Speaker 1: This is Master's in business with very renaults on Bluebird
Speaker 1: Radio this weekend on the podcast Strap Yourself In. This
Speaker 1: is just astonishing. Bill Browder, founder CEO of Hermitage Capital
Speaker 1: Management and the author of Red Notice, A true story
Speaker 1: of high finance, murder and one man's Fight for Justice,
Speaker 1: has a new book out about what's been going on
Speaker 1: with the Russians and the Magnitsky Act that he helped
Speaker 1: to pass in order to get justice for his Russian
Speaker 1: attorney who was tortured and murdered by the Russian government
Speaker 1: while in their custody in prison. This is just really
Speaker 1: astonishing stuff. I read all of Red Notice. It was
Speaker 1: like a spine novel. You plow right through it on
Speaker 1: the weekend. And then I did the same thing with
Speaker 1: Freezing Water, which is what's taken place in the five
Speaker 1: years since Red Notice came out out. So I felt
Speaker 1: like I knew everything he was gonna say, and even
Speaker 1: still he astonished me. I I spoke to him for
Speaker 1: nearly two hours, most of the time my job was
Speaker 1: on the desk. I just was shocked at how um
Speaker 1: just barbaric and you can't even call it corrupt. It's
Speaker 1: just next level illegality that seems to take place in Russia.
Speaker 1: Browder describes that nation as a country that doesn't have laws.
Speaker 1: It's the wild West, and it is a as he
Speaker 1: describes it, a kleptocracy and a fascist state, which doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like it's the sort of place where anybody would
Speaker 1: want to live. Uh. This is not just bad, it's
Speaker 1: bad and getting worse. Uh. And he describes both uh
Speaker 1: the invasion of Ukraine as a giant distraction um by
Speaker 1: Putin again people who would challenge his rule. Really just
Speaker 1: I don't even know what to say. A fascinating, shocking,
Speaker 1: horrifying conversation. Even if you read both the Browder's books,
Speaker 1: you will find something to be amazed at. With no
Speaker 1: further ado, my conversation with Bill Browner. So, so let's
Speaker 1: start out just with a little bit about your your background.
Speaker 1: You have a b a. In economics from Chicago and
Speaker 1: NBA from Stanford. You begin in Solomon Brothers in the
Speaker 1: ninety nineties early in your career, and you kind of
Speaker 1: successfully stumble into some privatization of government entities in Poland
Speaker 1: while you're at Solomon. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: that early experience. Well, I should just back up one
Speaker 1: step further, which is a little bit on my family background,
Speaker 1: which is what got me interested in all this Eastern
Speaker 1: European stuff. And my grandfather was was an American communist
Speaker 1: who was head of the American Communist Party from ninety two.
Speaker 1: And so in my teenager and I decided to become
Speaker 1: a catalyst, which at Stanford Business schools you mentioned, and
Speaker 1: I finished business school in nineteen nine, the year the
Speaker 1: burn Wall came down, and I thought to myself, if
Speaker 1: my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the
Speaker 1: Berlin Wall has come down, I'm going to become the
Speaker 1: biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And so I ended up
Speaker 1: in London on the East European desk of Solomon Brothers.
Speaker 1: And and this was at the right around the time
Speaker 1: that that all the countries of Eastern Europe or privatizing.
Speaker 1: And um, my, my very first experience was actually before
Speaker 1: I joined Solomon Brothers. UM, I had another job at
Speaker 1: the Boxing consulting group. They sent me out to Poland
Speaker 1: in um to work on a failing Polish bus factory,
Speaker 1: and I noticed my interpreter had a newspaper under his
Speaker 1: arms with a bunch of financial fig years. I asked
Speaker 1: him what those were and he said, these are the
Speaker 1: very first Polish privatizations, and I was I was kind
Speaker 1: of intrigued, and so I said, can we discuss it?
Speaker 1: And he laid it out on a conference table and
Speaker 1: I said, what's this number? He said, this is the
Speaker 1: number of shares outstanding of this one company that's being privatized.
Speaker 1: And I said, what's this numbers at the share price?
Speaker 1: I multiplied the two numbers together and that got you
Speaker 1: to a market cap of this company of eighty million dollars.
Speaker 1: And then I said, what's this number down here? And
Speaker 1: he said this is the last year's earnings. I said, no,
Speaker 1: that couldn't be right, so could just retranslating it, and
Speaker 1: it's the last year's earnings and that number was a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty million dollars. So, but here's a company
Speaker 1: that's valued at eighty million dollars. The previous year's earnings
Speaker 1: were a hundred and sixty million dollars, so it's trading
Speaker 1: at one half a pe of one half and and uh,
Speaker 1: and I thought, well, this isn't this what I went
Speaker 1: to business school for, it to like invest in this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff and I had a total life savings
Speaker 1: at the time with two thousand dollars, and I converted
Speaker 1: my total life savings of two thousand dollars into Polish body,
Speaker 1: which is their currency, went down with my translator to
Speaker 1: the post office, and subscribed to the very first privatization
Speaker 1: in Poland. And over the course of the next twelve
Speaker 1: months it went up ten times. That's my two thousand
Speaker 1: turned into twenty and and there's a certain feeling that
Speaker 1: you get if you make ten times your money. It's
Speaker 1: like the financial equivalent of crack cocaine. And I just
Speaker 1: wanted to repeat the experience. And so I now knew
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to be a consultant. I wanted to be investing
Speaker 1: in these privatizations in East Europe. And that's what led
Speaker 1: me eventually as Solomon Brothers, and I was working on
Speaker 1: their proprietary trading desks, and that's when I discovered Russia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the story in the book is quite fascinating. How really
Speaker 1: Solomon Brothers is a shark tank. They throw everybody in
Speaker 1: the pool. You either sink or swim, and you kind
Speaker 1: of stumbled and to Russia. By accident. They were not
Speaker 1: especially supportive until you found one champion who managed to
Speaker 1: get you a nice pool of capital. Invest tell us
Speaker 1: how that that progressed. What happened was my very first
Speaker 1: assignment at Solomon Brothers um was to advise the management
Speaker 1: of a of a fishing fleet in Mirmanskill on their privatization.
Speaker 1: And so I um uh fly up from Romance, which
Speaker 1: is two d miles north of the Arctic circles, the
Speaker 1: most farthest north place in the world. I go up
Speaker 1: there and the head of the fishing fleet meets me
Speaker 1: at the airport. He takes me down to the docks
Speaker 1: and he shows me one of their ships. And this
Speaker 1: ship was like four feet long. It was on five stories,
Speaker 1: and the top story they collected that they had the
Speaker 1: nets where they caught the fish, and they separate them
Speaker 1: and they worked their way down and eventually at the
Speaker 1: bottom story of the of the boat they have canning machines.
Speaker 1: And so it wasn't just a fishing boat, it was
Speaker 1: an ocean going factory. Very impressive. And I asked how
Speaker 1: much is one of these things cost? And he said
Speaker 1: twenty million dollars. New how many do you have in
Speaker 1: your fleet A hundred million times a hundred gets you
Speaker 1: to two billion dollars of the ships, and said, what's
Speaker 1: the average age of your fleet head? Seven years? So
Speaker 1: I don't know much about shipping or fishing or anything,
Speaker 1: but I figured that makes it maybe have to appreciate it.
Speaker 1: So a billion dollars with the ships. And these guys
Speaker 1: had hired me, the management of this troller fleet, to
Speaker 1: advise them on whether the management should exercise their legitimate
Speaker 1: right under the privatization program with Russia to buy and
Speaker 1: so I said, at what prices of government selling? And
Speaker 1: he said two and a half million dollars. So let
Speaker 1: me just repeat the math. A billion dollars of the
Speaker 1: ships for two or two and a half million dollars.
Speaker 1: And that's when I realized that that something really crazy
Speaker 1: was going on Russia, and if and if that situation
Speaker 1: in Poland had gotten my juices flowing, my god, this
Speaker 1: is even crazier. And so then I went to Moscow.
Speaker 1: I thought, I I said to myself, is this just
Speaker 1: something some weird anomaly with the fishing industry or is
Speaker 1: this something going on more widespread? And I went to Moscow,
Speaker 1: and I as I was going through the airport in Moscow.
Speaker 1: They were selling a little English language yellow page directory,
Speaker 1: and so I m I kind of didn't know anyone
Speaker 1: in Russia didn't speak the language, and so I bought
Speaker 1: this English language yellow page directory, and I just started
Speaker 1: cold calling people who might be able to explain to
Speaker 1: me what was going on. And over the course of
Speaker 1: a week I had about forty meetings. I met with
Speaker 1: all different types of people, and I was able to
Speaker 1: figure out what was going on more widespread, and this
Speaker 1: was the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my
Speaker 1: my professional life. But basically they be in order to
Speaker 1: go from communism to capitalism, the Russian government had given
Speaker 1: every citizen in the country a thing called a voucher,
Speaker 1: a physical certificate called voucher. And at the time, there's
Speaker 1: about hundred and fifty million people in the country. And
Speaker 1: these vouchers were freely tradeable, so you could you could
Speaker 1: buy them, you could sell them, and you can burn them,
Speaker 1: you can trade them, you can do anything he wanted
Speaker 1: with them, and so the vouchers developed a sort of
Speaker 1: secondary market, and they traded for about twenty dollars each
Speaker 1: and so again I went through the simple math. There's
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty million vouchers times twenty dollars gets you
Speaker 1: three billion dollars of vouchers in circulation. And these three
Speaker 1: three billion dollars of vouchers in circulation were exchangeable for
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the shaff capital of all Russian companies,
Speaker 1: which meant that the market cap of the entire country
Speaker 1: of Russia, everything, every every asset in the country was
Speaker 1: ten billion dollars. This is the country with the world's
Speaker 1: natural gas, and percent of the world's royal ti, percent
Speaker 1: of the world's aluminum, steel, fertilizer, car companies, telephone company,
Speaker 1: electricity company, banks, etcetera. The entire country ten billion dollars.
Speaker 1: At the time, you couldn't buy a mid sized Oklahoma
Speaker 1: oil company for ten billion dollars. Here, you could buy
Speaker 1: the whole country of Russia. So I rushed back to
Speaker 1: Solomon and I said, guys, we've got to stop doing
Speaker 1: everything else we're doing, and we've got to invest in Russia.
Speaker 1: They're like literally giving money away for free. And and
Speaker 1: the moment I met and mentioned Russia, people like just
Speaker 1: immediately just switched off. And I wasn't very good. I
Speaker 1: wasn't very good at at politics. Inside an organization. So
Speaker 1: if one person said no, I just went to the
Speaker 1: next person, and I'm just wide eyed and crazy. He said,
Speaker 1: We've got to stop doing everything in invest in Russia.
Speaker 1: And by the time I was done, I had completely
Speaker 1: burned my reputation with everybody in the whole company. Even
Speaker 1: the young guys who I was hanging out with stopped
Speaker 1: inviting me to lunches and drinks because nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: be seen with that crazy guy who was obsessed with
Speaker 1: investing in Russia. And and Solomon was a place where
Speaker 1: if you didn't earn five times when they were paying
Speaker 1: you within a year, fired And I wasn't earning anywhere
Speaker 1: near five times anything, and I was going to be fired.
Speaker 1: And so not only was I not gonna be able
Speaker 1: to invest in all this great stuff in Russia, I
Speaker 1: wasn't gonna be able to pay my rent. And so
Speaker 1: I was just sitting They're just totally demoralized. And one
Speaker 1: day my phone rang and it was the most one
Speaker 1: of the most senior guys in New York office of
Speaker 1: Solomon Brothers. I was in London, and he said, I
Speaker 1: hear you might be having some career troubles, but you've
Speaker 1: got something interesting to say about Russia. Can you come
Speaker 1: over and explain to me what's going on. So I
Speaker 1: spent a couple of days all night putting together the
Speaker 1: best power point presentation I could come up with explaining
Speaker 1: how cheap everything was in Russia. I go over to Solomon,
Speaker 1: I sit down with this guy. I take him through
Speaker 1: the presentation and he's he's not a very um uh
Speaker 1: sort of friendly or or community guy, and he sort
Speaker 1: of stares blankly. I mean, as I'm going through this presentation,
Speaker 1: and the halfway through the presentation, he just gets up
Speaker 1: and leaves, and I thought to myself, I'd like blown
Speaker 1: my chance and saving my career and um And I'm
Speaker 1: sitting there tapping my foot trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: long and retrieved this meeting. When he comes back and
Speaker 1: he's gone for ten minutes. He comes back like fifty
Speaker 1: two minutes later, and I'm about to blurt something out
Speaker 1: to try to save the meeting. But before I have
Speaker 1: a chance to say anything, he said, I just, uh,
Speaker 1: those slides you show me are the single most impressive
Speaker 1: thing I've ever seen in my investment career. I've just
Speaker 1: gone to the risk management committee I've got you twenty
Speaker 1: million dollars to invest in Russia. I want you to
Speaker 1: stop doing everything else you're doing and get over there
Speaker 1: and get this money invested. This is unbelievable. And that's
Speaker 1: what that's what, that's what's set me off of my career.
Speaker 1: I'm investing in Russia. Wow, amazing, amazing story. Um So,
Speaker 1: so now you set up this funds and it does
Speaker 1: really well, and you circle back to Sally and say, hey,
Speaker 1: let's really expand this, and suddenly everybody wants a piece
Speaker 1: of you. Tell us a little bit about that. So
Speaker 1: so I go into so this guy get sending me
Speaker 1: after Russia. I invest the million and for a while
Speaker 1: it's doing nothing. It's just sitting there, totally, tiny, little
Speaker 1: elquid market. Nobody knows anything about it. It's just starts
Speaker 1: sitting there. And I invest his money in in like
Speaker 1: the fall and going into December of and then the
Speaker 1: Economist magazine in England writes an article called Sale of
Speaker 1: the Century in which they described the same math that
Speaker 1: I've just shared with you. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it's in that now it's in black and white and
Speaker 1: ink um. You know, all sorts of people reading it,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, I about twenty serious like
Speaker 1: major Western investors, hedge fund managers, billionaires, proprietary training desks
Speaker 1: all say all in unis and say, wow, how how
Speaker 1: come I didn't know? Why didn't I know about this?
Speaker 1: We gotta get involved. And so you know, when you
Speaker 1: take twenty huge investors and you try to go into
Speaker 1: a tiny, a liquid, almost untraded market and all at
Speaker 1: once try to buy it, what happens? Share price goes
Speaker 1: up and so over. In the course of a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks after this economist article, the Russian stock market
Speaker 1: goes up and our million dollars turns into a million dollars.
Speaker 1: And I should point out that this was back in
Speaker 1: the days when a hundred million dollars profit was real money,
Speaker 1: and so so so all of a sudden, I go
Speaker 1: from a total zero to like a hero on the
Speaker 1: trading floor. And all those guys who had stopped inviting
Speaker 1: me to lunch his drinks were all camped out around
Speaker 1: my desk when I had arrived in the morning, all
Speaker 1: just desperate for tips on how they can make five
Speaker 1: times their money on the on the Russian stock market.
Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, some of the older
Speaker 1: fellows started coming around to my desk, and and old
Speaker 1: at Solomon was like forty years. You know, you couldn't
Speaker 1: survive past forty without having a heart attack or something
Speaker 1: like that. At Solomon, so forty was like the maximum age.
Speaker 1: But I was in my late twenties. So these older
Speaker 1: guys will come around, and Solomon is a very disrespectful place,
Speaker 1: and people were not very nice to each other. But
Speaker 1: they'll come by very and very deferentially saying, you know,
Speaker 1: excuse me, Mr Browder. I know you're very busy, but
Speaker 1: is there any chance I could convince you to come
Speaker 1: and spend a few minutes to brief my clients. Mr Soros,
Speaker 1: he would be so grateful for just a tiny bit
Speaker 1: of your time. Another guy came by, uh, Sir John Templeton,
Speaker 1: the founder of Templeton, which just he'ld be so appreciative
Speaker 1: if you could just be with him for a little
Speaker 1: bit of your time. And I was getting these invitations
Speaker 1: to like the the Royalty of Wall Street. Everybody wanted
Speaker 1: to meet me because nobody knew anything about investing in Russia.
Speaker 1: There is this one die and Renews and the Land
Speaker 1: of the Blind the one eyed man who was king.
Speaker 1: And so I went on this world tour of of
Speaker 1: of the Royalty of Wall Street and and they were
Speaker 1: much smarter than my colleagues as Solomon, And within moments
Speaker 1: when I showed them the data, they were saying, this
Speaker 1: is unbelievable. Can we give you some money to manage?
Speaker 1: So I don't know at the moment, we're just doing
Speaker 1: this for ourselves. But but let me go back to
Speaker 1: the bosses and see what I can I can do
Speaker 1: for you. And so I go back to the head
Speaker 1: of the trading floor in London and I say, you know,
Speaker 1: I was just with George Sorrows and he wants to
Speaker 1: give us some money to manage. What do you think
Speaker 1: and the and the guy said, I think that's a
Speaker 1: brilliant idea. Let's form a task force to study it.
Speaker 1: And say okay. So the first task force meeting was
Speaker 1: a week later. I show up in this room and
Speaker 1: there's like forty people in this room, like thirty five
Speaker 1: of them I've never seen in my life before. There
Speaker 1: was the vice chairman of the company, the senior managing directors,
Speaker 1: managing directors, senior directors, directors, vice presidents, and me I
Speaker 1: was the lowest ranking guy in the whole room, and
Speaker 1: within moments of the meeting starting, a fight broke out
Speaker 1: among all these different people about which who is going
Speaker 1: to get the economic credit for the business, and and
Speaker 1: investment bankers have an unbelievable skill and capacity for making
Speaker 1: plausible arguments for why they deserve money that they don't deserve,
Speaker 1: and and and these people were just I was watching,
Speaker 1: like like multidimensional Tennis is like the asset management group
Speaker 1: that had made an argument, and then the investment banks
Speaker 1: so he worked here, and then emerging markets people say
Speaker 1: what about us? And and it was going on on
Speaker 1: and on, and I didn't know who was going to
Speaker 1: win this argument, but I was a d percent sure
Speaker 1: of who wasn't going to get any economic credit for
Speaker 1: the business, and that was going to be me. And
Speaker 1: so I after three days of like not being able
Speaker 1: to sleep, I I walked into the head of the
Speaker 1: trading floor. I gave him my security badge and I say,
Speaker 1: I'm quitting. I'm going to start my own fund. And
Speaker 1: I went I moved to Oscow. This was early what
Speaker 1: what was became the Hermitage Fund. He told me, you're
Speaker 1: never going to succeed. But off I went and I
Speaker 1: ended up getting I went back to one of those
Speaker 1: guys from from those meetings that I went to on
Speaker 1: Wall Street. It was it was a guy named Edmund Saffra,
Speaker 1: who was the owner of Republic National Bank of New
Speaker 1: York and he was one of the largest and most
Speaker 1: successful private bankers in the world. He gave me twenty
Speaker 1: five million dollars to invest, he started the fund and
Speaker 1: it just went like unbelievably up within moments of starting. Amazing,
Speaker 1: really quite amazing. So it's a fascinating story, but it
Speaker 1: raises so many interesting questions, starting with you know, the
Speaker 1: companies you're investing in in Russia? Are these all formally
Speaker 1: state owned companies? Sort of the way things are up
Speaker 1: earning in China today? Um, did they still retain any
Speaker 1: sort of state ownership? And and and who were the
Speaker 1: private owners of these farms and so so, Um, what
Speaker 1: would happen is in most cases the companies became completely privatized. UM,
Speaker 1: and and the people who owned them. And these are
Speaker 1: big companies. And you've heard of these companies Luke Oils,
Speaker 1: Spare Bank Gas from UM through good Naphgace. These are
Speaker 1: companies than anyone who trades Russian stocks would know the
Speaker 1: names of these companies, big state company, big formerly state companies.
Speaker 1: Most of them were fully privatized, and the people who
Speaker 1: became the majority shareholders were these people who we now
Speaker 1: know as the oligarchs. A couple of them, like gas
Speaker 1: from the Spare Bank, remained um partially state owned or
Speaker 1: in some cases the majority stay owned, but the shares
Speaker 1: the would trade on the stock market. Um. But the
Speaker 1: big problem that we discovered and and um and this
Speaker 1: this was one of the reasons everything was so cheap,
Speaker 1: was that you might have owned a share of a
Speaker 1: Russian company, but you didn't really have a share of
Speaker 1: any thing because the oligarchs or in some cases the
Speaker 1: corrupt managers, we're basically stealing all the money out the
Speaker 1: back door there was. You might have had a share
Speaker 1: of company, you had no share of the economics because
Speaker 1: they were just literally stealing billions in every possible way.
Speaker 1: You can imagine that the kind of corruption that that
Speaker 1: that we got to see with our own eyes was
Speaker 1: just mind boggling. It was the biggest theft in the
Speaker 1: history of the world was being done that of these companies.
Speaker 1: And these companies are generating tens of billions of dollars
Speaker 1: of profits, but if you look at the financials, they
Speaker 1: were nonprofits and and so so it presented a terrible
Speaker 1: dilemma for me, because you know, I got out to
Speaker 1: the world and convinced all sorts of famous people to
Speaker 1: come and invest with me. I showed them all these
Speaker 1: graphs and charts about how cheap everything was, and it
Speaker 1: was on paper, but it wasn't in reality, because these
Speaker 1: guys were just stealing all the money out the back door.
Speaker 1: And it was and it created a real album. And
Speaker 1: it was also really infuriating, like why would these it
Speaker 1: was mostly these oligarchs doing it. Why would these people
Speaker 1: feel so entitled that they could do that and just
Speaker 1: at the expense of everybody else cheap for a reason? Right, So,
Speaker 1: so that raises a question. Russia is a unique place.
Speaker 1: Corruption is endemic. It's well known for a century. It's
Speaker 1: not the sort of geography that you really think of
Speaker 1: when you think of shareholder activism. What led you to
Speaker 1: that sort of approach in that sort of place. Well,
Speaker 1: so it was a combination of circumstances. So um I
Speaker 1: started out with twenty five million dollars of staffers of money,
Speaker 1: and and then it started going up and up and up.
Speaker 1: And this was this was a hedge fund structure where
Speaker 1: you could put your money in at any point in time.
Speaker 1: And everybody said, oh my god, this is unbelievable. So
Speaker 1: they'd started adding more and more money to the fund,
Speaker 1: and and by UM I had more than a billion
Speaker 1: dollars invested in the Russian stock market, which was you know,
Speaker 1: this is a tiny little market, so billion dollars was
Speaker 1: like the It was like the equivalent of fidelity in Russia,
Speaker 1: and in terms of the size of assets. And then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, and for anyone listening to this
Speaker 1: is who's you know, my age or near um happened?
Speaker 1: This was the year that Russia defaulted and devalued their currency,
Speaker 1: and so they defaulted on the domestic bonds, the currency
Speaker 1: devalued by s and and and my portfolio, which was
Speaker 1: above a billion dollars went down. And so there I
Speaker 1: was nursing a loss. I lost nine hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: in my clients money. And these are people that I've
Speaker 1: gone around and tried to convince, to convinced to invest
Speaker 1: in Russia. I went and went around meeting all sorts
Speaker 1: of people all over the world. You know, if every
Speaker 1: twenty people I would meet, nineteen said no, you're crazy,
Speaker 1: I'm not giving you any money, and one person would
Speaker 1: say yes, and that one person who was with me,
Speaker 1: who like you know, who had given me their confidence. Um,
Speaker 1: I lost of their money. And I was just mortified.
Speaker 1: And I was totally totally ashamed of myself that I
Speaker 1: had been so emphatic saying what a great opportunity this was,
Speaker 1: and I lost people so much money, and and I
Speaker 1: just couldn't look at myself in the mirror unless I
Speaker 1: did something to try to try to get their money back.
Speaker 1: And so as I was trying to get there, so
Speaker 1: I was sitting with my last ten cents on the dollar.
Speaker 1: The market had crashed, and the oligarchs, and this was
Speaker 1: a particularly poignant moment in their lives that they had
Speaker 1: up until that time kind of behaved themselves, not as much.
Speaker 1: I mean, there was a lot of stealing going on
Speaker 1: before this, but but after this crash, they realized that
Speaker 1: Wall Street was closed for business for them. They could
Speaker 1: never borrow a penny on Wall Street. Nobody was ever
Speaker 1: going to touch them in any way, shape or form,
Speaker 1: and that was the only thing sort of moderating their
Speaker 1: behavior at all. And so when when they saw this,
Speaker 1: that that that nobody was returning their calls from Olden
Speaker 1: Sacks and Morgan Stanley, who had been all, you know,
Speaker 1: wining and dining them a year before, they said to themselves,
Speaker 1: whether there if there's no incentive to behave And there's
Speaker 1: never been any disincentives against misbehavior because in the laws
Speaker 1: existing in Russia, we might as well steal everything that's
Speaker 1: not nailed down, and and and they went from stealing
Speaker 1: cash flow, which is what they had stolen before, to
Speaker 1: stealing assets and and and there were assets stripping and
Speaker 1: and organizing huge delusive share issues and embezzlement and all
Speaker 1: sorts of crazy stuff. And and so I was they
Speaker 1: were going to try to steal the last ten cents
Speaker 1: on the dollar that I had right at the moment
Speaker 1: that I was that I had sort of vowed to
Speaker 1: try to get that money back. And so I kind
Speaker 1: of felt like I was forced into this because I wasn't.
Speaker 1: I just couldn't imagine just dusting myself off and leaving,
Speaker 1: and you know, just leaving everybody in such a terrible
Speaker 1: state of among my clients, and so I said, okay, well,
Speaker 1: how how do I stop them from stealing? And it's
Speaker 1: not like you could go to the regulator and say,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a stealing going onto my company, could
Speaker 1: you please investigate? Because regulators don't regulate. You couldn't go
Speaker 1: to the courts or the police, or or the parliament
Speaker 1: or anything. But the one thing, the one thing I
Speaker 1: could do is go to the media. And and so
Speaker 1: we started to do um what I what is now
Speaker 1: known as stealing analysis of Russian companies, where we would
Speaker 1: go into these companies and we would do an analysis
Speaker 1: and of like how they're stealing, how they were stealing,
Speaker 1: who was stealing, what they were stealing, where the money
Speaker 1: was going. And and you might think that that, well,
Speaker 1: how do you do is stealing analysis and a Russian company?
Speaker 1: And and the answer is pretty interesting, which is that
Speaker 1: that these companies and the country, it's just everything is
Speaker 1: total bureaucracy there. You can't even go the bathroom without
Speaker 1: like putting your writing, your name down on a form,
Speaker 1: and then those forms get filed with four different ministries
Speaker 1: and quadruple kate and and all that information about everything
Speaker 1: in the country was effectively for sale, you could basically
Speaker 1: buy a disc with the information about everything. And and
Speaker 1: so we started buying these discs with all this information
Speaker 1: and and and people also weren't very tight lipped about it.
Speaker 1: Everybody was really upset that that all the stealing was
Speaker 1: going on because only a very few people participated in
Speaker 1: but a lot of people got to see it with
Speaker 1: it and see it themselves. And so we started to
Speaker 1: put together these really detailed, um, you know, summarison analysis
Speaker 1: of how the stealing was happening. And any other big
Speaker 1: benefit that I had was that all the foreign correspondents
Speaker 1: all pretty much hung out at the same restaurants and
Speaker 1: bars that I did. And and so I got to
Speaker 1: know all these guys and and and they loved me
Speaker 1: because here I was showing up with like work that
Speaker 1: would have taken them three months to do, which I
Speaker 1: just did myself with my team. I'm showing like these
Speaker 1: massive defts going on in these big important Russian companies
Speaker 1: like gas problems, Bare Bank and so on. And so
Speaker 1: I would I would um, I would do these naming
Speaker 1: and shaming campaigns, and they would write up the stories
Speaker 1: of the Wall Street Journal with Financial Times and Your Times, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And then the most interesting thing happened, which is that
Speaker 1: it was just at the same time that Vladimir Putin
Speaker 1: had come to power, and and Putin was fighting with
Speaker 1: the same guys I was fighting with. When he came
Speaker 1: to power um in the year two thousand, he wasn't
Speaker 1: powerful like he is today. All these oligarchs had had
Speaker 1: basically informally usurped the power of the presidency, and he
Speaker 1: was really keen on getting it back. And so and
Speaker 1: I should point out that I've never spoken or met
Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin, but when I would put these expose a
Speaker 1: s out there, it created this opportunity for him to
Speaker 1: go after his enemies. And there's there's an expression your
Speaker 1: enemy's enemy as your friend. And so he would I
Speaker 1: would put out a big expose on gas From and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden he'd step in and he
Speaker 1: would fire the CEO gas From using the state's shares,
Speaker 1: or he would issue issue a presidential decree about spare
Speaker 1: or whatever. And this had an unbelievably positive effect on
Speaker 1: the value of my portfolio. And so if you so basically,
Speaker 1: I remember I started with twenty million dollars, it goes
Speaker 1: up to a billion it goes down to nine to million,
Speaker 1: and as a result of the naming and shaming campaigns,
Speaker 1: it goes from a hundred million to four and a
Speaker 1: half billions, and I became the largest foreign investor in
Speaker 1: the country. So so, shareholder activism is usually a pretty um,
Speaker 1: bare knuckles sort of um strategy. And in a country
Speaker 1: like the United States or even the UK or Europe,
Speaker 1: there is the rule of law and respect for property
Speaker 1: rights and and regulation and law enforcement. There's really not
Speaker 1: a whole lot of that in the U. In Russia.
Speaker 1: At what point do you start to think, Hey, you know,
Speaker 1: I could be really pissing off some pretty powerful and
Speaker 1: dangerous characters. Well, I was, on one hand, I was
Speaker 1: scared to death doing this and literally scared to death.
Speaker 1: Um uh. And and it wasn't like I was doing this,
Speaker 1: you know, enthusiastically. I was doing this in reactions to
Speaker 1: the fact that I was they were going to try
Speaker 1: to take everything away from me. And and when I
Speaker 1: did it, I I hired bodyguards. I had one particular
Speaker 1: fight that I had, I had literally fifteen bodyguards. I
Speaker 1: had When I would go from the office to home,
Speaker 1: I had my car with with three armed guys and
Speaker 1: then there'll be three other cars, a lead car, a
Speaker 1: lag car, a sidecar, and I get home and we
Speaker 1: were the lead car would go ahead to get there faster,
Speaker 1: and they would scope out for for snipers and look
Speaker 1: up the stairwells and make sure there's no bombs, and
Speaker 1: then there'll be a guy sitting in my apartment was
Speaker 1: like automatic weapon loaded sitting in my living room. Um.
Speaker 1: It was pretty horrifying and scary. Um. And you know
Speaker 1: that these guys do a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of terrible things. Um. But the one thing
Speaker 1: that I had going for me, and this is it's
Speaker 1: kind of a a joke, but it was very serious,
Speaker 1: is that in Russia, nobody, um, everything is a conspiracy.
Speaker 1: That nothing is as it seems on the surface. And
Speaker 1: and so everybody looked at me and saying, there's no
Speaker 1: way that some guy from the South side of Chicago,
Speaker 1: American guy shows up in Russia and takes on the
Speaker 1: most powerful, dangerous oligarchs in the country on his own volition.
Speaker 1: Somebody must be standing behind him. This must be a project.
Speaker 1: And everybody looked at the whole pattern and they said, well, okay,
Speaker 1: Browder does this stuff. And then all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: Putin steps in and any attacks the people right afterwards.
Speaker 1: This must be a how clever of Putin to come
Speaker 1: up with this weird strategy, and and and they were
Speaker 1: kind of scared of Putin and so um like that
Speaker 1: they thought. And I wasn't going to correct them and
Speaker 1: tell them that that this is like totally my doing,
Speaker 1: it has nothing to do with him. And so I
Speaker 1: let them believe that this was some type of Putin
Speaker 1: project because that that gave me some some protection, this misunderstanding,
Speaker 1: um and and and so you know here I am
Speaker 1: now sitting here telling the story, so that nobody got
Speaker 1: to me. But it was of course a very scary,
Speaker 1: you know, thing to do, extremely scary thing to do,
Speaker 1: and everybody was scratching their hands and wondering how I
Speaker 1: can do it and get away with it. So so
Speaker 1: you and Putin's interests appear to be aligned, at least
Speaker 1: in the beginning in the nineties. Then a few years
Speaker 1: go by and suddenly you're declared a national security threat.
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about what that experience was like, uh,
Speaker 1: not being permitted back into the country and denied a visa.
Speaker 1: So Putin had this problem with the oligarchs. They were
Speaker 1: stealing power from him, and he um, you know, and
Speaker 1: so every time I would be doing this stuff, he
Speaker 1: would come come in and do you know, come down
Speaker 1: on them. And that wasn't enough for him. He had
Speaker 1: to solve this problem once and for all. And he
Speaker 1: came up with with a plan in late two thousand
Speaker 1: and three to solve this problem with the oligarchs. And
Speaker 1: what he did was there was one oligarch in particular
Speaker 1: who was the richest oligarc. His name was Mikhail Hoardakovski.
Speaker 1: At the time, it was worth about twenty billion dollars.
Speaker 1: He was the owner of an oil company called Yukos.
Speaker 1: And so Putin decided that he was going to win
Speaker 1: his war with the oligarchs by arresting the richest oligarch.
Speaker 1: And so hardakovskis on his private jet. His jet his
Speaker 1: land from some air airport in Siberia, and Putin organizes
Speaker 1: for his private jet to be surrounded by the FSB,
Speaker 1: which is the successor organization of the KGB. They surround
Speaker 1: the jet, they arrest him, they put him on a
Speaker 1: government plane back to Moscow. They put him in jail,
Speaker 1: and then they put him on trial. In Russia, when
Speaker 1: you go on trial, there's a seven percent conviction rate,
Speaker 1: and so there's no presumption of innocence. And so when
Speaker 1: you're on trial, they put you in a cage because
Speaker 1: that's where you're going to be when the trial is over.
Speaker 1: So they put Mikhail Khordakovsky, the richest man in Russia,
Speaker 1: on trial, in a cage, and they allowed television cameras
Speaker 1: to come in and film them. And so imagine you're
Speaker 1: the seventeenth richest oligarch in Russia. You're on your yacht.
Speaker 1: It's parked off the Code Desur in France. You can
Speaker 1: just finished up with your mistress in the bedroom. You
Speaker 1: go out to the the living room, you click on CNN,
Speaker 1: and you see a guy far smarter, far more powerful,
Speaker 1: far better than you, sitting in a cage. What's your
Speaker 1: natural reaction going to be? You don't want to sit
Speaker 1: in that cage. And so, one by one by one,
Speaker 1: these some oligarchs went to Prudent after Ordakovski was convicted
Speaker 1: and sentenced to ten years, and they say to Putin
Speaker 1: as a summer of two thousand four, Vladimir, what do
Speaker 1: we have to do so we don't sit in the
Speaker 1: cage and and prudent says, real simple, not for the
Speaker 1: Russian government or for the presidential administration of Russia, for
Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin. And at that moment in time two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, Vladimir Putin becames becomes the richest man in
Speaker 1: the world. And at that moment in time, all of
Speaker 1: my activities exposing the oligarchs are no longer exposing his enemies,
Speaker 1: but exposing his personal interest. And they must have struggled
Speaker 1: to figure out what's what to do with me, but
Speaker 1: they figured it out. And in early November two thousand
Speaker 1: and five, I was flying back to Moscow from London.
Speaker 1: I was I've been living in Moscow for ten years.
Speaker 1: I was largest foreign investor in the country. And I
Speaker 1: get arrested at Sharon Matevo Airport by four heavily armed
Speaker 1: border guards. They take me down to the detention center
Speaker 1: of the airport. They locked me up overnight, and I'm
Speaker 1: sitting there, cursing myself for having been so stupid for
Speaker 1: doing this, and wondering whether I'm going off to Siberia
Speaker 1: like Kordakowski, or whether I'm going to be deported. I
Speaker 1: was sitting there for fifteen hours and then they finally
Speaker 1: marched me back onto a air Flouts flight, stick me
Speaker 1: in the middle of seat, and to court me back
Speaker 1: to London. And I'll tell you something, I was so
Speaker 1: so happy that it was if you've ever watched that
Speaker 1: movie Argo, when they take off from Iran, I was
Speaker 1: so happy that I wasn't being sent off to Siberia. Um.
Speaker 1: But so I get back to London, um, and and
Speaker 1: and then I get an official letter from the Russian
Speaker 1: Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that I've been banned entry
Speaker 1: into Russia because I was a threat to national security
Speaker 1: and and and I was really surprised, actually, because I
Speaker 1: thought I'd been doing them a favor by exposing all
Speaker 1: this corruption. But you know, as I figured out Putin,
Speaker 1: Putin was now the beneficiary of this whole thing. And
Speaker 1: so at this point I was pretty scared because, okay, yes, um,
Speaker 1: being kicked out it's not a great thing if you're
Speaker 1: specialized in investing in Russia. But you know, when the
Speaker 1: Russians decide to go after you, they don't intend to
Speaker 1: do it mildly. They usually do it with extreme prejudice.
Speaker 1: And so I said to myself, where else to do?
Speaker 1: You know, where else am I exposed? And there is
Speaker 1: two places where I was exposed. I had a bunch
Speaker 1: of people, A bunch of people were for me and
Speaker 1: their family members that they could arrest um in Russia.
Speaker 1: And I had a hell of a lot of money
Speaker 1: invested in the country. And so I organized an emergency
Speaker 1: evacuation in my entire staff, all of the people who
Speaker 1: were for me and their and their dependence. And I
Speaker 1: got them all out and got them all to London.
Speaker 1: And once I got everybody safely out, we then organized. Uh.
Speaker 1: We we quickly and quietly liquidated every last year we
Speaker 1: held them in the country. So let's talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about the raid. Russian officials, while you're in Paris,
Speaker 1: decide to raid the remnants of what was Hermitage. You
Speaker 1: would already essentially wound down operations, removed everybody um except
Speaker 1: for one secretary, and and gotten all of the cash
Speaker 1: out of out of Russia. Uh, tell us how this progressed?
Speaker 1: What what was this raid about? So they they seize
Speaker 1: these documents that the stamp seals and certificates for investment
Speaker 1: holding companies, which were at this point, we're empty. So
Speaker 1: they seize these documents and and then we discover that
Speaker 1: the document that the companies no longer belong to us.
Speaker 1: They have been frauduably reregistered into the name of a
Speaker 1: man who had been convicted of manslaughter and let out
Speaker 1: of jail early um he became the new owner of
Speaker 1: these of our of our empty investment holding companies, which
Speaker 1: and the only way he could have done that it
Speaker 1: was in collusion with the police. And so at this
Speaker 1: point I don't have any money at stake in Russia,
Speaker 1: because all the money is safely out. But I'm terrified,
Speaker 1: not from a financial perspective, but from a legal perspective,
Speaker 1: because I know that if the police are working with
Speaker 1: killers steel companies, I'm gonna be walking through some airport
Speaker 1: somewhere and then I'm gonna be arrested in some future data.
Speaker 1: And so I am. I call up the smartest lawyer
Speaker 1: I know in Russia, the young man named Sergei Magnitsky.
Speaker 1: Sergey was at the time thirty five years old. He
Speaker 1: worked for an American law firm, and he was one
Speaker 1: of these people who could literally do ten things in
Speaker 1: the time it takes another lawyer to do one. It's
Speaker 1: just a genius, hard working, unbelievably good lawyer, and I
Speaker 1: say to Sergey, I don't know what's going on here,
Speaker 1: but I need you to figure it out and I
Speaker 1: need to stop it. As a Surge goes out and
Speaker 1: he investigates, and he goes and sends letters of request,
Speaker 1: information documents, all stufferent people, and he goes to registries
Speaker 1: and he goes to courts, he goes everywhere. And he
Speaker 1: comes back and he said, I figured it out. There
Speaker 1: were two parts of this scam, he said. The first
Speaker 1: part of the scam didn't succeed. The first part of
Speaker 1: the scam was they wanted to steal all of your money,
Speaker 1: but because I've gotten all my money out before they
Speaker 1: got to us, they didn't get it. He said. However,
Speaker 1: the second part of their scam did succeed. And what
Speaker 1: he explained was that after we had liquidated all of
Speaker 1: our holdings in Russia in the previous year, when we
Speaker 1: got all our money out, we had a profit of
Speaker 1: a billion dollars, and on that profit of a billion dollars,
Speaker 1: we paid to the Russian government million dollars of capital
Speaker 1: games tax. What Serge had learned through his investigation was
Speaker 1: that after our companies were stolen, the people who stole.
Speaker 1: Our companies went back to the tax authorities on the
Speaker 1: December two thousand and seven, and they said, there was
Speaker 1: a mistake made in the previous year tax filing. Instead
Speaker 1: of these companies earning a billion dollars, they're in zero.
Speaker 1: This is what they said. And they came up from
Speaker 1: complicated way of trying to explain that, and they said,
Speaker 1: as a result of them earning zero, the two million
Speaker 1: dollars of taxes that was paid in the previous year
Speaker 1: is paid an error, and we'd like that money back.
Speaker 1: And so on December two thousand seven, two days before Christmas,
Speaker 1: they applied for a two thirty million dollar fraudulent tax refund.
Speaker 1: It was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia.
Speaker 1: Applied for it on the two days before Christmas, and
Speaker 1: it was approved and paid out the next day on
Speaker 1: Christmas Eve, and so pretty shocking. Well, I mean, if
Speaker 1: you if so, let's just say you overpay taxes legitimately
Speaker 1: by five thousand dollars, you know you'd be fifteen years
Speaker 1: later and you still not to get that money back
Speaker 1: from the Russians. You don't think you get it the
Speaker 1: next day, even if it was Christmas Eve. It was
Speaker 1: like a lovely Christmas present. Two million dollars near nearly
Speaker 1: a quarter of a billion dollars paid out on a
Speaker 1: fraud in one day on Christmas Eve. So Sergey and
Speaker 1: I were looking at this and this was just a
Speaker 1: monumental discovery and we and we said to each other,
Speaker 1: this couldn't possibly be authorized, because this wasn't this wasn't
Speaker 1: not my money that was being stolen. This was the
Speaker 1: Russian government's money being stolen. And we thought, you know, Putin,
Speaker 1: he might be a nasty guy, but he's he's a nationalist,
Speaker 1: he's a patriot. This is his this is his own
Speaker 1: money that's being stolen. He couldn't have authorized this. And
Speaker 1: so we figured that the best way of dealing with
Speaker 1: it is to bring it to the attention of the
Speaker 1: highest authorities in Russia. As we wrote criminal complaints to
Speaker 1: the head of the General of the General Prosecutor of Russia,
Speaker 1: to the head of the Russian State Investigative Committee, to
Speaker 1: the head of the Internal Affairs Department of the Interior Ministry.
Speaker 1: I then went to the newspapers, to the radio television
Speaker 1: telling the story of what had happened. And then Serge
Speaker 1: went and gave formal testimony to the Russian State Investigative Committee,
Speaker 1: which is their FBI. And we sat back and we
Speaker 1: waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out that in Vladimir Pruten's Russia there are
Speaker 1: no good guys. Five weeks after Surge testified against the officials,
Speaker 1: these cops and so on who did the raid. The
Speaker 1: same people he testified against came to his home on
Speaker 1: November two thousand and arrested him. They put him in
Speaker 1: pre child attention, where he was then tortured to withdraw
Speaker 1: his testimony. They put him in cells with fourteen inmates
Speaker 1: and eight beds and less lights on twenty four hours
Speaker 1: a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in
Speaker 1: cells with no heat and now window panes. In December,
Speaker 1: moscows and nearly froze to death. To put him in
Speaker 1: cells and no toilet, just a hole in the flower
Speaker 1: where the sewage would bubble up. They moved him from
Speaker 1: cell to cell to cell. And the purpose of all
Speaker 1: this um was was to get him to withdraw his
Speaker 1: testimony against these corrupt police officers. And they wanted to
Speaker 1: get in to sign a false confession to say that
Speaker 1: he stole the two thirty million dollars, and he did
Speaker 1: so in my instruction, and Serge he looked at them like,
Speaker 1: just like a soft guy. Here's a guy who you know,
Speaker 1: wears a gray suit and a white shirt and a
Speaker 1: red tie, goes to a fancy American law firm and
Speaker 1: buy Starbucks coffee in the morning. You know, a week
Speaker 1: of this is the old buckle. But what they they
Speaker 1: completely misunderstood Sergey Magnitsky. Sergey was this man of unbelievable
Speaker 1: principle and integrity, and for him, the idea of perjuring
Speaker 1: himself and bearing false witness was more more painful than
Speaker 1: the physical pain they were subjecting to, and he just refused.
Speaker 1: And as a result of his refusal, they just upped
Speaker 1: up to up the pressure in the torture. And after
Speaker 1: about six months of this, his health started to deteriorate.
Speaker 1: He started to develop terrible pains in his stomach, couldn't eat,
Speaker 1: He lost forty pounds, and he eventually went to the
Speaker 1: prison doctor and they diagnosed and as having pancreatitis and
Speaker 1: gallstones and meeting an operation which was scheduled for the
Speaker 1: first of August two thousand nine. Um. A week before
Speaker 1: the operation. He um that the the the bad guys
Speaker 1: come to him again again demand him to sign the
Speaker 1: false confession. Again he refuses, and in retaliation they move
Speaker 1: him from the prison where he was where that which
Speaker 1: had this medical facility, to a maximum security prison in
Speaker 1: Moscow called Boutyrka, and Boutyrka is considered to be one
Speaker 1: of the most horrible prisons in Russia. It's like a
Speaker 1: medieval prison, but but worse than that for Sergey is
Speaker 1: that there was no medical facilities there and at Brutyirka
Speaker 1: has helped completely broke down. And when in a terrible
Speaker 1: downward spiral, constant agonizing pain, and all medical attention and
Speaker 1: was refused, he and his lawyers wrote twenty different desperate
Speaker 1: requests to every different branch or the criminal justice system,
Speaker 1: begging for medical attention, and every different letter was either
Speaker 1: ignored or denied in writing by so many different parts
Speaker 1: of the criminal justice system. Things got worse and worse
Speaker 1: than On November sixty two tho nine, Sergey went into
Speaker 1: critical condition. On that night, the Bluecherka authorities didn't want
Speaker 1: to have responsibility for him anymore, and so they put
Speaker 1: him in an ambulance and sent him to another prison
Speaker 1: across town and had a medically wing. When he gets
Speaker 1: to the new prison, has been of putting him in
Speaker 1: the emergency room. They put him in an isolation cell.
Speaker 1: They chained him to a bed, and then eight riot
Speaker 1: guards with rubber baton's come into the cell and beat
Speaker 1: Sergei Magnitsky to death. He was thirty seven years old.
Speaker 1: That was November six, two thousand nine, a little more
Speaker 1: than twelve and a half years ago. He left a wife, him,
Speaker 1: two children. He was killed. Ibelieve the most unbelievable, horrifying, traumatizing, shocking,
Speaker 1: horrific thing I've ever had anything to do with in
Speaker 1: my life. The guy who worked for me was killed
Speaker 1: because he worked for me, was effectively killed as my proxy.
Speaker 1: And when I was finally able to clear the fog
Speaker 1: of hysteria and heartbreak and shock, I think clearly I
Speaker 1: made a vow to his memory, to his family, and
Speaker 1: to myself that I was going to put aside everything
Speaker 1: else I was doing in my life, and I was
Speaker 1: going to devote all of my time, all of my resources,
Speaker 1: and all of my energies going after the bastards have
Speaker 1: killed him, to make sure they faced justice at the
Speaker 1: last twelve and a half years. That's what I've been doing.
Speaker 1: So you had previously discussed how effectively the Russian government
Speaker 1: had had Sergey beaten to death in their custody. At
Speaker 1: this point you decide you want um, you want payback,
Speaker 1: You want to make the people who did this pay
Speaker 1: tell us how the idea of the Magnitsky Acts came
Speaker 1: about and what was it like shepherding that through Congress.
Speaker 1: So after Sergey was killed, I said to myself, well,
Speaker 1: how do we get justice? And Serge had done something
Speaker 1: unique when he was in jail, which is that he
Speaker 1: wrote everything down that happened to him. Every every time
Speaker 1: they did something bad to him, he wrote a criminal
Speaker 1: complaint about who did it, what they did, where they
Speaker 1: did it, what law was violated when they did it.
Speaker 1: And that was his way of dealing with the adversity
Speaker 1: of being in jail. And so over the course of
Speaker 1: three days and attention, he had written four hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty complaints documenting his mistreatment, and once a month or
Speaker 1: so he write these complaints out. Once a month or
Speaker 1: so he would hand them to his lawyer. His lawyer
Speaker 1: would then five of them and we would get copies
Speaker 1: and although none of these complaints were ever acted on,
Speaker 1: we because we had copies, we had the most well documented, granular, detailed,
Speaker 1: firsthand account of human rights abuse have to ever come
Speaker 1: out of the Russian system. And because these were so
Speaker 1: articularly written, um they made horrifying caps for you know,
Speaker 1: Russia was like this is this is not Nobody could
Speaker 1: imagine that this was the Russia. You know, Russia of
Speaker 1: the years of two thousand and nine. They thought this
Speaker 1: was stalling when they read these letters and complaints, and
Speaker 1: we thought that that would be enough. It's released have
Speaker 1: them throw some of the low level people under the bus.
Speaker 1: But I was completely wrong. Instead of prosecuting anybody wide,
Speaker 1: recruitin got personally involved. He circled the wagons. He made
Speaker 1: public statements that nobody had done anything wrong. He has
Speaker 1: honorated every single individual. Some of the most complicit people
Speaker 1: even received state honors and promotions. And in the most
Speaker 1: unbelievable miscarriage of justice, three years after they murdered Sergey Magnosky,
Speaker 1: they put him on trial, in the first ever trial
Speaker 1: against a dead man in the history of Russia. They
Speaker 1: put me on trial as his co defendant. We were
Speaker 1: both found guilty. They couldn't do anything more to Surgey
Speaker 1: than they had already done of killing him. Um, they
Speaker 1: sends me to nine years and months sentia. It became
Speaker 1: obvious well before that that this that that that we
Speaker 1: weren't going to succeed in getting justice in Russia. So
Speaker 1: we said, well, how do we get justice outside of Russia?
Speaker 1: And this is when I came up with an idea,
Speaker 1: which is that the people who killed Sergey didn't kill
Speaker 1: him for ideological or religious reasons, as many things have
Speaker 1: happened in the past. They killed him for money. They
Speaker 1: killed him very simply for two million dollars. And the
Speaker 1: people who still let to enter thirty million dollars don't
Speaker 1: keep that money in Russia. There's as easily as they
Speaker 1: stole it, it could be stolen from them. They keep
Speaker 1: that money in America, in the in the UK, they
Speaker 1: buy fancy apartments in London, they buy houses in South
Speaker 1: Beach and Miami, they buy villas on the on the
Speaker 1: front line in santra Pe and the s and their
Speaker 1: kids the Swiss boarding school and their girl girlfriends on
Speaker 1: shopping trips to Milan, and so we we it's it
Speaker 1: would be very difficult to prosecute somebody for for torture
Speaker 1: and murder in the West for a crime that was
Speaker 1: committed in Russia. But we certainly don't have to let
Speaker 1: them travel to the West, or that we can certainly
Speaker 1: don't have to let them use our banks from the West.
Speaker 1: We can freeze their assets in the West. And so
Speaker 1: that's when I came up this idea of freezing their
Speaker 1: assets and banning their visas. And so I took this
Speaker 1: idea to Washington and I met two senators and the
Speaker 1: Senator Benjamin Carton, who was a Democrat from Maryland, and
Speaker 1: Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, and I shared
Speaker 1: the story which I just shared with you now, and
Speaker 1: I said, can we freeze their assets and ban their visas?
Speaker 1: And these two senators were so moved by the story,
Speaker 1: they said, yes, we can, as we do here in Congress,
Speaker 1: we can make a law, and they made something called
Speaker 1: the Magnetsky Act. And so they put this idea of
Speaker 1: the Magnifski Act on the books. And it was originally
Speaker 1: just to go after the people who killed ser Gay Magnetsky,
Speaker 1: but as soon as other other people victims had heard
Speaker 1: of this story. The holmes in these two senators offices
Speaker 1: started lighting up with calls from Moscow and other parts
Speaker 1: of Russia, saying, you found me Achilles heel of the
Speaker 1: Putin regime. This is what they do. They commit terrible
Speaker 1: crimes in Russia and they keep their money in the West.
Speaker 1: Can you possibly um sanctioned the people who killed my husband,
Speaker 1: my brother, my sister, my aunt. And after about a
Speaker 1: dozen of these calls, these two senators realized they are,
Speaker 1: but they weren't just something much bigger in just one
Speaker 1: case that and so they added sixty five words to
Speaker 1: the law to include all human rights abusers in Russia,
Speaker 1: not just the people who killed Magnifsky. And all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, all sorts of victims fanned out across Capitol
Speaker 1: Hill telling their stories. I was trapped telling Surrogey's story.
Speaker 1: And in November of two thousand twelve, it went for
Speaker 1: a vote in the Senate and it passed ninety two
Speaker 1: to four. The Magnifici Act passed two to four, and
Speaker 1: asster representatives had passed with eight m and on December fourteen,
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, President Obama signed the magnet Ski Acts
Speaker 1: into the federal law, and Vladimir Putin went out of
Speaker 1: his mind. He got so angry that in retaliation he
Speaker 1: banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families. And
Speaker 1: that that may sound bad, there's actually much worse than
Speaker 1: it sounds, because the orphans that the Russians put up
Speaker 1: for adoption were the unhealthy ones, the ones with with
Speaker 1: down syndrome, with fetal alcohol syndrome, with HIV, with all
Speaker 1: other cerebral things. And Americans would come with open hearts
Speaker 1: and open arms and take these six children back to
Speaker 1: America and nurse them to help. And in Russia, the
Speaker 1: orphanages didn't have the resources, and these kids would die.
Speaker 1: And so basically Putin was sentencing his own orphans to
Speaker 1: death as a way of retaliating the Magnifici Act. He
Speaker 1: then made it a single larger foreign policy priority to
Speaker 1: try to repeal the Magnidski Act, and and he even
Speaker 1: went so far as the sending his own representative, a
Speaker 1: female lawyer named the Natalia vessel Midskaya to Trump Cower
Speaker 1: after Trump was nominated before before he was elected president
Speaker 1: two thousand sixteen nine two thousand sixteen, with a specific
Speaker 1: request one just one simple request that if he becomes president,
Speaker 1: he should repeal the Magnitski Act. Now happy to say
Speaker 1: that it didn't work, that no Magnitski Act has ever
Speaker 1: been repealed. In fact, it was not just not repealed,
Speaker 1: but it was broadened. The Magnetski Act in two thousand
Speaker 1: sixteen became the Global Magnanski Act, which doesn't just go
Speaker 1: after the people who do terrible things in Russia, but
Speaker 1: in China and Iran and Venezuela and all other countries.
Speaker 1: The Magniski Act now exists, not just in the United States.
Speaker 1: We've got it passed in Canada in two thousands steven
Speaker 1: a team in the UK and two thousand eight team
Speaker 1: in the European Union in two thousand twenty, in Australia
Speaker 1: in two thousan. They're now thirty four countries that have
Speaker 1: the Getsky Acts around the world. And this is actually
Speaker 1: the tool, the template, which is being used to go
Speaker 1: after all the bad guys in Putain's regime that are
Speaker 1: involved in the war in Ukraine. So let's let's put
Speaker 1: some flesh on those bones a little bit and talk
Speaker 1: about the dollar amounts involved. So so Surgey discovered a
Speaker 1: two hundred and thirty million dollar tax fraud. And then
Speaker 1: courtesy of investigative journalism like the Panama Papers and a
Speaker 1: number of other items, UM, just one bank alone, dank
Speaker 1: Ski Bank in sin the Navy was discovered to have
Speaker 1: laundered two hundred and thirty four billion, not million billion
Speaker 1: in in Russian money. What do you think the total
Speaker 1: amount of dirty, corrupt, stolen money out of Russia adds
Speaker 1: up to that's been laundered through Western banks. Well so
Speaker 1: so yeah, so so. One of the big things that
Speaker 1: after the Magnitsky Act has passed was to figure out
Speaker 1: where where all the money was. And so we we
Speaker 1: that became like my primary life mission was to figure
Speaker 1: it out. And I had a bunch of people working
Speaker 1: for me, and we collaborated with a lot of these
Speaker 1: journalists and UM, and we ended up getting a lot
Speaker 1: of information in different countries and and and what we
Speaker 1: discovered was that UM, in order to get the money
Speaker 1: out of Russia, they never atended directly from Russia to
Speaker 1: like buy an apartment in London or France, because the
Speaker 1: banks in London and France would be suspicious. And so
Speaker 1: what they did was they found these countries that were
Speaker 1: members of the European Union. Um, but we're still sort
Speaker 1: of not up to par with the European Union as
Speaker 1: far as you know must and laws and and the
Speaker 1: The countries that were really sort of that category were
Speaker 1: these three countries of the Baltics, Stonia, Latvia and Lithuania
Speaker 1: and Cyprus. And as we started digging and digging and
Speaker 1: pulling and threads and getting more data and leaks and
Speaker 1: and working with journalists, we discovered that million of the
Speaker 1: two million that that that was stolen had all gone
Speaker 1: to one bank, the Estonian branch of Danski bank a
Speaker 1: Danish banks all gone through this one branch. And we
Speaker 1: had all this great data and these journalists that we
Speaker 1: were working that we knew in Denmark, we're really interested
Speaker 1: in the data we had because identified the names of
Speaker 1: the holding companies and the account numbers and all those
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Because they had a huge database themselves
Speaker 1: called the Russian Laundermat database. But they couldn't make sense
Speaker 1: of the database, but they they could if if they
Speaker 1: could take our our our analysis of the two million,
Speaker 1: So they get our analysis, they get are all of
Speaker 1: our analysis and they compare it to this big sort
Speaker 1: of unstructured database, they have this Russian launderman, and they
Speaker 1: come back and say, actually, it wasn't two hundred million,
Speaker 1: there's eight and a half billion that was laundered through
Speaker 1: this bank. So they write this story and it was
Speaker 1: just like a blockbuster story, and it was a particular
Speaker 1: blockbuster story because Denmark is supposed to be like this
Speaker 1: honest country. If you look at the Transparency International Index,
Speaker 1: it's supposed to be the second most honest country in
Speaker 1: the world after New Zealand. And so here you've got
Speaker 1: this Danish bank, the major bank in Denmark, laundering eight
Speaker 1: and a half billion of dirty Russian money. And at
Speaker 1: this point, the Dame, the Dame, the CEO of the bank,
Speaker 1: he can't just sit back and do nothing, and so
Speaker 1: he orders a like full external investigation of everything they
Speaker 1: went on in this bank, and they bring in accounting
Speaker 1: firms and law firms, data, a little analytics firms and
Speaker 1: so on, and they finished their analysis and they discover
Speaker 1: it wasn't just eight and a half billion, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: it was two thirty two billion of money was laundered
Speaker 1: to this bank. And so here I am, I'm looking
Speaker 1: at this thing, and I'm saying, okay, this is just
Speaker 1: one Danish bank that's laundered two hut two billions. If
Speaker 1: if we could lift the hood on Rifeisen Bank in Vienna,
Speaker 1: on Deutsche Bank, on ubs and credit swifts, I think
Speaker 1: that number. You could multiply that number by four easily
Speaker 1: and you'd still be on the low end. And so
Speaker 1: I estimate that a trillion dollars of money has been
Speaker 1: stolen out of Russia Bibe Prutin and the thousand people
Speaker 1: around him and lauded into the West. A trillion dollars,
Speaker 1: a thousand billion dollars. So let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about that. You know, you know, we've we've taken to
Speaker 1: calling London London stand because it's been so blatant. You
Speaker 1: mentioned places like Miami and Santrope. How was this just allowed?
Speaker 1: Why why were Russians allowed to act with such impunity
Speaker 1: in the West. Well, the reason that Russians have been
Speaker 1: allowed to act with such impunity is because so many,
Speaker 1: so many people are getting rich off of this. There's
Speaker 1: so many bankers. I think that like Danski Bank, Estonian
Speaker 1: branch had a return on equity so um, but so
Speaker 1: many people are getting so rich out of doing this
Speaker 1: that that there. And these are not just nobody's These
Speaker 1: are like highly placed influential people. And in London, the
Speaker 1: Russians are are were sprinkling this money around like confetti
Speaker 1: like every you know, all lawyers were getting this money,
Speaker 1: and the bankers and account hunting firms and concierge's and
Speaker 1: real estate agents and and these are all people who
Speaker 1: had friends in high places. And as a result of this,
Speaker 1: and this is this has been a huge problem for
Speaker 1: the world. Everybody was financially incentivized to look the other
Speaker 1: way when Putin was doing terrible things at every step
Speaker 1: of the way. Let's get a little more explicit with
Speaker 1: some of that. In in Freezing Order, you specifically name
Speaker 1: names and call certain people Putin's us enablers. You mentioned
Speaker 1: a couple of attorneys by name, John Moscow and Mark Simrock,
Speaker 1: former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, even Congressman Dana Roarbeck.
Speaker 1: What it has to be more than just money or
Speaker 1: or am I making it too complicated? Is it just
Speaker 1: that simple? These folks are all for sale? Well, let
Speaker 1: me tell you the story of John Moscow, because it's
Speaker 1: one of the most shocking stories and such a great name.
Speaker 1: It's it's wild. Yeah, exactly, It's like it's straight out
Speaker 1: of Central Casting this guy. So I'm looking around as
Speaker 1: after Surrogey is murdered, I'm looking around for for somebody
Speaker 1: to help me find the money. And I ask everybody
Speaker 1: I know who's the best like anti money laundering, the
Speaker 1: lawyer in the world, and like four people tell me,
Speaker 1: go to this guy, John Moscow, and I had to laugh,
Speaker 1: like John Moscow. So so I go to this guy
Speaker 1: John Moscow. He's a former New York d A who
Speaker 1: is responsible for prosecuting all these big money laundering cases
Speaker 1: in New York. And he's the real deal. This guy
Speaker 1: is like, you know, he went into private practice after
Speaker 1: after his life as a prosecutor, and he knows his
Speaker 1: way around all the different tools of finding dirty money.
Speaker 1: And he gave us a whole bunch of We hired him,
Speaker 1: we could pay him a bunch of money, and he
Speaker 1: gave us all sorts of like good ideas and and
Speaker 1: help us draft all these subpoenas and all this interesting stuff.
Speaker 1: And then one day he just like proofs, disappears into
Speaker 1: into the ether, stops returning my calls, and and effectively
Speaker 1: just stops working for us. Anyways, I thought that was
Speaker 1: pretty weird, But you know, I've encountered so much horribleness
Speaker 1: in my life, that's hardly the worst horribleness. And we
Speaker 1: found some other lawyers and took all of John Moscow's
Speaker 1: ideas and implemented them. And we found the money in
Speaker 1: New York. And we found a bunch of money going
Speaker 1: to purchase luxury apartments in New York, twenty million dollars
Speaker 1: with the luxury apartments coming and which was trade, which
Speaker 1: was linked to to the to the fraud that ser
Speaker 1: Game Magnificy was killed over. So I take this to
Speaker 1: the New York authorities and they pass it up to
Speaker 1: the federal authorities and the US government. The Department of
Speaker 1: Justice issues a federal forfeiture over all these properties. And
Speaker 1: when you read the complaint, it's just like, you know,
Speaker 1: just the most damning thing you've ever seen. And I
Speaker 1: couldn't imagine that that anyone would ever show up to
Speaker 1: try to defend it. I thought the Russians would just
Speaker 1: like slither into the slither away and then and just
Speaker 1: let their apartments get seized. But when as soon as
Speaker 1: the government files it, the next day, a lawyer appears
Speaker 1: on behalf of the Russian Uh could prince Um, who
Speaker 1: is the lawyer John Moscow? So the lawyer who's who?
Speaker 1: My lawyer? The guy I'm the victim? Um, we surrogates
Speaker 1: the victim, I'm the victim. Were the victims? Um a
Speaker 1: lawyer for the victim, Um switched his side and becomes
Speaker 1: the lawyer for the alleged perpetrator. UM. So Uh, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not I didn't go to law school. I went
Speaker 1: to business school. But I know that you can't do that.
Speaker 1: Lawyers can't switch sides. I mean, that's what it's surd
Speaker 1: and uh. And I should point out that that that
Speaker 1: he didn't just do this by himself. He did this
Speaker 1: with this. He mentioned other lawyer named Mark sim Rot.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't like they were just like to the
Speaker 1: bucket shop, the lawyers working out of a shopping mall.
Speaker 1: They were working for Baker Hosteller. This is one of
Speaker 1: the most prestigious law firms in America. They have like
Speaker 1: thousands of lawyers. They representing Microsoft and Ford Motor also's
Speaker 1: other prestigious companies. And this firm basically went from from
Speaker 1: uh working for for you know, the the agents of
Speaker 1: the Russian government and uh and switching sides. And the
Speaker 1: first thing he did when he switched sides is he
Speaker 1: then issues the subpoena against me looking demanding all of
Speaker 1: my personal security details, all of my travel information, all
Speaker 1: the information about my colleagues and their families. I mean,
Speaker 1: just shocking the you know what, where is this information
Speaker 1: going to go? It's going to go to his Russian client,
Speaker 1: who was an agent of the Russian government to kill me.
Speaker 1: And Uh, Baker Hosteller, let me just say that a
Speaker 1: couple more Baker Hosteller, major American law firm, just working,
Speaker 1: you know, effectively working as an arm of the Russian
Speaker 1: Intelligence Services UM in America. And you say, why are
Speaker 1: they doing it? They're doing it for money, plain and simple,
Speaker 1: for tens of millions of dollars. You you filed UM
Speaker 1: a number of motions to have them disqualified. You had
Speaker 1: kind of an old daughtering eighties something year old federal
Speaker 1: judge who really didn't understand the case. How did you
Speaker 1: ultimately get them kicked off the case? Uh? I was
Speaker 1: fascinated by that in in freezing water that they had
Speaker 1: previously made some motions saying this has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with Browder. We didn't represent him that we this is
Speaker 1: a completely different entity. And then they kind of shot
Speaker 1: themselves in the foot tell us about that. So so, um,
Speaker 1: the first thing we did was when this happened, I said, well,
Speaker 1: this is not right, this is not legal. We should
Speaker 1: we So we filed a motion to have them disqualified
Speaker 1: because it was a conflict of interest. And I mean,
Speaker 1: it just seems like plain as day. And if you
Speaker 1: were to survey, you know, a hundred legal professionals, a
Speaker 1: hundred of them would say this is a conflict of interest.
Speaker 1: So we show up and I think it's just a
Speaker 1: no brainer, and it's a quick, quicken, simple procedure, and
Speaker 1: we'll get rid of him and and no longer be
Speaker 1: at risk of him, you know, uh, knowing all of
Speaker 1: my personal details and being able to share them with
Speaker 1: the Russian government. And so we file it and we
Speaker 1: we got the most unlucky draw you could ever get
Speaker 1: in the history of draws in the court, and we
Speaker 1: get this judge. His name is Judge Thomas Grisse, and
Speaker 1: this Brisse at the time was eight three years old,
Speaker 1: and um, and he had a long ago lost his
Speaker 1: you know, he was just you know, old age does
Speaker 1: terrible things to people. And I know it for my
Speaker 1: own family and my own father when he got really old.
Speaker 1: My father was a genius mathematician, one of the top
Speaker 1: mathematicians in the world, and things, you know, weren't so
Speaker 1: great when when he got into his mid eighties. And
Speaker 1: this guy, there's no mandatory retirement age for a federal judge,
Speaker 1: and we've got in front of this guy and he
Speaker 1: and he didn't understand. He just didn't understand that there
Speaker 1: was a conflict of interest, and he was done only
Speaker 1: that he was sort of angry with me for sort
Speaker 1: of delaying the case by making this motion, and he
Speaker 1: granted the subpoena in full and basically, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: ordered me to hand over all of my information to
Speaker 1: the effectively to the Russian government, um, which would have
Speaker 1: gotten me or people close to me killed. And and
Speaker 1: we went through hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars
Speaker 1: of legal expenses fighting this thing off, and finally we
Speaker 1: we we sort of did a Hail Mary, and we
Speaker 1: appealed it. There's a special type of legal challenge you
Speaker 1: can do called the rid of mandamos, which almost never succeeds,
Speaker 1: where you basically saying that the judge has gone off
Speaker 1: the reservation. And we filed and like these things never succeed,
Speaker 1: but we filed it, and and we went again, and
Speaker 1: we went to the appeals court and the judges of
Speaker 1: the appeals court said, this is the most unbelievable thing
Speaker 1: they've ever seen, and they disqualified John Moscow and Baker
Speaker 1: Hosteller Um and and interestingly the judge was sort of
Speaker 1: quietly put put out to pasture um and we got
Speaker 1: rid of them, what or so we thought. And then
Speaker 1: we discovered after the whole case was over, when when
Speaker 1: when the case finally came to fruition, the Russians paid
Speaker 1: the US government six million dollars instead of going to trial.
Speaker 1: And then we discovered afterwards that even after John Moscow
Speaker 1: and Baker Hofsteller were disqualified, they continued to secretly work
Speaker 1: for the Russians. Now, if you're working for the Russians
Speaker 1: um a foreign entity, don't you have to register as
Speaker 1: a lobbyists tell us a little bit about that. Well,
Speaker 1: So what was interesting was they weren't just doing this case.
Speaker 1: They were running all around Washington Baker Hosteller and they
Speaker 1: also hired a guy named Glenn Simpson who was the
Speaker 1: author of the Trump dossier so well, so the hired
Speaker 1: Glen Simpson to basically run a smear campaign against me
Speaker 1: and the Magnetski Act in Washington as we were lobbying
Speaker 1: for the Global Magniski Act to be passed in summer
Speaker 1: of two thousands sixteen. And so you've got this guy
Speaker 1: Mark Simrott who was going around briefing members of Congress
Speaker 1: saying that Magnitsky was a crook, Bill Browder's a crook.
Speaker 1: Don't do the Magnifski Act, don't name it after Magnitsky,
Speaker 1: don't do it. Glenn Simpson was was was trying to
Speaker 1: get journalists write these articles. He was feeding in misinformation
Speaker 1: and nonsense to different journalists and desperately trying to create
Speaker 1: this this appearance that Prudent was good and me and
Speaker 1: Surrogaate Magnitsky were bad and the Magnifski Act was something
Speaker 1: wrong and terrible and and when you do that, and
Speaker 1: so they came up with this thing a long time ago,
Speaker 1: during during the Second World War, when the Nazis were
Speaker 1: doing similar types of stuff, they came up with a
Speaker 1: law called the Foreign Agent Registration Act in Washington, and
Speaker 1: the Foreign Regent Agent Registration Act says that if somebody
Speaker 1: is working for a foreign government or or entity connected
Speaker 1: to a foreign government, they have to declare do a
Speaker 1: public declaration with the Department of Justice to say that
Speaker 1: they're working for as a foreign agent for Russian or
Speaker 1: for a foreign government. And so this is a clear
Speaker 1: example when Mark Simrod from Baker Hoste learned glem Simpson
Speaker 1: should have been doing that and why why is it important?
Speaker 1: Because then you understand that this is the Russian government's agenda,
Speaker 1: and then all sorts of people would say, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: actually I'm not so interested in getting involved in this thing.
Speaker 1: But they they didn't do that, and so they violated
Speaker 1: the Foreign Agent Registration Act by just basically running rough
Speaker 1: shot over the whole thing. We made a complaint to
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice, um and unfortunately to this day
Speaker 1: there has not been a prosecution in this case. That's shocking,
Speaker 1: that's that's absolutely shocking. So so last question in this
Speaker 1: segment has to be given, all this money that's been
Speaker 1: laundered not just through danks Key Bank, but all these
Speaker 1: Western banks that you are estimating conservatively at a trillion dollars,
Speaker 1: what is Vladimir Putin's net worth. Is he the wealthiest
Speaker 1: person in the world, No question. Vladim Reprutin is the
Speaker 1: wealthiest person in the world by by a huge amount. Um.
Speaker 1: I haven't done the calculations recently, but like you know,
Speaker 1: five six years ago, I think he was worth more
Speaker 1: than two dollars. That numbers has probably multiplied by now.
Speaker 1: He's an extremely rich man. And and his wealth, I
Speaker 1: believe is the source of all the problems that we're
Speaker 1: facing today. The fact that he's so rich. He's stolen
Speaker 1: so much money from the people. He bought so many
Speaker 1: yachts and villas and all this kind of stuff, um.
Speaker 1: And that's all money that should have been spent on
Speaker 1: healthcare and education and all the stuff that people and
Speaker 1: RuSHA deserve, and it's been stolen by him and his cronies.
Speaker 1: And I believe, and I think that if you were
Speaker 1: to pull anybody who really understands Russia, Lexi the Balnat,
Speaker 1: the guy in jail, Michael Hohrdokovsky, the guy I was
Speaker 1: telling you about it has been ten years in jail,
Speaker 1: or any of these other Russian dissidents. Gary cast brought
Speaker 1: the former chess champion, any and every one of them
Speaker 1: will tell you that that the reason why Putin has
Speaker 1: started this war in Ukraine is that he was worried
Speaker 1: about people in Russia rising up against him eventually because
Speaker 1: they were so angry at the corruption and all the
Speaker 1: money that's been stolen, and they needed to create a
Speaker 1: foreign enemy. And that's what this war is about. It's
Speaker 1: not about the Greater Russian Empire or NATO. It's about
Speaker 1: Putin being a corrupt, sick, corrupt man who needed to
Speaker 1: create a major distraction so that the people in Russia
Speaker 1: didn't rise up against him. And and it succeeded that
Speaker 1: the war in Ukraine has has had led to an
Speaker 1: are enthusiastic approval rating of Ladyman Putin. So let's let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about this invasion of Ukraine, which
Speaker 1: you've described as really a wagged the dog, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of situation. He Putin is trying to distract the
Speaker 1: Russian populace from the state of their economy and all
Speaker 1: the corruption that's taking place. To tell us your thoughts
Speaker 1: about what's going on now, so so that Putin has
Speaker 1: to um divert the anger that Russian people have for
Speaker 1: that that that you can't get a doctor to prescribe medicine.
Speaker 1: Your children aren't being educated, the potholes in the roads
Speaker 1: aren't being filled. He has to distract from that anger
Speaker 1: because he knows that one day it's like you know,
Speaker 1: tinder in the forest, like all dry leaves, that it
Speaker 1: all takes one match set it on fire. And you know,
Speaker 1: he can put ten people in jail, he can put
Speaker 1: a hundred people in jail, he can put a thousand
Speaker 1: people in jail, but if a million people mark up
Speaker 1: march on Red Square, he's finished. And he's so scared
Speaker 1: of that. And he's created such a pressure cooker type
Speaker 1: of situation by stealing all this money over such a
Speaker 1: long period of time that he knows that that's going
Speaker 1: to that that that that kind of thing is going
Speaker 1: to come for him at some point, and and that's
Speaker 1: why he started this war and and and so it's
Speaker 1: really important to understand this because as everybody is looking
Speaker 1: at this terrible war in Ukraine and all the tragedy
Speaker 1: and all the implications in the West, everybody is desperate
Speaker 1: for this thing to end. And a lot of people,
Speaker 1: a lot of very learned people in Washington and other
Speaker 1: Berlin and London are all looking at this thing and saying, well,
Speaker 1: you know, if we give him this or we give
Speaker 1: him that, then maybe he'll stop. And first of all,
Speaker 1: appusement never works. But beyond that, that that that that
Speaker 1: shows that the fundamental misunderstanding, which is that that it's
Speaker 1: not about NATO, it's not about something wanting some piece
Speaker 1: of Ukraine. It's about wanting to be at war so
Speaker 1: that he can stay in power. So the end game
Speaker 1: for him is being at war. And if that's the case,
Speaker 1: there's nothing we can offer him, even if we if
Speaker 1: even if we wanted to be appeasers, and and and
Speaker 1: a lot of people are saying this war is going
Speaker 1: badly for him, and it is going badly. We can
Speaker 1: see the military defeats and the number of dead Russian
Speaker 1: soldiers and all the terror, and that the fact that
Speaker 1: he succeed in getting to Kiev and all this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. But the one thing that's going really well
Speaker 1: for Prutent is that he doesn't have to worry about
Speaker 1: being overthrown in Russia. And that's a very happy place
Speaker 1: for him to be. That he can sit there confidently
Speaker 1: know that he's securely in power, and and and and
Speaker 1: and so as we're all sitting here thinking of that.
Speaker 1: He must be really upset and the oligarchics are upset. Well, no,
Speaker 1: he's pretty happy right now because at least he knows
Speaker 1: he's not going to be overgrown. Build just unbelievable, incredible stuff.
Speaker 1: You you really are are doing, um God's work. It
Speaker 1: it's just the story you tell in Red Notice is
Speaker 1: just astonishing. It it reads like a spy thriller. UM.
Speaker 1: I'm very pleased that you managed to get so much
Speaker 1: legislation passed in the United States and and around the world.
Speaker 1: And and good luck with your campaign. UH, we're rooting
Speaker 1: for you. We really it's really just an amazing set
Speaker 1: of UM achievements that you've you've completed under the most
Speaker 1: trying possible uh conditions, and and all of the global
Speaker 1: recognition and human rights awards that that you've UM garnered
Speaker 1: are are are well deserved. And and thank you for
Speaker 1: all the things you're doing. Thank you. If you enjoyed
Speaker 1: hearing this conversation, be sure and check out all of
Speaker 1: our previous four hundred or so interviews. You can find
Speaker 1: those wherever you get your favorite podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, Google,
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Speaker 1: right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: You can sign up for my daily reading list at
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Speaker 1: project manager. Paris Wald is my producer. Sean Russo is
Speaker 1: my researcher. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters
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