Bill Browder - Vladimir Putin Wants Me Dead

Full transcript: Bill Browder on London Real

4:16 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Bill Browder, the American-born CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, who is often referred to as the number one enemy of the Russian President Vladimir Putin. Your fund, Hermitage Capital, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005, when you were denied entry to the country for exposing corruption in Russian state-owned companies. In 2009, a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was killed in a Moscow prison after exposing a $230 million fraud committed by the Russian government.

4:45 Since then, you spent the last eight years conducting a global campaign to impose visa bans and asset freezes on individual human rights abusers, particularly those who played a role in Magnitsky’s false arrest, torture and death. The United States was the first to impose these sanctions with the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act. Your New York Times best-selling book, Red Notice, recounts your experience in Russia and your ongoing fight for justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

5:11 Bill, welcome to London Real. Great to be here, thank you. Great to have you. This is an incredible story and I can’t wait to get into kind of the history of it and the details, but I’d love to just start off and say, first of all, it seems to me there’s not many worse enemies to have in the world than President Vladimir Putin, and I wonder if you could comment on that, and then maybe you could tell us what we don’t know about Vladimir Putin. Well, first of all, you’re right, he’s truly one of the most cynical, aggressive, evil dictators on the planet.

5:46 He’s a sociopath, he’s a killer, and he kills people in Russia and kills people outside of Russia that cross his path. So by ending up as his enemy, I put my life in mortal danger. I didn’t choose to be his enemy, he kind of chose me through a variety of horrific circumstances which I’m sure we’re going to talk about in great detail, and as a result of being his enemy and as a result of his homicidal tendencies, I’ve had to adjust my life very profoundly to try to stay alive, but I’m still here, which is a good thing.

6:23 Vladimir Putin, often people look at him, particularly heads of state, and they say, well, you know, we just need to figure out how to work with this guy, and what they don’t understand, what I have learned, is that there is no working with Vladimir Putin. There is only containing him and showing him strength, because he views anything less than that as weakness and he’ll take advantage of that in any way he can. Well, why do we not take him as seriously as we should?

6:56 Because he shows up at the G, you know, the G20 meetings, and there he is, and you know Trump says things about him, but you know, it seems like we don’t really see what you see about him and see how dangerous he could potentially be, nuclear arsenal, all these other things. Well, I mean, people look at him and they say, okay, he kind of looks like us and he’s European, of sorts, and so he probably thinks like us and he has our values, and so we just need to convince him that it’s the right thing to do to behave yourself and not invade countries, not bomb children and not cheat in sports and all this kind of stuff, when in fact he is nothing like us. He’s completely not like us, and it’s so interesting to watch all these heads of state, and I don’t even say Western heads of state, because you know, even the Japanese and even the Koreans are like us compared to Vladimir Putin, who’s just a mafia boss sort of pretending to be a head of state, but his state is basically a criminal state that he runs, which is the state of Russia.

8:02 Is that a Russian mentality, is that an ex-FSB mentality, or is that just something that is solely a Putin thing? Well, it’s a little bit of each. So first of all, if you look at Russian history, you go back hundreds of years, they’ve never really got a break in that country. You know, they’ve had the czars and the serfs and they had the Russian Revolution and everybody was poor and then they had perestroika and the breakup of the Soviet Union and then the oligarchs took over, and now you have this, what I call this sort of criminal slash police state, which is a Russian thing.

8:42 It’s also kind of a Putin FSB thing. So if your FSB stands for the Federal Security Service, which used to be the KGB, and the KGB, people think of it sort of like the CIA, but it’s not. The KGB is this sort of organization which has, which tries to compromise people one way or another, either by bribery or by extortion and blackmail, so that they can control people to do the various things that they want to do, and so Putin has been brought up his entire life not trying to ever win people over through persuasion.

9:19 It’s always been through blackmail or bribery, and so his only experience with other human beings is just the cynical experience of how do I control another person. And then so you have Russia, you have the FSB, and then you have, as you asked, is it a Vladimir Putin thing, and Vladimir Putin is a unique character. He’s clearly a sociopath, he has no human emotion over the death of somebody or anyone else’s pain, he has no ability to empathy, no empathy in him, and so you sort of add it all up: a history where everybody has sort of gotten a rotten deal, the FSB where it’s just a totally sort of evil, cynical organization, and then a guy with no empathy, and it’s a pretty toxic mixture of things.

10:07 I still remember this, when Hillary Clinton went over there, I think as Secretary of State for Obama, and she brought the reset button with her, and I still remember that, and even I, without knowing you and knowing your history, I remember her with the reset button and I remember him looking at her and just thinking, you really don’t understand this guy. That whole reset, which I always labeled as, far back as then, as the appeasement strategy, was just the dumbest thing, the dumbest strategy you could ever come up with, because it wasn’t as if our relations with Russia were ruined by anything that we did. The relationship with Russia was ruined by everything Putin did, and so to go and say we’re going to reset relations because you ruined our relations and we’re now going to try to be nice to you, it’s kind of like, I’m trying to, like, a battered wife trying to reset her relations with her brutal alcoholic violent husband.

11:07 You know, the moment he drinks again he’ll beat her and it has nothing to do with her behavior, and she’s just cowering around hoping not to provoke him. That’s what the West’s relationship with Russia is like right now. And geopolitically, as an area, this is something that’s almost predictably cyclical in Russia, right? Massive amounts of power in one person and then it drops and it just constantly cycles, right? Well, I was gonna, when you’re saying cyclical I was thinking about the West’s relationship with Russia, so in Russia, let’s start with Russia and we’ll talk about the West.

11:38 In Russia you have, there’s an expression that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so Putin, when he started his reign of power and he came in as a prime minister in 1999 and became president of Russia in the year 2000, and when he became president of Russia he didn’t have that much power. A lot of the power that he had had been effectively usurped by these people, these oligarchs that we all know as these rich guys. So they had taken his power away before he had even got there, and so his first objective was to try to bring the power back to the presidency, and he did that in different ways.

12:12 He imprisoned the richest oligarch in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and then all the other oligarchs said, oh my God, if that’s what they’re doing to the richest guy, what’s going to happen to me? And so he got some of the oligarchs that way, and then he went after the governors of regions and took away their ability to be elected, and he went after the newspaper owners and the television owners. Pretty soon he brought all the power back to himself, and once he had all that power he said, wow, this is kind of nice, and it wasn’t just power to govern, it was power to steal, and so he said, well, I’m gonna I want to have, I wanna 50 percent of that, and I want 50 percent of that, and I want to have some of that and I want to have some of that, and pretty soon he started getting all this money and he said, this feels pretty good and I want more, and he’s an obsessive character, and so the more money he had the more money he wanted, and the more money he had the more people he had to steal it from and take it from and imprison and torture and kill and so he had more enemies, and then he’s a bit scared of his enemies, so he said, well, I need more power to protect myself from my enemies, and it just kept on growing and growing and growing until we ended up going from what I would call a chaotic situation to an authoritarian situation, and now we’re going from an authoritarian situation to a totalitarian situation.

13:29 What I mean by that is there’s absolutely no freedoms in Russia, anyone can be imprisoned at any time for anything, the entire message on all media is controlled and it’s basically a full-on police state in Russia now, and yet he’s still beloved by the people? How does he pull that off? He’s not beloved by the people. No, no, of course not. Okay, so his formula is very simple.

13:53 First of all, no competition. So, yeah, imagine that you’re playing, as we say here in London, football, or soccer as we say in America, and Vladimir Putin is the guy with the ball. He’s running down the field, someone tries to take the ball away from him, he pulls a gun out of his shorts, he shoots the guy, he keeps on running down the field, the next guy comes up to him, he shoots that guy, he’s in front of the goalie, the goalie’s standing there trying to protect the goal, he shoots the goalie, he drops dead, he kicks the ball into the thing and says, you know, goal, what a great sportsman I am.

14:26 That that’s his sort of model of running the country. And so, no competition. He kills, imprisons or exiles anybody who’s his competitor. He runs a complete lie on all media: television, newspapers, radio and internet about how he’s a great president, including Russia Today. Russia Today, they don’t watch Russia Today in Russia, that’s their propaganda for the West.

14:54 And then to the extent that there’s any risk of that, they stuff the ballot boxes. And so, and then of course they do a poll, and so you’re sitting in Russia, you know that anyone who says anything bad about Putin is going to lose their job and have trouble with the authorities, get arrested, whatever, and some stranger calls you up in a paranoid country and says, do you support Vladimir Putin? What are you going to say? No. So you disagree that the population likes him or approves of it?

15:23 Well, I think that there’s a problem, the Russians do have a history of liking that strong leader and liking him defy the West and these kinds of things, right? Well, that’s not propaganda. No, no, that’s true, but it’s the same thing as Mugabe in Zimbabwe. For those not paying attention, he was the dictator of Zimbabwe for like 30 years, he had an 88 percent approval rating in Zimbabwe, and then all of a sudden there was a coup and his approval rating went down to zero, and the same thing would happen with Putin.

15:47 It’s not a real liking, it’s sort of a liking based on a fraud, based on fear. It’s based on fraud, I mean it’s based on fraud, it’s based on fear and it’s based on a sort of like wheel, like anyone who’s in that position until they’re not in that position anymore, then we’ll hate them. Okay, but it is true that again, how we don’t understand Putin, we also don’t understand Russia. What’s the famous quote, you cannot understand Russia with your mind? And so, you know, the people maybe even liking some things about him, whereas it might not make sense in the West, there could be an element of that.

16:18 Well, I mean, you know, if you go to a Russian redneck they’ll say, yeah, this guy is like our man, you know, he’s like fighting those evil Westerners who are trying to take over our country, but the Westerners aren’t trying to take over their country and he’s out there making sure that Russia gets respect on the world stage. Well, Russia is not respected on the world stage, Russia’s despised. But he’s got a pitch to people who don’t know any better, and to those people he’s pretty good, but you know, to anybody who has any access to any other information, they’re all saying, how do I get out of here?

16:51 I mean, it’s not as if you know there’s a serious, you know, talented people from Russia are leaving in droves and coming to London, coming to New York, coming to Canada, coming anywhere they can come, because nobody has a future in Russia in this criminal Putin regime. There’s a famous line in the movie All the President’s Men where he says to the reporter, follow the money, tell me about the money, because I don’t think I was aware of what’s going on, and the money can tell us everything. The money tells you everything.

17:21 So Vladimir Putin likes money. He likes it because it’s a measure of greatness to have a lot of money, and particularly in Russia you can’t be the leader of Russia and not be the richest guy in Russia at the same time, otherwise people don’t respect you. So he’s got to be having more money than everybody because it gives you power or gives you the impression of being the top dog. It’s a top dog situation, I mean, and he can’t keep any of the money in his own name because if he does, that’s compromising information that someone can use against him.

17:50 So all the money he has is, and he has a lot, I estimate that his wealth is 200 billion dollars, and all that money makes him the richest man in the world, much richer than Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. So he’s got 200 billion dollars, and that sounds ridiculous and it sounds exaggerated, but it’s true. I mean, there’s so much money that he’s been able to accumulate, and he’s accumulated it through extortion, he’s accumulated it through huge huge embezzlement from the state, and he’s accumulated it through just being basically the top mafia boss who gets a cut of everything.

18:30 Can I stop you there, are you net at all on weird days looking back at the situation and somewhat impressed by what Putin has done, from going from a FSB KGB, you know, middleman to building up this? Well, so he’s a total accidental dictator. So the, I’m not impressed at all, because anyone with his morals and his tools could do that. He wasn’t meant to be the president of Russia, he was their fourth choice. So Yeltsin, the previous president, he was effectively alcoholic, his health was failing, he couldn’t hold it together, he needed somebody to come in and be the president after him who could do one thing, do they do two things?

19:16 One, pardon him. Pardon him? Yeah. And the second thing is stay in power to respect that pardon. And so Yeltsin went through three other prime ministers, people they put in as prime minister and then watched them on the job and realized that this person wasn’t gonna be able to hold it all together, and he, Putin, was like their last chance, fourth choice, and nobody knew who Putin was.

19:42 He was this sort of faceless, I mean, you know, he showed no expression on his face, he has just no facial expression. He was the sufficient guy, he got the job done, he seemed loyal and a good worker, you know, didn’t drink, fit, and so they picked him as a fourth choice and he came in there and just quietly took over the whole damn thing. Okay, all right, back to the money. So Putin likes money, he likes it a lot, wants to get it, started getting it, but he doesn’t keep any of that money in his own name.

20:18 So the way he accumulates wealth is that he has these people that are oligarchs, trustees. So when you see a rich Russian on the Forbes list or wherever, that person is only half as rich as the Forbes thing says, because the other half of the money is Vladimir Putin’s. Where do you get that number, half? It’s well known in anyone in Russia knows that none of these guys are their own men, they’re all trustees. What’s the guy in London who owns Chelsea Football Club, Abramovich?

20:51 Right, right. So does he have half of his wealth as well? Well, we live in a highly libel litigious place and so I don’t like to go into names of oligarchs, but I believe that this system of ownership of 50 percent ownership is a widespread system that applies to most if not all oligarchs. Okay, and he slowly put this into place but now has it into place, so as long as he can keep his power or keep this potential threat, then that’s his net worth. Well, so here’s where it gets complicated and it’s a damned situation for him.

21:31 So the only, so Russia is a place where nobody respects, so there’s no written document anywhere that says these people hold his money, not a document, so it’s all based on a handshake and their word. Now Russia is a place where the handshake and the word is worth less than, I mean a written document’s not worth much, but a handshake and your word is worth almost nothing, and the only way that he can feel comfortable knowing that he has got that money is if he can kill or imprison or destroy the life of the person who’s his trustee. He has to have a serious leverage over that person, but the only way he can continue to have that leverage over that person is if he stays the president, because the moment he’s not president, he calls up Igor who’s supposedly holding, you know, a billion from him and he says, Igor, can you wire in that billion, and Igor says, Vladimir who, and puts the phone down, and so Putin’s money is totally elusive because it’s only his money if he’s president, and it’s worse than that because he’s committed grave crimes to get all that money and all those crimes will come right back to haunt him the moment he loses power, and so he’ll go to jail, and if he goes to jail he knows that good things don’t happen in jail, bad things happen in Russian jails, and so for him the only option, there is no Putin Presidential Library where he can then retire to and give speeches and do paintings or whatever.

23:06 And so for him it’s a brutal world where he has to stay in power forever and the longer he stays in power, the more grumbling the Russian people are, because it doesn’t matter whether you’re the best president or the worst president, people just get tired of you after a while. So what’s his exit strategy? There is no exit strategy. So you respect the fact that he is fighting for his life? Correct.

23:29 And that’s why he makes these moves, because it’s not just about getting rich, he’s not like Jeff Bezos, let’s keep Amazon stock price high. He’s like, I will die unless I rule with a strong arm. Well, so yes, so people are grumbling for two reasons. One, because anybody, no matter whether you’re the charmingest, best, charismatic president in the world or whatever, gets tired after 17 years. Okay, they’re just tired of him, and on top of that the economy in Russia has been stagnating and going down, and so he just picks up the dictator’s playbook, and rule one of the dictator’s playbook is when people start to tire of you, start a war.

24:10 So they looked around and said, where can we start a war that’s gonna that’s easy to start and not too hard to win, and they’re probably in their National Security Council meeting and some guy in the back says, hey boss, I’ve got an idea, we already have 15,000 troops in Crimea, we have a naval base there, let’s just invade Crimea because we don’t have to send them anywhere. Brilliant idea. So in 2014 they basically declared Crimea theirs. I think three people died, I mean it’s nothing.

24:39 They declared Crimea theirs. Now let me back up before doing that. They ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, huge, huge television campaign to say that the Ukrainians are Nazis and fascists and they hate Russians and they’re going to kill Russian families and children, we have to go in on a humanitarian mission and regain what’s ours, we’re going to start with Crimea, take Crimea, protect our Russian brothers, that’s what we have to do, and then they declared Crimea as ours, and everybody who was so worked up by this huge 24-hour-a-day propaganda blitz where it was just completely untrue, his approval ratings went from like 55 to 88 percent.

25:27 Classic move. So find a scapegoat, dictator handbook 101, find a foreign enemy or create a foreign enemy, invade it, everyone’s going to love you. So they invaded Crimea. Now if he had been a financial player and he could have sold out with his 88 and cashed in his chips, that would have been the right thing to do, but he’s not, he’s a dictator trying to hold on to power, and so he’s now convinced the Russian people that the Ukrainians are Nazis and fascists and they’re going to eat Russian babies for breakfast, and it’s not just the Crimean people but elsewhere in Ukraine, and so they wanted to invade.

26:07 In order to keep his popularity as high as it was he had to invade more of Ukraine and other parts of eastern Ukraine, and you might remember this, that at the time that they did that, the Ukrainian president had fled to Russia. So the Ukrainian president had fled to Russia and so there was no Ukrainian president, there’s nobody to like fight off Russians as they were coming into Ukraine, and Putin at this point was still scared of the West and he didn’t want to send columns of tanks into Ukraine, and so they went around all the prisons in Russia and said, we’ll let you out of prison if you’re willing to fight in Ukraine. So they got a bunch of convicts to fight, they hired a bunch of mercenaries, they sent in a few FSB or they call SVR military intelligence people to organise them, and they invaded some towns and there was this very famous town called Slavyansk.

27:00 If you had been watching CNN you would have seen they’d like raised this flag over Slavyansk, and invaded Slavyansk and a few other of these towns, and it was all looking very ugly and these drunken criminal mercenaries were all doing this stuff, and then the Ukrainians had an election, they elected a democratically elected president and he said the hell with this, and then they sent in troops and he had the mandate to go in and fight, and it was completely and absolutely straightforward to get rid of all these, I mean they were, you know, a real army versus a bunch of ex-convicts is not a fair fight, and as they started clearing out all this Putin stuff that he put in there, so it was a nice easy win, it was an easy win, and Putin saw this and said, I’m going to lose it, you know, so remember dictator’s handbook 101, he’s got to be winning out there, and so he’s like, oh my God, this is not good, and so they then started to send in real troops.

27:55 And by the way, at the time that this was happening, the Ukrainians were to soften up these mercenary criminal gang armies, they were bombing them, and so Russia brought in a bunch of anti-aircraft equipment. Yeah, they started shooting down these Ukrainian fighter jets, and then one day they shot down MH17, commercial plane. Yeah, when I heard that, I saw it, I was like, uh oh, we’re going to have a major, like, a world war going on here. It was dramatically stupid.

28:32 They didn’t do it on purpose, they were just shooting down planes and the Russian military shot down a passenger plane with 298 innocent people just flying from Holland to Malaysia. They shot it down and killed 298 people, and all of a sudden, and this is where we get back to Putin, all of a sudden the West woke up and said, this guy is very bad, and they imposed sanctions. So let’s, so sanctions then caused the ruble to devalue by 50 percent, costs all sorts of other economic problems, okay, and people of Russia started getting more angry because they were getting more economically disenfranchised, and so then Putin’s got to do something else, start another war.

29:16 So he’s down in Syria with another war and they’re showing bombing runs on television, they do the weather report and saying, here’s a good day for bombing in Syria, and what’s going on? So is that why he’s there? That’s why he’s there. It’s he’s in all these places to distract the people, that’s what he’s doing abroad, and then domestically, because he’s been there for 17 years, people are grumbling, you know, they’re trying to create a patriot, patriotic fervor, but back at home they’re also turning the screws tight and so it’s become a really dangerous place to be anything other than silent against Putin.

29:55 Okay, and he’s going to get reelected this year, right? Well, I take offense when everyone, whenever anyone uses the word elected, remember this is, okay, so what do you call it? Well, I don’t call it anything, it’s a farce, it’s an administrative farce to create the impression that there’s a democracy in Russia. There’s nothing close to it. Okay, but he will be president for another six years officially in the next few months.

30:19 He’ll be president for as long as he chooses to be president. None of these fake terms of elections and constitution mean anything. But legally he can only do another six years until he puts someone else in place like he did. No, no, legally he, you know, he has another term after that. Oh, he does?

30:33 Okay. Legally, and then he’ll change the law. Okay, now this gets more interesting, which is why they’re turning your book into a Hollywood movie, in that in 2016 at a meeting in Trump Tower with the then president-elect, not even president-elect, running for president, Trump, your name comes up in a meeting. Can you explain what happened here? So my story in a very brief nutshell is that I went to Russia, became the largest foreign investor in Russia, uncovered corruption in the companies I invested in, exposed the corruption, annoyed the Kremlin and Putin, I was expelled from Russia, my offices were raided, they seized all of our company documents, those documents were then used to steal 230 million dollars of taxes that my company paid to the Russian government.

31:24 So it wasn’t my money that was stolen, they ended up stealing 230 million dollars of taxes. Officials and criminals stole from their own government using my stolen companies. I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to investigate, he investigated it, he exposed it, he was then arrested by the people he exposed, put in prison, tortured for 358 days and killed on November 16, 2009 at the age of 37. His name again was Sergei Magnitsky. After they killed him, I made a vow to his family, to his memory, to myself that I was going to go after the people who killed him and make sure that they face justice, and when it became clear that there was no justice in Russia, I went to the West, I went to the United States, I went to Congress, I went to John McCain and Benjamin Cardin, two senators, Republican and Democrat, and I told them the story of what happened to Sergei Magnitsky and I told them the story of what was going on in Russia, and I said we should not allow these people to travel to America and we should not allow them to keep their money in America and we should freeze their assets, and that became known as the Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer who was killed.

32:40 The Magnitsky Act was a sort of piece of legislation whose time had just come in terms of dealing with Russia. They had passed 92 to 4 in the Senate, 89 of the House of Representatives, in 2012. It became a federal law December 14, 2012, and it completely and absolutely drove Putin up the wall. Vladimir Putin, as I mentioned, is the richest man in the world, he was also a beneficiary of this crime that Sergei Magnitsky exposed, and he got so angry that in retaliation for the passage of the Magnitsky Act he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families, effectively, and these were mostly disabled and sick orphans, effectively sentencing his own orphans to death as a way of trying to retaliate and trying to show how crazy he was about this whole thing, and he also named it his single largest foreign policy priority to get rid of the Magnitsky Act.

33:38 And coming back to your question, on June 9th, 2016, a Russian lawyer, a female Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya, went to Trump Tower, sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort with one specific request coming from Vladimir Putin, which was to repeal the Magnitsky Act. We don’t know, we know that for sure, that was what happened at that meeting. We don’t know what they offered in return and we don’t know whether that was accepted or not, but we do know what they asked for, and in doing so, and this was before Trump had been elected, this was when he was just the Republican nominee, but we know that that effectively why it was that Vladimir Putin was trying to manipulate the outcome of the US election was because of the Magnitsky Act.

34:32 So you’re hitting him where it hurts. We’re hitting him where it hurts so bad that he’s ready to like completely upset the entire balance of power between Russia and the West, to manipulate the elections, to do whatever he had to do, because this thing is so existentially terrifying for him, because this whole modus operandi was to steal. He worked very hard to steal 200 billion dollars and all of a sudden he’s at risk of having that frozen, which could lead to him losing power and his death.

34:59 Exactly. And so he’s now, it has become for him an existential threat. My piece of legislation that I was responsible for getting passed in the United States is an existential threat to Vladimir Putin. Okay, and you had dealt with this Russian lawyer before and you said she’s one of the most aggressive persons you’ve ever dealt with. So she had been sent in just to do everything, to use all things within her power, within her checkbook’s power to destroy me, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

35:30 She spent millions and millions of dollars on lawyers, public relations firms, private investigators, smear campaigners and just about everybody else in between, doing filmmakers, just doing everything she could to try to take me down, to discredit me, to destroy me and have me arrested, to do whatever she could do to try to make me go away on behalf of her ultimate boss Vladimir Putin, and so I knew very well because I was dealing with it on a day-to-day basis. What do you do with that, how do you fight against that? Well, you do it by being smart, by having the facts, by knowing how to deliver the facts and unfortunately spending a lot of money to counter it.

36:13 We had to hire our own lawyers and, you know, get our message out, but thankfully her message never got traction. Do you think Trump might repeal this act? He can’t. In order to repeal the act, it was an act of Congress, and to make an act of Congress you need Congress to vote in favor of it on a majority basis, and to repeal a piece of legislation you need Congress to vote against it. And so imagine that there was a proposal to Congress to allow Russian torturers and murderers to come to America, which is the repeal of this act.

36:47 You’re not going to get very many people from Congress voting in favor of that. What do you think is going on behind the scenes with Trump, Putin, Russia? It’s a complete mystery to me who’s doing what to whom. On one hand is what you see on the surface from his tweets, he says Putin is a good guy, he says that he likes how he does stuff, he says that he doesn’t think he’s a killer. That’s what he’s saying in his tweets or in his interviews.

37:17 Just below that you have the Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, you have the US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, you’ve got Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, who are the most clear-eyed, tough people on Russia, and much clearer-eyed and tougher than John Kerry was or any of his equivalents in the Obama administration. And so it’s a kind of a schizophrenic situation. Russia has not gotten any of the things that it wanted from Donald Trump.

37:50 The Magnitsky Act is still firmly in place and the Trump administration added more people to the Magnitsky list in December of last year. The Obama administration didn’t provide any weapons to the Ukrainians to fight Russia, strangely, with all this nice tweeting about Putin, the Trump administration is providing those weapons. And so how do you make sense of that? I don’t know. It may, you know, maybe there’s some good cop, bad cop thing going on, maybe Trump has no idea what his administration is actually doing because he’s on the toilet tweeting at night, I don’t know, but what I can say is that there’s no clear obvious message if you actually look at the substance of what’s going on.

38:30 Who’s driving this process? Is this another strike for Putin, as in he tried another thing that might help him with his agenda and it’s not working well? Well, that’s true, but there’s one thing that is working beautifully, and with all the money in the world they couldn’t have expected, the Russians couldn’t have expected this success, which is Putin has created total political and ideological chaos in the United States. I mean, everybody’s at each other’s throats and I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime, and he’s got to be, whether he’s, I mean I’m sure he’s pretty frustrated he hasn’t lifted sanctions, but at the same time he must be sort of licking his chops saying, wow, this is pretty cool, because in America, divided is an America distracted completely, and he can carry on doing a lot of dirty business, which he has done, without anyone paying attention because we’re so busy fighting with ourselves right now.

39:22 Did he influence the election? Yeah, of course he did. And that also makes him look like a hero in his country. Well, it makes him look like, you know, a guy who gets stepped on. Just remember, right, Russia is a country with an economy the size of Italy, I mean this is not some, I mean it’s not an economic superpower.

39:36 America has 20 times the military budget of Russia, this is not, it’s not even a military superpower, but somehow he’s stepped into this place with a pair of, playing poker with a pair of twos and has completely made himself the center of the world and a man who everyone has to talk to about anything. Are you concerned for your safety? Of course I am. There is a risk to my safety, the answer is yes. The Russian government has threatened to kill me, they’re trying to kidnap me, they’ve tried to arrest me with Interpol six times, here in London they’ve approached the British government on 12 different occasions requesting mutual legal assistance, in some cases extradition.

40:21 I was just in Switzerland last week and I was leaving Geneva airport after giving a speech at the United Nations and I was detained on a Russian request by the Swiss law enforcement. I’m primary number one target of Vladimir Putin and so there’s real risk. Now, a lot of people ask me, am I worried about that, and the answer is that I don’t spend a lot of time worrying because if I’m worried then they’ve achieved their objective. I spend my time being very careful about my personal safety but I don’t spend a lot of time cowering or shaking about what they’re doing, because if I did that then they would have already achieved their goals.

41:05 You seem remarkably calm and you smiled when you said that. Well, I mean, I’ve been, you know, this is, I mean first of all, we’re all going to die eventually. I hope to live a very long life, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I was somehow cowering in fear and buckling and not carrying on with my agenda, which is to get justice for them murdering Sergei Magnitsky. But you’re careful, even I don’t know where you live, where your office is, you refused a beverage here, I’m guessing that’s all because you’re careful.

41:37 Well, I mean, you know, it’s easier, you know, if they want to poison me, you know, put in my drink, you know, so no point taking any drinks from anybody, never go to the same restaurant twice, you know, stuff like that. There was that big case, was it Litvinenko, I forgot his name, that was the polonium poisoning, happened right here in Mayfair in ’06 or ’07, you probably watched that, you know, probably saw things I didn’t see. I mean that’s a clear example of someone being publicly poisoned with direct ties back to Putin.

42:07 Yeah, and so Putin ordered it, the FSB organized it, and they carried out a nuclear assassination using polonium-210 in the heart of London against a British citizen, Litvinenko was a British citizen at the time. Just thank you. They killed him here in London, so, and then so that that’s the first message, the second message is that the British government did nothing. I mean they should have come down on Russia like a ton of bricks. I mean all the Russians are busy buying up property here in London and nothing happened, and so that was both a demonstration of what can be done abroad and effectively a welcome mat by the British government to carry on doing hits in in London.

42:51 Why didn’t the government react? Because they want the money to keep flowing in, you know, I don’t know why they didn’t react. I think that they, it’s a funny, you know, it’s a different culture here, that they’re not as tough as the Americans on this type of stuff. But it was also Putin flexing his muscles, yeah, and showing everybody in the world what I can do, and he showed it very well, right? And he did that with Khodorkovsky.

43:16 And I want to get into the details of your story because I appreciate that summary but I think the details are really interesting. You know, a couple things that’s interesting for me to observe is that you used to be a very big hedge fund manager with billions and billions of assets, I’m guessing at one point you might have had a billion dollars in net worth, something like that. Now you’re a human rights guy, and yet when I get right in here, the people might look at them and say, oh, they are right, they’ve been downtrodden.

43:45 Do you sometimes have a hard time convincing people that they should listen to your case because of your history and wealth and all that? Well, so if I was going and telling people I’m really hard done by, you know, I don’t think anyone would have any sympathy because you know, I’m a highly, you know, capable, well-resourced former hedge fund manager, that’s not, my demographic is not a very sympathetic one. You have plenty of money. However, I wasn’t going to advocate for myself, I was going to advocate for Sergei Magnitsky, who is a highly sympathetic character whose life was ruined and taken away from him at the age of 37 after he tried to do the right thing, and I’m his advocate.

44:29 I’m not advocating for myself, I’m advocating for him, and I’m not looking for any glory, I’m not looking for any benefits for myself, I’m looking for justice for Sergei Magnitsky, and that pitch is a perfect pitch. Everybody who hears his story can’t help but be absolutely enraged that a young man, a young patriot, a young Russian patriot would be killed for trying to do the right thing, and his killers getting away with it in an openly defiant way by Vladimir Putin, and that’s something that everybody responds to. I remember reading about it and hearing about it, you know, I guess it was back in ’09, and just continually thinking, like, how can this be possible, how is this still happening, and it was almost overt in many ways.

45:21 I mean you described the actions happening here, I mean he’s getting sick, he might be already dying and yet they still beat him to death, you know, and then maybe this is just a sociopathic Putin or it’s a move to show people the power that he has, but it just seemed so blatant. It was very blatant, the way they killed him. They killed lots of people this way. This is the only thing unique about this story, is that I’m here and I’m around the world telling it, but what makes it so remarkable beyond the pedestrian killing of him, which is what they do to everybody, is that afterwards they got so mad at the fact that everybody was upset about it that they put him on trial.

46:00 They put Sergei Magnitsky, the man they killed, on trial three years after they killed him, in the first trial ever in the history of Russia against a dead man, and it just, I mean, his story, the narrative of Sergei Magnitsky was so upsetting to them they wanted to do anything they could to blacken his name, including posthumously convicting him and then to call him a criminal afterwards. And at the same time they convicted you in absentia for nine years. They convicted me as his co-conspirator, and as alleged co-conspirator I got nine years in absentia.

46:35 I’ve since been convicted again in absentia and so I’ve now got 18 years of in absentia convictions against me in Russia. Did that change your life at all? No, no, no, you’re already Public Enemy Number One, you can’t get anything. What are they gonna do? Again, okay, so I mean they currently have a murder investigation open up against me for murdering who?

46:56 For murdering Sergei Magnitsky. You’re complicit in that whole thing somehow. So they’re accusing me of murdering Sergei Magnitsky and they’re accusing me of murdering three other people, so I’m a serial killer according to them. I’m a tax evader, I’m a fraudster, I’m a spy, they’ve accused me of being an MI6 CIA agent, they’ve even accused me of stealing 4.8 billion dollars that was destined from the IMF to Russia which was stolen in 1998. So basically, I mean, I’m waiting for them to accuse me of killing John F.

47:32 Kennedy, which happened a year before I was born. How can you kill Sergei if he’s in a prison in Russia? Well, I mean, ask them that, I’m not the one who came up with that. Okay, what was it like being here, I guess maybe you were in London for that year that Sergei was there and getting these reports back and hearing about his condition, like what do you do? Well, so up until the time he was arrested, this whole issue we had with Russia was virtual in the sense that it was all stuff that people were doing in other places and, you know, pieces of paper and filings and so on and so forth.

48:04 The moment he was arrested it became human and real, and so he became a hostage, and it’s very, very upsetting. I mean I can’t even describe how upsetting it is to have somebody who works for you taken hostage, because there’s not a moment that you can feel happiness or relaxation or anything, because you just know that, well, you know, you’re in your own bed, he’s sleeping on a, like, a stone cot, while you’re taking a shower, he’s not allowed to shower, you know, while you’re sitting in a warm room he’s sitting in a room nearly freezing to death, and that is, it’s like a voodoo doll and I could feel his pain, and it was the most horrifying thing, and while he was in jail and while they were doing all this terrible stuff to him I felt it all and I felt terrible and I felt guilty and I felt totally tied up, and but for me the thing going through my mind is how do I make this up to him when it’s all done.

49:08 I was like, when they sentenced him and put him in jail for seven years, what happens when he gets out, how am I gonna, you know, those were the way I was thinking, and so when he died, when they killed him, that was so far outside of my own expectations of the worst case scenario, I couldn’t even process that, it was just so horrible. And how did you process it? Well, I processed it the only way I knew how, which was to say, which was to take responsibility, to go after the people that killed him and to put aside everything else I was doing.

49:43 I’m not a businessman anymore, I gave back all my clients’ money and I’m a full-time justice campaigner. What’s that like, that change? Well, it was done out of necessity because I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d done anything other than that, but it’s very meaningful because what I’m doing, I’m on a righteous mission, I’m on a mission to get justice for my murdered friend and lawyer, and that is important work, and when we have success it’s real success, it’s meaningful success, and it feels important and satisfying that when we get that success, when Sergei’s name goes on another law, when we get another batch of money frozen by law enforcement in a different country, that feels like a real, important thing I’m doing.

50:34 Does it feel better than making billions in Moscow? It feels much better, but as I tell my friends, fighting for justice is infinitely more satisfying than fighting for money. You know, fighting for money is just numbers, and of course everyone needs money and I need money to feed myself and my family, but you know, once that’s done, it doesn’t, that doesn’t bring any, the idea of that doesn’t bring any joy to me. Is there anything you could have done to get him out?

51:01 No. I mean, people say what would you have done differently, and the only thing I could have done differently is just not gone to Russia in the first place. So everything that happened after going to Russia was a series of events where I wouldn’t have done things differently. You know, people said, well, maybe you shouldn’t have just challenged, you should just not have challenged corruption in Russia. Well, that’s not who I am, you know, I would, you know, to like buy into their system, that’s not who I wanted to be.

51:28 Let’s talk about how you got to Russia because it’s an interesting journey, including the fact that you have Russian blood in you, your grandmother was Russian. Yeah, and that surprised me and probably would surprise people here. Can you walk me through a little bit of the Browder family history because it’s pretty interesting too? Sure, so I have an American accent, I was born in Princeton, New Jersey, I grew up in Chicago, Hyde Park, but I come from a very unusual American family.

51:58 My grandfather was, his name was Earl Browder, he was from Wichita, Kansas, he was a labor union organizer in Wichita, he was spotted as being really good at what he did, he then ended up in Kansas City, he then ended up in New York City, and in New York City there was a lot of Communists running around and they said, maybe you’d like to come check out what we’re doing in Russia, this is this communist stuff is pretty cool. What year was this roughly? This was like 1925.

52:26 Okay, so Earl goes to Moscow in 1927 and he meets a young Russian girl who became my grandmother, and my father was born in Moscow. What’s going on in Moscow in ’27? So the Revolution was ’17. Yeah, so this was like the Communist Revolution and he was, apparently it’s like really great to be an American Communist in Russia at the time, like you know, all the girls went crazy for American Communists. And so the Communists had been kind of expanding, looking around the world, watching what was going on in America, recruited him, he took a boat over there.

53:05 I mean that’s a movie right there. Yeah, I mean, well, he had a fantastically amazing life. He then goes, in 1932, five years after arriving, he’s sent back to America to become head of the American Communist Party, so the family moves back to America and he runs for president on the Communist ticket in 1936 against Franklin Roosevelt. I ran again in 1940. He was on the cover of Time magazine.

53:36 Was the Communist Party big, was it a threat to the Democrats at the time? Well, remember in 1929 was the stock market crash and then the Great Depression started and a lot of really bad stuff was happening economically, and so I don’t think he got that many votes, he maybe got 100,000 votes, but what he did do, and this is sort of documented in history, was he brought the whole debate towards the left, and he was a very influential person, and in 1940 he ran for president again, in 1941 they put him in jail for passport violations because you weren’t allowed to travel to the Soviet Union, and then it’s interesting because when my grandfather was running for president he was the first American presidential candidate to have an African-American running mate, and so he was considered to be a friend of the Negro and African-American community in America, and so when he was in jail they had demonstrations all over, in New York and Chicago and Cleveland, free Earl Browder, and Mayor LaGuardia of New York called up Roosevelt and said, this is turning into a real problem, you got to get this guy out of jail because this is turning into a real social problem for us.

55:01 And Roosevelt had put him in jail to silence him, you think? Exactly. And so they let him out of jail and gave him, he got a presidential pardon in 1942. Sounds like an interesting guy, your grandpa. Yeah, he was a fascinating guy and, you know, very brave fellow, and in 1945 he was then expelled from the Communist Party.

55:22 This was at the end of the Second World War, Stalin no longer so my grandfather believed that communism and capitalism could peacefully coexist, he sort of had a Swedish version of communism, maybe more like socialism, and that was all fine, that was cool during the time when America and the Soviet Union were allies fighting Hitler, but once that was over, Stalin had his own ideas and the Communist Party expelled my grandfather, and anyone who is a follower of my grandfather in other countries around Europe and Eastern Europe were liquidated, they were killed by Stalin, and my grandfather survived because he was in America and they, Stalin didn’t have that long reach. So they kicked him out of the Communist Party, he sort of went into the wilderness, he had no longer, you know, it was not exactly, there’s not much you can do in America.

56:18 Dangerous to dance with the Russian government, as your family can see. And then in the 1950s began, and that was when the McCarthy era began, and so it wasn’t like they were doing deep analysis of who were the good Communists and bad Communists, if you were a communist you’re a communist, and so my grandfather was put in front of the House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities and persecuted very viciously. They tried to deport my Russian grandmother, who, shockingly, was dying of cancer, she was on her deathbed and they wanted to deport her back to Russia while she was dying of cancer.

56:57 And then my father, who was a child prodigy and a math genius who had just gone to MIT at the age of 14, graduated when he was 18, went to, had a PhD of math from Princeton at the age of 21, couldn’t get a job in any university in America because of who his father was, because the McCarthy era was so strong. Exactly. How do you describe that to someone, you know, and maybe even the younger generation that doesn’t really know what that was all about? I mean I’m sure you’ve read so much about it and know from what your family said, but how would you describe what the climate was like in the early ’50s with this?

57:31 It was like mass hysteria, it’s like, it’s like anyone who is a communist was like someone who’s like Al Qaeda now. I mean it was so, you know, there was just a witch hunt and it got to be where it was almost like the boogeyman witch hunt and you know, in order to, you would just start pointing the finger at people in order to just, you know, also project attention away from you. I mean it came, it got really scary, it got very scary and it was a real problem for my father because, so he couldn’t get it, so he was like truly the top yeah, math genius in America and no university wanted to employ him, and so at the time if you weren’t employed properly you had to go into the army, and so he was drafted into the army, and so for the first couple days they were kind of excited, they said, wow, we got a smart guy, let’s stick him in Army intelligence, and then somebody finally, like, I guess they didn’t have the internet back then, but they finally figured out he was the son of the leader of the Communist Party of America, and so they said, well, you’re a security risk, and so they made my father, one of the top math geniuses of America, pump gas for three years at a gas station in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and so he was writing his math papers from Fort Bragg, and and then eventually he was discharged and he applied for a job, he was applying for a lot of jobs and again getting rejected, and he applied for a job at Brandeis University and it just so happened that Eleanor Roosevelt was the chairman of the Board of Trustees of Brandeis, the wife of Franklin Roosevelt, passed by this time, and so he was

59:03 Applying for a job and all the, you know, the consensus, some establishment guys on the board saying, no, we can’t have him, it’s going to mess up our stuff, and then she intervened and she said this would be the most un-American thing we could do, to deny a great scientist his profession. And so she overcame the objections and he got a job at Brandeis and he was then resurrected and rehabilitated, and then he went on to great things in mathematics. He became the chairman of the Mathematics Department of the University of Chicago and then went on, and to win, under Bill Clinton, the National Medal of Science, which is the highest honor in mathematics you can get.

59:40 Wow, I always like that Eleanor Roosevelt, she was very stoic and very wise. That’s a pretty fascinating story, and how did all of this affect young Bill? Well, so I came from this family of Communists and academics and geniuses and I was none of them, so I was not a genius, I was not a communist and I was not an academic, and I was just a regular kid, and it was very oppressive in this family of great people with all these sort of extreme positions, and so in my rebellion I decided to try to, as a teenager I was really sort of pretty frustrated being in this, feeling all these pressures, and so I decided to rebel for my family.

1:00:22 First thing I did was to grow my hair long, it’s not obvious what would happen to my hair growing along now, but back then I had a full head of hair and it grew into an Afro, and I thought, okay, this will really upset my family, but strangely it didn’t. I then followed the Grateful Dead around for three months thinking that that would somehow really enrage them, and that didn’t, and then I finally figured out the right rebellion tool, which was to put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist, and that really got them going. Did that make him mad?

1:00:56 That made them very upset and took them a long time to get over that. What was your mom like? My mom was a Holocaust refugee from Vienna, she grew up in Vienna, a Jew from Vienna, and she was there during the Holocaust and her mother at the time wanted to get her to safety and they both couldn’t go to America at the time, but because they were all like, it’s kind of like America is right now, not taking a lot of refugees, and so she came up with a plan which was to get my mother safe, my grandmother put her up for adoption and she was adopted by a nice Jewish family in Brookline, Massachusetts, and they took her in, to my mother in, and my mother at the age of eight by herself took a train across Europe by herself to a ship by herself, age of eight, at the age of eight, and then traveled to America to join this new family.

1:02:03 In Brookline, Massachusetts, at the age of eight, and my grandmother couldn’t get to America, she ended up being able to get refugee status in Britain for and then finally, like, three or four years later she was able to get to America and reunite with my mother, and then my mother became one of the first women students at MIT and in fact that’s where she met my father and then they got married. Wow, no pressure, Bill, everyone’s got great stories and great pedigrees. So you put on a suit inside to become a capitalist?

1:02:39 Yeah, I became a capitalist and I wasn’t a very good student at first, but I first went to the University of Colorado in Boulder, which was the number one party school in the country. Was it hippie then too? Or it was so much of a hippie then, I was just a party, just a partier, and then I looked around and I realized that I could probably, you know, the people who are partying the hardest were probably going to end up being parking lot attendants, and I came from this very distinguished family of successes and that seemed kind of like a stupid path to be going on, and so I finally sort of sucked up my gut and started to apply myself and did well in school, and I then transferred from the University of Colorado, which is the number one party school in America, to the University of Chicago, which is, there’s an expression that’s where fun goes to die, or at least it was back then.

1:03:35 They work you like dogs, I mean it is the most academic school in America, more than MIT, I think even more than MIT. And I disagree with that, I don’t know, we can have an arm wrestling for that. My high school girlfriend went there and I went and visited and you know it was definitely a place where they went to work. Yeah, so you went there and so I went to the University of Chicago, really put my nose down, and then eventually did well and I got into Stanford Business School and I started business school in 1987 and finished business school in 1989, which is a very auspicious year because that was the year that the Berlin Wall came down, and I was coming out of business school and looking for jobs, and business school is really a sort of a professional school, a parochial school, and the purpose of it is to get you a job afterwards.

1:04:28 That’s how business schools are all judged, by how good a job and how high the starting salary is of their graduates, and so lots of companies come on campus to recruit, there’s investment banks and consulting firms and consumer products firms and real estate developers and all sorts of stuff, and as a student you go and they have these things called brown bag lunches, you sit there, the guy from Clorox tells you how exciting it is to sell detergent and all these people coming in and I was just, I couldn’t get excited by any, I mean nothing against selling detergent but I just couldn’t get excited by that or a lot of other stuff, and I was thinking to myself, what am I going to do, you know, I need to find a profession and find a job like everybody else, but none of these things excite me, and 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.

1:05:28 That just came to you walking around Palo Alto? Yeah. Wow. Okay, and so how do you do that? Well, I couldn’t get to Eastern Europe at the time, Eastern Europe was still sort of kind of not happening, and so I ended up coming to London, 1989, and I am in London, I got a job at the Boston Consulting Group and I asked to be in their Eastern European practice area and there was nothing really going on in Eastern Europe at the time but there’s one partner in the Boston Consulting Group who was kind of interested in Eastern Europe and so he said, if you come here, the first thing we, you know, the first assignment we have in Eastern Europe, you’re our guy.

1:06:10 So I said okay and I did some other work for a while and then one day he comes knocking on the door and he says, we’ve got something in Eastern Europe, it’s in a little town, it’s six hours from Warsaw on the Ukrainian border, a town called Sanok. It’s a bus factory, it’s almost out of business, we’ve been hired to try to turn it around, the World Bank is paying our fees, we can’t afford to send anyone other than you. I was like, you know, six months out of business school.

1:06:41 So they sent me out to this town, and it’s just, what was that like? The most, this was back, they have this thing called shock therapy in Poland at the time where they basically just allowed all prices to rise, all subsidies end, food shortages, shortages of heating oil, phones didn’t work, it was really primitive, primitive, and six hours more, so you could not call, you could not make a long distance call. They put me in a place called the Hotel Turysta in this little town and the first night, I know the room was really cold and I went down to the front desk, started, and I didn’t speak any Polish and like, you know, trying to, you know, pantomime out that it was freezing, and somehow they explained to me without language that the heat doesn’t go on until another two or three weeks, and so I put on all my clothes, my down parka, and I still was freezing in the room, and you know, kind of once you get cold it’s hard to get warm, and then in the morning I tried to go into the bathroom to get a hot shower and there’s no hot water, and then I go into the, so my first day of work I go into the bus factory, the general director of the bus factory is really happy and proud that this American consulting firm has sent this genius consultant to fix their problems, and he welcomes me into his office and he says, you know, that we’re so happy you’re here, you’re going to save us all.

1:08:24 He tries to pour me some brandy, it’s 10 o’clock in the morning, they’re drinking in the morning, thank you, and his office, by the way, is really nice and toasty warm, and I noticed that he’s got a space heater in the corner of his office, and he says, is there anything we can do here at Autosan to make your stay in Sanok more comfortable? And I said, well, actually, is there any way you can get me one of those space heaters for my room? Then he burst out laughing, he says, oh, we could do much better than that for you, we can get you a woman to keep you warm at night, and I looked down at my shoes, I said, well, actually I just came up with the space heater, and so that was the beginning of my stay in Poland and it was pretty crazy then.

1:09:12 And why was Poland kind of a pivotal moment for you, what happened there? Well, so they assigned me this guy to go around the factory, who was like permanent translator, interpreter, his name is Lechek, and everywhere I go he would be with me and he was kind of just my right-hand man and explaining to me who was saying what and so on. One day I noticed that under his arm he always was carrying around the newspaper, I noticed in the newspaper under his arm he had, they have all these financial figures on the newspaper, and so I say, hey, let’s check what’s going on here, what are these financial figures?

1:09:51 His eyes lit up, he said, oh, this is very great, these are the first privatizations going on in Poland and these are the financial statements. I said, wow, that’s interesting, I said, can you explain it to me? So he said, yeah, so we went to the conference room and he laid out the newspapers on the table and we started going through these financial statements and I said, what is this number? He said, this is the number of shares outstanding of the company.

1:10:13 Okay, how about this one? And he said, this is the price that the government is selling the shares at. And I did the math and it was the times shares outstanding times the price, values the company at 80 million dollars. I said, what’s this number under here? He said, no, this is last year’s earnings.

1:10:31 I said, are you sure about that? And I said, yeah, I said, could you just like read each word for me, and I said, last year’s earnings, and that number was 160 million dollars. So a company is valued at 80 million dollars, in the previous year made 160 million dollars, and you don’t have to be a financial genius to know that, like, if they like make twice in one year with the price, with the company costs, that’s got to be a pretty good deal. And I said, well, how do you buy the shares?

1:11:04 They said, well, you can reply down to the post office, and I thought, this is what I went to business school for, isn’t it, like to like do this type of stuff. And so I had 2,000 dollars of net worth total, life savings, and had it with me in the form of traveler’s checks, and so we convert the traveler’s checks to Polish currency, the zloty, and then Lechek and I applied for the privatizations and I got the shares, and a year later my 2,000 dollars was worth 20,000 dollars. And as I wrote in my book, there’s a certain, when you make 10 times your money it releases a certain chemical in your stomach.

1:11:58 It’s the financial equivalent of crack cocaine, and once you have that experience you just want to repeat it over and over again, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life after that, which was to invest in the privatizations of Eastern Europe. That’s a big bet, putting your whole savings in there, but it worked out pretty well. You know, every whole savings, 2,000 dollars, but 2,000 turned into 20, and I was feeling like, okay, this is good. And that kicks off the start of your investing career?

1:12:28 So that kicks off the start of my investing career. My next job, my next significant job was at Salomon Brothers, which doesn’t exist anymore, but if you go back in history it’s a very famous firm immortalized by Michael Lewis in the book Liar’s Poker, and I get a job on the East European investment banking team at Salomon Brothers here in London. Here in London, and Salomon Brothers were known as kind of the guys, they were the bond traders, they were known as kind of the guys that would get it done.

1:13:01 Right, they weren’t the pedigrees. No, these were not the like nice suited Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley guys, not the preppy guys, these were the cowboys, and it was a real dog-eat-dog firm. You showed up there and no training program, there was no mentor, the guy who sort of greeted me at the front desk brought me to my desk, gave me my business cards, he says, here’s your phone, here’s your cards, the deal is you make five times what we’re paying you in your first year, otherwise you’re fired.

1:13:34 Get to work, good luck. Yeah, there’s something beautiful about that, Bill. So so I’m in the investment bank of Salomon Brothers, in a, I show up to try to do the, make my five times my salary, and no one’s told me what to do, and so I sort of heard that there was a meeting going on about the privatization of the Hungarian airline, and so I kind of make my way over to this conference room where this meeting is going on, and I walk into the room and everybody in the room just like stops talking and looks at me, and I say, I’m here, you know, I’m on the East European team, you’re doing an East European deal, I was wondering if you guys could use my help.

1:14:18 They said, no, thanks, we don’t need your help. So I go back out, and a couple days later I learned about this, there’s a Polish Telecom privatization going on, so I show up there and they’re much less polite than the Hungarian team and they say, listen, Bill, we have absolutely no interest in Europe being associated with us, don’t even think of coming anywhere near Poland. You’ve hit the junior guy at this point. I was a very junior guy, and what I realized was that nobody there, there’s a whole five times that you had to earn, five times for the firm, and they were also busy trying to get to their five times, the last thing I wanted to do is dilute it with some new guy.

1:14:57 Right, and for people that are watching, the privatization is when the government is selling off state assets, correct, which was in the previous times before the fall of the wall was pretty much everything was a state asset, right, and so then as they sell off these individual companies they’re looking for buyers, and I guess there weren’t a lot of buyers in the beginning, which is why the prices were deflated. And so you can’t get any action there, so there’s no action, and so anywhere where there’s real money to be made nobody wants to share it because you know everyone was just fighting for their five times, they’re like this dogged guy is fighting for their five times, and I noticed that there was nobody doing Russia, and so one day I declared myself the investment banker in charge of Russia and nobody objected, it was a total sort of unmanaged cowboy firm, and so I became the investment banker in charge of Russia, nobody objected because there’s no money in Russia at the time, and then I started looking for business, and I ended up getting a piece of business, there was a fishing fleet called the Murmansk Trawl Fleet.

1:16:01 Murmansk is the farthest north population center in the world, it’s 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Russia, and the management of this fishing fleet wanted to have an investment banker advise them on their privatization options, and the total fee they were paying was 50,000 dollars. Now, 50,000 dollars was your salary? Well, now I had a higher salary than 50,000 dollars, but 50,000 dollars, an investment banker wouldn’t get out of bed for 50,000 dollars.

1:16:30 It was just, and this was like for a month’s worth of work, 50,000, and but it was 50,000 greater than zero and I was nowhere near five times what I was making, and so I took the assignment. I go to Murmansk and to get to Murmansk, you fly to St. Petersburg, which is like a four and a half hour flight, then you sit in St. Petersburg airport until the middle of the night before the plane leaves at like four in the morning, so they’re like two hours up to Murmansk, get off the airplane in the, and actually it’s interesting, at the time the commercial airport had like a big hole in the runway and so they decided to land the plane at the military airport. This was like totally high security, like you know, closed to the world, you know, during all the Soviet times, we landed at this military airport and I saw this like rows upon rows upon rows of completely defunct rusted MiG fighter jets, and it was just, I mean it was like this airplane graveyard at this military airport, and this was like, you know, the superpower that we were fighting, it was just all rusted.

1:17:40 Anyway, so the head of this fishing fleet meets me at this Murmansk airport, military airport, and he says, before we go to the company’s offices I want to show you what our fishing fleet looks like, I’m going to take you down to the docks. So we go down to the docks and we go in and he shows me one of these boats and it’s just this huge vessel, it’s like 300 feet long on all these different stories, and the top story they have the nets. He brought me up to the top and showed me how the nets work and then when they catch the fish they put them into a chute and it goes down to the next story, and we go down and the smell was oppressive, and that’s where they separate the fish from all the debris.

1:18:21 Are you enjoying this, are you thinking, I went to Stanford, what the hell am I doing here? Well, I was not enjoying it at all, it was the most horrifying smell, and I was like, what is, I mean 50,000 dollars for a month and you don’t speak Russian. Yeah, there’s a translator there. Okay, right. That’s always the case, there’s always like a beautiful blonde 23-year-old translator for these 55-year-old CEOs of these companies, and anyways I think she was the translator and the mistress.

1:18:51 It was, she’s translating, and so I asked him, and by the way, the bottom story they have all these like machines that can the fish, and so it’s like an ocean-going factory, and I asked the guy, how much does one of these things cost, through this interpreter, and he said 20 million. What about that, that makes sense. And how many of these ships do you have in your fleet? 100. So 20 million times 100 is 2 billion dollars.

1:19:24 Wow, 2 billion dollars, all these fleets of ships. Okay, yeah, and then I don’t know much about fishing or ships but I said, how old is the fleet? Seven years. I figure probably about a billion dollars of the ships now, and the management of this fleet, this guy and his compatriots, had hired me at Salomon Brothers to advise them on whether to exercise their right under the privatization program for the management to buy 51 percent of the fleet. Management given the legitimate right, it’s not a scam or a bad or something, some malfeasance, they had the legitimate right under the privatization program to buy 51 percent of the fleet.

1:20:04 So I asked him, at what price is the government selling 51 percent? He said 2.5 million dollars. So you have a billion dollars’ worth of ships and the management has the right to buy 51 percent for 2.5 million dollars. Now remember, I’ve had this experience already in Poland with this stuff secreting in my stomach, and this is like a much better deal than that Polish, it’s more than 10x, and I’m thinking to myself, 200x, oh my God, this is unbelievable.

1:20:37 So how, so what am I, and I’m being paid 50,000 for this whole exercise, I want to be investing in this thing, you know, I don’t want to be advising for fees, and so but I didn’t know if it was just a one-off for the fishing fleet or whether this is something more widespread. And so did the management see it as a no-brainer, or were they new to all these concepts of finance and they weren’t sure? He didn’t know what he was doing, so it was, I mean, very primitive.

1:21:07 If you grew up in communism your whole life, how would any corporate finance models make any sense? I mean, and so I explained to them very simply and they understood, but these were very primitive people, they didn’t understand capitalism or anything. Anyway, so instead of going back to London, I was scheduled to go back to London, I thought, this is big, I’m gonna go to Moscow and figure this thing out. So go to Moscow, I fly from Murmansk to Moscow and I get off the plane at Moscow Sheremetyevo airport and I don’t speak a word of Russian and I don’t know anybody in Russia other than the head of this fishing fleet, and so I’m at the airport thinking, what am I going to do now, what next?

1:21:48 And I’m walking through the airport and I noticed that there’s a little kiosk that’s selling newspapers and books and other things and in the window they have this little very thin English language Yellow Pages directory, so I buy it and I get a taxi to the Metropol Hotel on Red Square and go to sleep that night, and the next morning I start circling names of businesses or institutions that I could call to have a meeting with to figure out the privatization program, and so I cold call and a lot of people say no, a few people say yes, and over the course of the next week I have 40 meetings and by the end of the week I’ve discovered that if I thought Poland was cheap, I mean Russia was just off the charts cheap. And how old are you now? This is like 29, or no, no, I’m sorry, I’m not 29.

1:22:42 This was, yeah, something like that, anyways, like in the late 20s, and so I’m, and here’s what I figured out, was that they gave a voucher, a physical voucher, to every person over the age of 18, roughly 150 million vouchers, and these vouchers traded for about 20 each, so 20 dollars times 150 million gets you to 3 billion dollars of the vouchers, and these 3 billion dollars of the vouchers were exchangeable for 30 percent of the share capital of all Russian companies, which meant that the total value of Russia in 1992 was 10 billion dollars. Now this is a country with 35 percent of all the world’s natural gas, 10 percent of the world’s oil, 10 percent of the world’s electricity, 10 percent of the world’s aluminum, and all sorts of other stuff. The entire value of the country is 10 billion dollars.

1:23:33 You couldn’t buy like a mid-size oil company in Oklahoma for 10 billion dollars. The whole country of Russia was 10 billion dollars. And so I fly back to Salomon Brothers and I’m just like on fire, and I come in there and I say, guys, first person I see, guys, we got to stop what we’re doing and invest in Russia, this is unbelievable, they’re giving money away for free. And you know, these were like bond traders, they’re like, invest in Russia, what are you talking about, what’s the spread, you know, on that?

1:24:05 I said, no, no, no, and the first person I said it to just, you know, walked away, and so I’ve like, I had no political skills and I just went to the next person who I could find and I said, stop everything we’re doing and invest in Russia, and anyways, by the time I was done doing this I hadn’t convinced anybody to invest in Russia but I completely discredited myself inside the firm, and the guys, there was, I was in my late 20s, I was like hanging around a bunch of guys for lunches and drinks after work, they stopped inviting me to lunches and drinks after work because nobody wanted to be seen with this crazy guy who was like talking about Russia, and I wasn’t making my five times my salary and so I was really kind of in a bad situation because they fire people who are not making five times, and to the extent that they keep you on it’s only because you’re a good guy, and I wasn’t a good guy because I was this crazy guy talking about Russia, and I’d found this whole thing and I couldn’t exercise, I mean I couldn’t figure out how to do it because I was going to be fired, and so I I’m getting more and more depressed and more and more upset, and then one day my phone rings and it’s a guy from the New York office of Salomon Brothers, very senior guy, and he says, I hear you’re having some career difficulties, Bill, but you might have something interesting to say about Russia, can you come to New York and tell me?

1:25:29 So I spent a couple nights putting together the most beautiful PowerPoint presentation, persuasive, on how this whole thing is working. I rehearse it in my apartment, I rehearse it to myself on the airplane, I rehearse it in the mirror at the hotel, I go in and meet this guy, I start going through my PowerPoint and I’m not getting any feedback and he’s not like nodding or a-highing or asking me any questions, he’s just staring at me and passively page going through pages. I get to page 21 and without another word he gets up, he leaves the office, and I’m sitting there by myself thinking, what have I done, how did I mess this meeting up, this is my meeting to save my career, I thought I’d gotten this perfect, I’d rehearsed it, I’d thought it through, and this guy just leaves.

1:26:13 What am I, how, when this guy comes back I’m going to fix this, I’m going to turn this meeting around, I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’m going to fix it. 10 minutes goes by, he’s still gone, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, I’m getting more and more agitated, kind of trying to come up with the right thing to do, 45 minutes, 52 minutes later he comes back in and I’m about to launch into some thing to try to turn this meeting around, but before I have a chance to say anything he said very calmly, he said, Bill, those pages you showed me are the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in my investment career. I’ve just gone to the risk management committee of Salomon Brothers and I’ve got you 25 million dollars to invest.

1:26:49 Stop everything else you’re doing, we need to get this money invested. And at that moment in time the entire weight of the world had lifted off my shoulders. I went to Russia, I invested the 25 million dollars. What’d you buy? We bought the vouchers first and then we submitted the vouchers in these auctions for oil companies and telephone companies and electricity companies and anything you could, and then most interestingly, The Economist wrote an article in the summer of the following year called “Sale of the Century” in which they described the math that I’ve just shared with you, and on the back of that article, like 20 big Western investors wanted to invest in Russian stocks, big rich guys and pension or hedge funds and proprietary trading desks, investment banks, and the Russian stock market was a tiny little thinly traded stock market, you got 20 big foreigners showing up all at the same time and what happened, our portfolio went up 500 percent, our 25 million dollars turned into 125 million dollars, and this is back in the days when 100 million dollars was real money.

1:28:02 And all of a sudden all the guys, all the young guys who had been avoiding me for drinks and lunches were all at my desk in the morning waiting for me to come in so they could get their Russian stock tips, and then very interestingly some older guys started coming around my desk and one of them came by and said, you know, Bill, I know you’ve got a lot going on and this is really, you’re really busy with some important stuff, but is there any chance that you can spare a bit of your time to explain to my client George Soros what’s going on? And then someone else came by my desk and said, my client Sir John Templeton would really like to invite you to the Bahamas to explain to him Russia, and could you come, I know you’re busy, and I was like all of, whatever, 28 years old, and I was getting invitations from all of the royalty of Wall Street, everybody wanted to meet me, that’s like on this world tour of the royalty of Wall Street, and they’re much smarter than my Salomon colleagues, and within minutes they said, we want to give you some money to manage, and I said, well, we don’t manage other people’s money, we just do our own, and so they said, but well, can you manage our money?

1:29:17 So let me go back and ask, so I go back and ask, I go to the head of the trading floor at Salomon Brothers in London and I say, hey, I’ve just been with George Soros, he wants us to manage his money, what do you think? The guy said, brilliant idea, let’s form a task force to study it. So I show up at the first task force meeting and I walk into a relatively large conference room and in this conference room there are 45 people, 40 of them I’ve never seen before in my life.

1:29:45 There’s like the vice chairman of the firm, senior managing directors, managing directors, senior directors, directors, senior vice presidents, vice presidents, then me, I was the lowest rank guy in the room. As soon as the meeting started, a fight broke out between different groups within Salomon Brothers over who is going to get the economic credit for the business. and it was really impressive to watch all these different groups make these hugely persuasive arguments about why they deserve the economic credit for the business, and I was like watching this sort of multi-dimensional game of tennis bouncing around and everybody seemed to have a good argument and it wasn’t clear to me who was going to win, but I became 100 percent convinced of who wasn’t going to get any economic credit for this business, and that was gonna be me, and so I got very upset, couldn’t sleep for several nights and I resigned, handed in my badge, moved to Moscow, got one of these famous investors, a guy named Edmond Safra, to give me 25 million dollars to invest on his behalf and started what became known as the Hermitage Fund in Russia, and it was the single most successful launch of an investment fund in the history of investment funds.

1:31:00 In the first 18 months the Hermitage Fund went up 850 percent. We were the best performing fund manager in the world. In 1997 I was featured in The New York Times and the Financial Times and The Economist, BusinessWeek, as some type of financial genius. My clients were all sending their private jets to take me to their yachts to toast my financial success, and at this point I was 31 years old. Okay, how is Bill keeping it together through all of this?

1:31:39 Well, I mean it was like it was like riding a dirt bike on a bumpy road, you know, there was no time to think about anything, it’s just trying to hold on, just hold on to the handlebars and not get thrown off the bike. But the one thing I didn’t do at this time, so I thought it was all going to go to, and by the way, I had a billion, so 25 million went to a billion, went to a billion dollars. So now you’re 30-something, 31 years old, I was managing a billion dollars, which was just a fortune, a lot of money to be managing.

1:32:09 And you’re famous? I’m famous. I’m sure I read about you back then. I’m famous, I’m being toasted as like some kind of new financial genius of Wall Street and I was 31 years old. Now, putting all this stuff together, that is the biggest sell signal there ever was, 31 years old.

1:32:26 So I didn’t see that. Can you explain what that means to someone who hasn’t been on a trading floor before? Well, basically when things are too good to be true, they’re too good to be true and things are all, the only thing that’s going to happen next is things are going to crash. Right, but at the time did you think it was going to 10 billion, did you feel like a master of the universe? I felt like, you’re the king of Moscow.

1:32:47 I never felt like a master of the universe because I was never sort of inward looking, I was just thinking how do I hold this all together. I think I thought it was going to go to 10 billion, I had a whole narrative in my mind about how it was going to go to 10 billion, I could sort of picture it all going to 10 billion, I was really excited about it going to 10 billion, telling everyone it’s going to go to 10 billion, and then in August of 1998 the Russian government had an economic crisis in Russia, the Russian government defaulted on their debt, they devalued their currency by 75 percent, and I lost 900 million dollars. I was managing a billion, I lost 90, I lost 900 million dollars, and I was no longer getting any invitations to anyone’s yachts, but the real humiliation for me was that here I was, I’d been going around the world explaining to everyone, proselytizing about how great Russia was, and all of a sudden I’ve lost everybody almost all their money, and it was great humiliation, a terrible feeling to lose other people’s money.

1:33:55 It feels worse than even losing your own money, much worse. Everyone is like so disappointed with me, emotionally disappointed, just really disappointed, like, you know, I’m, I trusted you, mad. I lost everyone’s trust, I lost their confidence, that just felt terrible and I so much wanted to fix that, and so I was determined to go from the 10 cents on the dollar back to par, back to even, okay, for them. So I was in London at the time trading credit derivatives, and it was a new product and it was a way of kind of shorting the market or betting that maybe things can default or go wrong, and we traded Russian default swaps and I remember trading these things and they started off at 200 and 300 and 400 basis points and went up to a thousand, 2,000, and I remember watching this whole thing happen and no one ever expected Russia to default on their debt, on their dollar-denominated or whatever-currency-denominated, yen-denominated debt, and then it happened and then it caused this major financial crisis.

1:34:53 It was dramatic and totally devastating for Russia and for my portfolio and for my investors and for the Russian people and for everybody, it was just a really bad time, but I was determined that I was going to get everyone out of this hole. Were you depressed? Shell-shocked was probably more the right description. Depressed, I mean, I was no, depressed is the wrong way of describing it, I was actively trying to get everybody out of this mess and, you know, I was just determined, definitely not depressed.

1:35:24 Did you ever think about going home, going back to London, going back to investment banking, going back to consulting? Well, so I had a poker group in Moscow and it was sort of expats or English-speaking Russians and every Thursday night we played poker and there’s about 13 people who played poker, and not everyone was at the game every Thursday night but this really solid group of 13 people, by the time the financial crisis had hit, every single member of my poker group had left Russia except for me, and I didn’t leave because I was determined to get everyone’s money back because I was not going to be this loser who lost everyone their money, and that’s not how I wanted to be remembered. It shows a lot of character.

1:36:04 Well, I just felt terrible, I was really ashamed of myself and wanting to make it right, and so the Gold Rush was over and everyone left and I was the only one left. It was like being at the airport at the baggage carousel and like everyone’s gotten their bags and you’re still waiting and the things going around and around, you’re the only one left standing there and the big nights on the town are over and all that’s over and it’s just you alone just there, and but there was sort of a spark of hope, which was that I was mostly invested in oil companies and the oil companies sold their oil in dollars and they paid for their expenses, their salaries and stuff, in rubles, and the ruble had just devalued by 75 percent, and so what that meant was that the costs had gone down by 75 percent, the sales had stayed the same in dollar terms, which meant in theory the profits should have exploded.

1:37:01 Right, but since everybody was liquidating in Russia it wasn’t obvious at first, that wasn’t obvious, everyone just wanted out, but I was saying, okay, we’re going to get our money back, I’m going to make my clients their money back, I just have to sit tight, be stoic, everyone’s gonna get their money back. But then I discovered this thing which changed my life forever, which was the oligarchs. So the oligarchs were the majority shareholders of all these companies I was investing in, and the oligarchs only owned, say, 51 or 75 or 95 percent of these companies and they had kind of behaved themselves up until 1998 because they got approaches from all these fancy investment bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley who said to them, if you behave yourself we can get you some free money on Wall Street.

1:37:54 These oligarchs said, hmm, what do you mean by that? I said, well, you know, don’t scandalize your minority shareholders, don’t rip them off, and if you behave yourself then the capital markets will open for you, we can do a bond issue or share issue or God knows what, gets you some money from Wall Street. Okay, so do the right things in a corporate framework and maybe keep a low profile too? No, you don’t have to keep a low profile, just don’t scandalize.

1:38:18 Right, so these guys said, well, we kind of like scandalizing, stealing, but you know, we can do that later, let’s get the free money right now. So up until 1998, as much as these oligarchs were very bad people, as much as they wanted to like steal because that’s how they got everything in the first place, they thought, well, behave ourselves, and so everything was kind of steady and okay up until 1998. But after the default and devaluation they call up their banker and say, hey, I could really use some of that money that you’re talking about, and the banker would say, I’m sorry, how do I know you?

1:38:57 Because they didn’t want to be associated with anything to do with Russia, everyone in all these banks who were seen as the Russia guy were all fired. Yeah, and that’s the way it is in emerging markets on Wall Street, whether it’s Mexico or Brazil or all these, it’s like it’s hot and then it’s not and it’s hot and it’s not, you know, and everyone’s just, you know, rushing towards the profits, rushing away from the losses, and so the oligarch said, wait a second, nobody’s returning my calls anymore. there’s no more free money on Wall Street.

1:39:26 Well, if there’s nobody, no more free money on Wall Street, then there’s no reason not to do what’s in our natural inclination, which is to steal every last thing, just squeeze the companies dry. Yeah, for ourselves, not for anybody else. And so these oligarchs embarked on an orgy of stealing which has been unprecedented in the history of business. They were doing asset stripping and transfer pricing and embezzlements and dilutions and doing it to a fine art and a high form, and I was sitting there with my last 10 cents on the dollar and they were going to steal it all from me, and so by necessity I became a shareholder rights activist, or an anti-corruption activist, in Russia, and the way I went about doing it was to research how they did the stealing and then expose that research through the international media, and which company was your company of choice?

1:40:20 Well, the most famous one is Gazprom. We discovered that the management of Gazprom, between 1996 and 1999, nine members of management of Gazprom had stolen oil and gas reserves equal to the size of Kuwait out of Gazprom. That’s a lot of oil and gas, market value of that? Hundreds of billions. Now remember there’s a war flood over oil and gas reserves the size of Kuwait.

1:40:49 Yeah, Kuwait. So we discovered that, we shared it with the media. Which media? The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc. They wrote stories and then in the back of their stories the Russian media picked up the story, on the back of that the Russian Parliament then began debates about whether it was a good thing or bad thing for these assets to be stolen, more stories out the back of that, the management of Gazprom hired PricewaterhouseCoopers, the famous international accounting firm, to write a report to say it was a good thing to steal these assets, more stories, and then the weirdest thing happened, which was that at the annual general meeting in the following year of Gazprom, Vladimir Putin, who had just come into power, stepped in and he used the voting shares that the government had of Gazprom to fire the CEO who did the stealing and to replace him with a new guy whose job it was not to steal assets, he could steal other stuff, just not assets.

1:41:53 And when he made the announcement of the firing and the new guy coming in, the share price jumped 138 percent, and then the share price doubled again, doubled again, it doubled again, it doubled again, it doubled again, and then doubled again and then doubled again, the share price went up a hundred times, a hundred times between 1999 and 2005. Because you exposed corruption? Correct. The share price went up. Correct, because it was trading at a 99.7 percent discount before this, and we came up with a formula for making money which was researching how they did the stealing and then exposing them, and my hundred million dollars at the bottom of the market in 1999 turned into four and a half billion dollars by 2005.

1:42:41 I became the largest foreign investor in the country. You’re like Robin Hood. Well, it was an amazing job because I could do good and make money in the same job and it was just fantastic, but of course it was never going to last forever. And Khodorkovsky was, this was the, was running Gazprom, is that the guy that Putin got rid of? No, so Khodorkovsky was the guy running Yukos, which was, and so Putin in 2003, so we did this at the electricity company, at the national savings bank, at Gazprom, at two oil companies, we did this all over.

1:43:12 All over, you were like the activist investor bringing justice and the Russians were happy that you were doing it? Well, so Putin and I had this alignment of interest. I was going, you never met him? I never met him, but your enemy’s enemy is your friend, and so every time I go after one of his enemies he would step in, and people thought that I, so they were saying there’s no way that this guy from the South Side of Chicago would be doing this on his own volition, this must, so and everyone in Russia has got a conspiracy theory, so they’re saying, he’s, so who’s standing behind him?

1:43:40 And every time I would put this stuff out there, Putin would step in. They say, this is really clever because Vladimir Putin, what a clever SOB he is, and he’s got this guy from Chicago, and I’ve got a few, he’s got a few Americans on his payroll for sure, and so I wasn’t going to disabuse anybody of this notion because it was keeping me alive. No one was going to touch me thinking that I was somehow this Putin project. So you let that go. And I had the four of the most beautiful years of my life between 1999 and 2003, and then Putin decided to win his war with the oligarchs.

1:44:13 He arrested the richest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of Yukos, he arrested him, put him on trial, allowed the television cameras to come in and film the richest man in Russia on trial sitting in a cage, and all those other oligarchs watched this and said, I don’t want to be sitting in that cage, and that’s when he fired the shot across the bow and they all went to him and said, what do we have to do? 50 percent. And that was the moment that Putin became the richest man in the world, and that’s the moment that my interests diverged from Putin’s, because I kept on doing the naming and shaming campaigns but now I was going after Putin’s own personal financial interests.

1:44:53 Right, that’s when I was expelled from Russia, and my offices were raided, and this is in ’05, where that happened. And that 50 number again, you’re saying that’s common knowledge, that’s common against the elite oligarchs, etc.? Correct. That it’s just, I get half and you’re going to pay me if and when I need it, and you see him every now and then summon everyone back to Russia and, and there’s been these deals that like he has, there’s a house, a billion dollar house on the Black Sea I’ve seen, and the guy who built the house, in charge of the project, he defected from Russia, he’s like got asylum in Estonia, and he’s got all the papers to show that this was Putin’s house and oligarchs paid for it, and so I mean there’s a lot of these examples out there now.

1:45:36 Okay, and so as soon as Putin did that, no longer is it the enemy of my enemy because now he’s aligned with these oligarchs because for him he wants a piece of the action because that will give him more power, and this is the summary from before where you’re saying this is how he built up to where he is today. Correct. And so you get in this situation and now you’re the enemy. Did you see this coming? No, I didn’t, I was not.

1:46:01 Yeah, so people say why didn’t you see it coming, and to do all the stuff that I was doing in Russia you kind of have to sand down your risk sensors, because if you have a normal risk sensor in your head you would have never done any of the stuff I did to start out with, which is investing in all these crazy companies and just doing a fighting holographs, doing all this kind of, you just wouldn’t have done it, and so because that’s dangerous, everything was dangerous. Do you get threatened when you’re going after these oligarchs? Well, I didn’t because everyone thought that I was Putin’s guy.

1:46:29 Okay. Okay, and at one point you’re talking about you bought some databases on the black market. Well, the way we did our research was, because it was total cowboy Russia, and so we were trying to get this, trying to figure out the stealing at Gazprom, and it turns out that you can get all the information, all government databases were for sale, you could buy them for five bucks at a traffic light. All right, so you didn’t see this coming, and what’s it like to have four and a half billion dollars under management and to be doing good and putting these people in jail?

1:47:00 I mean you said that you could cut the esprit de corps with a knife in your office. It was amazing and it wasn’t the money, it was the getting the bad guys. I mean you know everyone was well paid and everything, but there was nothing better, like for young Russian smart guys, to be making their country a better place and to be doing it in a business context, and you know, when we would expose them and the newspapers would publish the story and something would happen, it was just so exciting and wonderful.

1:47:26 I mean it’s very rare in life to be able to make money and do good. You can either make money and not do good or you can do good and not make any money, but to do both in size, I mean we’re doing great and making a lot of money. Yeah, I mean it’s great to put the bad guys away but four and a half billion dollars goes a long way. Oh, yeah, it was amazing. And were you all living large, were you kind of, you know, well known in Moscow?

1:47:50 And I’m there, that’s not the kind of person I am, I live in a modest apartment and you know, there was none of that fancy stuff. Okay, ’05 happens, you’re coming back to Russia in the airport and you, I’m fine, I was on a weekend trip to London, I arrive at Moscow, you have family now in Moscow, or children, or are you still solo? I was, I had a wife who was in London about to give birth, I’d been in London because she was about to give birth. Okay. And fly back to Moscow and I go to the VIP lounge at Sheremetyevo airport, and in the VIP lounge four heavily armed guys come in, grab me, take me to the basement of the airport, lock me up and keep me there, and I didn’t know whether I was being arrested or deported.

1:48:49 Were you scared? I was terrified. Is that the first incident like that had ever happened? Yep. Other than that you were just the guy that would go in and trade and buy, but no, you know, just a guy flying in and out, never spoken to by the government?

1:49:04 Never spoken to by the government, just all of a sudden I’m being treated like a criminal and I was terrified that I was going to be the next Khodorkovsky, the guy who had been arrested before and they sent him to a gulag somewhere and he got sick and a lot of terrible stuff happened to him, and so I thought they were going to send me out to Siberia. And you’re an American, perfect. Yeah, but they didn’t. The next morning they grabbed me, put me on an airplane and sent me back to London, and I was so relieved that I was not going off to Siberia.

1:49:35 Was that the correct move for them? Anything more extreme would have just brought attention, wrong attention. Well, they had three options. They could have killed me, they could have, which was way too extreme at that point, killing an American, you know, fund manager, that would just not go over well. They could have imprisoned me but had they done that they would have also been hostage to the same situation and every world leader would have come in and had, you know, tried to free Bill Browder, it was a bit awkward, so to get me out of there seemed like at that time, based on their set of risk reward, the best thing they could do.

1:50:04 Okay, so you get out, what happens next? I get out and I say, you know, this is like hardly a sanction compared to what they could do, and so I call up my guys and say, listen, emergency evacuation, grab your wives, grab your kids, first flight out, we need to get everyone out tonight. Everybody comes over who’s not a Russian citizen, everyone comes over, even the Russians? Yeah, we have Russians. Okay, Russia’s particular.

1:50:37 I kept a secretary in the office but that was then, and then I said, once everyone got out I said, let’s sell everything we got in Russia now, let’s do it quickly, let’s do it quietly, let’s get everything out, and amazingly we sold everything and got all of our money out. That’s crazy. People like, people say, well, how is it that they allowed you to do that, and the answer is that these guys were evil but they’re very incompetent at executing their evil.

1:51:05 These are not the best people and they’re not well organized, and so we were able to get our people out and get our money out, and I thought that was the end of the story. It turned out that that was the beginning of the worst nightmare you could ever imagine, and 18 months after I was expelled, 25 police officers raided my office, 25 more right at the office of my American law firm, looking for the stamped seals and certificates for our empty investment holding companies, companies we had cleaned out, right? They found them at the law firm, as I mentioned before, they took those documents, used the documents to fraudulently re-register our companies out of our name into the name of this convicted murderer, and that’s when we got Sergei Magnitsky involved, my lawyer.

1:51:50 And he was always your lawyer in Moscow? He had been doing lots of legal projects for us over the years. Okay, but you never evacuated him because he wasn’t part of your company, he was an outside lawyer. He’s an outside lawyer, you never thought they’d go after outside lawyers? No, they go after our employees, go after my assets, but outside lawyers, that seemed inconceivable, they had never done that in any other situation, and so they do this, they extracted that 230 million dollars just because they could.

1:52:14 And it makes you look bad? Well, no, they did it because they wanted the money. Okay, purely, we paid a lot of taxes, they wanted to steal it. Okay, they stole 230 million dollars of taxes that we paid. Who steals from the government, is the KGB or the mafia stealing from the government?

1:52:28 The government steals from the government, officials steal from the government and Putin gets a cut. Foreign. And so then the story plays on in the most heartbreaking way, which is that we then, Sergei testifies against the officials, they arrest him, they torture him. Why did they make him a scapegoat, why him? Well, he needed somebody, so they always need to wrap this whole, anytime they have crime gets exposed they’ve got to wrap it up properly in a nice little bow and say, look, we found the culprits, and they wanted him to confess so they could then blame it on him.

1:53:02 It’s all perfect, you know, they don’t blame it on the real people, they blame it on the victims, and so he was the guy, and also he was willing to not talk, right? He refused. He refused to, so they were torturing him, they figured a tax lawyer who drinks his Starbucks in the morning and brings it to his cubicle in a Western law firm, he’ll buckle in a week, and they didn’t understand that Sergei Magnitsky was the most principled guy they would ever come across, and for him the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was much worse than anything they could do to him physically.

1:53:38 He was just a man of principle. Did you know that about him? I had no idea, he was my tax lawyer, so yeah, brief encounters with him. Yeah, because of this great smart tax lawyer, right? Really good, he was smart as hell, I had no idea that he was this like saint.

1:53:53 Do you sometimes wish you would have? I wish he would have, I wish he would have compromised, he would still be alive today, but he didn’t, and for that, you know, I mean he died in my stead. There’s a proxy for you. He was my proxy, he’d still be alive today if he wasn’t my lawyer, and that burden sits very heavily on my shoulders. Is that hard, did that take years to kind of come around with or come to terms with?

1:54:18 I haven’t come to terms with it. Okay, that’s why I continue to fight for justice eight and a half years after they killed him. So they bring him in expecting some type of written confession or something, seven days in he doesn’t talk and they decide they’re going to squeeze him, can they just make it harder and harder for him, more and more torture, more and more pressure, what are they doing to him? They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds and left lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation, they put him in cells with no heat and no window panes in December in Moscow, so he nearly froze to death, they put him in a cell with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up, they’d move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night.

1:54:59 The purpose of all this is to get him to withdraw this testimony and to sign this false confession, and he wouldn’t, and they just kept on escalating and escalating, and he got sick, and he got sick and they, and they refused him all medical attention and he probably would have died from his own sickness, maybe, hard to say, you know, pancreatitis and gallstones is the most painful one of the most painful afflictions but it’s not a deadly affliction if they treated right, and they were going to have him, first surgery and it got canceled, and they’re going to happen for surgery, then they abruptly moved him before the surgery because he refused to sign this false confession, and then they just kept on denying him medical attention, and it’s very important something which is that you’re only allowed to be in pre-trial detention for 365 days, for one year, at which point they have to put you on trial or let you go free, and this was 358 days and he was not buckling, he was not going to confess, and so if they put him on trial he was going to tell the whole story and so they had to kill him.

1:56:15 And in the end you’re fairly certain they did, they beat him to death? We know for sure they beat him to death because they, these guys are so stupid, they signed a protocol saying I participated in the beating. Why would they? We have a document, why did they do that? Because it’s like they don’t think there’s any consequence to any of their actions, and they document everything in Russia, it’s like the Gestapo.

1:56:37 And he filed like 400 and some complaints and documented every complaint, he documented everything up until last night of his life, he wrote 450 complaints and it was 358 days in detention, documenting exactly who did what to him, where, how, when and why, and he filed all these things, like once a month he’d hand the stack to his lawyers, his lawyers would take them and file them, they would be ignored or rejected, but we got copies and so as a result of that we have this testimony which is the most granular details of human rights abuse that has come out of Russia in the last 35 years, and because of that we thought for sure they should give us justice in Russia, but they absolutely refused. Will anyone ever be brought to justice for this? Well, we have this, what I call intermediate justice, which is Magnitsky sanctions in the West, which does affect them very profoundly.

1:57:29 We’ve also frozen a lot of assets based on law enforcement cases, but the real justice is going to come when Putin ends, when Putin’s no longer in power, and I believe that when, assuming that a real government comes to Russia after Putin, and that’s a big assumption, but if they have a real overturning, the overthrow of Putin’s government, the very first tribunals of the Putin regime will be the Magnitsky tribunals and then we will get justice and they’ll put Putin on trial for that, somebody on trial, and that’ll happen within the next 10, 20 years. You know, he may last for 20 years as president and then die in the night or he may be overthrown in three months’ time, we don’t know, probably not three months’ time though, we don’t know. And the crazy thing is that by doing what Magnitsky did, by really sticking to his guns and his moral compass, he ended up doing something incredible.

1:58:30 He did, and they will make monuments for Sergei Magnitsky in Russia in a different era in the future for a real patriot. Were you surprised when you got this act pushed through, passed through Congress in the Senate? I mean that’s no easy feat. No, getting a law passed, the probability is lower than winning the lottery. It was only truly only because of the unbelievable power of Sergei Magnitsky’s legacy and his story that this law got passed, and so that’s how that story ended in ’09.

1:59:06 Between then and now, what else has happened? We now have six countries that have Magnitsky Acts: the United States, Canada, Britain and then three Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which means none of these people that were associated with this can go live there when they’re done, and it makes it harder probably for them to hide money in these countries, and also once you’re on one sanctions list then most banks don’t want to touch you, you become a financial pariah, particularly if you’re on the US or Canadian or UK sanctions list. So that’s in place.

1:59:40 We’re trying to get Magnitsky sanctions passed right this year in France, Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands. Ukraine has got one going through their parliament, South Africa’s got one going through their parliament, and it’s turning into a global justice movement, the Magnitsky movement, and it’s not just about Russians who had several rights abuses or human rights abuses, it’s anyone. Correct. And in Sergei Magnitsky’s name there are now sanctions against Chinese human rights abusers, Pakistani human rights abusers, Vietnamese human rights abusers in his name, and so basically we’ve created a new tool, it’s like the new technology for dealing with bad guys: freeze their assets and ban their visas, which everyone takes very seriously, and it’s become, and every human rights organization in the world is now flooding across Ottawa and Washington and London trying to get Magnitsky sanctions against people who are terrorizing their relatives in their countries, and we’ve created this new technology, this is a new tool and it evens the balance.

2:00:42 It used to be that if a dictator dictated in their country and broke the law there’s nothing you could do, now we’ve found, in a globalized world, we found something that you can do, which is take away their ability to use the banking system and travel, and that’s profound. Hit him where it hurts, hit him, hit him where it hurts, in the pocket, and there’s an example of this, when we did this to Iran it really closed things down for them, right? Well, particularly in kleptocracies, going after individuals who are running the kleptocracies, and it doesn’t hurt the people, that’s the beautiful thing, the Russian people who are living in an occupied country are not hurt by these sanctions, it just hurts, you know, the people around Putin, just the top guys, surgically, you know, pinprick precision.

2:01:21 Right, and it could help the people by repatriating money and assets in the long run, so going after their crooks, they love it. Right, and you had seen as a case study when we cut off the SWIFT access to the banking system of Iran, we saw that it really affected things, that brought them right to their knees within like six months. Yeah, it’s funny, right, it reminds me a little bit of how they got Capone, you know, because everybody wanted Capone to fry for his crimes, to get hung or whatever, you know, an eye for an eye, and maybe you felt that way at some point or maybe other people did, but they did it by going after his taxes and hit him.

2:01:56 It’s effectively what we’ve done here. Okay, and so you’re gonna spend the rest of your life working on this? Well, I’m going to spend the rest of my life working on justice because it’s a very meaningful way to spend one’s life. Will justice ever be served in this case? In this case, maybe.

2:02:16 I think that there’s a chance but Putin has to go down for that to happen. Yeah. Okay, and you deliberately keep yourself in the public eye for your own safety? Well, basically if I try to disappear from the public eye, if I was no longer relevant, it would be a less costly assassination than if I am in the public eye. It’s real talk.

2:02:37 Yep, it’s a real thing. Have you studied the art of martyrdom and the art of these things, because this is fascinating stuff that’s repeated itself in human history over and over again. Well, I don’t plan to be a martyr, I plan to stay alive, so I am very clever about tools to stay alive, and so for them it’s all about that choice they made when they deported me in ’05. It’s like what’s the upside, to use a trading term, what’s the downside? In that case, killing Bill didn’t make sense, and right now with the current climate and where you’re at, it still doesn’t make sense.

2:03:13 Well, Kelly, I’ve been alive for more than eight years, they’d love to kill me if they could get away with it. Okay, that’s that, but they don’t want to get caught because being caught, there will be a huge political price to pay. And how would that manifest, do you think? Well, if they shot me as I was walking out of the studio tonight on the street and it became known that they shot me, which it probably would, then you know I’m well known in every capital of the world, there’d be hell to pay, there’d be huge sanctions against Russia, there’d be all sorts of other stuff, so they don’t want that.

2:03:49 So you’re going to continue doing this. So what they’d like is if they could find a plausibly deniable way of killing me, they would kill me. And is there anything plausible at this point? I mean dying of natural causes, they could kill me with poison, they could kill me with car accidents, there’s lots of ways they could kill me, but I’ve got to look at avoiding those types of situations. Okay, and what is your immediate outlook like, I mean what are some of the things that you’re focused on doing?

2:04:16 You know, there’s your book, there’s a potential movie about your book, which in a weird way might also help you survive with a profile. Can you talk about that? Well, we’re hoping to get this movie made, so you know, a book, how many people read books? In my case maybe three quarters of a million people have read my book, which is a lot of people, but not that many people. If you have a Hollywood movie, you know, like The Hunt for Red October, you know, tens of millions of people could watch that, and so in terms of telling Sergei’s story I’d like to have a Hollywood movie.

2:04:50 Okay, what do you make of what’s happened with the Olympics recently, in the doping, and did you see this movie Icarus? Of course I saw the movie. They asserted in the movie that, you know, Putin, based on the power he got from all those gold medals in Sochi, first of all he rolled the dice to actually have his athletes on the steroids during the Olympics, which apparently had never happened before, they’d always cycled them off, but he wanted as many medals as possible, you know, and then of course they said that he later invaded Ukraine.

2:05:20 What was your take on the doping scandal, Putin’s relation, and even the movie, because you’re quite an expert here? Well, it’s obvious that Putin cheats in every different venue. He cheats in sports, he cheats in politics, he cheats in finance, he cheats in crime, he cheats in international relations, and this is no different than anything else, it’s just the cynical criminal attitude, and the cheating goes right to the very top, and I know Bryan Fogel, who’s the director of that movie, and he actually read my book while he was making the movie, it was one of the things that inspired him to like be, you know, this hero whistleblower with Grigory Rodchenkov, and it’s really an important piece of work he did because it shows without any doubt these people cheat, and we’re coming up to the Academy Awards, I hope that they win one because it would really be an important message.

2:06:10 Do you think the public understood what happened there, do you think the reaction was less or more than you thought, because when you see that movie it seems like it’s just all blown up and obvious? Well, I mean nobody knew how bad it was until they watched that movie. Yeah, in the same way no one knew how bad, you know, Putin is as a criminal until you read my book. Right, and yet when you see the Olympics in Korea the Russian athletes are still there, there’s no flag, do you think that they got off easy?

2:06:35 Yeah, apparently they’ve been reinstated, yeah, because the IOC is just as dirty as the, the IOC is dirtier than anything, I mean it’s beyond belief, right, because they’re getting money from somewhere, and from you could be assured that there’s some type of deep corruption in that organization. Yeah, it’s really sad to see when you see the movie and the New York Times articles and everything and then you see them retreating on that, and everyone believes the Olympics is some, you know, holier-than-thou institution and you realize it’s subject to the same corruption as so many other things. Sad.

2:07:07 What did you see in that movie that I might not have seen, including Grigory, is it Gregory? Yeah. What did you see, because you spent time in Russia and you probably saw things I didn’t see? You know, I mean I just felt like it was a total validation of my whole thesis, which is that it’s much worse than anyone thinks. Yeah, but I didn’t need to see anything else.

2:07:27 I mean I just saw what everybody saw, but it completely, I was totally moved by it because I thought, you know, here’s another absolutely clear-cut example of the same exact thing. Historians will tell you that whenever Putin leaves power and it goes back to some type of a more, I don’t know, democratic place to be, that within 50 years or 100 years it’s just going to happen again, it’s a geopolitical issue in Russia because of the way it’s spread out, the way it’s set up, the history, everything, the culture. You know, I think that’s a very, very cynical way to look at it.

2:08:02 I think every place has the potential to be good and it’s all depending on who’s running it and what kind of leaders they have. Okay, tell me a bit about Bill Browder, how do you wake up every day and stay focused, how do you not worry, okay, about yourself but, you know, your family, how do you stay focused on this job? You know, my mission is completely overwhelming, and overwhelming in a good way, and then I I wake up every day and say, okay, what am I trying to do today, and how do I, what’s the most important thing I’m trying to do today, what’s the second most important thing, what’s the third most important thing, and then I go out and I try to do that, and I’m never, I wake up happy every day.

2:08:49 Did you always wake up happy every day? No, I’m much happier now on this mission than I ever was as a business person. Strangest thing I observe about you is that it’s almost like you needed this shift, and I might have even argued that if this hadn’t happened you might have burned out investing within five years. I mean investing was a great business and a great fun occupation but it wasn’t meaningful like this is, and I don’t begrudge anyone who’s an investor, but I found my calling, I found my meaning and this is what I do and I feel good about doing it.

2:09:23 Do you have daily practices, do you meditate, do you wake up early, do you train? I try to stay in shape but you know, as best I can as a middle-aged man, but I don’t do any meditating or any of that kind of stuff. If I were to ask a bunch of your friends what is Bill’s superpower that allows him to just get things done, because you have a history in your life of getting things done, I mean 29 and pushing through a lot of this negativity, not leaving Moscow when everything went down the toilet in ’98, a lot of people would have walked away from that, what would they say, Bill, is it, what is it about him?

2:09:57 They would say that I’m the most tenacious person they’ve ever come across, you know, tenacity kind of wins the day. Got that from Grandpa? You know, I don’t know, it’s interesting, I mean if you look through generations of my family, my grandfather was the chairman of the Communist Party, my father was a famous, you know, award-winning mathematician, I did what I did, I actually have a 21-year-old son who’s turning the law upside down by artificial intelligence, using artificial intelligence to replace lawyers.

2:10:30 You know, something genetic, I don’t know exactly how to analyze it, but something like that, so it’s in the, it’s in the family somehow. And hearing the story of your mom and your dad it also sounds like it comes from both sides. I think so, not just the male side. Do you think about your family or your friends, do you worry about them? I try to protect everybody as best I can.

2:10:51 I’m not on Facebook, for example, you know, on Facebook it defines who all your friends are, I would never want to put any of my friends at risk like that, but. And you probably keep your schedule to yourself and your locations to yourself, and I wasn’t surprised when you didn’t want us to send you a car, so I guess is that all basics you learned, did anyone teach you that stuff? It’s common sense. Okay, what scares you? What scares me is this wave of evil and anti-democracy and untruthfulness that’s sort of going across the world, you know, in Hungary and Turkey and in Russia of course and there’s tendencies in America and it scares me that we could end up in a world where truth no longer matters, people are kind of going the other way, getting away from that.

2:11:52 And what do you see in Trump that I might not see and how does his future affect your future, besides making the country extremely divisive, and I didn’t even understand that, when my mom visits from California she’s like, it’s really bad, people kind of go after each other, and did you vote for him, and then she’s like, never seen it that bad. It’s hard to get that impression from London but it is bad, it’s very bad. You know, I don’t know what to make of him, it’s a it’s very frustrating to watch, you know, a lot of things that, you know, the all this tweeting and so on, it’s not easy to get comfortable with because it means the office of the presidency.

2:12:37 Well, it also, you know, the way that I bring up my children is not how he’s behaving with the country, you know, leaders should, like, you know, not be vindictive, should be gracious, you know, I have a lot of values that don’t correspond with that. And him questioning the news and fake news doesn’t necessarily do your cause any good? Well, it doesn’t really have any, I mean he’s not involved in my cause, but just the idea that there’s no objective truth I think is very frustrating.

2:13:09 Does he get reelected? Who knows, I think yes is the unfortunate answer. What was best day of your life and the worst day of your life? Well, the worst day of my life is easy, that was the day that Sergei Magnitsky was, that I learned that Sergei Magnitsky was killed, on November 17th, 2009, at 7:25 a.m. The best day of my life was, well, we had a lot of good days, but I had a pretty good day last October, I took Sergei Magnitsky’s family to Ottawa right after the Canadians passed the Magnitsky Act, and we were in the Parliament and the man who had introduced the Magnitsky Act into Parliament gave us a short speech and then we were standing in the gallery, the balcony gallery, and he pointed towards us and the entire house stood up and gave the Magnitsky family a standing ovation.

2:14:15 That really moved me. You’re doing some big things here, Bill, you know, I mean big stuff, you know, it’s hard to get this stuff done. You know, you know more than anyone. Yeah. How does his family feel about everything?

2:14:28 Well, of course they’re highly traumatized by what happened, but you know, I think they feel good knowing that the world has recognized their Sergei’s sacrifice and is honoring Sergei, I think that that’s a small consolation to a horrible, horrible tragedy. How did you get them out of Russia? They weren’t preventing anyone coming out, we got them out, they’re here now, they live here again. It’s fascinating how maybe different offices don’t always communicate, even getting Grigory out and the movie seemed a little too easy.

2:15:03 Yeah, yeah, but they’re a bit incompetent about all this stuff. Right, right, yeah, I guess that makes sense if you know anything about governments, but it’s just, yeah, it’s interesting how it’s kind of a sieve in that in that sense. What keeps you awake at night? What keeps me awake at night? Well, I’m not a heavy sleeper generally, you know, there’s, everything keeps me awake at night, as I’m sort of, as all different projects are ricocheting off each other in different time zones and so on and so forth.

2:15:36 It’s a, okay, and figuratively, does anything? I don’t think that you know, I mean I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about a lot of stuff. I mean if I did I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing because there’d be too much to worry about. Right, team mindset to learn from. Most influential person in your life?

2:16:07 Sergei Magnitsky, by far, he changed my life. Right, okay, Bill, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if I could give you a magic phone and you could make a call to the 20-year-old Bill Browder and give that young man a bit of advice, I guess he’s at Hyde Park, right, in Chicago at this point, studying economics maybe, right? What would you tell him? Well, yeah, so that’s a little younger, but I would say don’t go to Russia when you’re at Stanford.

2:16:36 Stay in Silicon Valley, do business with nice people, look for your adventure somewhere else other than business. But would you really say that to him? Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely say that to him. I don’t know if he would have listened. Do you value the adventure you went on?

2:16:59 That was a spectacular adventure and very exciting, and I’m sure you read my book, you know what I’m talking about, it was, but it came at such an enormous terrible cost. Not worth it? No, even if you’re doing these great things with the Magnitsky Act, I’d rather not have the need to do these great things, because everything didn’t happen the way it happened. Okay, second part of this question, best advice you’ve ever received, your whole life, who did that come from and what would they have said?

2:17:31 Maybe it was father, did you have much exposure to your grandfather? And then he died when I was very young. Right. It was actually the best advice that I received was from my boss at Salomon Brothers, who said, and it was a bit of market advice but I think it applies to everything, which is, there was something going on in the market, I was all very agitated, having all sorts of plans, and he said, Bill, sometimes the best thing to do is just nothing. Amen to that.

2:18:01 Some wisdom on those trading floors. Last question is to that 20-year-old that’s watching this now, listening to us, what’s the thing that they can do to make a big difference to, they’ve listened to us, they’ve heard this story, they know what’s going on, people that are in Russia watching this, people all around the world, what’s the thing they can do to make sure that this man didn’t die in vain? I think the main thing that people should come away from my story and in the Icarus story and other stories like it is to understand that Vladimir Putin is a very dangerous man and not accept any of the sort of conventional wisdom of trying to constantly trying to rehabilitate him and to make him into a sort of manageable character, he’s not, and if everybody around the world sort of comes to that conclusion solidly then our leaders won’t make the stupid mistake of sort of continuing to capitulate and appease Putin, which will lead us to ruin in the end if we do.

2:19:09 Throw away the reset button forever, that mentality is completely wrong. It’s wrong and lost, right? Bill, thank you for coming on, I’ve been very much looking forward to this. You know, I like the fact that we can really tell your whole story, that people can really see what this whole thing is all about. You know, you’re very brave to continue this and just to continue doing this, I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but it’s also great to see you with this kind of light inside of you, that you feel like you’re on the right road to doing some great things, and at first I didn’t understand that this act was beyond Russia, but now that I see it is, it’s a fascinating tool, it’s a total world game changer to be able to even the scales between justice and injustice with a punishment, a sanction, that can be done against bad guys wherever they come from.

2:20:04 Yeah, and it’s surgical, like you said, because you can’t try governments, that never works, and it’s new technology, that’s what you said. Yes. And that’s a fascinating way to look at this and that’s exactly what it is. Yeah. On London Real we say it’s about the journey.

2:20:19 Bill, be safe, thank you, please continue doing your message and thank you for sharing today. Thank you. All right, my pleasure.