The Courage of Sir Bill Browder

>> Andrew Roberts: So, Bill Browder is a financier and political activist who Vladimir Putin has repeatedly tried to arrest. Bill, tell us about the Hermitage Fund. It had four and a half billion dollars under management. When and how did you become the largest foreign investor in Russia?

>> Bill Browder: Well, it's kind of a strange story.

So I come from an unusual American family. My grandfather was the general secretary of the American Communist Party from 1932 to 1945. In my teenage rebellion, I decided to become a capitalist. I went to Stanford business school, and I graduated business school in 1989, which was the year the Berlin Wall came down.

As I was trying to figure out what to do with my life post business school, one day I had this epiphany, which is that if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the Berlin Wall has just come down, I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist in eastern Europe.

And so I moved to London, which was as close as I could get to eastern Europe at the time. I ended up with a job at Solomon Brothers on their east european investment banking team. And my very first client was the Murmansk trawler fleet, which is a fishing fleet located in Murmansk, Russia, which is a couple hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.

I fly to Murmansk. The head of the fishing fleet shows me one of their ships. It's an enormous vessel. I say, how much is one of these things cost? $20 million. How many do you have in your fleet? 100, that's $2 billion worth of ships. And I'd been hired to advise them on whether or not to exercise their right under the privatization program of Russia to buy 51%.

And I said, what price is the government selling you? 51%. And he said, $2.5 million.

>> Andrew Roberts: Even I can work out. I'm no capitalist investor, but even I can work out that you've got a deal there, Bill.

>> Bill Browder: Exactly, you don't have to be a Solomon Brothers banker or a Stanford MBA to know that that's a pretty good deal.

So I said to myself, I don't wanna be advising on this stuff, I wanna be investing in this stuff. And I eventually quit Solomon Brothers, I moved to Moscow. I set up a fund called the Hermitage Fund. I started with $25 million from a famous investor named Edmund Safra.

And eventually, I grew to become the largest foreign investor in the country with $4.5 billion. And so I kind of achieved my goal.

>> Andrew Roberts: And at this moment, Putin was weak and the oligarchs were powerful. Isn't that right? We don't think of Putin as being less powerful than anybody else in Russia.

But in those days, that was the case, wasn't it? Tell us about that and also how it changed.

>> Bill Browder: So basically, when Putin showed up, he showed up as a prime minister in 1999 and then became president in year 2000. But as you said, he wasn't this all powerful man like he is today, because all of the power of the presidency had been informally stolen or usurped by these people known as the Russian oligarchs.

And when I was investing there, I was fighting with the oligarchs who were stealing money from me. He was fighting with oligarchs who were stealing power from him. And we had this weird alignment of interest for some brief period of time, when every time I would attack the oligarchs, he would weigh in on my side, even though I've never met the guy.

And all that worked out very nicely for a while. But one day he decided he wanted to finally win his war with the oligarchs. And the way he went about that was to arrest the richest oligarch in Russia. There was a man named Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the owner of an oil company called Yukos.

He arrests him off his private jet in Siberia, brings him back to Moscow, puts him on trial. And this was at the time when the oligarchs were the powerful ones and the president was the weak one. And so everybody said, of course, hes not gonna go to jail.

I dont know whats going to happen here, but thats not going to happen. Everyone watched very carefully. And when you're on trial, you sit in a cage. And so they allowed the television cameras to come in and film the richest man in Russia sitting in a cage. And so he was sitting in this cage, everyone was saying, no, nothing's gonna happen, it was impossible.

And then the court case came to a conclusion, and Khodorkovsky was sentenced to ten years in prison. And everybody was completely shocked. I mean, this was not, in most people's view, that was not how they imagined things would work out. And the people who were most shocked were the other oligarchs, because they've been living in this world where they were the ones most powerful.

And all of a sudden, they see their compatriot sent off to jail. And so the rest of the oligarchs went to Putin in the summer of 2004 and said, Vladimir, that was pretty extreme. What do we do to make sure that we don't end up sitting in a cage?

And Putin said, it's real simple, 50% and not 50% for the Russian government or 50% for the presidential administration of Russia, 50% for Vladimirovich Putin. And that was the moment that he became the richest man in the world. And that was the moment that the oligarchs all became subordinate to him.

>> Andrew Roberts: And it also changed your life slightly in that in November 2005, you were deported as a threat to national security, deported to London. How did that come about? And what happened next?

>> Bill Browder: Well, so previously, I had been in this sort of strange alignment of interests with Putin.

I was fighting with the same guys he was fighting with. Our interests were aligned. There's a famous expression, your enemy's enemy is your friend. And then all of a sudden, Putin becomes business partners with the same people that I'm still fighting with. And I was still exposing their corruption and complaining about all the money that was being stolen.

But instead of exposing Putin's enemies, now I'm exposing Putin's 50% business partners. And so in November of 2005, I was flying back from London to Moscow. I'd been on this flight 250 times before, and I arrived at the VIP lounge, Sheremetyevo Airport. What should have been like a two minute, the administrative thing to get checked in and move it on.

I'm sitting there for an hour, and then eventually, four heavily armed border guards come into the lounge, grab me, frog march me down to the detention center of the airport. I'm sitting there overnight, not knowing whether I'm going to be deported or arrested. And thank God, the next morning at 11 AM, they put me on the air flight or Aeroflot flight back to Moscow, and they declare me a threat to national security.

And this was November 13, 2005, so I haven't been back in 19 years.

>> Andrew Roberts: The 4 June 2007 was an important day in your life as well, wasn't it? Tell us what happened then.

>> Bill Browder: Well, so after I'm kicked out, I do several things. First thing I do is I say to myself, if they're gonna go after me like that, that's not a very serious.

When the Russians turn on you, they tend to do so with extreme prejudice. And what they've done is not that bad. Kicking me out is not that bad. What else could they do? I said, well, they could arrest my people. So I evacuated all my people. And then they could seize my assets.

And once my people were evacuated, we quickly and quietly sold every last security we had in Russia, we got everything out. And I thought that was the end of my story with Russia. The only thing I kept there was an empty office and a secretary sitting in the office in case one day the storm blew over.

And so I'm going about other things in my life, I have a new fund investing in other parts of the world. And on June 4th, 2007, I get this frantic phone call from the Lone Secretary in the empty Moscow office. And she says, bill, there's 25 police officers raiding our office, what should I do?

And I wasn't sure, so I called up an American lawyer that I used in Moscow, and I say, there's 25 police officers raiding my office. What should I do? And he sounded very distracted. He said, there's 25 police officers raiding my office looking for your documents. I'm not sure.

And so in total, there were 50 police officers rating both offices, looking for our stamp seals and certificates for our investment holding companies, the companies that had used to own all of our assets. But now we're empty because I had sold everything. And they found all those documents at the law firm's office.

They seized those documents, and then the next thing we know, we no longer own our investment holding companies. They have been fraudulently re-registered by the police, using documents seized by the police into the name of a man who had been convicted of manslaughter and let out of jail early.

And at this point, I was terrified. Not because there was any economic loss, potential loss. We got all our money out, but I was terrified that if the police were working with killers to steal my companies. I'm going to be walking through Frankfurt airport one day and find myself arrested on a Russian warrant or something.

And so I decided to hire the smartest lawyer I could find in Russia. It was a young man named Sergei Magnitsky. Sergei was one of these people that could do ten things in the time it takes others to do one. I heard Sergei say, help me figure out what's going on and help me stop it.

So Sergei goes out and investigates and researches and comes back and says, I figured out what these guys are up to. And basically, when we had sold everything in the previous year and got all of our money out, we had a big profit that year. We had a billion dollars of profit.

And on that billion dollars of profit, we paid $230 million of capital gains tax to the Russian government. And what Sergei had discovered in his investigation was that the $230 million that we paid had been refunded to a group of crooked officials using our stolen investment holding companies.

So they went to the tax authorities and they said there actually wasn't a billion dollars of profits last year, and they came up with some way of explaining that. And therefore, the $230 million was paid in error, and we want that money back. And so they applied for an illegal $230 million tax refund on Christmas Eve 2007, I'm sorry, on 23rd December 2007.

And it was approved and paid out the next day, Christmas Eve. Largest tax refund in the history of Russia paid out in one day on a fraud. If you had legitimately overpaid $5,000, you'd still be fighting for it 20 years later. But nope, $230 million overnight, Christmas Eve.

>> Andrew Roberts: From that, do we assume that Putin himself probably had profited from it, those around him?

>> Bill Browder: Well, interestingly, so knowing what I know now, he did. I mean, I could prove it, but back then, I was still naive. I guess I thought that Putin was some type of nationalist, a patriot, that he was caring for his country.

He might not have cared about a foreigner getting ripped off, but he wouldn't like his own government being ripped off. That was my logic. It wasn't like I was by myself with that. Sergei, my lawyer, had the same view. He thought that this is a theft against our country, the Russian country, and he couldn't stand what he was seeing.

And so we wrote criminal complaints to every different law enforcement agency in Russia, exposing the crime. I went on television, radio, newspapers to tell the story. And Sergei went to the Russian state investigative committee, which is their version of the FBI, and gave sworn testimony about the individuals involved.

And then we sat back and waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. And in Putin's Russia, there are no good guys. And five weeks after Sergei testified against these corrupt officials, the same officials he testified against came to his home on the 24th November 2008.

They arrested him, they put him in pretrial detention, and then they began to torture him to get him to withdraw his testimony, and they put him in cells.

>> Andrew Roberts: Sorry, within a year, he was dead. So tell us how that happened. What do we know about the murder, essentially, of your friend?

>> Bill Browder: Well, so what we know is that they started off by trying to torture him, to get him withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds and left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no window panes.

In December, in Moscow, in cells with no heat and 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 moved from cell to cell to cell, and they wanted 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 had stolen the $230 million, and he had done so on my instruction. And Sergei was a man of incredible principle and integrity, and for him, the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more awful than the physical pain they were subjecting him to and he refused.

And so the pressure and the torture got worse and worse. And after about six months of this, his health started to deteriorate. He started getting terrible pains in his stomach. He ended up losing 20 kilos. He was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones and needing an operation, which was scheduled for the 1st August 2009.

A week before the operation, they came to him again and asked him to sign a false confession. Again he refused, and in retaliation, they then moved him to a prison that had no medical facilities. At this other prison, they completely denied him all medical care. His condition got worse and worse and worse, and on the night of November 16th, 2009, he went into critical condition.

On that night, the Butyrka authorities at this new prison didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore, and so they put him in an ambulance and sent him back across town to the prison that had a medical wing. And 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 eight riot guards with rubber batons beat him until he died. That was November 16th, 2009. So about 15 years ago. And he left a wife and two children. 37 years old.

>> Andrew Roberts: 37 years old. What you're talking about is essentially a mafia gang that's taken over a state, aren't you?

>> Bill Browder: Well, that's been my realization from this whole Magnitsky case, is that, and it becomes even more apparent when we look at what happened after Sergei's murder. So Sergei gets murdered, and. I thought, possibly, and he did something very unusual. He wrote everything down. In his 358 days in detention, he wrote 450 complaints documenting who did what to him, when, how, where, etc.

And he would put these together. He'd write them by hand, give them to his lawyer. Once a month, the lawyer would come and visit him, get a package of these things. His lawyer would file these complaints. The authorities would ignore them or deny them. But I got copies, and so I started to put this stuff out there after he was killed to show everybody what had happened.

It was the most well documented case of human rights abuse that's ever come out. And what happened after that was really remarkable, which is that the entire Russian system basically covered up the murder, covered up everything that happened to him. They said he died of natural causes, and then they covered up the economic crime that he exposed.

And it wasn't just the low level and medium level people. Vladimir Putin personally got involved in the cover up. And so what does that tell you? I mean, Putin was neck deep into this whole thing. And so it's not just rogue operation, this was like a mafia state.

And so, I mean, and I should point out that since then, we have traced who got the $230 million. And we discovered that some of that money went to a very famous person named Sergey Roldugin. And Sergey Roldugin is a name that most Russia watchers would know, but most people in the West wouldn't.

But he became really famous during the Panama Papers expose. Each country had their own sort of hero, and Sergey Roldugin was the Russian hero, or antihero, I should say, because he was a cellist from St. Petersburg that they discovered was worth $2 billion. And where did this cellist get all this money?

From all sorts of dirty deals, including he got some of the money from the Magnitsky case. And why is this cellist so interesting is that he happens to be Putin's best friend from childhood, the godfather of Putin's daughter, the person who introduced Putin to his wife. And for all intents and purposes, this guy is a Putin nominee, a Putin trustee.

There's no reason why a bunch of oligarchs and other people would send hundreds of millions of dollars to a cellist in St. Petersburg, except for the fact that he's just a frontman for Putin. And so I can say conclusively, based on the evidence, that Putin was a beneficiary of the crime that Sergei Magnitsky was killed over.

And I can also say that Putin is a beneficiary of almost every other crime that's committed in Russia. It's like a mafia state. He's the mafia boss, and everything. Some piece of everything, has to go to him.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you weren't going to put up with. You weren't going to allow the name of Magnitsky to die in the way that he himself had died.

You were going to not accept this, were you? You managed to get some coalition together and to pass the Magnitsky Act in December, 2012. Tell us about that, about the act and about how you cobbled together this global alliance.

>> Bill Browder: Well, so after Sergei was murdered, it was the most traumatic, heartbreaking, shocking, life-changing thing that could have ever happened.

He was killed as my proxy. He was like a voodoo doll. And I felt the pain of everything that was happening to him. And I couldn't go on with my life as it was. And so I made a vow to his memory, to his family, and to myself that I was gonna give up my life as a businessman and use my time, energy, and resources to go after the people who killed him and make sure they face justice.

And that's what I've been doing for the last 15 years. And originally, I thought I could get justice in Russia, but as I mentioned, they circled the wagons and made sure there was no possibility in Russia. So I said, well, if we can't get justice inside of Russia, we need to get justice outside of Russia.

But how do we get justice outside of Russia for a torture and murder that took place inside of Russia? And that's when I came up with this idea, which is that the people who killed Sergei didn't kill him for ideology, or politics, or religion, or anything like that.

They killed him for $230 million. And they don't keep that $230 million in Russia, because as easily as they stole it, it could be stolen from them. They keep that money in the West. And so I had this idea, which is that we might not be able to prosecute them in the West for these terrible things that they did to him, but we could probably go after their assets, and certainly we can make sure that they can't travel.

And so I went to Washington and I presented this idea to two senators, a Democratic senator from Maryland named Benjamin Cardin and a Republican senator from Arizona, the late John McCain. And I told him the same story I've just shared with you. And I said, can we freeze their assets and ban their travel?

And these two senators said, yes, and that became known as the Magnitsky Act. And it was remarkable. I mean, it was not a hard. I mean, it's sort of interesting, because getting a piece of legislation passed in America is really not something that happens very often, but it was not very hard because the story of Sergei Magnitsky was so shocking.

And the idea of banning torturers and murderers from coming to America, who's gonna be against that? And so when it went for a vote in the Senate, it passed 92 to 4, and the 4 people who voted against it were only voting against it because they wanted something even tougher.

And it passed 89% of the House of Representatives and it became a federal law on December 14, 2012. And since then, Canada has a Magnitsky Act, the UK has a Magnitsky Act, the EU has a Magnitsky Act, Australia has a Magnitsky Act, Norway has a Magnitsky Act, Iceland has a Magnitsky Act.

I mean, it's-

>> Andrew Roberts: There are 35 countries in total, aren't they?

>> Bill Browder: Exactly.

>> Andrew Roberts: What a splendid legal monument to the memory of your friend. What was Putin's response?

>> Bill Browder: Putin went crazy. So, we've lived in a world, for the most part, where everybody has been appeasing and genuflecting to Putin.

And all of a sudden, nobody from nowhere, me, shows up and creates this total disrespectful piece of legislation, basically labeling the Russians a bunch of crooks and murderers and creating external consequences for the Russians. And most importantly, Putin is a guy who commits human rights abuse and kleptocracy on a grand scale and then keeps his money in the West through all these different oligarchs.

And he values money more than human life, and so his entire business model is about to be ruined by Bill Browder, this guy from the south side of Chicago. He, first of all, was very angry with the US, and he banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families in direct response to the Magnitsky Act.

And he then made it its single largest foreign policy priority to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act. He put it in writing in a foreign policy paper that that's what he wanted to do. And then he started huffing and puffing. And then, he started going after me. And so he went after me with, they sentenced me twice in prison in a court.

Court in Russia to 18 years in prison. They then started chasing me around the world with Interpol arrest warrants. I've been on the Interpol arrest list eight times. They've been begging the british government to hand me over for extradition, suing me, surveilling me, threatening me. All just nastiness of the.

>> Andrew Roberts: We think of Interpol as being a good thing, as being a sort of positive force. You actually found it sort of taking part in your persecution?

>> Bill Browder: Well, not only that, but Interpol is every country in the world is a member of Interpol and all you need to do to, like, chase someone you don't like is to have a court issue an arrest warrant.

And so Interpol is great if some rapist from here flees to Germany, and then we can catch them in Germany and send them back here. But if a opposition politician in Nicaragua flees and the Nicaraguan government puts out an Interpol warrant for him or her, that's not so good.

And there's a lot of that abuse going on. We've seen Russia and Turkey and Iran and China use this Interpol system ad nauseam for their own political and criminal purposes. And so Interpol, it's kind of like a public swimming pool. It's all wonderful to swim in on a hot summer day, but people start pissing in the pool.

Nobody wants to swim in there.

>> Andrew Roberts: Where's the $230 million? You tracked it down, didn't you? Where did it wind up?

>> Bill Browder: Well, we did track it down, and we found all of it, and it went to 26 different countries. And every time we would find where it went, we would write a criminal complaint to the law enforcement agency of that country with the details of where the money went so they could open a criminal investigation, freeze, and then seize that money.

16 countries opened criminal investigations, including the United States, France, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Poland, all sorts of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, all sorts of places. The one country that didn't is the country that you and I are both sitting in right now, which is the United Kingdom, which, by the way, received the largest share of that money.

More money came from that $230 million into the United Kingdom than any other country, which is not a big leap, because London is considered London grad by many people, because that's where a lot of this money flows. For a long time, the government here just didn't want to do anything to rock the boat.

There was too much money flowing here, and so they refused to ever open an investigation.

>> Andrew Roberts: And how much of the 230 million did you manage to. I mean, you've tracked it all down, but did you manage to get any of it frozen?

>> Bill Browder: We got a lot of the money frozen.

I mean, not a lot in proportional terms. I mean, so we got about 20 million or so frozen in Switzerland. I think 18 million in France, 20 some odd in Spain, the bad guys paid a $6 million fine. In New York, there's another fine being paid by one of the banks in New York, one of the banks that laundered the money in New York.

I think it's like $37 million. I would say maybe if you added it all up, probably $100 million or something like that.

>> Andrew Roberts: That's certainly enough money to put your life in danger. Have you had death threats or anything sort of physically unpleasant happened to you?

>> Bill Browder: Yeah, all the time.

I mean, these people are constantly surveilling me, threatening me. I was told by the US Department of Justice that there was a kidnapping plot being cooked up against me and that I should basically leave the country. I was going to Davos in Switzerland, and I was warned by the Swiss security services that there was a plot there against me.

And so there's a lot of nastiness going on against me because it's not even that. The amount of money is not even so significant. But what I've done is I've exposed the whole money laundering pipe coming out of Russia, and much, much bigger amounts came out of Russia than just the 230 million.

And in fact, as part of our investigation, we discovered that the first bank that all this money was laundered through was Dansky bank in Estonia. And we did 200 million of the 230 went to Jansky bank, and we wrote criminal complaints about that. And one day we were contacted by the main newspaper in Denmark, and they said, can we get access to your criminal complaint?

Because we've got a data leak coming out of Dansky bank, and we think there's a lot more money that was stolen out of Russia. And so we gave them our criminal complaint. They then compared it to the data leak they found, and they discovered that it wasn't 200 million that had been dirty money coming out of Russia, it was 8.3 billion.

And this is Denmark, which is supposed to be the second most honest country in the world. And so the bank had to do an external investigation. They hired outside law firm and outside accounting firm and outside data analysis firm. They did a full review, and they came back and said, actually, it wasn't 8.3 billion, it was 232 billion of dirty money was laundered.

Through their bank coming out of Russia. And most shockingly about this whole story is that this is just one mid sized Scandinavian bank. If you were to lift the hood on Raifais in Vienna, Deutsche bank and Frankfurt, Credit Suisse and UBS and a few other banks, I think the number would be close to a trillion of money that was stolen from Russia and laundered in the west by about 1000 people of Putin and 1000 people around him.

And I think that that's actually the most important discovery of this whole investigation. Because if I'm right, and I'm pretty sure I am right, that's money that should have been spent on hospitals and schools and roads instead was spent on private jets and yachts and villas. And that's an unsustainable situation in a country like Russia.

Putin and his guys stole too much money. And I think that that they put themselves in an untenable position. You can't really survive with that kind of, in a country with 141 million people and 1000 people stealing all that money, eventually that 141 million people is going to come for you.

And I think that Putin understood this, and I think that that's the basis for his invasion of Ukraine. What do you do if you're a guy who's stolen too much money, you're a dictator, you're afraid of your own people, and you don't wanna be sitting in the Kremlin and having them storm through the Kremlin gates.

What do you do? You create a foreign enemy and you start a war. Machiavelli 101. And I believe that this war in Ukraine has more to do with Putin desperately trying to stay in power, because if he's not in power, he won't be alive. I think that the war is like a wag the dog war.

This is a war to stay in power. It's not a war about Russian empire. It's not a war about NATO enlargement, it's just a war about a grubby little man who's stolen too much money and is afraid of dying.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you've also said this about the wars in Georgia in 2008 and the.

Crimea attack in 2014, that it's a form of massive displacement therapy, essentially.

>> Bill Browder: Exactly. And it's very interesting because if you look at those two other wars, and not just those wars, but also the first chechen war, when Putin first came to power, each time he used the war as a way of jacking up his popular support, creating some fervent nationalist patriotism or whatever you want to call it.

And if you follow his approval ratings, they were going down in 2008 around the global financial crisis. He goes into Georgia and they're right back up, stays up for a while, and then starts going down. Around 2014, he goes into Crimea. And what happens is approval ratings skyrocket.

His approval ratings start flagging, particularly during COVID He comes out of COVID what does he do? He goes into, does a full scale invasion of Ukraine. And his approval ratings, of course, shoot up again, but they're not up high now. But there's no more wars he can do now.

All he can do is just fight the war as hard as he can and repress everybody inside of Russia.

>> Andrew Roberts: How long can this go on for? Do you think he's in a precarious position, or do you think that he's going to die as president in his old age with his boots off, as it were?

>> Bill Browder: Well, I mean, there's no 100% certainty about anything, but I think the most likely scenario is that he can go on for a very long time. I mean look, Stalin lost 25 million men or maybe more. So far, Putin's only lost 650,000. I think there's a lot more people he can send into war.

And he's completely has no emotion. He has, there's no empathy or anything like that. And so for him, it's just purely moving pieces around a board. And so if he's got to send another 3 million men to their deaths, he'll do it. Absolutely. How do you feel about apologists for Putin?

>> Andrew Roberts: I'm thinking in terms of Tucker Carlson, for example. What's your take on him and other people who are trying to essentially apologize for, of Vladimir teaching?

>> Bill Browder: Well, I'm not gonna speak about Tucker CarlSon directly because we're in the UK and you're not allowed to libel certain individuals without.

But let me speak about the class of people more generally of Putin apologists. What I've learned is that when you scratch the surface, so it doesn't make sense if you look at it on the surface, these people who come from mostly Republicans, I believe the Republicans in the past have been the most supportive of my cause.

The most tough one, Russia, the real sort of conservatives if you will. And it was harder to get the Democrats than the Republicans when I was working on the Magnitsky act. Of course, we got everybody in the end. It's not a natural thing for a Republican to be sort of pro Putin.

And so what I've learned in my life as an investor is that if something doesn't look right on the surface, you just don't have all the information. So what information could I have that would explain that? And I don't have any proof of this with certain people, but the proof has come out in other people who I don't particularly know.

But basically, Putin pays people. He pays them one way or another. And we saw that there was some firm in Tennessee that got $10 million from the Russian security services to go and put a bunch of influencers on YouTube and various other places with Russian talking points. And I can't see any other plausible explanation for this group of people doing this other than there's some financial interest in doing so.

>> Andrew Roberts: I always ask the same questions of all my guests at the end of our interviews. The first is, what if, have you got a, have you got a historical what if, or counterfactual that particularly interests you?

>> Bill Browder: Well, I guess the one that I'm always thinking is, what if we had actually been tough on Russia after the invasion of Georgia?

What if we had been tough on Russia after the taking of Crimea? What if we had been tough on Russia after the Skripal poisonings here?

>> Andrew Roberts: By tough, what do you mean? We couldn't physically stop Russia from attacking Georgia in 2008. You mean massive economic sanctions?

>> Bill Browder: What if we'd rolled out really tough sanctions like we were doing right now?

Nothing on the order of magnitude we're doing right now, but just 10% of what we're doing right now. I bet you, I think, that Putin wouldn't have gone into Ukraine. I think he was so emboldened by our appeasement that he thought nothing would happen. He thought we were also just such scared accommodators that he would go into Ukraine.

We would issue some superficial sanctions, and that would be the end of that. And I think that he's 95% responsible for invading Ukraine, but we're 5% responsible for giving him the comfort to go in. And I think that it's possible that if we had been tough in the past in any of these circumstances, not all of them, just one.

He might have had different thoughts about it.

>> Andrew Roberts: Which history book or biography are you reading at the moment?

>> Bill Browder: Well, I'm re-reading a book. It's sort of a history and a bit of a biography. It's called the Age of Assassins. It's written by a guy named Yuri Velchinsky.

And it's basically about all the murders that Putin committed. It was written about, I don't know, 15 years ago. But it goes into really great detail about all sorts of murders in Russia that Putin committed. And there's one murder that I'm really interested in in particular, which is the murder of Putin's boss, Anatoly Sobchak.

And the reason I'm interested in this is because there was this big prisoner swap that just came about a few weeks ago, on August 1. And the reason for the prisoner swap was Putin was desperate to get an assassin out of a Berlin prison who had been caught in Germany.

There was a German news article in build magazine claiming that the person who Putin wanted to get out was a person who Putin had instructed to kill his boss, Anatoly Sobchak, who was basically standing in the way, or a corruption scandal in which his boss was the center of.

And he was a sort of part of, was standing in the way with between him and becoming president of Russia. And so I find the whole story very interesting, fascinating, and explains a lot about many things.

>> Andrew Roberts: You've written two books yourself on all this red notice and freezing order, and they've been huge bestsellers and very successful.

Have you got any other plans to write about anything?

>> Bill Browder: Well, indeed, I actually am starting a third book. So for the last couple of years, people have come to me and said, when are you gonna write your next book? It would be right for you to have a trilogy.

And for the last couple of years, I've been very busy because I've been working to try to get one of my closest friends and allies, a guy named Vladimir Karamurza, out of prison. He had helped me with the Magnitsky Act, and he went back to Russia, and they sentenced him to 25 years in prison.

And he was going to die in prison, and they were really torturing him. Solitary confinement in Siberia, the longest sentence of any political prisoner. And I always said to them, I can't spend any time doing anything other than trying to get my friend out of prison. And I was traveling the world, meeting with world leaders and foreign ministers and so on and so forth, trying to get him out of prison, and we succeeded.

He was one of the people who was included in that prisoner swap on August 1 for that Vra Vadim Krasikov, the one that I was just telling you about. And so now that he's out, I can write my third book. And what's my third book going to be about?

It's gonna be about this absolute struggle to get him out. And it comes with a happy ending, which is that he was released and he's alive.

>> Andrew Roberts: It's very good to have a book on anything to do with this subject that has a happy ending. Congratulations on everything you do.

Can we say just a word about Alexei Navalny, who also voluntarily returned to Russia. Tell us about the kind of courage that that requires. And, of course, what happened to him.

>> Bill Browder: Well, so Alexey Navalny was truly the leader of Russia, I mean, Putin, in a real democratic context, Putin would get 1% of the vote.

Alexei Navalny would get 80% of the vote. He was a true leader. Why was he a leader? Because he had figured out what Russian people were most upset about, which was just the absolute pervasive corruption that rots the whole country from top to bottom. And Alexei was this tall, charismatic, good looking, strong man.

Strong in a good way. Strong man, tough. And most importantly, he was totally disrespectful towards this weak little man, Vladimir Putin. And Putin, for a long time, tolerated him cuz he thought he didn't tolerate Alexei, because he wasn't feeling all that threatened. But as the situation became worse and worse for Putin with the war and with all this other stuff, and actually, even before the war, he then decided he wanted to kill Alexei Navalny, and so they poisoned him, it didn't work.

Alexei was poisoned with Novichok. He was in a coma. He ended up in Berlin and the Charite Hospital, they nursed him back to life. And then Putin said to try to keep him away from politics. Putin said, if you come back to Russia, you'll be arrested thinking that they wouldn't come back to Russia.

And Alexei, he was one of these people who said my country is more important than my personal freedom. And he went back and everyone said, that's crazy, that's stupid. But I think there was a scenario, maybe not high probability, but if he could have survived in prison until the moment that the Putin regime fell apart, he was the natural leader for a post Putin Russia.

I think he was killed very specifically because the Germans, when Putin wanted Krasikov released, the Germans said, we're only gonna release Krasikov if Alexei Navalny is released. And Putin was so desperate to get Krasikov that he decided that he would kill Navalny and then come up with a list of other people to release.

And so basically, I believe that Navalny was killed because the Germans insisted on having him as part of the prisoner swamp.

>> Andrew Roberts: So, Bill Browder, valiant fighter for truth, thank you very much for coming on secrets of statecraft, and good luck with your next book.

>> Bill Browder: Thank you.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Bill, my guest on my next show is General Jim Mad Dog Mattis. He's a Marine four-star general who commanded forces in the Gulf war, Afghanistan, and the Iraq War and served as secretary for defense from 2017 to 2019. He's presently a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

>> Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.