Bill Browder on Putin, the War in Ukraine and the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign October 2022

Our Guest this evening is no stranger to facing these sorts of challenges some of you will remember him from one of our prior events in Napa California he was the largest foreign investor in Russia up until 2005. he's an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and he's dedicated his life to exposing corruption in Russia he is the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management he's the head of the global magnitsky Justice campaign and he is the author of two phenomenal books red notice and freezing order please welcome my friend Bill Browder thank you [Applause] [Music] good evening so Kevin invited me to Napa Valley in July of 2017. um to speak to you and I think there are some Veterans of that speech [Applause] and it was really um it was a wonderful event and a wonderful venue and and uh there was only one problem which was that I wasn't sure what to wear um because it was really really hot in Napa and so um I uh normally would wear a jacket um whatever but I shed shed my jacket left in the room and just went out there um and then what happens is you know we were in this beautiful setting um sort of overlooking the vineyard and and um we were and it was like my moment to speak was just as the sun had said and it started freezing and I was just wearing my shirt and I would have been a little sweaty and I was freezing and so um I'm delighted to say that that when coming here it's freezing from the from the get-go I was really I'm really happy to be back and Kevin thank you for for being a friend and and Ally um so as Kevin mentioned there was two books that I've written my first one was read notice and I wrote red notice well I should say that I had never intended to write any book um I was a hedge fund manager in Russia it wasn't I never win College wanted to be an author um I never had written anything longer than a four-page monthly investment summary and but I had a really important story to tell which was the story of of um uh my my lawyer Sergey magnitsky how he was murdered I was talking about the magnitsky ACT which was some justice for him and it was it was sort of well structured for a book it was the transition the character transition from a capitalist to a human rights activist there was a very good narrative Arc it was all it all fit perfectly into a book and and I wrote it and and um it it was remarkable how many people liked it and how well it did and and uh very unusual actually for someone like me to be able to write a book and and it's like lightning striking and and uh and I thought you know I got lucky to write a good book and one and done but after and the book ended with the passage of the magnitsky act and and um and afterwards so much crazy stuff happened um that it really felt important to continue to tell the story that Putin had killed more people he tried to kill other people connected to me he got involved in trying to manipulate the U.S political process he did all sorts of stuff and it was really important for me to write a second book and and um so in July of 2018 I sat down to write the second book and I I normally live in London but I have a house in Aspen Colorado which was where I was in July of 2018. and so I set up my computer in my dining room and I told all my children to stay out of the dining room for the next four hours I um turned off the internet on my computer so I wasn't going to get any distracted distractions from emails and and all this kind of stuff I put my phone on the silent face down and I stared at an empty screen and um it was really intimidating because there was no way I I thought I could ever write a second book as good as the first book and I didn't even know how to start and I started typing and I deleted and I typed some more and read it and deleted I went through this process for about an hour and I finally gave up I couldn't stand not looking at my phone so I turned it over and there was 176 new messages that it came in in the last hour and the first one read bill are you watching Helsinki with a question mark and an exclamation point the next one had some expletives which I won't repeat the third one said if you need a place to hide out I've got a place in the mountains where you can hide out and what they were all talking about was that there was this Summit that was taking place between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Helsinki uh and the summit was the first time that these two presidents had met formally it was taking place on a Monday on the previous Friday Robert Mueller the special counsel who was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election had indicted 12 Russian Military Intelligence Officers and um and so the obvious question that was going to come up at the summit was what was going to happen with this indictment so the two presidents Putin and Trump go into a meeting and it was a secret meeting nobody um else was attending there was no Secretary of State no National Security adviser no note taker um nobody or I should say nobody from the American side it was just Donald Trump Vladimir Putin and one of Putin's guys and they effectively had a secret Summit for four and a half hours nobody to this day nobody knows exactly what took place in that room for four and a half hours so after they're done with this secret Summit two leaders emerge and they um walk up to the to their respective podiums at the press conference post Summit press conference and Putin is looking very self-confident he's standing tall he's he's beaming self-confidence Trump is kind of looking a little punched in not good they go up to their respective lectures and and they get into the Press questioning and and um about three questions in the Reuters journalist raises his hand and and he directs his question to Putin and he said Mr President are you going to hand over these 12 Russian Military Intelligence Officers Putin smiled he'd been obviously waiting for this question and preparing for it all weekend he said yes is is entirely possible that we would hand over these individuals but we would expect some good will and reciprocity from our American friends and specifically we would want them to hand over Bill Browder me so um that wasn't very pleasant I mean of the seven billion people on the planet I was the one name that came up in this press conference it was unpleasant but it wasn't unexpected Putin had been chasing me around since the passage of the magnitsky act with arrest warrants with Interpol red notices with death threats with kidnapping threats with all sorts of other nastiness he had brought me up on many other occasions publicly and so I kind of I almost kind of expected it but what was unexpected was what happened next about three questions later another journalist raises his hand and he directs the question to Donald Trump and he says Mr President what do you think of Putin's offer and Trump without missing a beat said I think it's an incredible offer that was unexpected to have the most powerful man in the Free World offering to hand me over to a dictator who wants to kill me was really really awful so the summit ends the two presidents go in their respective planes at the Helsinki Airport and I'm expecting within any minute that the U.S um or the the U.S the Trump's advisor one of his advisors would gather up the Press Corps on Air Force One or getting onto the airplane and clarify that what the president meant was that it was an incredibly bad offer or or or something like that but there was total silence so they get on their plane Air Force One they fly back to Washington and the next morning my wife shakes me awake really early and she says Bill you've got to see this and she had been up for about an hour and she had been downloading uh the Russian press and apparently Putin who's normally considers himself to be this master negotiator had realized overnight that he made a terrible error in his negotiation the Americans were asking for 12. and he had only asked for one that's really stupid and so he overnight he added 11 other Americans that he wanted handed over he wanted the former U.S ambassador to Russia Mike McFall who was a friend of mine who had helped me with the magnitsky ACT he wanted a guy named Kyle Parker who was the chief of staff to the Congressional committee that wrote the magnitsky ACT he wanted three acting Department of Homeland Security officers who were investigating money laundering in America connected to the magnitsky case basically everyone on Putin's list with someone who I knew who I'd worked with who had helped me with my campaign for justice for my murdered lawyer Sergey magnitsky now it's one thing to ask for a private individual to be handed over and pretty distasteful but it's another thing entirely for Putin to ask for a bunch of U.S current or former U.S government officials to be handed over I mean who would ever join the government if just by doing your job making U.S policy some future president could hand you over to a murderous dictator that wants to kill you I mean that was just this insanity and so it would have seemed like within moments when Putin made that announcement the U.S would have firmly pushed back on that and said under no circumstances but there was more silence One Day of Silence two days of Silence on the third day I was giving an interview and I've been giving interviews all throughout this time everyone wanted to know who's this bill Browder that I was going to tell them on the third day I was giving an interview with Fox and I should point out there was there was no difference between Fox and MSNBC or anybody else and the entire press Corps was nothing partisan about it it was just obviously unreasonable what was going on and so I'm getting giving an interview with Fox and they cut me off halfway into the interview and they say um we're gonna have to hold it right there there's a press conference taking place in the white house right now and we'll come back to you so I've got my earpiece in and I'm listening to this press conference Sarah Huckabee Sanders she was the um president's spokeswoman and the lady from the New York Times raises her hand Maggie Haberman and she says um is the president planning to hand over Bill Browder Mike McFall and the 10 other Americans and this would have been the moment the exact moment that they should have pushed back and she said well the president is considering Putin's request and his Consulting his advisors we'll let you know everybody I and everybody else was in complete shock at this point because like what in the world is going on this is insanity and and again no partisanship whatsoever Republicans Democrats everyone this is outrageous unreasonable and the Senate decided the next day to have a vote on whether to hand us over or not and obviously no Senator was going to want to hand us over and um the vote was going to take place at 4 pm that day and as the Senators start making public statements about how unreasonable this whole thing is and how they're gonna of course vote not to hand us over the White House finally comes to its senses and about 3 P.M an hour before the vote Trump's issue is a very Meek statement saying while he understood that Putin's request was very sincere he would be unable to honor it at this time an hour later the Senate votes 98-0 not to hand us over so when I say I'm delighted to be here tonight I really am delighted to be here tonight so how did I end up in this mess and some of you have heard this part of the story but for those who haven't I think it's important to share it I come from an unusual American Family my grandfather was a labor union organizer from Wichita Kansas and he was so good at organizing the union that he ended up getting invited to Russia in 1927. the Communists said if you like labor unionism you're going to love communism come and check it out so he goes to Moscow he meets a Russian girl who becomes my grandmother my father is born there and five years later in 1932 they returned to America and he becomes chairman of the Communist Party of the United States of America so he becomes the head of the American Communist Party he runs for president in 1936-1940 on the Communist ticket against Roosevelt he's imprisoned in 1941 pardoned by Roosevelt in 42 kicked out of the Communist Party in 1945 for being too much of a capitalist and then viciously persecuted in the 1950s for being a communist this is my family Legacy I'm born I was born in 1964. I'm 58 years old and when I was going through my teenage rebellion I decided that I needed to find a way of rebelling from this family of communists and I came up with a perfect way of doing it which was to put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist um I became a capitalist I went to Stanford Business School and I graduated business school in 1989 which was the year that the Berlin Wall came down and as I was trying to figure out what to do with my life and my career I had an epiphany which is that my grandfather was the biggest communist in America I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe and that's what I set out to do so um uh my first I had several jobs I was at the Boston Consulting Group first in their East European practice area they sent me out to a little town in Poland to advise on a bus Factory that was going bankrupt and um I couldn't save the bus Factory but I noticed one day that my interpreter was carrying around a um a newspaper under his arm and on the newspaper there was a bunch of financial figures and I said what's that and he said it's the very first privatization in Poland and I said oh that's interesting can you explain it to me and so we sat down in his office and he um we started going through the numbers the first one was the number of shares outstanding of one of the companies that was being privatized next number was the price of the shares and I did the math and that was 80 million dollars multiplied the shares outstanding by the price and then I said what's this line and um he said this is uh net profit last year's net profit I said no no just just read it he said I said net profit that was 160 million dollars so you don't have to be like uh you know some kind of financial genius to know that if if you can buy a company for half of one year's earnings so that's probably um probably a good deal I mean it's different than this whole Venture Capital thing that you guys do which where your earnings are out in the future but um so this this is what half of one year's earnings and I thought I didn't know anything about investing I'd never invested a penny before that but I thought you know this is this isn't this what you're like this is why I went to business school to like do this and so I had a total Savings of two thousand dollars and I um took my savings down to the post office um I converted it to polish zlati and I invested in this uh in these privatizations in my two thousand dollar investment went up 10 times and um uh and that's when when you have an in one year and when you have a 10 bagger um it releases a certain chemical in your stomach and you want to repeat the experience and so I knew exactly what I wanted to do and and that was to be an investor in Eastern Europe I then end up at Solomon Brothers um as an investment banker in the at the very beginning of the Russian privatization program and at Solomon Brothers my very first assignment was to advise a fishing fleet located in romansk Russia which is a couple hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle on their privatization so the head of the fishing fleet um takes me out to see one of the boats and it's this enormous vessel it's like 400 feet long there's all these nets on the top where they catch the fish and then the fish get processed throughout this throughout this boat and at the bottom they actually have canning machines putting them into cans and so it's not just a fishing boat it's ocean going Factory very impressive I asked him how much does one of these things cost uh 20 million dollars new how many do you have in your Fleet a hundred so 20 million times a hundred two billion what's the age of your Fleet seven years now I don't know anything about fishing or shipping but I figure that makes it half depreciated so billion dollars worth of ships and I had been hired um by the management of this fishing fleet to advise them on whether to exercise their legitimate right under the privatization program of Russia to buy 51 percent and I asked him at what price is the government selling 51 percent and he said two and a half million dollars let me just repeat the math there's a billion dollars worth of ships and you can buy 51 for two and a half million dollars so um uh if if that chemical had been released in my stomach before now I was really like wanting to like repeat the exercise and this was much better than than the situation in Poland and um and I was wondering whether this was something just going on in the fishing fishing industry or the shipping or I don't know what and it turns out that this was going on across the board all over Russia in order to go from communism to capitalism they decided to give everything away for free to create a bunch of capitalists and so I ended up leaving Solomon Brothers setting up an investment fund called The Hermitage fund moving to Moscow in 1996 and starting to invest and um and it went unbelievably well um I started with with almost no capital and it and again it wasn't like what like like the funds you have here which where you'd like raise fund one or two or three or four this was an open-ended fund where people could put their money in on a monthly basis and everyone my first month I think I was up 45 then and so people wanted to put it in and put their money in next month is up 36 percent and um by the time uh uh I was I I I guess by 18 18 months in I was up 865 percent um and I'd gone from 25 million dollars to a billion dollars of assets under management which was just an enormous this was back in the days when a billion dollars was real money and and this was it was just an enormous amount of money in an even and more enormous amount of money for Russia and um and then what happened was in 1998 the Russian government defaulted on their debt and they devalued their currency by 75 percent and I lost um 900 million dollars of my billion dollars that I was managing when I went down 90 percent which was horrifying because I was the face of the Russian stock market on the way up and I became the face of the collapse on the way down and I was even more horrified because I convinced all these skeptical investors to give me money to manage and I lost them 90 of their money and so I was determined to try to get their money back um but at that moment in time I discovered something really terrible which is that the oligarchs these um people we all now know of who owned in most cases between 51 and 96 of these companies these oligarchs had behaved themselves up until that moment in time because they wanted access to Wall Street they're all these fancy Bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley who were running around Moscow with their Hermes ties telling all these Bankers that they could get money from Wall Street under the one condition that they didn't rip off their minority investors and before before this crash the Holograms were like you know I don't know if I can do that but you know I'd really like free money and so a lot of them behaved themselves and didn't rip off their minority investors and so um but after the crash after everything went down 90 percent and after the currency was devalued none of them had any incentive whatsoever to behave themselves and there's never been any disincentive against misbehavior and so the oligarchs embarked on an orgy of stealing which has been unprecedented in the history of of business they were doing asset stripping transfer pricing embezzlement dilution everything on an industrial scale and so I decided that um not not as a good investment strategy but as my only survival strategy they were going to try to steal the last 10 cents on the dollar that I had and um I needed to to stop them and so I decided to try to stop them from stealing and there wasn't exactly like I had a lot of tools at my disposal you couldn't go to the regulator and say these guys are stealing because The Regulators were all cut in on the action couldn't go to the police couldn't go to the parliament couldn't go anywhere really the only thing that I could do was I could research how they were doing the stealing and then publicized the research now you may think to yourself well how is it possible to research stealing in Russia it's a very opaque place it's a very secretive place well it turns out that it isn't Russia is actually an incredibly transparent place for a reason that you would never expect so Russia is the most bureaucratic country in the world if you go to the bathroom you've got to write your name on the sheet outside the bathroom and then some Ministry some guy in some Ministry is collecting all that information and entering in on a database and they're doing it in bathrooms they're doing it oil wells and they're doing it at tax registry they're doing it everywhere everything is is the most bureaucratic country in the world and everybody all the information is being collected by these Ministries and the people in the Ministries are paid almost nothing and so in order for them to survive they have to sell the information and so if if I was having a me if we were in Russia and I was having a meeting with any of you and and I wanted to like do a bit of due diligence in advance of the meeting um I could find I could buy your bank statement find out how much money you have in your account I could buy your medical records figure out if you have any embarrassing diseases um I could find out where you've traveled to I could find out who you've been calling on your mobile phone I could find out anything same thing is true with these companies and so we were actually able to put together the most unbelievable dossiers of corruption and theft at Big Russian companies like gas prom spare Bank unified Energy Systems and then I would take this research and I would share it with journalists from The Wall Street Journal the financial times New York Times Washington Post business week and the journalists loved me because I was saving them all sorts of research and work that they were that they needed to do and I started publicizing these scandals just at the same time that Vladimir Putin had come to power now Vladimir Putin then was a different guy than he is now I mean he might have been the same individual but he wasn't this tyrannical self-confident vicious man he was this very little man who didn't have power at all the presidency all the powers of the president had effectively been usurped by these oligarchs and so his big job when he first came into office was to try to return some of the powers of the presidency that had been lost and he so he was fighting with the same guys I was fighting with the oligarchs were stealing power from him at the same time as they were stealing money for me and so when I started to publicize these scandals Putin would step in and he would do things like using the state's shares to fire the CEO or to issue a presidential decree to do something or to change the the law in some way and as a result of that the value I went from a bill I went from 25 million to a billion down to 100 million and and as Putin was going through this exercise and as I was naming and shaming I went from 100 million to four and a half billion dollars it's up 45 times from the bottom of the market and obviously I felt pretty good about myself as a fund manager um and and uh and I felt pretty good about Putin actually too because you know here was this guy who was like I was you know we were on the same side trying to go after the bad guys and you know I mean I had the best job in the world making money and doing good in the same job but it turned out that Putin's interest um was not necessarily to clean up Russia he just wanted to get rid of the guys who were he was fighting with the oligarchs and so one day at the end of 2003 he decided to win his war with the oligarchs by arresting a man named Michael hortikovsky who was the uh owner of yukos the oil company he surrounded him he surrounded his private jet in Siberia arrested him brought him back to Moscow put him on trial and allow the television cameras to come into the courtroom and film the richest man in Russia on trial sitting in a cage now imagine you're the 17th richest guy in Russia and you see a guy far richer far more powerful far smarter than you sitting in a cage what's your natural reaction you don't want to sit in that cage yourself and one by one by one these guys went to Putin instead of Vladimir what do we have to do so we don't sit in a cage and he said Real Simple 50 percent not 50 for the Russian government or 50 for the presidential administration of Russia 50 for Vladimir Putin and that was the moment that Putin became the richest man in the world and that was the moment that um my interests and his diverged in November of 2005 so this is about a year and a half after this whole thing I was flying back to Moscow from a weekend trip to London and I was arrested at the border I was detained for 15 hours at the Sherman airport Detention Center I wasn't sure whether I was going to Siberia or being deported and thankfully the next morning they put me on an aeroflot flight sent me back to London and subsequently declared me a threat to National Security of Russia now this is a big shock um I was a specialist investing in Russia I had a four and a half billion dollar fund not being allowed to get into Russia definitely wasn't going to be good for business um but I understood when when the when the Russians turn on you they don't tend to do so mildly they do so with extreme prejudice and being kicked out is a pretty mild sanction so I said to myself what else can they do they could arrest my people um or they could seize my assets and so I organized an emergency evacuation of all my staff and I was able to get all of them and all of their family members safely out of Russia and once everybody was out we then quickly and quietly liquidated our portfolio in Russia and we got all of our money out safe I breathe a big sigh of relief I dusted off my hands I said maybe I'll write a book about this someday time to invest elsewhere I set up a new investment fund I thought if I can invest in Russia I could handle any emerging market after that I set up this emerging market fund started investing in other parts of the world and about 18 months after that I'm having a board meeting for my new Fund in Paris and I get this frantic call from the one employee I've left in Russia who is a secretary who is the lone person Manning my empty office in Moscow who I never spoke to because I didn't think I I kept the office in case the storm ever blew over but I never thought that there was no reason to speak to her because this is just no nothing going on there and she's in hysterics and she said there's 25 police officers in the office right now drilling the safe and reading the office what should I do and I said I don't know let me call up our lawyer so I have an American lawyer in Moscow who I used for all my legal stuff and I call him up he sounds pretty distracted when I get him on the phone and I tell him there's 25 police officers in my office and he says there's 25 police officers in my office looking for your documents 50 police officers raiding both of our offices looking for the stamp seals and certificates for our investment holding companies which at this point we're empty they find them at the law firm's office and they seize those documents and the next thing we know we no longer own our investment holding companies they have been fraudulently re-registered using the documents seized by the police registered into the name of a man who had been convicted of manslaughter and let out of jail early by the police now there was no Financial loss for me because we had to sold everything the year before but I'm thinking to myself if the police are working stealing companies and doing identity theft you're working with murderers I'm going to be walking through Frankfurt airport one day and there's going to be some uh arrest warrant for me I need to stop this and so I go out and hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia a young man named Sergey magnitsky um to help me figure this whole thing out to stop it I send him out to investigate he investigates and he comes back and he says I figured out what's going on and it's not pretty he said there's two parts of the scam the first part was they wanted to steal all of your money but it failed because you took your money out he said however the second part succeeded and what he explained was that when we sold everything after I'd been kicked out the um we had a profit of a billion dollars and we paid to the Russian government 230 million dollars of capital gains tax and what Sergey had figured out was that the people who stole our companies went to the tax authorities and they said there was a mistake made in the previous year's tax filing these companies didn't earn a billion dollars they earned zero and they came up with a complicated way of explaining this therefore the 230 million dollars of taxes was paid in error and we'd like that money back it was the largest tax refund in the history of Russia they applied for it on the 23rd of December 2007. and it was approved and paid out the next day so if if I had overpaid legitimately overpaid five thousand dollars of taxes in 2006 I'd still be waiting for that refund right now but they were able to get a 230 million dollar tax refund in one day on Christmas Eve the largest tax refund in the history of Russia now Sergey and I were convinced that Putin is a nationalist and a patriot um he might be a bad guy but he would he allow his own officials to steal 230 million dollars of their money this was not my money this was tax money that that their own tax money and we were sure that if if if this was just brought to the attention of the right people the top people that the good guys would get the bad guys and so we wrote criminal complaints to every different branch of uh Russian law enforcement um I gave interviews to all the TV radio newspapers explaining the scam Sergey gave sworn testimony to the um uh to the Russian State investigative committee their version of the FBI and we sat back and waited for the good guys to get the bad guys well it turns out that in Putin's Russia there are no good guys and five weeks after Sergey testified the same police officers he testified against came to his home on the 24th of November 2008 they arrested him they threw him in pre-trial detention and then they began to torture him to get him to withdraw his testimony 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 and Moscow so he nearly froze to death they put him in cells with no toilet just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up they'd move from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night and the purpose of all this was to get him to withdraw his testimony against the corrupt police officers and they wanted to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the 230 million dollars and he did so in my instruction and they figure here's a guy who wears a red tie and a blue suit he goes into a fancy American Law Firm every morning he buys his Starbucks Coffee he'll Buckle within a week but they completely misjudged Sergey magnitsky Sergey was a man of incredible Integrity for him the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more upsetting than the physical pain they were subjecting him to and he refused and as a result the torture and the pressure got worse and worse and about six months into this his health started to break down he ended up um uh getting terrible pains in his stomach he lost 20 kilos he was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones and needing an operation which was scheduled for the first of August 2009. a week before the operation they come to him again again ask him to sign a false confession again he refuses in retaliation they move him from the prison that had a medical facility to a Maximum Security Prison called buchirka which is considered to be one of the most horrific and most awful prisons in Russia and most significantly for Sergey at buchirka they have no medical facilities and at butyrica's Health completely breaks down he goes into a terrible downward spiral constant agonizing pain he's desperate for medical attention he and his lawyers write 20 different desperate requests for medical attention to every different branch of the Criminal Justice System and every one of those requests was either ignored or denied in writing on the night of November 16 2009 Sergey magnitsky went into critical condition on that night the butyrica authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore so they put him in an ambulance and sent him across town to a different prison that had a medical wing when he arrived there instead of putting him in the emergency room they put him in an isolation cell they chained him to a bed and ate Riot guards with rubber batons beat him until he died that was November 16 2009 13 years ago Sergey magnitski was 37 years old he left a wife and two children I got the news the very next day and it was the most horrific traumatic heartbreaking life-changing news I could have ever gotten Sergey magnitski was killed because he worked for me he was killed as my proxy and he'd still be alive today if he hadn't been my lawyer and so when I was finally able to clear the fog of heartbreak and Hysteria to think clearly I made a vow to his memory to myself and to his family that I was going to put aside everything else that I was doing and devote all of my time all of my energy and all my resources to go after the people who killed him to make sure they face Justice and for the last 13 years that's what I've been doing originally I thought there was some chance of getting Justice inside of Russia Sergey had written everything down he wrote during his 358 days in detention he wrote 450 criminal complaints documenting who did what to him where they did it how they did it when they did it he would write these up by hand hand him to his lawyer once a month the lawyer would file them they would be ignored or denied but we got copies and from those copies we had the most well-documented case of Human Rights abuse that's probably ever come out of Russia and from that I would have thought I thought that that they'd have to throw at least some of the low-level people under the bus they have to prosecute somebody for this horrific crime but that didn't happen they circled the wagons the Putin regime circled the wagons they gave promotions and state honors to some of the people who were most complicit Putin personally got involved in exonerating every single official involved and in the most cynical and Despicable miscarriage of Justice they put Sergey magnitsky on trial three years after they killed him in the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia they put me on trial as his co-defendant we were both found guilty they couldn't do anything more than killing him to him they sentenced me to nine years in absentia it became obvious well before this crazy trial that um we weren't going to get any justice in Russia so I said how do we get Justice outside of Russia and that's when I came up with this idea which is that these people who stole who killed Sergey did it because they did just steal 230 million dollars they don't and they don't keep that money in Russia they keep that money in the West and we've all seen it I mean there's Russian money is sloshing around everywhere in uh Manhattan and South Beach and the French Riviera and the Swiss Alps and send their kids to boarding school in England and their girlfriends on shopping trips to Milan and all sorts of other things like that and so I came up with this idea which is we may not be able to prosecute them for torture and murder that took place in the Russia we can't prosecute them in the West for that but we certainly don't have to allow them to come here and spend their money here and so I took this idea to Washington and I I um I presented this story share the same story I've just shared with you tonight with um with these um with two senators Senator Benjamin Cardin a Democrat from Maryland and the late John McCain republican from Arizona and I said can we ban the Visas and freeze the assets of these people who killed Sergey magnitsky and they said yes and that became the magnitsky act now originally it was just for Sergey magnitsky and when they put it onto the um law books to be voted on their phones immediately started lighting up from other victims in Russia who said you found the Achilles heel of the Putin regime this is what they do they commit terrible crimes kill people imprison people do all this type of stuff in Russia and then they take their money to the West can you please sanction the people who killed my my father my husband my sister my Aunt and after about a dozen of these calls these two senators realized they were into something much bigger than just one case they added 65 words to the law to include all gross human rights abusers in Russia and then all of a sudden all these other victims came out fanned out across Capitol Hill told their stories and when and when it went for a vote in the senate in November of 2012 it passed 92 to 4. he passed the House of Representatives with 89 percent and it became a federal law on December 14 2012 the magnitsky ACT Vladimir Putin went out of his mind he was so angry he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families in retaliation he made it his single largest foreign policy priority to try to repeal the magnitsky ACT he even sent his own Emissary to Trump Tower on June 9th 2016 a woman named Natalia vesselnitskaya to meet with Donald Trump Jr Jared Kushner and Paul manafort this is after Trump was nominated before he was elected with one specific request to repeal the magnitsky ACT um well I'm very happy that that didn't happen and it couldn't happen because um the magnitsky Act was an act of Congress and Trump couldn't just sign an executive order and get rid of it it required would require 51 percent of Congress and if they're voting 92 to 4 um a few years before they weren't going to repeal it in fact Congress did something even better which was they um expanded the magnitsky act just before Trump was elected it became the global magnetsky Act instead of just targeting Russian human rights abusers it targeted Chinese human rights abusers and Iranian human rights abusers and Venezuelan human rights abusers from all sorts of bad guys from all over the world I um it was really important for me that the magnitude act wasn't just a piece of legislation in the United States and it was very difficult for me to find other countries um that were ready to directly follow the U.S with this legislation and so I spent an enormous amount of time working on Canada and it's interesting because there's lots of countries that are anti -american but there's no such thing as being anti-canadian and um and it was really a glorious moment in um uh in October I'm sorry November of 2017 to watch the Canadian Parliament voting on the magnitsky ACT and uh I don't know how many of you have watched a um a Canadian vote before but um it's the each of the members has to stand up briefly to like register their vote as kind of like a human wave and so they like one by one by one it took it took like 10 minutes they all each person stood up and anyone opposed and the entire Parliament was sitting it was a unanimous vote of the Canadian Parliament and um passed in 2017 it passed in in Britain in in 2018 the magnitsky Act passed in the European Union in 2020 it passed in Australia in 2021 uh there are now 35 countries with the magnitsky acts all around the world and it's become the tool that's being used it was it's the tool that's now being used for all these terrible people in the Putin regime who were involved in in this war in Ukraine and I could have never imagined that that one man's death my lawyer's death would lead to this huge International Justice movement this law that's being used all over the world that's being used in this war and being used everywhere I'll never be able to bring Sergey back and and for me that's this burden that's going to have to carry with me for the rest of my life but I but I have been able to um uh to give him a legacy and um and I'm not done yet my hope is that as time goes on and all these countries that have the magnitsky ACT um start using it properly and liberally all over the place that the probability of being sanctioned becomes really high right now there's like let's say 500 people that are on the magnitsky list but my hope is that you know there'll be 20 000 people on these Magnus key lists and and and if there are if the probability becomes High Enough that um a dictator who's going to do terrible things will start to think well maybe I shouldn't do these terrible things because the the risk of not being able to access my money is so high that you know the the crime is not worth the punishment and my hope is that that's where we get to and if we do get there then Sergey magnitsky's death will save many many thousands or perhaps millions of lives and for that um it wasn't a meaningless death those are my prepared remarks I'm here also to talk about current events um uh because there's a lot to talk about in current events but I I think it's important to tell that story and I think it's also important to tell that story because I think a lot of the current events are connected to this magnitsky story in in my second book the um the the it's called freezing order and it's all it's a big part of it is about us tracing who got the 230 million dollars and what we discovered was um that one of the beneficiaries was Vladimir Putin um he didn't get it in his own name um some of you may remember the Panama papers the Panama papers was a leak from a law firm in Panama called masak fenseca apparently the I think some secretary who was going out with the managing director was mistreated by him and she decided to leak the entire database of the entire Law Firm and every country had a hero or an anti-hero and the anti-hero of Russia was a man named Sergey roll Dugan and Sergey roll Dugan had a very interesting backstory which is he was the um he was a cellist from St Petersburg and the Panama papers had these unbelievables details of how this cell is from St Petersburg ended up uh getting two billion dollars um from oligarchs and Russian State Banks and I mean the the next richest cellist in the world is Yo-Yo Ma with 25 million and this is a Russian cellist that no one's ever heard of it's got 2 billion and everyone said why did this cellist get all this money and the answer is because he's Putin's best friend from childhood he's the Godfather of Putin's daughter and um one of his daughters and uh he introduced Putin to his wife and he's Putin's proxy his Putin's nominee this is how Putin stores his money and the most interesting thing we discovered for ourselves was that in our money laundering investigation which I've conducted for 12 years um we discovered that um uh Sir Gabriel Dugan got some of the money from the magnitsky case and so Putin got some of the money which explains a lot about why he was so eager to cover this crime up and as we continued our money laundering investigation we discovered that one of the main Banks that laundered the money was a Danish Bank called dansky Bank and they laundered 200 million of the 230 million through their Estonian branch and we were able to verify this from from data that we had gotten from from whistleblowers and other data leaks and once we figure this out we were contacted by a Danish investigative journalist team who had gotten another big data leak of all sorts of account information but they couldn't make any sense of it because we hadn't determined from our data the names of the accounts and the account holders and all this kind of stuff in this dansky bank they wanted to see our data and so we gave them our data they compared it with their data leak which was called the Russian laundromat and they called us back and they said it's actually not 200 million that was laundered through this Danish Bank it was 8.3 billion and so they published the article in their newspaper and it was the most well-read article in the history of their newspaper and Denmark is a country which is supposed to be really um squeaky clean it's the number two country on the Transparency International index and the the CEO of the bank couldn't just shrug it off and and not do anything about it and so he ordered a um a special external audit of the whole thing and he was maybe hoping that the Auditors the law firm and the accounting firm and the data analysis would they'd come back and say actually the journalists weren't right but they came back for with their external audit and they and they came back and discovered that it wasn't 8.3 billion it was 234 billion that had been laundered from Russia now this is just one Bank in that we could lift the hood on one one Danish Bank if we could lift the hood on rif eisenbank in Vienna on UBS and credit Swiss and Switzerland on Deutsche Bank in Germany I think we would get a number closer to a trillion dollars of money that was stolen by Putin and the thousand people around him from Russia a thousand billion dollars and I think this explains everything so you can steal a smaller amount of money over a shorter period of time and probably get away with it but to steal a trillion dollars this is money that should have been spent on hospitals and schools and and Roads and public services and instead was spent on Jets and Yachts and so on and so forth you can you just you can do this for one year three years five years but you just can't do this for 22 years without the people eventually rising up and Putin understands very clearly that if at some point the Russian people were to rise up and want to get rid of him there's no he can't do like George Bush and you know set up the Putin Presidential Library and paint um or you know like Boris Johnson sit on the back bench and give speeches for 250 000 a pop um if Putin were to lose power he'd lose his money he'd go to jail and he'd die and so for Putin he's got to stay in power forever he understands that it's a question of life and death and for Putin to stay in power forever is a very hard thing if everyone's gonna if he's just continuing to like tighten and tighten and tighten the screws and take away and create this pressure cooker environment and particularly in this moment in time if we look at it after covid you have all of these leaders that are losing their jobs Mario draghi lost his job bolsonaro is going to lose his job Boris Johnson lost his job the the guy from Israel law sister every all Democratic leaders are losing their jobs and so if there's anything it's gonna it was gonna happen to him and so what does a dictator do when they're afraid they're going to lose their job that the people are going to rise up against them Machiavelli 101 read the prince Machiavelli the prince you create a foreign enemy you go to war this war is not about NATO enlargement this war is not about Putin's Legacy there's a lot of people saying that he wants to create a great Russian Empire for his legacy if he cared about his legacy he wouldn't have stolen a trillion dollars from his people that's just not what a person does who wants Legacy this war is about a a small-minded criminal who's stolen a lot of money who's desperate to stay in power and that that is a very important um conclusion because if that's the case then these proposals are like from Elon Musk says well let's just let's just give them uh let's let's just give the Russians four territories and and declare Ukraine neutral and to avoid war none of that avoids any War at all um because Putin he doesn't care about that stuff he just wants to be at War and so there's only one of two outcomes that can come from this whole thing either the Russians win or the ukrainians win and if the Russians win in Ukraine then I guarantee you they're going to be at the Estonian border next and if they're the Estonian border next um they'll Point their guns at Estonia which is a NATO member and probably point a few nukes at us and then watch us go crazy on our talk shows about wait a second why why do we why do we have this article 5 of NATO where we have to go to war with Russia the Americans the British and the Russians and the ukrainians signed a treaty called The Budapest memorandum where they basically said if they give up their nuclear weapons we would guarantee their integrity their territorial Integrity ukrainians gave up their nuclear weapons and what happens we also well actually it wasn't a treaty it was just a memorandum so never mind I guarantee you that we would have that same conversation about NATO and that's what Putin would be hoping for and if and if if we have that conversation and then we give up NATO then all hell is going to break loose in the world and so we can never we cannot allow the ukrainians to lose this war and at the moment we've given the ukrainians enough so they're not losing the war but we're not giving them enough to win the war and there's a lot of people in the U.S government that are in other governments that are kind of wanting to hold back on giving the ukrainians what they actually need militarily to win this war and there's a lot of people that are saying you know we don't want um you know that he's threatening nuclear war um if we're going to Cave into his threats of nuclear war right now um over Ukraine then why not just cave over every place because I mean if he's going to do it for Ukraine why doesn't he do it for Germany or anywhere else and so this is really an existential you know we're at a moment of existential crisis and and uh the ukrainians at the moment are are doing a good job but um I I hate to say this and and well it's always people always criticize me for being a uh bummer speaker but but um uh I'm not sure how how I can see this thing ending I don't I don't see that there isn't there is no it's hard for me to see that the Russians can win this war because the ukrainians have enough to stop them but I don't think the ukrainians have enough to win the war either and so I can imagine this thing carrying on and will Putin you know doing a nuclear attack he could he's a psychopath um I think we're a long way away from that he's got a lot of other things up his sleeve to cause trouble I mean who would have thought that he would decide to just bomb every Power Plant in the Ukraine right now before the winter that's pretty clever make them freeze to death in the winter that's that's not a bad you know sort of out of you know control military strategy you know could he blow up our internet cables sure the pipelines absolutely and all sorts of other stuff that we can't even imagine because no one's ever done it before that's how Putin is probably going to behave in the coming years and months and so on anyways let me let me um as now that I've really bummed you out let me let me answer any questions because I have I'm sure you have a lot of questions and I can for some Runners so if anyone has a question just raise your hand and we'll bring the mics up to you sorry so thank you are a really really good dog I have a question about something I didn't see you constantly face this really terrible odds you're literally taking on a country in doing so at a very considerable personal risk right what about everyone else right like your family your wife your kids there's adverse effects throughout everyone what about the conversation that somebody had with you saying is it worth it how did you respond to that conversation well it's it's a um it's a really um impossible position to be put in when somebody is murdered [Music] um and for me I I have no capacity to allow that to um I mean if I if I had not done what I did I wouldn't have been able to live with myself it would have poisoned me from the inside I couldn't being the person I am I couldn't have done that and thankfully um I'm married to a woman who was equally outraged by the whole thing and and I wouldn't want my kids to be brought up by a father who did anything different than what I what I'm doing because um uh you know it's it's important it's important for them to see what what integrity and what Justice is and and so yes it's been an incredibly costly not not as costly for me as it has been for other people connected to me there's a a man in my book named Vladimir karamorza who helped me get the magnitsky Act passed in various countries including here in Canada and um he was such he was a Russian dissident Russian opposition politician and uh in retaliation for his good work for me they poisoned him with novichok in 2015 and he nearly died and they poisoned him in 2017 again he nearly died he survived both attempts and he went back to Moscow after the war started to stand up against Putin and I had dinner with him three nights before he returned to Moscow and I said don't go they'll put you in prison and he said maybe they will maybe they won't but I can't not go because some how am I asking the Russian people to stand up to Putin if I'm not willing to do it and he went back and he was arrested after he gave an interview on CNN calling Putin a murderer and he's now facing 24 years in prison for high treason and so I mean people pay the highest price for for this um but um you know we all choose our course in life and it's what's interesting about it is is the Russian people for the most part aren't like Vladimir karamorzo we were just talking about this in our dinner table uh this evening most people in Russia have an extremely narrow Focus they just want to focus on their own lives um if you have in fact it's really interesting in an apartment building in Moscow you can have the most beautiful apartment the highest level everything best marble best wood best everything and then you walk out into the common areas and it smells like urine because um there's just no sense of of of um common good there's no people don't care about anybody other than themselves and um and as a result of that you end up in a situation where wherein Russians just could not care less about what Putin is doing they couldn't care less for for a very long time until the moment that they're all being called up for draft and then they're all flapping about like the world's coming to an end which it is for them but why didn't they start flapping about you know 20 years ago um everyone chooses their own path I wish that the Russians were there were a few more people like Vladimir karamorza and Russia and we have time for one more question only one I have time for more a few hours I've got Mike um uh bill I had the pleasure of seeing you uh the last uh relay AGM and your story is of course incredible and captivating and I think we're all like at the edge of RC listening to what you had to say so I kind of a two-part question and I think I asked the same question back then which is um I by the way saw the live uh Donald Trump and Putin when they said and your name came up and I said hey I met that guy right um and I so and with with apart from that what else in the news there's been a lot of mysterious oligarchs and oil Executives that have been falling out of Windows in hospitals and stuff like that so my first question is I think our same question is how are you still alive and two uh do you think that we're starting to see the effects of um all this embezzlement and stealing everything else kind of play out in this war because like you think that all of us before thought the Red Army was this terrible thing that we're going to go in and steamroll and just take over Ukraine in 30 seconds but instead they're facing opposition and they don't have the military might that they thought that we thought they had and instead perhaps all this money that should have gone to not only human structural hospitals hotels but also tanks and regiments and ballistics have gone into oligarch's pocket and like you said I've been to London a thousand times and it's little Moscow there and there's Russian money being thrown all over the place but do you think the Russian people aren't starting to see this now and going wait a minute we've been bamboozled for years and we're not we're not who we thought we were I mean it's it's from so so the reason I'm alive is the same reason that the ukrainians are are are doing such a remarkable job um is um for me it's it's a matter of survival um as it is for the ukrainians and for the Russians um the whole system has been hollowed out in every different in every different way I mean it's um you know the the Russians have not created air superiority over Ukraine why a pretty big part of it is because they don't have an airworthy Air Force why don't they have an air-worthy Air Force because they got a bunch of migs and they've sold all the parts off their migs to the Indian Air Force who have an airworthy Air Force I heard an amazing story from a filmmaker I know who was on the front line American filmmaker who is on the front line in Ukraine as the war was just starting and they had a program at the beginning of the war the ukrainians they were offering Russian tank drivers twenty five thousand dollars for their two million dollar tanks this is you know let's not shoot at each other we'll just pay you 25 Grand and they were and he witnessed the purchase of two two million dollar tanks for 25 000 each um and they said bring your friends we'll buy their tanks too um and that's been the story of the entire system um and we're just talking at dinner tonight about the nuclear Arsenal you know we're I mean and I don't want to um extrapolate this too much but um how do we even know that their nuclear Arsenal works you know you know wouldn't the guys in the nuclear force be you know not doing their job and not you know I mean maybe these things will blow up in their silos I I mean I don't want to go so far as to like not say we shouldn't be worried about that but I think that that's a very real real possibility based on their performance and uh it's it's a hollowed-out system I don't think Russia is even in the top 10 military Powers we thought it was number two before this War started I lied we actually have some extra questions Bill Bill great to see you alive I'm glad you didn't get assassinated on that hill in Napa um my question my question is what do you think China has learned from this especially as it comes to Taiwan tomorrow yeah so imagine so um let's put this put the context in place here um America spends a trillion dollars or more maybe two I remember the exact numbers on Afghanistan and and and then a whatever year and a half ago uh America um decides for the sake of three thousand soldiers who aren't even in combat to let the country fall to the Taliban um 38 million people fall to the Taliban because we have such a so little appetite for military confrontation so you're sitting there you're Xi Jinping and you're Vladimir Putin you're saying um the only other signal we've ever gotten as strong as this was that red line in Syria where that where we didn't enforce it um hell the Americans will never show up for anything so Putin goes in first to Ukraine thinking he's going to steamroll them and we're not going to do anything and boy is he wrong about the steamrolling and boy is he wrong about us not doing anything and we've been and the sanctions are just bigger more far-reaching and more aggressive than anything that's ever happened before and so imagine your Xi Jinping and you've been eyeing up this morsel of Taiwan for for a long time and that's really annoyed you that's that they're so you know snubbing their noses and uh and you see this huge economic crisis that that we've inflicted on the Russians you know I I think that they still want Taiwan but they're not gonna if if they were planning to invade that's been put off indefinitely while they try to figure this thing out and um and so I and I think that that this is not not just for these two guys but for every dictator out there who thinks that that I mean that you know the some some these symbols are this is hugely important not just for the ukrainians but for every country that that has where people are eyeing up with our borders and so I think this is really important for China and and on a on a commercial basis everybody thought okay the Chinese companies are going to come in and take the place of the American companies and Master Card and Visa pulls out um alipay is going to show up but alipay doesn't want to get get on some sanctions list I mean you know for the rest of the world when for some little country like Russia and so the Chinese have not showed up um to replace the Americans that have pulled out on on a commercial basis and so I think this is really um a a true watershed moment for the good guys um in in you know giving a really big black eye to a bad guy and sending the message that if you know this could happen elsewhere as well so um bill just to follow up on Kenny's question um just coming in from the Russian angle so what is that exit ramp for for Putin right now there's a great little image on Twitter which is which was the Kirsch bridge and that's the exit ramp he can go back I mean we we don't have to give Putin an exit ramp I mean Putin is a thug he only understands power and hard boundaries um he can come up with his own exit ramp it's not it's not for us to give him a dignified way out I mean in fact it sends a terrible signal if we give him a dignified way out um what it what it sends a signal is that that he has he still has some hole over us we should just give the ukrainians everything they need to not just to to not lose but to win the war that means longer range artillery that means uh uh stopping buying Russian oil and gas that means secondary hard secondary sanctions on countries that are involved in in evading sanctions and um and let the course let the course of this work take its natural course um I don't think we should give him an exit ramp or safe face and and I I you know it really annoys me when I hear macron and others saying that because why does he deserve an exit ramp for Bella on behalf of everyone here I just wanted to thank you for coming to speak with us today it was truly amazing and Mom will never forget so thank you thank you [Applause] [Music]

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Id: vYKfuE1nTzU

Length: 74min 11sec (4451 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023