17:19,400 --> 01:17:23,120
Speaker 1: for you. We really it's really just an amazing set

1342
01:17:23,160 --> 01:17:28,519
Speaker 1: of UM achievements that you've you've completed under the most

1343
01:17:28,600 --> 01:17:33,000
Speaker 1: trying possible uh conditions, and and all of the global

1344
01:17:33,080 --> 01:17:38,280
Speaker 1: recognition and human rights awards that that you've UM garnered

1345
01:17:38,880 --> 01:17:42,040
Speaker 1: are are are well deserved. And and thank you for

1346
01:17:42,120 --> 01:17:45,759
Speaker 1: all the things you're doing. Thank you. If you enjoyed

1347
01:17:46,160 --> 01:17:49,479
Speaker 1: hearing this conversation, be sure and check out all of

1348
01:17:49,560 --> 01:17:53,360
Speaker 1: our previous four hundred or so interviews. You can find

1349
01:17:53,439 --> 01:17:57,679
Speaker 1: those wherever you get your favorite podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, Google,

1350
01:17:57,800 --> 01:18:01,520
Speaker 1: a cast, wherever. We love your men's feedback in suggestions

1351
01:18:01,680 --> 01:18:04,880
Speaker 1: right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net.

1352
01:18:05,439 --> 01:18:07,360
Speaker 1: You can sign up for my daily reading list at

1353
01:18:07,439 --> 01:18:11,400
Speaker 1: Ridholts dot com. Follow me on Twitter at Ridolts. I

1354
01:18:11,479 --> 01:18:13,719
Speaker 1: would be remiss if I did not thank the crack

1355
01:18:13,800 --> 01:18:17,439
Speaker 1: team that helps put these conversations together each week. John

1356
01:18:17,520 --> 01:18:20,880
Speaker 1: Wasserman is my audio engineer. Attica val Brunn is my

1357
01:18:21,040 --> 01:18:26,040
Speaker 1: project manager. Paris Wald is my producer. Sean Russo is

1358
01:18:26,120 --> 01:18:30,639
Speaker 1: my researcher. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters

1359
01:18:30,680 --> 01:18:36,959
Speaker 1: and Business on Bloomberg radioa