How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy (Full Session)

good evening when you hear me open my mouth and the first words that come out of my mouth you're probably wondering how is this guy with the American accent some type of enemy of the state of Russia and so I'd like to tell you my story which goes back a number of decades I am indeed American I was born in New Jersey brought up in Chicago but I come from a very unusual American family my grandfather Earl Browder was from Wichita Kansas and he was a labor union organizer in the 1920s and he was so good at organizing the Union that the Communists spotted him from Russia and they said if you like labor and unionism you're gonna love communism why don't you come and check it out and so in 1927 my grandfather went to Moscow and then he did what what every American male single American male does when they get to Moscow he met a Russian girl who became my grandmother my father was born there and then in 1932 he was sent back to America to become head of the American Communist Party he ran for president twice on the Communist ticket in 1936 and 1940s Roosevelt he was then imprisoned by Roosevelt in in 1940 and then pardoned in 1941 he was in kicked out of the Communist Party for being too much of a capitalist in 1945 and then persecuted in the 1950s by McCarthy for being too much of a communist so this is my family legacy I was born in 1964 I'm 51 years old but when I was going through my teenage rebellion in the 1970s I was trying to figure out some way to repel from my family of Communists and and I tried the normal rebellion techniques like I grew my hair into an afro that didn't seem to upset my parents I follow the Grateful Dead around the country that also didn't upset my parents but then I came up with this great um great rebellion technique which did upset them which was to put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist so I became a capitalist and I went to Stanford Business School and I graduated Business School in 1989 which was a very significant year because that was the year that the Berlin Wall came down and so as many young MBAs I was looking to try to figure out what I could do that would be a meaningful job in my life and none of the normal recruiting on campus moved me and I was really having a hard time trying to figure out what to do and then until one day I had this epiphany which was if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the Berlin Wall has just come down I'm gonna set out to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe so it wasn't as if there was a lot of capitalism going on in Eastern Europe um after the Berlin Wall came down and my first job coming out of business school was was with the Boston Consulting Group in London and I went there because um they said to me that if if they ever get any Eastern European business I could be their guy so I go there to London I I started working in their office and one day about six months after I am arrived there there's a knock on my door and the guy in charge of the office said you're the guy wanted to work in Eastern Europe right and I said yeah he said well we got something for you now and so they had this assignment where the there there's the bus company in the southeast corner of Poland on the cranium border and the bus company had sold all its buses to the state of Poland and as they stopped buying the buses and so all of their sales had dried up and so that the World Bank had hired the Boston Consulting Group at a very very small fee to try to figure out what to do with this bus company and since since BCG couldn't afford to send anybody else out they sent a one a first-year associate out by myself to advise this this poor bus company so I get out to to Poland and it's really a mess out there at the time that they had um they have just gone from communism to capitalism and there was hyperinflation that telephones didn't work there was no heating in the building's they food shortages and all sorts of other stuff and it was very unpleasant experience and it was particularly pleasant that this company was really going down the tubes and there wasn't really much I could do to save them because if no one wants to buy their buses then they pretty much just have to fire everybody and so it's kind of a bleak experience and I was I had this guy who was my translator who would go around with me everywhere and I noticed one day that under his arm he had a newspaper with all these financial figures on it and I I stopped him and I said what's in it on the newspaper there and he looked at me very and smiled very proudly and said ah these are the very first privatizations in Poland I said that's interesting could we could you tell me about them and so we sat down at the in the conference room in II laid the newspaper on the table and and I said so what is this line saying he says that's the number of shares outstanding and I said okay and what is this line say and he said that's the share price at which they're selling in the privatization and so I did the math and it was about 80 million dollars which meant that that was the value of the company the market capitalization of the company and then I said well what's this line down here and and he said that's the profits of the company I said are you sure he said yeah it says net profit of the company I said this couldn't be said no that's what it says and that that number was 160 million dollars now you don't have to have a Stanford MBA to know that that if you can buy a company at one-half of one year's earnings that that's a pretty good deal and and this really got me excited night and I am I looked at this whole situation I said well isn't it I've never bought a share of my life before this but I thought isn't this what you're supposed to do when you go to business schools like find things like this and buy shares and so so I I decided to go all-in I'm at the time all in for me was $2,000 I made the investment and the investment went up over the course of the next year ten times now I don't know how many of you here tonight have had an investment that's gone up ten times but for those of you who have you'll know that it releases a certain chemical in your stomach and it and you want to repeat the experience as much as possible and so after that I knew what I wanted to do with my career which was to invest in privatizations in Eastern Europe so fast forward a couple years I end up at Salomon Brothers the bank that was made famous by the book liars poker doesn't exist anymore I end up with Salomon Brothers as a investment banker on their East European team and my very first assignment at Salomon Brothers was to advise the management of a a fishing fleet located in Murmansk and romance trawler fleet on the privatization the management had the right to buy 51% from the government under the privatization program and they had hired me to advise them so I go I fly to Murmansk which is a very hard place to get to we have to go through st. Petersburg and wait half the night in the airport and then you finally get there early in the morning the head of the fishing fleet comes and picks me up at the airport and takes me down to the docks so I can see one of their boats and the this fishing fleet had this I went on the boat and there's like a it's like a 300 foot factory vessel on the top they they put the nets out to catch the fish and then the fish go into some into some tubes and then in the middle they take they separate out all the non fish stuff that's caught up in the nets and then after that they put them in two cans at the lower level and these are very very enormous factory ships and I said to the head of the fleet how much does one of these it's cost and he said we buy them for about twenty million dollars new and I said well how many ships do you have in your fleet he said about a hundred so twenty million dollars times 100 to get C to two billion dollars and I said what is the age of the fleet and he said it's about seven years so I figured back-of-the-envelope that's about a billion dollars with their ships and I said well how much what is the price at which the Russian government is selling the management the 51% and he said two and a half million dollars okay so a billion dollars with the ships and they can buy 51% for two and a half million dollars now remember I had this something going on with my stomach and and the last thing I wanted to do is be advising these guys on this stuff I wanted to be buying it myself and and so instead of going back to London I went to Moscow from there and to try to investigate whether this was an anomaly with just the fishing fleet or whether there was something more broad going on now I should point out that I didn't speak a word of Russian and I didn't know anybody in Moscow but I was so determined to figure out that I just went there I got off the airplane and at the airport they were selling a english-language yellow page directory very thin little directory of all the businesses that had some interest or people wanting to advertise to people speaking English and so I I bought that I go to the hotel and I started calling up people to figure out what's going on and I had about 40 meetings with anyone who would meet with me to understand the privatization program and at the end of the week I discovered that the Russian privatization program was probably the single most compelling investment opportunity that has ever existed or will ever exist and what I learned was that they had given away as one part of the privatization program they've given away a hundred and fifty million vouchers they for each person in Russia they gave them a voucher and these vouchers were exchangeable for shares of Russian companies and they were freely tradable so everybody got a voucher and they could keep it they could exchange it for shares or they could sell it and they traded for about $20 each and so again I did the math and $20.00 times 150 million vouchers gets you to three billion dollars and these three billion dollars were the vouchers were exchangeable for 30% of all the share capital of all Russian companies so that meant that the market capitalization of Russia at that in that year this was 1992 was 10 billion dollars now this is a this is a country with 35% of the world's natural gas a 10% of the world's oil 10% of the world's aluminum 10% of the world's steel fertilizer banks telephone companies electricity companies timber everything the whole country they were basically selling for 10 billion dollars well I I mean I I was a man possessed so I go back to Salomon Brothers and I am and the first person I see I said we have to invest in Russia and and before I could even get into the math of why it was so cheap the moment I said Russia they looked at me like I was completely out of my mind and I wasn't a particularly good corporate politician and so I didn't understand how decisions were made and I figured if one person said no I just go to somebody else so I go to the next person I say we have to invest in Russia and again they shut me down and pretty soon um I went around to try to get anyone to listen to me and and and pretty soon I became a complete pariah inside the firm even the even the young guys who I hung out with for drinks and lunch stopped inviting me out and nobody wanted to have anything to do with this this strange guy who was obsessed with investing in Russia and and they certainly didn't want to give me any capital to invest and so I was some getting towards the point of being fired because I wasn't making a lot of money for the firm and I was at the same time talking all this crazy stuff about Russia and I was probably about a month away from being fired when I get a call from a very senior partner in the New York office of Salomon Brothers who was responsible for investing the firm's own capital and he calls me up and said I hear you might have something interesting to say about Russia can you come to New York and explain it to me so I spent a couple days putting together a PowerPoint presentation on on on how cheap everything was in Russia I go to New York I I started going through this presentation with this with this man and about halfway through the presentation he just gets up and leaves and III I was and this was this was like my last sort of opportunity to save my career and potentially find some way to invest in Russia and so I was really upset as he had left and I think couldn't he didn't tell me why he was leaving just got up and left and I was thinking what do I have to say to this guy to get this meeting back on track when he comes back as I'm sure he'll come back soon and and I was waiting for 10 minutes and 20 and 30 and 40 and about 45 minutes later he comes back into the office and I'm about to like blurt out something to try to get this meeting back on track but before I have a chance to say anything he says bill what you just showed me was the most amazing thing I've ever seen I've just gone to the Risk Committee and I've got you 25 million dollars to invest in the Russian stock market so that the weight slipped off my shoulders I go to Moscow we invest the twenty five million dollars this is now the fall of 1993 and then about seven months later The Economist magazine writes an article called sale of the century and as any and the magazine article basically describes the same math I've just taken you through right here right now and as a result of that about 25 people show up who want to invest in Russia hedge funds rich guys proprietary trading desks and as a result of those 25 people showing up to buy Russian shares the value of our twenty five million dollar portfolio goes up five times overnight I make a hundred million dollars on for the firm in seven months and this was back in the days when hundred million dollars was real money all of a sudden the guys who had stopped inviting me to lunch and drinks were hanging around my desk in the morning waiting for stock tips on how to make five times their money and the other thing which happened which was very interesting was that um the people that the most senior salespeople of Salomon Brothers sort of coming by my desk and saying hey Bill I know you're really busy but is there any chance you could make time to meet with George Soros to tell him about what what's going on in Russia you know bill I know you're you're doing a lot of traveling but is any possible way when you're next in New York um you could meet Julian Robertson and Michael Steinhardt I was 29 years old and I was being invited to meet the most important people on Wall Street and everyone's wondering if I had enough time to meet them so so I go in this on this world tour of famous investors and I shared with them my presentation the same one that I had given to my boss of Solomon and and they weren't as stupid as the original people at Salomon and they and they all said wow this is amazing can we give you some money to manage and I said well I don't know because we're just doing it for ourselves but let me go back and ask the bosses so I go back to to London to the boss on the trading floor and I say you know all these famous investors George Soros and etc would they want to invest with us can we manage their money and and the boss and the trading floor says that's a great idea let's form a task force to study in so I show up at the first task force meeting and there were like 40 people in the room and 38 of them I'd never seen in my life there was like the vice-chairman the senior managing directors managing directors junior managing directors senior directors by senior vice premier and and these investment bankers are it's very interesting a bunch of people I've never met a group of people who are who can argue so articulately about why they deserve money when it has nothing to do with them and and all these different people started like really making this very persuasive arguments about why they deserve all the economic credit from this business and it was just like a game of ping pong going back and forth we being different people and I wasn't sure who was gonna win the argument but I was pretty sure I know who is not gonna get any economic credit for the business and that was gonna be me and so I get very upset by this whole thing and I am I spent three days pacing around my apartment at night trying to figure out what I'm gonna do and I finally decided to quit I quit Salomon Brothers I set up my own company called Hermitage capital and I moved to Moscow and one of the guys who I met on this world tour was a guy named Edmond Safra who is the owner of Republic National Bank of New York and he put up the first 25 million dollars and became my business partner and I started the Hermitage fund in April of 1996 and I started the fund at a time when when the when there was an election going on where Yeltsin was running for reelection and it didn't look like he had great chances and and so a lot of people had had sort of a ban in the market there was if the Communists had won then he would realize everything and so he got in before the election when the prices were really low Yeltsin got together with the Russian oligarchs they turned around the whole election situation and in July 1996 Yeltsin was reelected and over the next 18 months my fund went up 865 percent my fund went from 25 million dollars of assets under management to more than a billion dollars which was a lot of money back then in Russia I was the best performing fund manager in the world in 1997 Businessweek Financial Times Time magazine we're all profiling me as a financial genius my clients were sending their private jets to take me to their yachts to celebrate my success and I was I was 33 years old now any of these things would have been a great achievement by itself but if you put all that together in the hands of a 33 year old in the parlance of Wall Street that is the biggest sell signal there ever was but I didn't sell but what did happen was that 1998 hit in Russia many of you will remember that there was a huge economic crisis in which the Russians defaulted on their bonds they devalued their currency by 75 percent and I lost nine hundred million of the 1 billion that I had under management now when you make ten times your money it releases a certain chemical in your stomach when you lose 90 percent it would be this release is a different chemical and I didn't feel particularly good about this and I felt particularly bad about the fact that I had had convinced all these people to invest with me and and I'd lost them a lot of money and I was absolutely determined to fight my way out of this hole and to make the money back I was gonna do whatever it took and it turned out that just as I was getting determined to make the money back the Russian oligarchs who owned the majority shares most of the companies that I invest in were determined since there was no longer any Wall Street had pretty much closed for business for them and they had no longer had any incentive to behave they were determined to steal every last penny that was still left on the table and so I ended up in a situation where if I wanted to recover my clients money I was gonna have to go to war with the oligarchs but I was so determined and so humiliated by by what I had put everybody through I was gonna go to war with the oligarchs am i my most famous battle involved gasps from which is the largest gas company in the world gas prom in 1999 was trading at a ninety nine point seven percent discount to BP and Exxon per barrel of reserves now why was it so cheap it was so cheap because everybody assumed in the market that every last cubic meter of gas had been stolen out of the company through some kind of scheme and so I decided to do something that was never done before which was a stealing analysis of gas prom now how do you do a stealing analysis that they don't teach this at Stanford Business School I couldn't go to the management of gas prom and say sir can you tell me how much you're stealing because they would not tell me obviously and maybe do worse things than that I couldn't go to the investment banks that were that we're doing the research on gas prom because they were so busy trying to get consulting and paid investment banking work that last thing they wanted to do is say anything that might bad-mouthed gas prom and so what I decided to do was to set up meetings with people who knew about the stealing ex-employees customers competitors suppliers etc and I decided to invite I made a list of the people I thought knew about the stealing and I invited all these people to breakfast lunch dinner tea coffee dessert I didn't tell him my agenda in advance I just invited them and of the 40 people I invited about 30 people said yes so I went to have this series of meals with these people and I discovered the most interesting thing about the Russian psychology which was that during the Soviet times the richest person Russia in Russia was six times richer than the poorest person maybe they had a better apartment a driver a dacha but it wasn't there wasn't a dramatic difference in lifestyle by 1999 the richest person in Russia was 250,000 times richer than the poorest person in Russia and that kind of disparity of wealth which was created over a 10-year period poisoned the psychology of the entire nation people were furious and every one of these meetings these people would would tell me the most unbelievable things about stealing a gas prom and I was writing this stuff down I was filling up notebooks after notebooks of of all these incredible stories the only problem was I had no idea how much of this stuff was true it could have been sour grapes it could have been exaggeration it could have been just about anything and so there I was I'm trying to figure out what do I do with all this information and and I couldn't figure out what to do with him until one day about three weeks after we had completed our last interview my head of research a Russian PhD named Vadim was at a traffic light at Pushkin Square and Pushkin Square is a place where the traffic basically gets backed up from anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour and as a result of that the sort of outdoor market had been created among the cars by these street urchins which they did they'd be selling pirated DVDs cigarettes everything all beer they were selling all sorts of stuff and some kid comes up to his car and he rolls down his window and he said what do you have and the kid said I've got databases he said what kind of databases and the kid opens up his coat and he has these this the sort of collection of databases and he said well for example here I've got the Moscow registration chamber database which shows the beneficial ownership of all Russian companies and my head research said well how much how much for that one he said five bucks so he bought it he comes back to the office he sticks it in the computer and and sure enough is the Moscow registration chamber database which is something we needed to have to confirm some of all these rumors and on top of that there was a number on the on the on the disk of so you can call to get other databases so we called up and got all the databases and we were able to prove definitively that the management of gas from nine individuals between 1996 1999 had stolen oil and gas reserves equal to the size of Kuwait now if you remember there was a war fought over oil and gas reserves the size of Kuwait called the Gulf War and here we had just discovered and nobody else knew it that the management of gas prom had done it under the nose of everybody in Russia so that was pretty shocking but the second most shocking thing from an investment standpoint is that oil and gas reserves the size of Kuwait only represented nine point six five percent of gas Proms total reserves so here is a situation where the company where the market is valuing the company at a ninety nine point seven percent discount because they thought everything is stolen and we've just discovered that more than ninety percent is still there and hasn't been stolen now isn't as an investor what do you do with that well I'll tell you what we did we backed up the truck and I bought as much gas promised I could possibly buy in my fund within the rules of my fund and after I did that then that's buy it by the way we're most normal fund managers stop but I thought this is just too interesting and too good I need to share this information with the world and so I took the dossier and I share it with the Financial Times The Wall Street Journal Business Week all the major newspapers and they all wrote stories about the this massive theft of gas problem and on the back of their stories and the Russian press picked it up on the back of that then there were broke there were parliamentary debates about whether it was a good thing or bad thing for oil and gas reserves the size of Kuwait to be stolen from gas problem more articles and the management went out and hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to come up with a report to say was a good thing to do this and each time everybody did this there was um there was more articles and by the end of this campaign there were 500 articles written about all the theft of gas from and then something really interesting happened at the annual general meeting about seven months after we started this campaign Putin stepped in and he fired a CEO of gas prom and he replaced him with a guy whose mandate it was not to steal assets cash flow yes assets no and on the day he made that announcement the share price jumped one hundred and thirty four percent and then doubled again and then it doubled again and then it doubled again and again between 1999 and 2005 the share price of gas prom which was my largest investment went up a hundred times now as you can imagine I felt pretty good about that and so I did it again at the National Savings Bank I did it at at the national pipeline company the national electricity company to oil companies etc and I had a lot of success for a really funny reason which was that Vladimir Putin was became without any conversation my ally in this fight I was fighting the oligarchs cuz they were stealing money from me and when he became president he was fighting the oligarchs because they were stealing power from him the oligarchs that essentially privatized all the presidential power in Russia and so every time I would publicize one of these scandals Putin would step in and so I I had the most glorious life between 1999 and about 2004 and my hundred million dollars which was where I was at the bottom of the market grew through appreciation and through new and with new investors coming into four and a half billion dollars and I became the largest investor in Russia and I was living the perfect life I was making money hand over fist for my clients I was getting the bad guys and I was doing good and there's very few jobs you can have in the world where you can make a lot of money and get the bad guys and you can become a cop if you want that you don't make a lot of money but but to do these two things in the same job it was truly gratifying if you could you could sort of cut through the esprit de corps in the air of my office it was just so thick but it was too good to be true and in the fall of 2003 Putin decided to finish his war with the oligarchs by arresting the richest man in Russia Michael quartic offski the owner of Yukos he arrested him he put him on trial and in 2004 and they allowed the television cameras to film the richest guy in Russia sitting in a cage and by doing so it created this enormous psychological impact on everybody all the out remaining oligarchs and they all went to Putin in 2000 at the summer of 2004 and said Vladimir what do we have to do to make sure we don't have to sit in a cage and he said it's very straightforward fifty percent not fifty percent for the Russian government or 50 percent for the presidential administration of Russia up a fifty percent for Vladimir Putin and at that point his interests and mine diverged now I didn't realize this until I was flying back to Russia on November 13 2005 after living there for 10 years and becoming the largest foreign investor in their country and I was stopped at Sheremetyevo Airport in the VIP lounge four armed guards came into the lounge grabbed me took me down to the tenth Detention Center of the airport kept me there overnight and then deported me the next day and subsequently declared me a threat to national security so at this point um I knew that when the Russian government turns against you they don't do so mildly they do do so with extreme prejudice and I decided that I there was two places they had they had had some leverage over me one was I had people that could be arrested in two I had assets in the country and so I evacuated my entire staff quickly and quietly and I sold every last security I held in Russia and I thought that was the end of the story I dusted off my hands and I thought end of story well it turns out that not to have been the end of the story but the beginning of worst nightmare you could ever imagine about a year after that in June of 2000 in 2007 25 police officers raided my office in Moscow kept my office there with one secretary 25 police officers raided my office in Moscow 25 more officers raid at the office of my American law firm where I kept all of our corporate documents and they were specifically looking for the stamps and seals and certificates of our investment holding companies which were empty at the time because we have taken all of our money out but they didn't know that they found it at the law firm and the next thing we we found out was that we no longer owned our investment holding companies using the documents seized by the police they've been fraudulently re-registered out of our name into the name of a man who had been convicted of murder and let out of jail early by the police I was terrified not for any economic reason but for legal reasons if the police were doing this God knows what they were gonna do next and so when I went out and hired the smartest lawyer I could find a young man named Sergei Magnitsky who worked for a an American law firm his Russian working for American law firm he was a 35 year old lawyer cleverest lawyer in Russia and he went and investigated and he came back from his investigation with two conclusions one was that the the first thing was they were trying to steal all of our money which they didn't succeed in doing because we had taken all of our money out beforehand but the second thing which he discovered they did succeed in doing which was that when we were taking all of our money out of the country and selling all of our shares we had a profit of a billion dollars and we paid two hundred and thirty million dollars of capital gains tax and what these guys did was they went back to the tax authorities and they said there was a mistake made in the previous year's tax filing there was no profit and and therefore the 230 million dollars was paid in error and it should be refunded to them they applied for a two hundred thirty million dollar tax refund two days before Christmas on the 23rd of December 2007 and it was approved and paid out the next day on Christmas Eve the largest tax refund in Russian history paid out in one day no questions asked well we were we were at we convinced this is rogue operation and Sergei and I put together criminal complaints to all the different law enforcement agencies in Russia I went to the press and then Sergei testified against the police officers who did the raid at the russian Investigative Committee which is the equivalent of the FBI and we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys and we discovered shortly after that that there are no good guys in the Putin regime in Russia instead of arresting the bad guys they went and arrested Sergei Magnitsky on November 24 2008 they put him in pretrial 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 in Moscow he nearly froze to death they put him in cells with no toilet just a hole in the floor with a sewage would bubble up they would move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night and they were doing all of this to try to get him to withdraw his his testimony against the police officers and to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the 230 million dollars and he did so at my instruction now I don't know how I would have behaved under these circumstances and if you had asked Sergei in advance he probably couldn't have told you how he would have behaved but when he was faced with the idea of bearing false witness and perjuring himself for him the moral pain of doing that was greater than the physical pain he was subjected to and he refused and they were surprised because nobody refused everybody always buckles in these situations but Sergei didn't buckle and and the the real problem for Sergei was that as they continue to do this his health deteriorated and after about six months he had lost 40 pounds he had developed terrible pains in his stomach and he was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gall stones and eating an operation which was scheduled for the 1st of August 2009 one week before the operation they came to him again with this sum this false confession again he refused to sign it and then they abruptly moved him from the prison that had medical facilities to a maximum-security prison with no medical facility they stuck him in this maximum-security prison and his health deteriorated very rapidly he went into constant agonizing terrible pain and they refused him all medical attention he and his lawyer is applied in writing to every different branch of the criminal justice system of Russia for medical attention and every one of the rigid application x' was either ignored or rejected and on the night of november 16 2009 Sergei Magnitsky went in critical condition on that night the prison officials decided to move him to a prison that had a hospital they put him in an ambulance when he arrived at the prison with the hospital instead of putting him in the emergency room they put him in an isolation cell they chained him to a bed and a dryad guards with rubber batons beat him until he died at the age of 37 that was November 16 2009 . no more than five years ago I got the news on the 17th of November in the morning and it was the most heartbreaking traumatic life-changing news I could have ever gotten Sergei Magnitsky was killed because he was my lawyer he was 37 years old he left a wife and two children and for me I just could not stand by and let that happen and so from that moment on I've put aside my commercial activities and I spent the last five and a half years on a campaign to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky and it shouldn't have been that hard for one very simple reason because Sergei Magnitsky wrote everything down he wrote four hundred and fifty complaints during his 358 days in detention documenting everything that happened and as a result we have the most granular detailed record of human rights abuses come out of Russia in the last 35 years and because of that I figured that that Putin and his regime would have to at least prosecute some of the mid-level people who tortured and killed him but I was wrong um Putin didn't do that Putin in spite of evidence all to the contrary Putin personally and publicly exonerated everybody involved he gave state honors and and promotions to some of the people most complicit and the only people the only two people have ever been prosecuted in this whole affair was Sergei Magnitsky himself years after they killed him they put him on trial in the first-ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia and found him guilty and they put me on trial as his co-defendant and sends me to nine years in absentia so it became obvious that there was no possibility of justice inside of Russia and so I said well we need to create some justice outside of Russia and so I looked around to see what kind of justice was available and I discovered that there is no justice available for a terrible crime committed and run in in a in a country like Russia there's no there is really no concept of international justice but I was so upset and so moved by Sergey x' death that I decided if there was none that I was gonna create some some mechanism for international justice and I looked around at what happened to Sergey and I said to myself this was not a crime of ideology or religion this was a crime of money and the people who did this crime they don't like to keep their money in Russia they'd like to keep it in America they'd like to keep it in Britain they'd like to keep in Switzerland and so I took this idea and I went to Washington and I meant two senators I met a Democrat from Maryland named senator Benjamin Cardin and I met a Republican from Arizona Senator John McCain and I just told I told him the same story I've shared with you tonight and I said can we ban these people from coming to America and freeze their assets and they said yes we can and they introduced in October of 2010 the Sergey Magnitsky Act and they put it on the books and all of a sudden immediately after they did that a bunch of Russian opposition politicians and Russian human rights activists came forward and said you've hit the Achilles heel of the Putin regime this is what they care about and they said can you add the people who killed my brother my father my hand my sister to your law and after about ten of these approaches they decided to add sixty five words to the law which not not only went after the people who killed Sergey Magnitsky but but who commit other gross human rights abuses in Russia and the whole thing snowballed and in November of 2012 it went for a vote in the Senate and it passed ninety two to four 89% of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the Sergey Magnitsky Act and on December 14th 2012 President Obama signed it into law now the Magnitsky Act doesn't punish people it's not proper justice for torture and murder but as a heck of a lot better than total impunity and what it does to the people there's now 32 people on the Magnitsky list and these 32 people um can't open a bank account anywhere in the world because if you're on the US sanctions list no bank will touch you some of their assets have been frozen they can't travel to America but most significantly and this is what what really terrifies them is that everybody knows that the Putin regime is not going to last forever everybody knows these these terrible dictatorships eventually fall and the people who work in these dictatorships who commit these gross human rights abuses do so with the comfort that when when it's all comes to an end they'll flee to England or Canada United States and ask for asylum but in this particular case if they flee when they go to the the British Home Office to do their Asylum interview the officer is gonna have typed into the computer their name and say wait a second you're on the Magnitsky list for having committed gross human rights abuses you can't have asylum here we're gonna send you back to Russia and that's the most terrifying thing for these people to know that there's no place to run to when it all comes to an end so the Magnitsky acts is is a it certainly doesn't bring the sergey back but it does it does prick the bubble of impunity we're working on a similar piece of legislation in Europe right now and in January of this year the same senators who proposed the Russian Magnitsky Act said why why do this just for Russia and so there's now a piece of legislation going through Congress called the Global Magnitsky Act which will impose visa sanctions and asset freezes on human rights abusers anywhere in addition to doing that them the other thing I'm doing is telling the story and I've just published this book I'm called read notice I see some of you have it on your tables out there I wrote it in a way so that it's a popular book for people even if you're not interested in Russia or finance or whatever it's a page-turner but if you really want to change the world and that's what I really want to do the the way you do it is through Hollywood and so um tomorrow flying to Los Angeles to spend a month there to try to make a movie or try to begin the process of making a movie about this and so I can't tell you who's gonna play me but but hopefully in about two years time you can go to the cinema or perhaps watch it on Netflix and and see this whole story on the on the wide screen thank you very much thank you I'm very high there's a lot of questions that always come up and I'm very happy to answer those questions for as much time as they'll let me answer them and I think there's two microphones I don't know where they are um there's one over there and one over there so when we start with that one over that with that gentleman hi my name is teen danger that's that is an incredible story and thank you so much for sharing it I you started this story talking about this a lot of the paths that you ended up taking being a reaction or some relationship with your family and your family's history and I'm wondering if your interpretation or your understanding of your family and where that comes from has changed or as any of this changed the way that you think about your family's background in history that's a good question abri psychological question yeah absolutely I mean I've gone from being a hedge fund manager to human rights activist and and there's not very many people would do that and I don't think I would have done it if I hadn't come from this family where this kind of sort of righteous indignation sort of pulses through our veins and and people always ask me would your grandfather think of you and I and probably he wouldn't've been too happy when I was out there hedge funding but he'd probably be pretty happy that I was out there I'm trying to poke the bad guys in the eyes right now and so there's definitely a there's definitely some that smooth any we got one right one right here hold on one second she's gonna bring you the microphone there's any authenticity to the Russian courts threatening to deny the constitutionality of the separation of the Baltics I believe I've heard that very recently and I think that's very worrisome well so um but so what's going on right now is that as time has gone on this whole thieving that Putin was doing this 50% which has accumulated about two hundred billion dollars of value into his own hands that that's no longer acceptable to the Russian people so they started to grumble and get angry with him and in order to and this is something that that leaders do through time and history well if people are angry at them they try to create a somebody else to be angry at and so what Putin has done is created a foreign enemy which started with Ukraine and as sort of the West and the EU as as well but it's not going to stop at Ukraine and so there are now meddling with the Baltics that they also have talked about reversing the night I think 1913 independence of Finland and and we laugh but but I I published my book in Finland and I was talking to my publisher and I think one out of every four young man is in in the Army Reserve now training to defend them against the Russians and I mean for anyone who thinks that that Russia is not the the single largest threat to world peace they don't know all the facts this is a dangerous dangerous man doing a lot of dangerous stuff and my my story people used to think that I was some kind of isolated incident what they've discovered I've just got what everyone's discovered is that I was the canary in the coal mine that this was something that what happened to me was just a small precursor to what's happening with the world and we have a man who is a mafia boss who's stolen a lot of money who's terrified of losing power who's ready to do anything to stay in power including using a nuclear arsenal if that's what it takes and that's terrifying okay how about this man this man in the red thank you so thank you so much why isn't our government putting some of the people in Russia that are responsible for the Ukrainian invasion whatever you want to call it on this same list well the the answer is they are so after the Magnitsky Act was passed Russia invaded Ukraine and and they they took the Magnitsky Act and replicated it for people were invading Ukraine and there's a number of people who were on that list I think is about a hundred people maybe less however our government and is not just the United States government it's also the European governments all very scared of Vladimir Putin and there's a very Masai ecology of appeasement people are saying well we don't want to do that because we don't want to enrage him further and it's really similar to the psychology of a battered wife saying with a vicious alcoholic husband and says I don't want to say anything that might make him violent and and so and I believe that's the wrong approach I think that the best way the only way to deal with Vladimir Putin is with strength and to show him that if he does stuff that there'll be bad consequences but that's not the current psychology of our government and other governments and as a result we're taking it a step too late each time in preventing him from doing stuff and we just heard about the Baltics and if Russia does invade the Baltics we have a treaty obligation under NATO is called article 5 of NATO to go to war with Russia to protect the Baltics or we can abrogate the treaty and let Russia just run run riot over Europe and that's pretty scary thought how about over here just a quick question what happened to sergey's wife and children that's the most important question sergey his wife and children or outside of russia they're in london they're safe they're being looked after by me and my colleagues over there I'm sitting here wondering you you would seem to be a significant risk we've heard you know people with you know mysterious disappearances in London the deaths you know like what's keeping you from you know disappearing well the the answer is that I'm sure that they would love to disappear me if they could get away with it and so this question of whether they can get away with it it does help me to speak publicly at the Aspen Institute and other places helps me to have a book that everyone reads it'll help me to have a movie so that if something does happen to me that will know who did it know that that's the only thing that can protect me there's there's no army of bodyguards that can protect me if they want me Dad and at some point they may do that but you know that is the that's the path I've chosen so we'll see hopefully I can survive and you can all pray for me and and buy my book and okay um what how about in the very back over there hi just a technical question how is it that you actually were able to so quickly wire the funds of all the holding companies were they the assets were not custody themselves in Moscow how did that work because I would think that they would clamp down on that as soon as it's possible you know you know it's interesting um a lot of people ask me that question the the Putin regime is evil but they're not very competent at implementing their evil they're they just have bad people working for them and because not good people don't want to work for them and so we had we owned publicly traded shares in Russia and we had we had a from November 2005 until July 2006 we had all that time to sell everything we sold everything and they didn't do anything it took until 2007 before they raided the offices and took them that long and so we were able to get our stuff out now a lot of people just don't people a lot of people when they get into situations like this just don't think terrible things can happen is that they just leave their stuff there and they're the ones who end up getting into trouble so the question is aren't there currency controls and the answer is there are no there there are no currency controls in place in Russia at the moment there may be in the future I that actually predict there will be but but there weren't certainly when I was trying to get the money out and so I was able to get it out fair and square two more questions okay let's how about the lady in red and over here it's an incredible story it's a remarkable story your courage and your commitment to following up on this is really really amazing and wonderful I'm wondering though you have criticized the US and Europeans for not taking Putin on what would be your idea as to what would be the best way as you obviously were very creative in this instance and I'd be really interested in knowing your thoughts on how you would would deal with that and I have a whole list of other people I'd like to put right behind Tamsin well basically I believe that that the way to stop Putin is to take his resources away to make trouble and so the way you take his resources away is first of all to do what they did with Iran so there was like 20 years worth of Iran sanctions that didn't do anything and then one day the United States and Europe came up with a very simple sanction which brought them to the table within 18 months which was to unplug Iran from the international banking system by by denying them the use of Swift to the International payment system if we do that to Russia that within 18 months they will have run out of money and they will come back and negotiate a date aunt a stopping of their nastiness the other thing I would do is that since all the money of Putin is held in the hands of Russian oligarchs I would go after the top 100 Russian oligarchs in the West and freeze their money and the last thing I would do is is I would provide armless to Ukraine Ukraine is is fighting a terrible battle with 20th century weapons against Russia with 21st century weapons and Ukraine is ready to be at war with Russia to defend their homeland and we should be ready to provide them weapons and at the moment it's still still very very much a controversial subject we have one more question we'll do it on this side of the room this gentleman right here in the front you mentioned very succinctly that Putin would go nuclear to save himself would you expand on that well so Putin is he is an associate path he doesn't have any capacity to look at the consequences that the human consequences of his actions and Putin also understands all he cares about is himself and he has no exit strategy he can't resign from from being president he can't leave because he knows that he if he leaves all his money will be taken away he'll be put in jail and he might be killed and so for him it's it's a mortal imperative to stay in power and because of that and because he's fears for his own life he's just he's ready to do just about anything he created a war he manufactured an enemy in the next-door country and is killing you know thousands of people to stay in power and he's ready to kill a lot more than a thousand people's if that's what it takes and and if if it comes to it I mean I could have I can envisage him taking a tactical nuclear weapon and sending it to a country that doesn't have any weapons is not part of NATO and killing a few hundred thousand people and then having the whole world look at him and say oh my god and everybody just becomes paralyzed at doing anything with Putin I could imagine him doing that um he's that crazy and and I don't I don't want to ruin your Friday night here but but um but that is the truth that this is this is a very evil man who has nuclear weapons and doesn't care about anybody he's ready to kill his own citizens and large numbers for a lot of different reasons and he'll kill whoever he needs to including using nuclear weapons sorry - ended on such a terrible note there's a jazz concert afterwards

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 40,480

Rating: 4.3493977 out of 5

Keywords: russia, Vladimir Putin (Politician), justice, law, Aspen Institute (Nonprofit Organization), aspen ideas festival, william browder, Politics (TV Genre), Police, Moscow, corruption, hedge fund, Soviet Union (Country)

Id: XpAqzIQffqo

Length: 55min 14sec (3314 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/bozmonster]

Saying he's Putin's number 1 enemy really gives him more credit than he deserves, nobody cares about the Magnitsky case except the British who probably had lost more with his death than we know about.

[u/Grimfandang0]

Bullshit, I am Putin and I don't know this fag

[u/WeAreBRICS]

Does Putin know that he is his No. 1 enemy?

[u/chewbacca81]

Who the fuck is this guy?

[u/[deleted]]

How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy

Probably because of his immense hubris.

[u/Brovich]

Watching most of the video made me hate Putin, but at the end during the Q&A session, Bill Browder made up a few lies and hyperboles that I knew were completely false. Now its hard to believe the rest of what he said.