← The Rest Is Politics: Leading
The Rest Is Politics: Leading
173. The man Putin can’t silence: Bill Browder and sanctioning Russia
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- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
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- [00:14]
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- [00:48]
Alistair Campbell
Hello and welcome to the Rest of Spotties. Leading with me Alistair Campbell.
- [00:51]
Rory Stewart
And with me Rory Stewart. We are very lucky today in Davos in a slightly noisy room for which apologies to be interviewing Bill Browder. And Bill has the most extraordinary story. He was probably the most successful international business person in Russia back in the early 2000s and then found himself stuck in a horrifying conflict with the Russian state which ended with his lawyer and friend being murdered by the Russian state. He then led a single handed campaign of sanctions, something called the Magnitsky act, through U.S. congress and eventually through the British Parliament. He's one of the best, most clear sighted observers of Russian money, Russian power, of Putin, and more latterly of the way that Putin works with Trump. So we're very happy to have you here today. Thank you for joining us.
- [01:44]
Bill Browder
Thank you.
- [01:44]
Alistair Campbell
Tell us where you were born, your background, how you got into the situation that we're then going to talk about and which you've talked about an awful lot and your experience with Vladimir Putin.
- [01:56]
Bill Browder
So I was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in a very unusual American family. My grandfather was the General secretary of the American Communist Party from 1932 to 1945. Ran for President twice as a communist against Roosevelt.
- [02:11]
Alistair Campbell
What vote did he get, by the way?
- [02:13]
Bill Browder
He got like a couple hundred thousand votes, but he was a spoiler. He was one of these people that sort of brought everything to the left. This was during the Great Depression. He was on the COVID of Time magazine and he was maybe one of the first politically motivated prosecutions in America. He was sent to jail by Roosevelt
- [02:27]
Alistair Campbell
in 1940 essentially for being a Communist.
- [02:30]
Bill Browder
For being a Communist. I mean, they came up with some pretext. You know, he had some passport violations or something like that. Just an aside he was the first American presidential candidate to have an African American running mate. And so when he was in jail, all the African Americans in inner cities started going on a general strike. And Mayor LaGuardia of New York.
- [02:51]
Alistair Campbell
Of the airport fame.
- [02:52]
Bill Browder
Yeah, of the airport fame, called up Roosevelt and said, this is really getting disruptive. You got to do something about this. And so Roosevelt then pardoned him after one year in jail. So he left jail and then he fell afoul of his communist supporters and Stalin banished him, kicked him out of the Communist Party for being too much of a capitalist in 1945. And then he had the bad luck of being a communist in 1950s, during the McCarthy era. So he had a pretty rough right of the whole thing. But that's a whole. That's a different story.
- [03:21]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, yeah.
- [03:22]
Bill Browder
And an interesting story.
- [03:23]
Rory Stewart
And then your father was an academic.
- [03:25]
Bill Browder
So my father was a mathematician. He skipped high school, he went to MIT at the age of 14, graduated when he was 17, got his PhD from Princeton when he was 21, and then couldn't find a job anywhere in academia because of who his father was. And he got drafted into the army. And then they realized that he was the son of a communist. First they said, oh, great, a smart guy. What put you in army intelligence? And then a week later they said, oh, you're a son of a Communist. And they made him pump gas for three years. He finished up his army service, he applied for some academic jobs. And interestingly, and this is a great sort of circular bit of justice, Eleanor Roosevelt, who is the chairman of the board of trustees of Brandeis, said that they all wanted to reject him. And she said it would be the most un American thing we could do to not give a great scientist his occupation. And she rehabilitated my father. He went on to do great things, became the chairman of the math department.
- [04:23]
Alistair Campbell
What were his and her politics?
- [04:24]
Bill Browder
His politics were left wing, academic, you know, like every other professor politics. So at the dinner table, all businessmen were crooks.
- [04:34]
Alistair Campbell
Is that why you became a business guy?
- [04:35]
Rory Stewart
Basically, Alice's view of the world, really?
- [04:38]
Bill Browder
Well, it's quite like the side of your family. Well, so I was born in 1964, I'm 61 years old. And when I was going through my teenage rebellion coming from this family of communists and left wing academics, I said, what's the best way to rebel from this communist, this family of communists? And I put on a suit in time, became a capitalist. And that really pissed them off a lot. And so for many years, I mean, many people in My family, not just my extended family, wouldn't talk to me because I was just such a sort of black sheep.
- [05:10]
Rory Stewart
So what is it that they thought? I mean, you went on to work for Boston Consulting Group, you went on to run a big fund. What is it looking at you troubled them? What was their political view that meant a good natured, sweet cousin or relative?
- [05:25]
Bill Browder
It's just capitalism. Being a guy pursuing money, it was just the wrong thing to do.
- [05:29]
Rory Stewart
And what did they think about somebody who pursued money? That your morality was not good or something?
- [05:33]
Bill Browder
Yeah, I guess they thought it's like, I mean, the world has always been polarized. We're seeing it now, like, in really extreme forms. But, you know, it's always been that, like, you know, you're either on our side or on the opposing side, and it was never all that comfortable.
- [05:49]
Alistair Campbell
You mentioned McCarthy there and the McCarthyism of the era that your father was growing up in and becoming an adult in. Do you see the parallels between then and now in the States? And does it worry you?
- [05:59]
Bill Browder
Well, yeah, absolutely. So the McCarthy thing was just this huge extreme overreaction, or, I mean, maybe a justified reaction. I mean, I'm now anti communist, as you get. But of course, it went too far, and they started rounding up people who were innocent and people who had nothing to do with anything. And, of course, we're seeing that right now in all sorts of ways. I mean, now if you're an immigrant in America, you're somehow like a tarnished bad criminal, and the bad guys chase you down.
- [06:26]
Rory Stewart
And, Bill, you tread two worlds. You're British and American. One of the troubling things we're talking here in Davos with Trump about to arrive is that you sometimes get the impression that Trump is reinforcing all the worst stereotypes of America that America's adversaries have been selling since the 40s. Is there something in the American psyche that we as Europeans, don't quite understand? Which actually means that some Americans, at least quite like this sense of kind of worldwide wrestling swagger that Trump is bringing to the world.
- [06:57]
Bill Browder
I'm glad you said some Americans, because I think that a majority of Americans don't like this sort of in your face, the strong dominate, the weak, and all that kind of stuff. There's many Americans that want to live in a multicultural society. There's many Americans that want to live in a society that values science and intellectual prowess and that values cooperation and all that kind of stuff, but there are some Americans that don't.
- [07:24]
Rory Stewart
What is that?
- [07:25]
Bill Browder
Tradition.
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Rory Stewart
I mean, help US understand a little bit about what he's drawing on because it's a very, very odd thing to see and to see some of the MAGA movement coming in behind this type of performance.
- [07:35]
Bill Browder
Well, I mean, I think it all comes back to 2008. Actually, the global financial crisis of 2008. You had a situation where a lot of people were earned on a wage that wasn't increasing. And whether the Federal Reserve admits it or not, there was massive inflation in America. So a lot of people saw their standard of living. I mean, I grew up in a middle class family. My father was a professor. And we got to go on like one European vacation a year. We had, you know, full dental, medical, you know, we bought a new car once every six or seven years. We lived in a house that my parents owned. It was all secure. Good. And then 2008 comes along and there's no such thing as the middle class anymore. There are wealthy people and most of the people are financially struggling.
- [08:25]
Alistair Campbell
So MAGA is a response to the failure of capitalism.
- [08:28]
Bill Browder
I think Mumega is a response to inflation. Capitalism hasn't necessarily failed. There's been inflation. Well, I would say the Central bank of America has failed because whether they want to admit it or not, the inflation wasn't 2% over those years. The inflation was a lot higher than that. So the average person saw their standard of living drop by 30 or 40% over a long period of time.
- [08:50]
Alistair Campbell
And just to go back to your capitalism, was it in part the rebellion against the communist background and family upbringing that led you actually to take your capitalism to Russia?
- [09:03]
Bill Browder
Indeed. So back onto my story. So I'm a rebel in my family. I want to do something totally on the other side. I become a capitalist. I go to Stanford Business School. I graduate business school in 1989, which is the year the Berlin Wall came down. And I was coming out of business school. And there may be people from business school listening to this podcast. And the purpose of business school is to figure out what your job after business school. And I couldn't figure out what to do after business school. And then one day I had this epiphany, which is that my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the Berlin Wall has just come down. I'm going to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And that's what I set out to do. And I couldn't actually get to Eastern Europe at the time because there was no capitalism going on. But I mean, it was just sort of starting. But I got a job in London at the Boston Consulting Group in their East European area. Boston Consulting Group is a management consulting firm. And they sent me out to Poland to advise on a failing bus factory. But while I'm there, Poland is very doing their very first privatizations. And I had total savings of $2,000 to my name. And I looked at the valuation of the companies that they were privatizing in Poland, and the companies were selling at, like, one half of the earnings of the previous year. So the company, let's say the value of the company was $80 million, and the previous year's earnings were $160 million. And you don't have to be a financial genius if you can buy a company or buy shares of a company for half of one year's earnings. All it takes is six months, in theory, for you to get your money back. So I took my $2,000 of savings, I invested it in the very first privatizations in Poland, and a year later, my $2,000 turned into $20,000. Anyone who's made 10 times their money on an investment will understand that it releases a certain chemical in your stomach. It's like crack cocaine, and you want to have another hit.
- [10:59]
Alistair Campbell
You made your kind of big wealth when you set up this Hermitage Capital Fund. Hermitage, I assume, is also part of the rebellion. Hermitage, very famous building in Putin's birthplace. What's all that about?
- [11:11]
Bill Browder
Once I was on the path, I was like, you know, grabbing the bull by the horns. I really enjoyed it. I mean, I really. There was nothing more satisfying than being an investor and doing well. I mean, and it wasn't about the money. I made a lot of money, but I don't spend. I'm not like, you know, driving around in Ferraris or anything like that. For me, it was all about being right, figuring stuff out and being right. Anyway, so eventually my $20,000, my 2000 turning into 20, led me to being an investor, and it led me to setting up this fund called the Hermitage Fund. And as you mentioned, I mean, it wasn't even a rebellion. The Hermitage Museum was where they kept all the treasures in Russia, and they were doing all this privatizing in Russia with treasures that I could invest in at 99% cheaper than a similar company in the West.
- [12:00]
Rory Stewart
So this is a moment which is incredibly famous, but maybe for younger listeners, this is the moment of immense privatization, deregulation in Russia. And of course, it's famous for most people at the moment where the oligarchs made their fortunes, where these Russian companies were sold off, and where it quite quickly emerged that it wasn't enough to buy a steel or aluminium company cheaply, but pretty soon you needed, if you were one of these Russian oligarchs, almost a private army to defend it from somebody else turning up steel. It sort of. This is quite Wild west, this world that you're stepping into.
- [12:32]
Bill Browder
So the Russian government, Boris Yeltsin, who was president of Russia at the time, made this decision to go from communism to capitalism, sort of my, my, my decision as well. His strategy for doing it, though, was flawed. He said in order to create a company, a country full of capitalists, he wants to give all state property away for free to the people. That because everything was owned by the state. So part of that was to do these vouchers where they gave vouchers to every citizen. And it all seemed very, very sort of egalitarian, and everyone was going to share and so on and so forth. But what happened was that 22 oligarchs basically took control of the whole situation and ended up with 40% of the GDP of Russia. Now, for me as a businessman, there were little crumbs falling off the table in between those 22 oligarchs. And I set up this fund called Hermitage to invest in these companies. And, and I was able to, for my clients and for myself, buy things at a 99% discount to the value of similar oil companies in the west or electricity companies in the West. But it was a flawed economic model because the average person in Russia was living in destitute poverty.
- [13:41]
Rory Stewart
Just to push it one. I mean, we've now seen in UK court cases, cases bought by people like Berezovsky, that actually some of these people were engaged in what appears to be genuine mafia activity. What is it we saw from those court cases about actually what was going on beyond simply oligarchs buying vouchers?
- [13:58]
Bill Browder
So it wasn't just oligarchs buying vouchers. First of all, that's just oversimplifying it. There was all sorts of really corrupt deals with the government of Russia. For example, Russia allowed a bunch of oligarchs to set up banks. They set up banks. Where did they get the money to be deposited? Their bank? From the Russian government. So an oligarch would set up a bank and he'd go to the Minister of Defense and say, put the Defense Ministry's money on account at my bank with 0% interest at a time when interest rates were 100%. And by the way, Mr. Minister, you can have 10 million in a Swiss bank account. So the Minister of Defense would Put all the Ministry of Defense's money and the oligarchs bank. And then the government would declare that they're actually out of money and they need to borrow money from the oligarchs. The government needs to borrow the money. And the government said, but we understand that it's a risky thing, so we're going to give you as collateral 40% of the biggest oil company in the country. And then the government then said, well, actually, we can't pay back the loan. The oligarch gets 40% of the biggest oil company. That's called the loans for shares scam.
- [15:07]
Rory Stewart
So that's corruption, that's scams. But the UK court cases also suggest there's organized crime going on.
- [15:14]
Bill Browder
So in a lot of businesses, in the oil business and the aluminum business, people were just killing each other left, right and center. I mean, it was, it was. I was living in Moscow at the time I moved there to set up the Hermitage fund and, you know, bulletproof cars and all. You know, it's just. It was really nasty stuff going on at that time.
- [15:30]
Alistair Campbell
Do you think London and the uk, and this includes in the time when the government eye was with. Was in power. Do you think we were too slow to react to and to see the damage that could be done to our country by the flow of Russian money and by these oligarchs getting a foothold in parts of our politics and culture?
- [15:50]
Bill Browder
Well, I would go much further than too slow. I mean, it was just sickening the way that the establishment in the UK from every different political party embraced dirty Russian money, looked the other way. And in my own story, my story gets. Goes off the rails. We'll get to that. And as I would go around to the government and to institutions in the UK trying to explain that these are crooks, these are murderers, these are thieves, these are con men. Everybody shun me in the most explicit way. I couldn't even get a meeting at the Foreign Office for many years just because my message was Russia is a criminal regime. And nobody wanted to come anywhere near me because they were so enjoying all this oligarch money coming into London.
- [16:44]
Rory Stewart
I was just trying to understand what are we actually saying? Are you saying that the diplomats in the Foreign Office were themselves taking bribes in Swiss bank accounts?
- [16:51]
Bill Browder
No, not at all. What I'm saying, it was the policy of the UK that it was good for the UK to have all this dirty money flowing. We're not going to look at where the money came from. We can enjoy our white tablecloths in our gentlemen's clubs and live very nicely and we're just going to look the other way. And I attribute this to the sort of colonial culture of the uk where
- [17:15]
Alistair Campbell
I like the way he looked at you in particular on that one. The colonial culture.
- [17:19]
Rory Stewart
I thought you were going to say this was the time of the Blair government.
- [17:22]
Alistair Campbell
Instead of what she looked at me
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Bill Browder
and said, the Colonial council, I mean, the Blair government, the Brown government, the Cameron government, the everything government. This was not a party political thing. This was a British national policy to let this money flow. And it's not just the governments, the people who were getting the money. This was lawyers all representing Russian oligarchs suing each other, were getting rich with these guys fighting over their dirty loot in London. And then anytime anyone wanted to do something, all these fancy lawyers would show up and whisper in the ears of their minister friends, you know, this is too good for us. Don't mess this up.
- [17:57]
Alistair Campbell
How did you feel when Roman Abramovich did suddenly become this big figure in British cultural life by owning one of our biggest football clubs?
- [18:04]
Bill Browder
You know, and I wanted to say to everyone, you don't understand where this guy comes from, this, this guy's background, how he made his money, who he's involved with. I mean, nobody wanted to hear that because everybody wanted. Chelsea now has a well funded sponsor, we're getting good players. Look how the team has turned around. We love football.
- [18:23]
Rory Stewart
Maybe we can loop back to this in a bit, but let's get straight into your story. You arrive, you set up Hermitage capital, you're going, and then things begin to go wrong. Tell us this story.
- [18:33]
Bill Browder
So I get to Russia, I start investing in these companies and my 10 bagger in Poland gets repeated multiple times in the investments that I'm making in Russia. And I get really successful. And I successful in terms of I was running an investment fund. The way you determine success is how much money you're managing and the returns you get on the money you're managing. My fund was up in the first 18 months, 865%. I was managing more than a billion dollars, which these days, you know, people don't even get out of bed for a billion dollars. But back then it was a lot of money and it was all just a huge success. But then what I started to see was that the oligarchs were just robbing blind the companies that I was investing in. I owned 1% or half a percent or a quarter percent of a company. The oligarch would own 51% and they would steal 100% of the profits for themselves?
- [19:23]
Alistair Campbell
And just could you be. Was it possible to be successful in the way that you were without at least embracing corruption in some form? Did you have to be aware of, conscious of, and in some instances actually take part in what we might define as corruption?
- [19:38]
Bill Browder
That. So the answer is to be long term successful in Russia. You do. And that was my problem, is that I didn't embrace it. I bristled against it. And I said, I can't tolerate this. This is outrageous. This is wrong. How can you treat your shareholders this way? And so I started to. First of all, I said, well, how do I fight this? It wasn't like you could go to the SEC of Russia and have them clamped down, nor could you go to the police or anybody. So but I had this one great skill, which is that I was good at doing analysis. And I had really, really smart people working for me who were even better at doing analysis. And we started investigating how the oligarchs went about doing the stealing. And what was interesting is that they were not covering it up. It was just out in the open.
- [20:25]
Alistair Campbell
I feel another parallel with today in America.
- [20:28]
Bill Browder
We'll get to that in a minute. And so I'm sitting there seeing this, and we're gathering the data, and I said, well, okay, well, we need to get this out there. And so I was an expat in Moscow, and I had lots of friends who were foreign correspondents, and I would share with them the information that we got. And they loved it because I was saving them three weeks worth of investigative work. And they would publish the stories. And what was interesting is that when I first started to expose the oligarchs was right around the time that Vladimir Putin had come to power, 2000. Well, a little bit earlier. But he was just coming into his own. And when he came in, he was fighting with the same guys I was fighting with. The oligarchs were stealing power from him at the same time as they were stealing money from me. And there's an expression, your enemy's enemy is your friend. And so Vladimir Putin, and he wasn't this tyrant he is now. Back then, he was this kind of insecure guy trying to figure out how to make his way in this position that he had. So he was fighting with the oligarchs, I was fighting with the oligarchs. And when I would publish a scandal, he would step in and do something about it using whatever the limited power at the time of the presidency of Russia, not because he believed in me or believed in what I was doing, but because he didn't like the oligarchs. But every time he stepped in, the value of my portfolio went up. And so I'm sitting there thinking, God, he's a pretty cool guy, this Vladimir Putin. You know, he's, like, clamping down on the oligarchs, and I'm making money. And this is pretty great situation. And it worked for a couple of years, and it worked until the day that he decided he wanted to win his war with the oligarchs.
- [22:08]
Alistair Campbell
And that's the famous meeting where he gets them all in, and he basically says, I'm the capo di capo.
- [22:12]
Bill Browder
Well, he did that at the very beginning, and a lot of them didn't respect him.
- [22:16]
Alistair Campbell
But this is when he basically gets him, lays down the law, and he goes for them.
- [22:20]
Bill Browder
This is when he goes for the biggest oligarch in the country. His name is Mikhail Hodakovsky. He's still around. He was worth, I don't know, 20 billion at the time, owned the biggest oil company in Russia, Yukos. And he arrests him off his private jet in Siberia. He arrests him, he puts him on trial. And this was at a time when everyone thought the oligarchs controlled everything, which they had up until that moment. And so everyone was saying, well, he'll be out of jail in a week because he just needs to, like, share a little, I don't know, do something. A week goes by, he's not out of jail. Two weeks goes by, a month goes by, and eventually he gets sentenced to 10 years for tax evasion, and he's
- [22:55]
Rory Stewart
sent to a pretty uncomfortable situation.
- [22:57]
Bill Browder
Well, there's no comfortable situation in Russian prison, but he gets sent to a particularly nasty one. And, like, up in the far north, you know, Russian prison is torture. I mean, it's really just horrible. And so all the other oligarchs are, you know, are sitting on their yachts off the Hotel du Camping. They're just saying to themselves, I don't want this to happen. And so they go back to Moscow and say, vladimir, how do we stay out of jail? And he says, real simple, 50%. And not 50% for the Russian government, but 50% for Vladimir Putin. And that's the moment he becomes the richest man in the world. And that's the moment the oligarchs are totally subordinate to him, and basically, their money is his money.
- [23:36]
Alistair Campbell
And it's really interesting what you said there about how your first impressions, because we've interviewed in the podcast before the widow of Litvinenko and also of Alexei Navalny, both of whom said that they thought that we, the Blair government, were very naive when we tried to sort of bring Putin into the G8 and we tried to sort of present a sense of this being a relationship that could work for both sides, etc. Do you think we were naive? Were you naive? Or was it just that this guy changed once he realized that corruption was the only way for him to go, that he wasn't going to be able to reform the country?
- [24:09]
Bill Browder
Well, and he's never changed and nobody ever changes. I mean, there's this famous movie about that attracts people at, you know, 6, 16, 26 and 16 or whatever. I don't remember the name of the
- [24:20]
Alistair Campbell
movie, but it's called 7Up.
- [24:21]
Bill Browder
If you watch that movie, you know, you can tell what a person's like when they're, when they're 7 years old and nobody ever changes. And Putin didn't change. His circumstances changed. You know, there's this expression that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that is, you know, Putin's instincts were always secret policeman, kgb, all that kind of stuff. But he didn't have the absolute power to do it. And when he, when he first came in, he had to be, he was in a democracy. He needed people to keep him in, vote him in. He had to be elected, he had to be reelected. There was a, there was a democracy going on. Now he chiseled away at all the institutions, the regional governors, the media, the courts, all that kind of stuff. But when he first came in, he was, he was subject to these constraints. And so if the constraints had stayed in place, none of this stuff would have ever happened. If the institutions of Russia had been robust enough, none of this would have ever happened.
- [25:16]
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Bill Browder
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Bill Browder
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- [25:50]
Rory Stewart
Let's now loop it back to your end story. We have Bill in Russia making a lot of money. We have Putin getting control, Khodorkovsky sent off to jail.
- [25:57]
Bill Browder
And then, well, so, so hodakovsky set off to jail. I'm sitting there and I haven't stopped my attack on the oligarchs. I continue to attack the oligarchs. And I'm exposing corruption at Gazprom, the national gas company that most people have heard of by now, Spare bank, all sorts of other big oil companies, more football involvement. And so they're all scratching their heads, what do we do with this guy? Because now I'm no longer going after Putin's enemies. They're now his business partners. He gets a 50% of everything. They have three options. They could kill me, they could arrest me, or could. They could deport me.
- [26:33]
Alistair Campbell
When you say they, you mean the government forces or the oligarchs?
- [26:37]
Bill Browder
Yeah, Putin. Because now Putin is. Is in on it. If the decision was taken today, they would have made the decision to kill me. But he was too. He was still timid back then to arrest me. I'm sure they thought about it seriously. But then they thought, okay, this guy would be sitting in jail and every foreign leader we. They would be just as much hostage to my arrest as I was. And so the easy answer was to deport me. And so I was flying back to Moscow. I'd been living there for 10 years. I landed at Sheremetyevo Airport. I went to the VIP lounge. I'd been through that lounge like 250 times. Normally it's a 30 second thing. I'm sitting there for an hour, and then eventually four heavily armed border guards come in, grab me, and frog march me down to the detention center of the airport. Kept me there overnight. I didn't know whether I'm being sent to Siberia or being deported. And thank God they deported me. The next morning, they declared me a threat to national security, not to be allowed back into Russia. And that was the beginning of the, you know, the most terrible story. And so after that, I realized that I've got to get my people out because they're going to go after my people next. I evacuate my staff. We sell. We successfully sell all of our securities.
- [27:47]
Alistair Campbell
Wow.
- [27:47]
Bill Browder
And everyone says, why did they allow you to do that? And the answer is that they're evil, but they're absolutely incompetent at exercising their evil. They have C students from D universities with no motivation. So they wanted to get all my money. They wanted to get all my people. They wanted to get everything. But we got the people out and got our money out safe. And I dusted off my hands and I thought, okay, that's the end of the story. It turns out to be the beginning of the worst nightmare you could ever imagine. 18 months after I was expelled, my offices were raided in Moscow.
- [28:17]
Rory Stewart
You'd still kept offices in Moscow?
- [28:19]
Bill Browder
Well, I kept my office in Moscow on the assumption that one day this storm is going to blow over. I didn't have any people there. I had one secretary manning the office, no professional staff.
- [28:28]
Rory Stewart
And which year are we? Where are we in time now?
- [28:30]
Bill Browder
We're now in 2007, June 2007. The office gets raided, 25 police officers. The office of the American law firm that I use to help me with all my paperwork also gets raided. They seize all of our corporate documents connected to our investment portfolio, and the documents are then used in a highly complex fraud in which they steal our companies. The police seize our documents, steal our companies, and then, working together with a bunch of organized criminals, steal $230 million of taxes that my firm had paid to the Russian government in the previous year. I have a young lawyer. His name was Sergei Magnitsky. He was 35 years old at the time. I hired him to look at this story. He discovers the tax fraud, he exposes it, he testifies against the officials involved. And then five weeks after he testifies, the same officials he testified against arrest him, put him in pretrial detention, and then torture him to withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds and left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heating, no window panes in December in Moscow, so he nearly freezes to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. They move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night. They want him to get him to withdraw his testimony. They also wanted to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the $230 million. And he did so on my instruction. He absolutely would not give in. He was a man of incredible principle and integrity. The torture got worse and worse and worse. He started to get sick. He lost 20 kilos, developed terrible pains in his stomach, was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones, needed an operation which was scheduled for the 1st of August. They refused to give him an operation. They moved him to a prison without any medical facilities. Torture got worse and worse, and on the night of November 16, 2009, he went into critical condition. Instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell, let eight riot guards into the cell, chained him to a bed and then beat him to death. He was 37 years old. November 16, 2009. He left a wife and two children. It's the most tragic, horrifying, unbelievable thing ever, I could have ever imagined.
- [30:56]
Alistair Campbell
I mean, obviously you had your initial reactions, tell us what that was. But then how did you sort of turn that into then fighting for the change that became known as a. An act in his name?
- [31:06]
Bill Browder
For me, it was the turning point in my life. It had all been sort of everything in the sort of virtual, you know, making money, losing money. You know, it was. It was all not material. But all of a sudden, a person who worked for me, a young man who worked for me, was tortured to death. And I just couldn't live with myself if I didn't do something about that. And so I made a vow to his memory, to his family, and to myself that I was going to put aside everything I was doing in my life as a businessman. And I was going to devote all of my time, energy and resources going after the people who killed him to make sure they faced justice. And that's what I, for the last 16 years, that's what I've been doing. And at first, we tried to get justice in Russia, and it was absolutely impossible. They circled the wagons, they started attacking him and attacking me as some type of criminals. Instead of going after the people who killed him, they didn't care about the money that was stolen. And so it became clear that we were not going to get any justice in Russia. And if we needed to get justice, we're going to have to get justice outside of Russia. And that's where I came up with this idea, which is the people who killed him did it for money. And they don't keep that money in Russia, they keep that money in the West. And so the idea was that we would freeze their assets in the west and ban their travel to the west. And that became known as the Magnitsky Act. And I first took this idea to Washington, and I got two senators interested. A Democratic senator from Maryland named Benjamin Cardin, liberal Democrat, and a Republican senator from Arizona, the late John McCain. And they took on this case. They called it the Magnitsky Act. And this was back in a time in Washington when there was no pro Russia torture and murder lobby in that city. And when it went for a vote in the Senate, it passed 92 to 4. It passed the House of Representatives with 89%. It became a federal law on December 14, 2012, signed by President Obama. Vladimir Putin went out of his mind with this law because he's a guy who does a lot of human rights abuse. He's a guy who loves money and he's a guy who keeps his money in the West. And so he made repealing the Magnitsky act his single largest foreign policy priority. He went after me in the most horrific way, put me and Sergei Magnitsky, who had already killed, on trial. It was the first ever trial against dead man in the history of Russia. Found us both guilty. I got nine years in absentia. They've been chasing me around the world with Interpol Red notices, a dozen attempts to have me extradited from the uk, kidnapping threats, death threats, lawsuits, you name it, everything. And it became clear that this was something that really got under Putin's skin.
- [33:53]
Alistair Campbell
There was a moment in, was it 2018, when you were arrested in Spain by sort of quotes, Interpol, close quotes, and Putin was basically at that time talking to Trump about getting you properly dealt with.
- [34:06]
Bill Browder
So I was arrested in Spain on a Russian Interpol notice. I was coming out of my hotel room in Spain. I was in Spain actually, to give evidence to the Spanish national prosecutor, anti corruption prosecutor, about dirty money from Russia connected to the murder of Sergei Magnitsky in Spain. Invited by the prosecutor to formally open the criminal case. As I'm coming out of my hotel room, two heavily armed police officers from the Policia Nacional of Spain were standing outside my room, arrested me. I said, why am I being arrested? Interpol, Russia. The manager of the hotel, who had given me a fabulous upgrade the night before, was standing there with him, begging them to, like, let me pack my bags because he didn't want his, like, fancy room occupied by, for some indefinite period by my belongings. While they were waiting to see if I was going to be released or not, they allowed me to pack my bags. I go into one of the. And it was a suite. And so I went out of sight and I tried to call my wife. She's still sleeping. It's early morning. I tried to call the Spanish lawyer who'd set up the meeting with the prosecutor. They don't get to the Spanish lawyers, don't get to work till like 11. Nobody was taking my call. And so I tweet out urgent. Being arrested in Madrid, Spain, right now on a Russian Interpol warrant. Not sure where they're taking me. Press send. I go out to the police car, they shove me into the back of the car. They didn't take my phone away, which was interesting. And I'm sitting in the back of the Police car. The windows don't go down and the doors don't open from the inside, and there's thick plexiglass between me and them. And I'm thinking, wait, wait a second. What if these guys are not actually police officers? Maybe these are, like, Russian kidnappers. I mean, how hard would it be to get a police uniform? And we're driving along, and I'm thinking to myself, what if people don't believe my tweet? And I took my phone out and I take a picture of the back of their head? So it's obvious that I'm in the police car with all the paraphernalia on, and I tweeted it out in the back of the police car on the way to the station. And at this point, my phone blows up, and it's all on silent New York Times, Financial Times news alert. Bill Browder being arrested in Spain. And then all of a sudden, I see. And calls coming in from everybody. And then I see my lawyer, and he's the only one whose call I want to take. And so I lean down to pick up the call, and then the police see that I have my phone. I'm on the phone in the back of their police car. They screech over to the side of the road. They grab my phone away from me. No phone. I said, lawyer. No lawyer. And then we arrive at what I. At some nondescript building in some old square in Madrid. And I said, where are we? And they say, medical exam. And I said, medical exam. And I could just picture going into some rooms, getting injected in the arm, and then waking up in a slow boat to Moscow. And one of me. Two of them, no handcuffs, and they could see that the situation was going to get out of control. And one of them starts calling somebody, and then it puts into Google Translate, medical exam is standard arrest protocol. And, like, no medical exam. Lawyer. No lawyer. Anyways, they decide to forego the medical exam. We jump into the police car again, and then we finally arrive at the police station. And I'm just so relieved to see, like, the, you know, the flag of Spain and the European Union flag at the police station, that I'm just being arrested and not kidnapped.
- [37:24]
Alistair Campbell
What did you feel? Did you think you're on your way to Moscow?
- [37:27]
Bill Browder
Well, I mean, everyone has different ways of dealing with crisis. And I'm actually. Crisis is. I'm good at crisis. I'm really. I'm not good at a lot of other stuff, but I'm good at crisis. I just, like, buckle down. I'M just looking. Where's my. You know, what do I have to do? You know, my mind is going at a thousand miles. I'm not panicking. I'm just, like, thinking what to do. And it was really good that I tweeted, because by the. So I get to the police station, and I'm sitting in the police station. This is just like a little police station in some place in Madrid. And they think they've got, like, Carlos the Jackal. I mean, international fugitive wanted by Interpol. They found him, they got him, and everyone's sort of popping their head in to see that, you know, like, you know, it doesn't look that. That scary, but, you know, they never do. You know, you never. This police station was, like, buzzing, and everyone was so interested and, like, you know. And so I'm sitting there, and I'm sitting there for about an hour and a half and then some. I could feel like the mood deflate. And I know what it was. And then, like, maybe 20 minutes later, the chief of police, along with the translator, comes into my cell, and they said, you know, Mr. Browder, we're very sorry. We've been on the phone to Interpol. The warrant is not valid. You're free to go. So the police officers, the one who arrested, arrested me, come up to me and through the translator say, is there any way you can delete that tweet? And I say, is it illegal? And they said, no. I said, I'm keeping it up there. So anyone who ever wants to go on my Twitter account, go back to that. This is, like, maybe 2018. You can find the picture in the back of the police car still on Twitter. And so there's been a lot of criticism of Twitter, and most of it's justified, but Twitter did save my life at that moment.
- [39:03]
Alistair Campbell
And when did the Trump, Putin.
- [39:04]
Bill Browder
A couple months later, Trump is meeting with Putin in Helsinki at the first summit between the two presidents. And it was right after Robert Mueller had indicted 12 military intelligence officers. And so the first question to Putin is, are you going to hand over the military intelligence officers? And he says, it's possible we would. If we did, we would expect some goodwill and reciprocity from our American friends, and particularly we would expect them to hand over Bill Browder, me. And then the next question goes to President Trump. What do you think of this deal? And Trump says, I think it's an incredible offer. And it took four days and a vote in the Senate, 98 to 0, not to hand me over before the whole thing stopped.
- [39:48]
Alistair Campbell
I'm not sure it would be the same vote today.
- [39:50]
Rory Stewart
As we move towards the end, let's kind of bring this now to Russia today. Tell us what we're missing about Putin, what Trump is missing about Putin, what Russia means in the world, and what we can learn about geopolitics from your story.
- [40:03]
Bill Browder
Well, the most important thing I can tell you from this story is what I've seen with Putin, with the Magnitsky money and with a thousand other scams like it. And we, by the way, have proven that Putin got some of the money from the Magnitsky crime. He gets money from every crime. Over the course of his 26 years in power, he has stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian state. When I say he, he and a thousand other people have stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian state. That money, the trillion dollars should have been spent on healthcare, schools, roads, public services. Instead was spent on yachts, private jets, villas in the south of France, villas and townhouses on Belgrave Square, etc. They've stolen too much money over too long a period of time. And what Putin is afraid of, what he's been afraid of for a while, is that the Russian people one day are going to snap. It happens everywhere, sooner or later, that if a dictator impoverishes his people too much, they come for him. And so if you're a dictator like Putin has stolen too much money and you're sitting in the Kremlin afraid that one day a million people are going to march on Red Square, what do you do to stop that from happening? You come straight out of Machiavelli 101. You create a foreign enemy and you start a war. The war with Ukraine is a totally manufactured war. They're not enemies of Russia. There's all this business about denazification of Ukraine. There is nothing. There's no Nazification that's taking place. It's a complete fabrication. He needed a foreign enemy to start a war. He needed a war to distract the people so they're not marching on the Kremlin, they're fighting with a foreign enemy. That's what this war is about. And this is what everybody misunderstands about this situation. And this is very important. And this is very important for Keir Starmer. It's very important for Macron. It's very important for everybody, which is there is no way he is going to stop this war. There is nothing we can give him. This is not about NATO. This is not about an empire. It's not about patriotism of Russia. This is about a little man who's stolen too much money, who's scared of his own people. He needs war, and therefore this war will carry on. And this 20 point peace plan, or this 28 point peace plan or whatever points peace plan Putin is not going to agree to.
- [42:32]
Alistair Campbell
So you mentioned Starmer there and Macron, but the truth is my very strong sense is that he's playing Trump along and Trump is falling for it.
- [42:41]
Bill Browder
Well, I think that that's a generous way to ascribe Trump's motivations.
- [42:46]
Alistair Campbell
So give me the ungenerous version for
- [42:49]
Bill Browder
reasons that we don't understand. And, you know, there's been books written and a thousand pages of ink spilled on this. Trump is more aligned with Putin than he is with Zelensky.
- [43:03]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I've been hearing through the entirety of this interview, every time you've talked about Russia, then I keep feeling parallels with America. Now, I find that incredibly scary.
- [43:13]
Rory Stewart
I mean, if you replace the word Ukraine with Greenland, you begin to think there's not much negotiation you can do with Trump if fundamentally the reason he wants to acquire Greenland is plan, political spectacle, distraction of the voters, and it's not actually a concrete national security request,
- [43:26]
Alistair Campbell
and he wants to become even richer than Putin.
- [43:28]
Bill Browder
Well, I think that there's something there. I mean, look, the Qataris gave him a $400 million jet, and he's building an air base for the Qataris in Idaho. Middle east potentates with an air base in Idaho. How is that in America's national interest? And so I don't know what Putin and Trump have agreed to. I don't know what they've discussed in secret meetings where there's been no note takers. But what I do know is that at every opportunity where Trump could have been tough on Putin, he has not been tough on Putin at every stage of the game.
- [44:05]
Rory Stewart
He could.
- [44:06]
Bill Browder
I mean, he is tough on everybody. He's like humiliating the Europeans with 10% tariffs and then 25% tariffs. You know what the tariffs are on Russia? 0% 0. And so I don't know what's going on with these two guys, but what I can say is that Trump is not acting as any other American, Democrat or Republican leader has acted in the past.
- [44:27]
Alistair Campbell
And yet the Republican politicians, a lot of them in Congress, are just going along with it. I don't think if this had happened to you in this era, I'm not sure you'd have survived.
- [44:38]
Bill Browder
And I think you're absolutely right. Do I even feel safe going to America right now? The answer is not when they're rounding up people left, right and center. And Putin wants to, you know, Trump wants to be friends with Putin.
- [44:49]
Alistair Campbell
Am I being alarmist to worry that the reason that Trump has got this sort of fondness, whatever it is, for Putin, is actually because he is jealous and he wants to be him. He wants to be the richest man in the world. He wants to be the most powerful person in the world. He wants to control his own country like a business.
- [45:07]
Bill Browder
Well, I don't think you're being alarmist. He's laid his cards on the table. I mean, the one thing that we can say about Trump is that he's totally transparent. He's not hiding anything. He doesn't want them to be limited by judges, the activist judges. He doesn't want the fake media to talk about what he's doing. He doesn't like these international institutions and laws and treaties that constrain him. He said it. There's no mystery to the whole thing. The question is, what is the rest of the world do to survive and to keep their sovereignty, keep their values, et cetera? And that's the big challenge. And Mark Carney gave a beautiful speech yesterday talking about that, and that is the challenge of the rule of law, the Europe, the world that's outside of Trump's direct control.
- [45:58]
Rory Stewart
Without being too self interested and British about this, but you've leveled some pretty terrible criticisms, justified criticisms, against Britain and the way it's behaved. Is there anything good that you can say about the way the British government has behaved and treated you in this case since 2012?
- [46:12]
Bill Browder
So when the war started, all of a sudden. So I couldn't get. I literally could not get a meeting with the most junior bureaucrat in the Foreign Office during the oligarch heyday, London Grad Times. But as soon as the war started, my phone started ringing. Not only could I get meetings, I was being asked to brief ministers. I was being asked to come in and talk about how do we counter this evil Russian aggression. All of a sudden, the British woke
- [46:41]
Rory Stewart
up and they gave you a knighthood.
- [46:42]
Bill Browder
They gave me a knighthood.
- [46:43]
Alistair Campbell
And you took it. I would never take it, Bill, from
- [46:46]
Bill Browder
not being able to get a meeting in the Foreign Office to be a Knight Commander of the distinguished order of St. Michael and St. George. It's complete.
- [46:55]
Rory Stewart
And you feel safe, I hope.
- [46:56]
Bill Browder
In Britain, I feel institutionally safe. I mean, you know, the Russians can do terrible things and the British government's not going to hand me over to the Russian government on a Russian arrest warrant on A bogus Russian arrest warrant. And so, I mean, I do feel I've been warmly embraced by the British establishment because of my views on Russia and because of the work that I've done to hold them to account.
- [47:18]
Alistair Campbell
But you weren't listened to when you were first articulating that.
- [47:20]
Bill Browder
If they had listened to me when I was first talking about it, and I don't want to overstate my importance, but if they had listened to me about sanctions, which is what I've been arguing for, the Magnitsky act, freezing the assets, which by the way is now a British law, and it had been used against Putin and against Russia earlier, I think it might have changed the course of history because Putin thought that if he were to invade Ukraine, it would be just like when he went into Georgia, nothing happened. Just like when he took Crimea, nothing happened. Just like when he carpet bombed Syria, nothing happened. Just like Litvinenko and Salisbury, nothing happened. And so Putin was of the impression that the UK and Europe would do nothing when he did a full scale invasion. We'd scream bloody murder, sanction a few low level people, and that would be that. If he had known that we had the capacity and the willingness to do this stuff earlier, he might have done something differently. And I wish. It breaks my heart that we were all so self interested during all those boom times with the oligarchs that this is where we ended up.
- [48:25]
Rory Stewart
Bill, it's been a great, great privilege. I mean, we could talk to you for many, many hours. But thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for your courage, thank you for your compassion and your loyalty and we're very proud to have you as one of our knights. Thank you.
- [48:38]
Alistair Campbell
Rory's a great believer in the honour system. Bill. I'm kind of less, I'm less convinced. Bill, thanks so much.
- [48:44]
Bill Browder
Thank you.