If I could do it all over again, I would have never gone to Russia.
Bill Browder
Ever since Barack Obama had become president, the main policy of the U.S. government toward Russia had been one of appeasement.
I'm not saying anyone should go to nuclear war with Russia. What we should do is contain them and show them that there are consequences if they do terrible things, which is what sanctions are all about.
On April 27th 2017 the UK approved Magnitsky Sanctions as part of the Criminal Finances Bill. The provision gives the British government the power to seize assets of gross human rights violators.
We have Russia, on a serial basis, abusing Interpol... The moral of this story is that if a country wants to abuse Interpol they can just keep abusing Interpol and it doesn't really matter how many times they do it.
Bodyguards offer fake security. The real security comes from having your enemies know nothing about you.
A Global Magnitsky Bill, which broadens the scope of the US Magnitsky Act to human rights abusers around the world was passed in December 2016. Estonia adopted Magnitsky legislation in December 2016, and the UK followed in April 2017. These are great successes, but my fight for justice continues.
Sergei Magnitsky was murdered as my proxy. If Sergei had not been my lawyer, he would still be alive today.
I work with so many levels of British law enforcement, I never know who is working for whom.
If there was one senator who could truly empathize with being tortured in prison, it was John McCain.
If you can present your case clearly and visually, anyone can understand it. No one has an attention span.
Well, what I can say about Denmark... Every law firm in town has some business with Danske Bank.
There's never been a time in my life where you had the names the United States and political uncertainty in the same sentence.
Our top targets are the people who tortured and killed Sergei Magnitsky. But our secondary targets are those people who profited from the crime that he was killed over or facilitated the money laundering for those people.
When you come from a family of communists and you go through your teenage rebellion, what's the best way of rebelling from a family of communists? Well, I put on a suit and tie and became a capitalist... There was nothing I could do to upset my family more than that.
The big insight that I have, not so much from writing 'Red Notice' but from living as the main character of 'Red Notice', is that Russia was and is a criminal state unlike any other sovereign country.
Russia is really a sort of a nonentity when it comes to - the economy is the size of the state of New York. Their military budget is 5 percent of the U.S. military budget. We shouldn't even be thinking about Russia other than the fact that they're sort of putting their nose into every bit of terrible activity all over the world.
Russia has a well-known reputation for corruption; unfortunately, I discovered that it was far worse than many had thought. While working in Moscow I learned that Russian oligarchs stole from shareholders, which included the fund I advised.
I do have some very strong thoughts on Glenn Simpson, who is one of the founders of Fusion GPS, based on his conduct in trying to discredit me and Sergei Magnitsky.
Sergei Magnitsky was an incredibly intelligent, principled and idealistic man who was this sort of positive face of the new Russia. He was in jail, really, as my proxy, and so it was impossible for me to sleep. I felt guilty taking a shower because I knew he couldn't.
Don't engage with corrupt officials under any circumstances. The results are always bad.
I'm not an American citizen.
On November 13, 2005, as I was flying into Moscow from a weekend away, I was stopped at Sheremetyevo airport, detained for 15 hours, deported, and declared a threat to national security.
I know many businesspeople in Russia who have knowingly signed up to effectively compromise their values for their own profit motive to become part of this criminal apparatus in Russia.
Denmark and Estonia both refused to prosecute the Danske Bank case when we filed in 2013.
I grew up in Chicago, but for the last 28 years I've lived in Moscow and London, and am now a British citizen. From 1996 to 2005, my firm, Hermitage Capital, was one of the largest investment advisers in Russia with more than $4 billion invested in Russian stocks.
I've never made a political donation to Hillary Clinton or any other political candidate.
While most people in the world probably haven't heard my name, Vladimir Putin thinks about my name on a very regular basis. He really dislikes me because I'm the guy responsible for the Magnitsky Act.
Putin offered to allow American investigators to interview the 12 Russian intelligence agents just indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for allowing Russians to have access to me and those close to me.
For the last ten years, I've been trying to avoid getting killed by Putin's regime, and there already exists a trail of dead bodies connected to its desire to see me dead.
Since 2012, Putin has made it perhaps his largest foreign policy priority to have the Magnitsky Act repealed. But none of his efforts have worked. Not only has it not been repealed, it's spread to six additional countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, the Baltic states and Gibraltar.
I am definitely not under British protection. I have to protect myself. I am not M.I.6. I am not C.I.A. I am not anything.
My grandfather was a justice fighter. I go to Russia and I find worse injustice than he had ever discovered. My task was investing people's money. But this was far beyond that. I became this sort of crusader.
The one report I will believe will be the report of Robert Mueller. He's a totally impartial law enforcement investigator who will come to the truth, whether it was collusion or it wasn't collusion. But when a partisan group puts together a report, it doesn't really hold much credibility for me.
Well, I mean, Russia was responsible for shooting down MH17. Russia was responsible for invading Ukraine. Russia is responsible for taking away the chemical weapons in Syria that they didn't take away. Russia was responsible for having honest athletes in the Olympics when they did the whole doping program.
The Russian government doesn't like me; Vladimir Putin doesn't like me.
Interpol was set up to catch fugitives, not act like the long arm of Putin going after his enemies.
Putin is a totally inscrutable guy. He gives nothing away. People interpreted what they wanted to see in him.
Russia is an interesting place because they're extremely evil but they're not that good at implementing their evil.
Vladimir Putin has to create foreign enemies, and he also has to justify... he has to claim... he can't acknowledge that there's a legitimate protest against his authoritarian rule, so he's got to blame it on Hilary Clinton.
George Bush looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul in the first meeting he had in Slovenia. And then in the next meeting, he realized his soul was very dark.
If the oil price goes down, Russia will go down. You can track the Ruble, you can track the stock market, just off the price of oil.
If you put tariffs in place, it creates inflation. If you put inflation in place, you have to raise interest rates. You raise interest rates, and stock markets shouldn't be so high.
Getting rid of the Magnitsky Act is one of the top, if not the top, priorities of the Putin regime.
My grandfather was an American Communist, and he married my grandmother, who was a Russian Communist. During the 1950s, the McCarthy era, my family was viciously persecuted.
Vladimir Putin is infuriated by the Magnitsky case. Why is he infuriated by it? It's because he steals a lot of money himself. He ends up terrorizing people himself. And he keeps that money he's stolen offshore.
And most worryingly, it wouldn't surprise me if Putin ends up starting a major military conflict with the West at some point in the future to save his own skin as head of state in Russia.
The main thing that I've learned since writing 'Red Notice' is not so much about Russia but about how many very legitimate people in the West have sold their souls to the Russians to help them in their terrible goals outside of the country.
If you want to go after Putin, go after his money and if you want to go after his money go after the oligarchs.
I am much happier fighting for justice than I ever was fighting for money.
