How I figured out the Achilles heel of Vladimir Putin | William Browder | TEDxBerlin

If you asked my friends to describe Bill Browder to me in one sentence, the answer would be that I am now Putin's number one enemy. That sounds very conceited it may sound a little exaggerated, maybe even ridiculous, but when you finish listening to what I have to say I think you will conclude that that is the correct description, so how come this guy with an American accent ended up being the Putin's number one enemy? Well, we have to go back several generations. My grandfather, um, uh, who is American. I'm an American, I was from Wichita Kansas and he was a union organizer and he was so good at organizing the union that the communists saw him and said, if you like unionism, you'll love communism, why don't you come?

Russia and check it out, so my grandfather went to Russia and did what most young Americans do when they come to Russia, he found a Russian girl who became my grandmother, my father was born there and five years later they returned to the United States United and my his grandfather became head of the American communist party he ran for president on the communist ticket against Roosevelt in 1936 1940 he was imprisoned in 1941 pardoned in 42 expelled from the communist party in 1945 for being too capitalist and then persecuted very cruelly in the 1950s during the McCarthy era, so this was my family legacy and when I was born in 1964 and during the 1970s when I was going through my teenage rebellion, I was trying to find a good way to rebel from this family of communists that I grew up.

My hair was long and you can't tell now, but it grew into an afro which strangely didn't bother my family. I also followed the grateful dead around the country for several months, which didn't bother my family either, but then I came up with the perfect rebellion technique which was to put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist and that bothered my family. I became a capitalist. I went to Stanford business school in 1987 and graduated from business school in 1989, which was a very auspicious year because it was the year the Berlin Wall fell and, like many other students coming out of business school, business, I was trying to decide what to do next and none of the recruiting events on campus appealed to me and I couldn't get excited about any of them. jobs after business school until one day I had a revelation: if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the Berlin Wall had just fallen, I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe and that's What I set out to do, I first moved to London and then to Moscow and ended up creating an investment fund called Hermitage Fund to invest in the newly privatized markets of Russia and Russia had gone through this amazing transformation from communism to capitalism and in doing so, They basically gave away all the state property in the country to the people for free, so I created this investment fund to effectively invest in this free property and it was a dramatic and successful launch, the most dramatic and successful launch of an investment fund.

In the history of mutual funds, my fund increased 850 percent in the first 18 months. I had enormous success with everything I was doing and then I discovered something I probably should have known all along, which is that all the companies I was investing in were very corrupt. The companies that I was investing in were basically being robbed by the oligarchs who were the majority shareholders of these companies, so I decided that I was going to try to do something to address the corruption and what I did was investigate how they did the robbery and then share that investigation with the international media and I was my I and my team were pretty good at doing the investigation and we knew a lot of journalists so by putting all this together um uh and by publishing all this information we started to have an effect and it was very interesting the reason why we had an effect because right when I started doing my denunciation and shaming campaigns was right at the moment that

vladimir

putin

had come to power and it turns out that he had been fighting with the same guys that I was with fighting, they were stealing his power at the same time they were stealing money from me, so every time I put one of these big exposés out there he would step in and fire someone or do something dramatic to go after his enemies and also, um uh secondarily helping me and so for a short period of time I had the perfect job because I was catching the bad guys that I was making Russia a better place and I was making a lot of money for my clients and myself and there's very few jobs where you can do good and make money in the same job, sometimes you can do good and not make money or you can make money and not do good but I had both for a short period of time but it turns out that Putin wasn't doing this because he cared about cleaning up Russia, he was doing it for another reason: he wanted to win his war with these oligarchs. and at the end of 2003 he decided to make his big move and his big move was to arrest the richest man in russia michael hortokovsky the owner of an oil company called yukos from his jet in siberia brought him back to moscow put him on trial and allowed television cameras into the courtroom to film Russia's richest man on trial sitting in a cage.

Now imagine that you are the 17th richest man in Russia. You are on your yacht parked in front of the Hotel du Cop. In Antibes, France, you turn on your CNN and there you see a guy much richer, much smarter and much more powerful than you, sitting in a cage, what is your natural reaction? You don't want to sit in a cage, and so on, one by one. They went back to Putin and said: Vladimir, what do we have to do to not sit in a cage? And he said: 50 percent, not 50 for the Russian government, not 50 percent for the Russian presidential administration, 50 for Vladimir Putin, and that was the point. in which our interests diverged i was still trying to expose corruption but now i was exposing corruption in situations where

vladimir

putin

had a 50/50 interest and it didn't take long for them to turn on me and on november 13, 2005 as it was flying back to Russia they stopped me at the border they put me in the airport detention center for 15 hours and then they deported me and declared me a threat to national security after that I evacuated all my staff we sold all our securities in Russia and I thought that was the end of the story turns out it wasn't the end of the story but the beginning of the worst nightmare you can imagine 18 months after I was expelled 25 police officers raided my office in Moscow 25 more police officers raided the office of En my law firm in Moscow were looking for seals and certificates of our empty investment holding companies.

They didn't know they were empty at the time they got them from the law firm, they confiscated those documents and the next thing we know they no longer own our investment holding companies, they have been fraudulently re-registered using the documents seized by the police. Right now, I hire the smartest lawyer I know in Russia, a young man named Sergey Magnitsky, to investigate and stop whatever they are. Sergey goes out and investigates and finds out that the purpose of taking over our companies was to try to steal all of our money, which they failed to do because I had already sold everything before they arrived, but he found out. that they had a second plan which was to steal 230 million dollars in taxes that we had paid to the Russian government the previous year.

They were able to um, they filed for an illegal $230 million tax refund on December 23, 2007 days before Christmas and it was approved and paid the next day on Christmas Eve with no questions asked it was the largest tax refund in history. of russia done illegally in one day sergey and i was convinced that this must be a dishonest operation there is no way that putin would do it he has authorized the theft of almost a quarter of a trillion dollars of his own government's money and that's why we thought that if we published this information as it appears, the good guys would take over the bad guys and that would be the end of the story, so we wrote criminal complaints to every different branch of the justice system, I went to the radio and the newspapers describing the scam and Sergey gave sworn testimony before the Russian state investigative committee, the Russian version of the FBI, then we sat and waited for the good guys to catch the bad guys.

It turns out that in Putin's Russia there are no good guys. Five weeks after Sergey testified, the The same officers he testified against arrived at his home on November 24, 2008, arrested him, and then placed him in pretrial detention. in preventive detention they began to torture him to make him withdraw his testimony they put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds they left lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation they put them in cells without a bathroom only with a hole in the floor where the sewage, put them in unheated, glassless cells in December in Moscow, so close to freezing to death, the purpose of this was to get him to withdraw his testimony against the corrupt police officers and to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the 230 millions of dollars.

Sergey Magnitsky absolutely refused to commit perjury and bear false testimony no matter how hard the torture was and he got worse and worse and worse and about six months later when his health deteriorated he ended up losing 20 kilos suffering terrible pains in his stomach and developing pancreatitis and gallstones and needing an operation that was scheduled for August 1, 2009 a week before this scheduled operation they came to him again and asked him to sign. a false confession which he again rejected and in retaliation he was transferred to a maximum security prison with no medical facilities while his health completely deteriorated and he was denied all medical treatment.

He and his attorneys wrote 20 different requests for medical care. All of her requests were either ignored or denied after a few weeks of this whole situation in Butyrica, her health could no longer tolerate the situation and she went into critical condition on the night of November 16, 2009. The boutique authorities did not want to They no longer had responsibility for him, so they put him in an ambulance and sent him to another prison that had a medical wing, but when they got there, instead of taking him to the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell, They chained him to a bed and eight riot guards entered that cell and beat Sergey Magnitsky to death.

That was November 16, 2009, eight and a half years ago. Sergey Magnitsky was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children. I received the news the next morning. and it was the most traumatic, heartbreaking, life changing news i could have ever received sergey magnitsky was murdered because he worked for me they killed him because he was my lawyer if he hadn't worked for me he would still be alive today and when i could clean up my mind from hysteria, I made a vow in his memory, to his family and to myself, that I was going to put aside everything else I was doing and get justice for Sergey Magnitsky and for the last eight and a half years, that is What I've done.

We've been doing it and we finally got some justice. An idea occurred to me, so the Russian government decided to completely cover up the crime. Vladimir Putin got involved, they surrounded the carriages. Putin personally exonerated everyone involved. He gave promotions of state honors to some of the most complicit people and then I said that if we can't get justice inside Russia, let's get justice outside of Russia and an idea occurred to me which is that the people who committed this crime did it for money and They don't stay That money in Russia they keep it in the West, so we came up with an idea: freeze the assets and ban the visas of the people who killed Sergey Magnitsky and the people who do this kind of thing and more from anywhere . the world i took this idea to washington and i met with two senators, a democrat and a republican, benjamin cardin and john mccain, and I came up with something called the magnitsky law, this is something that everyone in washington could agree on and November 2012 passed the Senate 92-4, passed the House of Representatives with 89 percent, and the Magnitsky Act became federal law on December 14, 2012.

There are now seven countries that have Magnitsky laws: States United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Gibraltar and actually the reason I am here in Germany today is that I am going to parliament as soon as I finish speaking to try to get a German Magnitsky law. The title of my speech today is how I found Putin's Achilles tendon.

heel

and it's not just putin, it's the Achilles

heel

of every dictator and this is it, so I hope this soon becomes the standard of how to deal with dictators around the world, it will never be able to bring back sergey magnitsky , but at least if we can implement a law in his name that goes after these bad guys around the world, his death won't have been a senseless death, thank you very much.