{"id":1841,"date":"2018-05-12T07:15:04","date_gmt":"2018-05-12T13:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/supportthebitkovs.com\/?p=1841"},"modified":"2018-05-24T01:13:41","modified_gmt":"2018-05-24T07:13:41","slug":"english-from-russia-with-no-love-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/supportthebitkovs.com\/en\/2018\/05\/12\/english-from-russia-with-no-love-lost\/","title":{"rendered":"From Russia With No Love Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ESPA\u00d1OL DISPONIBLE AQU\u00cd:<\/a><\/p>\n

Anti-Putin crusader Bill Browder on his disillusionment with Moscow\u2019s leader and his tangles with the man behind the Trump dossier.<\/h2>\n

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By Tunku Varadarajan<\/div>\n

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hicago<\/em><\/p>\n

On the elevator to his hotel suite, Bill Browder has his nose pressed to his cellphone. \u201cI\u2019m checking for updates from Guatemala,\u201d he tells me. Not for the latest coffee prices or vacation rentals, but for news of a Russian family imprisoned there \u201cfor violations of local residency laws\u2014all because of pressure from the Putin regime.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Bitkov family is Mr. Browder\u2019s latest moral campaign. An Anglo-American businessman with deep and harrowing ties to Russia, Mr. Browder is arguably the man Vladimir Putin would most like to see go up in a vengeful puff of smoke. Once the largest private investor in Russia, he has become\u2014since his 2005 expulsion from the country and the 2009 death in prison of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky \u2014Mr. Putin\u2019s most vocal civilian opponent in the Western world.<\/p>\n

In February 2015, Mr. Browder published a book called \u201cRed Notice,\u201d an account of the murder of Magnitsky, who was beaten to death in his cell by Russian riot police. \u201cPeople started writing to me,\u201d Mr. Browder says. \u201cSome said, \u2018I love your book\u2019; others said they hated it. One even wrote to me saying the CIA had installed devices in my teeth that listened to my thoughts, and that he could help me remove them.\u201d<\/p>\n

A more credible email came from a Russian woman who described what had happened to her and her husband. \u201cShe said they were greatly moved by the Magnitsky story, and were suffering from a similar ordeal,\u201d Mr. Browder says. So he decided to help.<\/p>\n

As Mr. Browder tells it, this was Irina Bitkov\u2019s story: Her husband, Igor, owned a profitable pulp mill near St. Petersburg. A local oligarch coveted the business and made Mr. Bitkov an offer. After he demurred\u2014the suggested price was derisory\u2014the Bitkovs\u2019 teenage daughter, Anastasia, was abducted and raped. Then Mr. Bitkov\u2019s bank (owned by a Putin crony) called in its loans, forcing the mill into bankruptcy. Fearing for their lives, the Bitkovs fled, ending up in Guatemala, which has no extradition treaty with Russia. They obtained legal residence in 2009 with the help of a Guatemalan law firm.<\/p>\n

Six years later, a local United Nations-funded anticorruption commission charged the Bitkovs with human trafficking, based on alleged \u201cpassport violations.\u201d It was \u201ca wildly improbable charge,\u201d Mr. Browder says, \u201cbrought under pressure from the Russian bank that had foreclosed on them.\u201d Mr. and Mrs. Bitkov were sentenced to 19 and 14 years in prison, respectively, \u201ca worse sentence than if they\u2019d committed rape, or assault, or armed robbery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the punishment already inflicted on the Bitkovs, why would Mr. Putin\u2019s forces bother to continue their vendetta? \u201cI\u2019ll explain it to you,\u201d Mr. Browder says, now animated. \u201cIt\u2019s all about example-making. The reason why they did it is so that the next person they go to in Russia, to ask him to turn over his business, doesn\u2019t say \u2018no.\u2019 If he says \u2018no,\u2019 they\u2019ll say, \u2018It doesn\u2019t matter where you go. We\u2019re going to take your stuff, we\u2019re going to hunt you and your family down, we\u2019re going to ruin your lives. Look at the Bitkovs.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

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ILLUSTRATION:\u00a0ZINA SAUNDERS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Mr. Browder pivots to the story of Sergei Magnitsky: \u201cThey made an example of him, too\u2014telling idealists everywhere in Russia that \u2018we\u2019ll kill you.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Magnitsky was the man who transformed Mr. Browder from an energetic and largely unfussy participant in Russia\u2019s markets to a crusader at war with Mr. Putin. It happened this way: Mr. Browder was the founder of Hermitage Capital, which was among the largest portfolio investors in Russia. Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer, worked on a contract for Mr. Browder beginning in October 2007.<\/p>\n

In the course of his auditing, Magnitsky uncovered a theft from the Russian treasury of past taxes Hermitage had paid, amounting to $230 million. When he refused to back down from his sleuthing, Magnistsky was arrested in November 2008. He died after 358 days in prison. Mr. Browder\u2019s subsequent lobbying prompted Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act of 2012, designed to punish any Russian official who had been involved in the lawyer\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

\u201cSergei was an idealist\u2014a naive idealist,\u201d Mr. Browder says. \u201cRussia has created a system where evil people get rewarded and good people get crushed. It\u2019s almost like the Soviet Union all over again.\u201d Back then, if you weren\u2019t a member of the Communist Party, \u201cyou were excluded from all privileges. Now, if you\u2019re not a member of the criminal enterprise, you\u2019re excluded from all the valuable things in life.\u201d By \u201cthe criminal enterprise,\u201d Mr. Browder means the Putin regime: \u201cThe mistake everybody makes about Russia is they think there\u2019s the mafia and there\u2019s the government. It really is one and the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Mr. Browder first went to Russia, in 1995, Boris Yeltsin was president and the country was in a state of amoral chaos. \u201cTwenty-two oligarchs,\u201d he says, \u201cended up with 40% of the country. Everyone else lived in destitute poverty, with professors driving taxis and art museums selling paintings off the walls.\u201d Mr. Browder acknowledges his own motives weren\u2019t idealistic. \u201cI went there,\u201d he says, \u201cas a capitalist and an opportunist. There was a huge market opportunity, which was that stocks were trading at this enormous discount.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what was happening in Russia soon began to disturb him. \u201cLong before the Magnitsky story, I saw this looting going on,\u201d he says. \u201cI would see very brazen theft from my own companies.\u201d This upset him \u201cfrom an economic standpoint.\u201d But more than that, it seemed \u201cso fundamentally wrong that there was just this total apathy about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

What followed was \u201ca growth of revulsion within me.\u201d He attributes the shameless stealing in the Yeltsin years to a continuation of old Communist-era habits. There were \u201cno moral boundaries\u2014the result of getting rid of religion. There was no \u2018Thou shalt not steal\u2019 or \u2018Thou shalt not kill.\u2019\u00a0\u201d So when Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, Mr. Browder was enthusiastic.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst of all,\u201d he says, \u201cPutin wasn\u2019t drunk. He seemed reasonably fit. He spoke a bit of English and seemed to be a technocrat. And then he said all of these things that sounded good, like, \u2018We\u2019re going to bring the chaos to an end,\u2019 and, \u2018We\u2019re going to end all this oligarch criminality.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Mr. Browder liked the spiel: \u201cIt was attractive. You wanted to believe him. It seemed plausible, and for a brief period of time he was actually doing the things that a person with those intentions would do.\u201d Mr. Browder adds that \u201cno one will admit it today. I\u2019m the only one who says openly that I was pro-Putin until I wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

When was the Damascene moment when Mr. Browder saw that Mr. Putin wasn\u2019t a force for good? \u201cI don\u2019t think there was a moment per se,\u201d he says. \u201cThere was a sort of slow deterioration in my impression of him, which eventually came to a full-on conclusion.\u201d Mr. Browder had cheered when Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia\u2019s richest oligarch, was arrested in 2003. \u201cKhodorkovsky was my biggest nemesis,\u201d Mr. Browder says, \u201cand I was fighting with him over all sorts of problems at Yukos,\u201d Mr. Khodorkovsky\u2019s oil company. \u201cI owned shares of Yukos and Yukos subsidiaries, and he did all these illegal tricks to reduce the value of those shares so that he could buy it all back.\u201d (Mr. Browder says he has \u201cfully forgiven Khodorkovsky,\u201d who was freed in 2013 and has always maintained his prosecution was politically motivated. \u201cWe\u2019re on the same side of the barricade, fighting against Putin.\u201d)<\/p>\n

What made Mr. Browder lose faith was the failure to prosecute another oligarch for practices similar to those of which Mr. Khodorkovsky had been accused: \u201cI thought to myself, wait a second. How does this work? How does this fit into that game plan of going after the oligarchs?\u201d That was when he says it \u201cbecame clear that Putin wasn\u2019t sincere. His intention wasn\u2019t to get rid of the oligarchs. It was to become the biggest oligarch himself.\u201d By arresting Mr. Khodorkovsky, Mr. Browder says, the regime had made an example, ensuring that every other oligarch in the land would capitulate: \u201cEveryone started to ask, \u2018What do we have to do to make sure we don\u2019t end up like Khodorkovsky?\u2019\u00a0\u201d Mr. Putin\u2019s answer, according to Mr. Browder, was: \u201cGive me 50% of your assets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Browder also contends that Mr. Putin benefited personally from the tax fraud Magnitsky uncovered: \u201cWhen the law was in its final version, he issued a public statement saying that his single-largest foreign-policy priority was to stop the Magnitsky Act from becoming law.\u201d Why? \u201cThe first and most specific reason,\u201d Mr. Browder says, \u201cand we only know this now, is that Putin actually received some of the proceeds of the crime that Sergei was killed over. In theory\u2014and Putin saw this\u2014he could be a person put on the Magnitsky list.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second reason is that the Magnitsky Act establishes a template to deal with human-rights violations that \u201cflips the old concept of sanctions on its head,\u201d Mr. Browder says. \u201cIt targets the perpetrators\u2014the financial and juridical elites\u2014and not an entire country. You can\u2019t travel. You can\u2019t move your money around. It\u2019s like modern-day cancer treatment targeting only the bad cells.\u201d<\/p>\n

The law\u2014and Mr. Browder\u2014featured most recently in the drama surrounding the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who in June 2016 met with representatives of Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign. The story also involves Fusion GPS, the Washington-based opposition-research firm contracted by Hillary Clinton\u2019s campaign and the Democratic Party to investigate Mr. Trump\u2019s possible Russia connections.<\/p>\n

\u201cPutin hates the Magnitsky Act, as we know,\u201d Mr. Browder says, \u201cand looks for different ways to stop it. And one of his projects\u2014well-resourced, with millions of dollars\u2014was Veselnitskaya. She was deputized for this project because she represented the Katsyv family\u2014Putin cronies caught up in laundering some Magnitsky money in the U.S. Some of that money enabled the purchase of apartment buildings in New York by Denis Katsyv, whose father is a government official close to Putin.\u201d (In May 2017 Mr. Katsyv\u2019s company, Prevezon Holdings, reached a $5.9 million settlement with the U.S. government, thereby avoiding a trial. The company and the Katsyvs denied any wrongdoing.)<\/p>\n

In Mr. Browder\u2019s account, Ms. Veselnitskaya came to America on behalf of the Katsyvs when the U.S. Justice Department began a forfeiture order for the properties. Ms. Veselnitskaya then began \u201ca legal campaign to extricate the Katsyvs\u201d from the case \u201cand a political campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act.\u201d She hired John W. Moscow, a lawyer with the firm Baker Hostetler, who \u201cbrought Glenn Simpson on as part of their team\u201d in 2014. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last August, Mr. Simpson, Fusion GPS\u2019s founder and a former Journal reporter, said his firm provided litigation support to Baker Hostetler in the Prevezon case. Mr. Browder says that Mr. Simpson \u201cgot very energized in the spring of 2016 and basically started to work on behalf of Veselnitskaya, who has since been shown to be a Russian agent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Browder is referring to Ms. Veselnitskaya\u2019s public acknowledgment that she is \u201can informant\u201d for the Russian prosecutor general\u2019s office. \u201cThat makes her an agent,\u201d Mr. Browder insists. \u201cSo Glenn Simpson was working, effectively, also as an agent for the Russian government, as an adjunct to the Russian FSB,\u201d the KGB\u2019s successor. \u201cAt the same time .\u00a0.\u00a0. he\u2019s doing this project to create a dossier on Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Browder tells me he heard from reporters that as the campaign against the Magnitsky Act proceeded, Mr. Simpson was pitching a story that \u201cMagnitsky wasn\u2019t murdered, he died of natural causes,\u201d that \u201cMagnitsky wasn\u2019t a whistleblower, he was a criminal,\u201d and that \u201cBill Browder telling this story is in contempt of Congress and perjuring himself.\u201d (Through a lawyer, Mr. Simpson declined to comment. In November Mr. Simpson testified before the House Intelligence Committee: \u201cI obviously think Sergei Magnitsky was killed in prison by neglect, if not worse.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Three days before Mr. Putin\u2019s fourth inauguration, I ask Mr. Browder about the Russian president\u2019s future. \u201cWe have Putin 4.0 now,\u201d he says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s his fourth or fifth term. None of the mechanical electoral processes are relevant.\u201d There are, Mr. Browder says, only three ways it can end: \u201cOne, he\u2019s killed in office. Two, he\u2019s overthrown. And three, he dies of natural causes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Browder\u2019s bet is on natural causes: \u201cHe will stay in power till he dies. That\u2019s the only way he can protect his money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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