The Jordan Harbinger Show - 3: Bill Browder | Hunted by Putin

Episode Date: February 13, 2018

Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) pioneered a brand-new market after the fall of The Iron Curtain while making powerful enemies -- including Vladimir Putin. He is the author of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice. "I made a vow on that morning to Sergei Magnitsky's memory, to his family, and to myself, that I was going to go after the people who killed him and make sure that they face justice." -Bill Browder What We Discuss with Bill Browder: How someone who grew up in a family of communist academics became one of today's most successful capitalists. How Bill Browder saw and continues to see and profit from opportunities that others discount as foolish. How Russian oligarchs rip off and defraud minority and foreign shareholders. How an Interpol Red Notice could mean arrest and extradition to Russia to face torture. Who was Sergei Magnitsky, and how is Bill seeking justice for his murder by the Russian state? And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It was amazing. When I was going from the office to my home, there was a lead car, a lag car, a side car, three-armed guys in my car. And when we got close to the home, the lead car would peel off, get there soon, get sooner than the rest of us. They would go and scout the rooftops for snipers. They would look for bombs under the cars parked in front of the building. They would secure the stairwells. And then the rest of them would come and escort me into the apartment. And then I had two guys with automatic weapons sitting in my living room. It was very, very very intense, very scary. Welcome to the Jordan Harbinger show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. On this episode of the show, we'll be talking with my friend Bill Browder. Man, the theme for today's episode really is courage. Bill Browder was one of the first foreign investors in Eastern Europe in Russia after the

fall of the Iron Curtain. However, he didn't just make his millions trading stocks, securities. He pioneered a brand new market while fighting against some of the most powerful and shadowy figures in the world, including the former KGB, even Vladimir Putin himself. And today we'll discuss how Bill saw and continues to see opportunities that everyone else thinks are foolish or impossible. We'll discover the mechanisms of fear and how our response to it will either make us or break us and we'll peel back the layers of what defines courage. Why having courage only really matters when you need it and why having the courage to stand up for

what we know is right is one of the most important things we as humans can ever do. And look, Jason, I know I just made this sound a little academic and Pollyanna about courage, but this book, Red Notice and this discussion with Bill, this is James Bond spy novel level stuff. It is an incredible story. I mean, there are guys with machine guns watching over him in his house. This is not academic in any way, shape, or form. No, Vladimir Putin kills people or killed people with radiation, and this guy's going toe to toe with him, making sure that there's sanctions against Russia and people in Russia, like Vladimir Putin,

specifically because of what happened to his friend. And we'll hear all about that today on this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Enjoy this episode with Bill Browder. One thing I noticed that we have in common is that I, too, have been detained by inept Soviet-era holdover bureaucrat officials in Ukraine. I was leaving Ukraine. I was going through customs, and they said, oh, yeah, the forms filled out incorrectly. So they took me to an ATM and they made me grab some cash and then they took me even some back room, went through all my luggage, took all, you know, my Palm Pilot and anything

that looked valuable at all and any sort of stuff that I bought in Ukraine that they wanted. And then I got deported. Wow. At the last minute. Yeah. Yeah. That's the punishment for going with Palm Pilot, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah. There's the, you got a trio. Get out of here. Don't ever come back. And I remember being on the airplane and telling the woman, next to me what happened. And she was really apologetic. She was Ukrainian. And she said, you know what? It happens to us too. And I live there. I'm from there. And it happens to us too. And that was really eye-opening because it wasn't just opportunistic. Here's a tourist.

Let's screw with them. This was, these are how this government at that time treated its people. It hasn't changed actually. I mean, this is going on to this day in Russia, in Ukraine, and almost all the post-Soviet states. It's just from top to bottom. And it seems almost intractable and how they can't get rid of this stuff. Everybody seems to survive off of it and it poisons the entire society. The irony that really struck me in the beginning of Red Notice was that your grandfather was the head of the American Communist Party. And so you're this amazing capitalist who's made lots of successful investments,

billions of dollars here, and your grandfather was kind of not trying to do that. I mean, he was at least one of the least capitalistic people, I guess, of his day and had that reputation to match. Yeah. So I am the direct result of my grandfather. I was brought up in a family of communists and left-wing academics. I was unlike everybody else in my family. In addition to them being communists,

we also had a family full of child prodigies and geniuses. My father went to university when he was 14, to MIT, had his degree when he was 17, and then had a PhD in math from Princeton And by the time he was 21, my brother went to the University of Chicago and physics at the age of 15. And so I was like, you know, really sort of an odd man out, black sheep with a family by just a normal kid. And I was looking for some way to distinguish myself. And I thought the best way to do that is to rebel from this family was to become a hardcore capitalist.

And that did truly create a lot of rifts in my family. To give people a little bit of background, can we, let's tell people, what you've done in Eastern Europe because what it seems like you did is you essentially found out that you can buy companies for pennies on the dollar in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It's almost like you found out about Bitcoin in 2009 or something. Well, except that in my prediction is Bitcoin is going to zero. But yeah, but anyways. Like many Polish companies, like many Soviet companies. Yeah, well, that's entirely true as well. Just to kind of circle back to the family history.

So when I finished business school at Stanford in 1989, and that was the year the Berlin Wall came down. And I was trying to figure out what to do with myself. I came up with this idea that if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, I'm going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe. And so I tried to get to Eastern Europe, which was there was nothing to do in Eastern Europe at the time. But I ended up in London. And my first job in London was with a American consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group. and they sent me out to Poland as one of my first assignments. And when I got out to Poland, I was supposed to be working to turn around a failing bus company,

which I had no ability to turn around. But while I was there, I noticed that they were doing the very first privatizations in Poland. And I had this interpreter guy, his name was Leshek. And he was always with me. And I noticed one day he had a newspaper under his arm with a bunch of financial figures on it. And I asked him what those were. And he proudly said, oh, these are the privatizations. And I had him explain them to me.

And we laid out the newspaper on the table. And I said, what's this number? He said, that's the number of shares outstanding. And then I said, what's this number? And he said, this is the share price. And I multiplied the two. And it got us to $80 million. That was the market value of the company.

And then I went down below. I said, what's this number? And he says, this number says net income. I said, no, no, no. read it again, and it says net income. I said, that can't possibly be true. I said, yeah, it's net income. And the net income for the previous year of that company was $160 million.

So just to be clear, so the company costs $80 million. In the previous year, they made $160 million. You're buying that company for half of their earnings for one year. All you have to do is stay in business for six months and you made your money back. And I thought to myself, wow, I want to buy some of this stuff. And I ended up in the first privatizations investing my entire life savings, which was $2,000. My $2,000 over the next 12 months went up 10 times. I made $20,000.

And there's a line in my book, which I'll repeat for you here, which is making 10 times your money is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine. And once you do it once, you would just want to repeat it over and over and over and over again. And once I had had that experience of making 10 times my money, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with myself, which was to go around and find more of these opportunities in Eastern Europe. And that's what I set out to do. This is, it sounds more and more like Bitcoin, the more and more we talk about this. Your money goes up 10 times. You're not quite sure what happened. Seems too good to be true.

You get more money and you figure out how to keep doing it. Yeah, it's, it is incredible to see this. And nobody else had spotted this. In a way, it's like you're the reverse forest gump of the financial. world in some ways because then, of course, you end up at another bank that's in trouble for manipulating the U.S. Treasury market, and you just really needed the job. And so they're like, look, we'll hire you. No one else wants to work here right now. And you're like, I don't care. I just need something, right, to continue this process. So that bank was called Solomon Brothers. It doesn't exist anymore,

but for anyone who has any memory of the financial world, it was one of the most aggressive dog-e-dog banks out there. There's a famous book written by Michael Lewis called Liars Poker about Solomon Brothers. They had just gotten busted, trying to rig the U.S. Treasury bond market and all sorts of people that left. And there was a lot of gaping holes in their team,

including one in the East European Division of Solomon. And I wanted to get into Eastern Europe properly. And so I joined Solomon Brothers in 1992. And my first assignment at Solomon was to go up and advise a fishing fleet located in Murmansk in Russia, which is a couple hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. And I get on a plane to Murmansk. I get met at the airport by the head of the fishing fleet.

He takes me in his car. And he says, before we go to the office to discuss business, I want to show you one of our boats. So I go to the, we drive down to the docks. And in front of me is this enormous vessel. It's like 300 feet long. It's on a whole bunch of different stories. On the top story, they have the nets where they catch the fish. And then they put the fish into some shoot with all the other stuff that comes in the nets.

And then they separate it out and it goes down further down the ship. And eventually gets down to the story where they have all these canning machines. And effectively, the ship is one ocean-going factory. And it was very impressive looking very large, very big. And I asked the guy, how much does one of these things cost? And he said, they cost $20 million new. And I said, how many do you have in your fleet? He said, 100.

So I did the math, $20 million times 100. That gives you to $2 billion. And I said, what's the average age of your fleet? And I should point out, I don't know much about ships or fishing, but he said, seven years. And so I said, okay, maybe that makes them half depreciated. So a billion dollars worth of ships. And the reason I had been hired to advise them was that the government had under the privatization program offered the management of this company, 51% of the share capital of the company from the government. And I asked him at what price is the government selling you 51%.

And he said, $2.5 million. Oh, my gosh. So let me just repeat the math. So there's a billion dollars of the ships and you can buy 51% for $2.5 million. So that made my Polish deal look like nothing. I mean, that was like much cheaper than Poland. And that was really what got me excited about investing in Russia because they were just giving everything away for free. And this privatization program was so that they could sort of rapidly transition to a market economy.

They knew the people didn't have money, so they had to lower it down to a price that somebody might potentially be able to afford at some point just to get things into private hands. Well, that was kind of the philosophy. So they said in order to go from communism to capitalism, let's create a country full of capitalists. And in some cases, they lowered it down to free. And so, for example, everybody in the country was offered something called a voucher. And so 150 million people got vouchers. They were freely exchangeable instruments, and they were not registered in anyone's name,

kind of like cash. And their secondary market developed for vouchers. And so these things traded for about $20 each. And so $150 million times $20 gets you to $3 billion with the vouchers. And those $3 billion with the vouchers were exchangeable for 30% of the share capital of all Russian companies, which meant that the market value of the entire country of Russia in 1992 was $10 billion. And just to put this in some perspective for you, this is a country with 35% of the world's natural gas, 10% of all the world's oil, 10% of the world's oil, 10% of the world's steel, 10% of the world's aluminum. There's banks, there's fertilizer companies, there's timber

companies, there's car companies, there's telephone companies, electricity companies, all together, all in the aggregate, $10 billion. At the time, I think that, you know, that was like 80% discount to the valuation of Walmart. And this is the country of Russia. And there was no restriction. Anybody could buy or sell shares. You didn't have to be Russian. Anybody could buy and sell the shares. And so that's what set off what became the most phenomenal investment opportunity in the history of the world. And you were in a rough spot because you had to make five times your salary or get fired. That was the rule. So everyone in your bank, everyone there is cutthroat, not trying to help anybody else.

And you kind of got stuck with, if memory serves, you got stuck with Russia. It wasn't just that you'd sniffed out this great opportunity. It was something nobody else wanted. people weren't going to mess with you inside your bank because you weren't stepping on toes. And you arrived to Russia and there's a burned out airplane carcass on the runway. And you're thinking, what did I get myself into? And then you start doing this back of the napkin math. And you think, oh, my gosh, this is, I'm finding winning lottery tickets in every drawer that I opened.

It was incredible. So Solomon was the most dysfunctional company, I think, that's ever existed. It was just true, true doggy dog. As you said, you show up on the first day of work, and they say, here's your desk, here are your business cards, here's the phone. You got to make five times your salary in the first year or you're fired. Good luck. Get to work.

For me, there was no training program, no mentors, no nothing. And every time I tried to do anything that I saw, like where there seems to be any money around, everybody else had such sharp elbows. They sort of elbow me out. And so I ended up sort of declaring myself, the investment banker in charge. of Russia because nobody else was doing Russia and nobody seemed to care because there's no money being made in Russia at the time. And that's what led me up to Murmansk, which then led me into this unbelievable discovery. And I should point out that when I got back to Solomon, so I discovered

this thing. And literally, like they're just giving free money away on the street. And I go in all wide-eyed and I tell the first person I see, oh, my God, you can't imagine what's going on out there. We've got to stop everything else we're doing. We've got to invest in Russia. And they looked at me like I was completely out of my mind. And I go to the next guy and same thing. And I had no skill in sort of working corporations. And so I just went around to the next person and the next person until I fully discredited myself inside Solomon Brothers to the point where I wasn't making five times my money.

And nobody wanted to have anything to do with me because I was this crazy guy talking about Russia all the time. And so I was getting close to being fired, even though I had probably the best sort of business money-making idea that anyone could ever have. have. But for a long time, they didn't see that until finally one of the senior guys in New York had heard about me and called me up and said, I hear you're having some career difficulties, but you might have something interesting to say about Russia. Can you come to New York and tell me about it? And so I stayed up for three nights in a row doing a PowerPoint presentation on how great

the Russian stock market was. I rehearse it in front of the mirror. I rehearse it on the airplane. I get to New York, I go up to the office, I sit down, I start going through my presentation. I think I'm making progress, but the guy who I'm looking at presenting to, he doesn't do any doesn't give me any feedback. It's no ahas or nodding or any of that kind of stuff you get when you think that maybe you're getting true to somebody. And so I'm just sort of doing my thing. And I get to about page 21 of the presentation. And without saying another word, the guy gets up, leaves the office and leaves me sitting there. And this was like going to be, my, this is supposed to be the meeting to save my career. And the guy's just like left the room

without saying anything. What are you thinking at that point? Because you, you spent so much time doing this and he just stares at you like you're not even, like he's watching TV and then gets up and leaves. And I'm thinking to myself, what am I doing wrong? I thought I had it right. I've got to fix this. This is my, this is the meeting that's going to save my career. I've got to do something. And 10 minutes goes by and he's still gone. And I think I'm, you know, when he comes back here, I'm going to turn this meeting around. I've got to. This is. my whole life depends on it. 20 minutes goes by.

He still hasn't come back. Getting more and more agitated, 30 minutes. Still hasn't come. 40 minutes. 52 minutes later, this guy comes back. He wanders into the room and I'm about to blurt something out to like, can I get the meeting on track? But before I have an opportunity to say anything,

he says very calmly, he said, Bill, what you showed me in those charts is the single most impressive thing I've seen in my investment career. I've just gone to the Risk Management Committee of Solomon Brothers and I've got you $25 million to invest. Stop everything else you're doing, and let's get this money to work. And it was like the biggest black cloud had just lifted off my shoulders. And I took that money and we invested it in the Russian stock market in the end of,

this was now at the end of 1993. Okay, but wasn't there a part of you that's like, hey, man, you couldn't have said that an hour ago? I've been freaking out over here. Come on. You know, I've dealt with a lot of difficult people in my life. I was just happy to have that money and get to get it to, to work and we got that money to work. And then amazingly, about seven months later,

the Economist magazine wrote an article titled Sale of the Century. And it just repeated the math that I've just shared with you about the voucher privatization program. And all of a sudden, because of that article, like 20 American investors decided they wanted to buy Russian stocks. And some of them were rich guys, a few hedge funds, a few investment banks. And I should point out that the Russian stock market was like all over the counter, wasn't automated in any way, totally thinly traded market, and all of a sudden, 20 blundering Westerners all show up at once trying to invest. And you know what happens to the stock market? It goes up 500% in three weeks. 500%. And you just owned a bunch of stock as well. So your stock that you got for pennies on the dollar

also went up. We had a $25 million portfolio that Bob, that my guy, Bobby, had allocated to me, and it went up to $125 million. And I should point out that this is back in the days when $100 million was real money. And so all the people who had been ignoring me and disparaging me during the times when I'd first come off that plane after my trip to Murmansk in Moscow, all these guys were all hanging around my desk at the first thing in the morning. I'm trying to glean Russian stock tips off of me. so they could make five times their money.

And that was the moment that some of the older guys started coming around my desk, these older bankers, guys in their 40s. And one of them was, he came up to me and said, you know, I cover the George Soros account. You know, Bill, I realize that you're, you know, you're real busy and you got a lot of important stuff going on. But is there any chance you could possibly spare an hour for George Soros to explain to him what's going on in Russia? He'd really like to meet you. Wow. And then the next guy came around covering the Sir John Templeton account.

So John Templeton was one of the absolute sort of gurus of investing. Same thing. Julian Robertson, the head of Tiger, Michael Steinhart, the royalty of Wall Street, all wanted to meet me. And so I went around and I went on a world tour of royalty of Wall Street. And every one of these guys said to me at the, they didn't have to wait until the end of the meeting. And they were much smarter than my Solomon colleagues. They said, wow, this is incredible. can we give you some money to manage?

And I said, I don't know. At the moment, we just do this for ourselves, but let me go back and ask the bosses. Maybe we can do this for you. And so I go back to the trading floor in London and I go to the head of the trading floor. And I go to his corner office and I say, hey, you know, I was just with George Soros. He wants to give us some money to manage. What do you think? And he said, that's a genius idea, Bill.

Let's form a task force to study it. So I said, okay. So a week later, I go to the first task force meeting and I walk into this room and there's 45 people in the room, 40 of them I've never seen before my life. There was the vice chairman of the firm, senior managing directors, managing directors, senior directors, directors, senior vice presidents, vice presidents. And then me. I was the absolute lowest guy on the totem pole in the room. And while I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm sitting there, a fight breaks out between different groups from Solomon Brothers over who is going to get the economic credit for the business. And it's like watching a game of multi-dimensional tennis. And I should point out that each of these groups has the absolute most compelling arguments about why they deserve the economic credit for the business. The investment bankers have a great capacity to argue for money they don't deserve.

And I'm sitting there watching this. And I'm very impressed with how smart these guys are. in their case. And I had no idea who was going to win the argument, but I was 100% certain who wasn't going to get any economic credit for this business. You. And that was going to be me. Yeah. You aren't getting everything. This guy Bobby out of New York who walked out of the room in the middle of your presentation, he seemed like a maverick. He seems like a courageous guy inside that organization. I mean, this is, you couldn't even get a desk on the trading floor. You basically begged for this meeting and then this guy goes and walks into somebody else's office and says,

look, I need this. Yes, it's risky. Whatever, I'll sign off on it. He hands you a stack of travel vouchers. It seems like, what do you learn from that? Because he just seems like a guy says, look, get it done, screw the permission, don't worry about it. The numbers speak for themselves.

And then we'll worry about protocol later. And that seems almost like a theme that you had to stick with all throughout investing in Eastern Europe and Russia. it was basically it was a very useful lesson so um he was a guy who um you know didn't didn't care about titles and offices and and any of that kind of stuff and and the situation which was most dramatic was that um you know he wanted me to go invest his money in in russia and i was supposed to go out and and like get a seat on the trading floor but he didn't bother to call anyone up to get me a seat on the trading floor of solomon brothers with no seat and i go and try to find a seat and like

nobody wants me to sit anywhere near them. You can't just, like, show up and ask for a seat on the trading floor. And I call him up in a desperation after, like, you know, everybody has turned me down. And he said, I don't care about seats on the trading floor, work from home. And I said, what, and he said, you shouldn't be in London anyways. You should be in Russia investing this money. And so I said, well, how do I get to Russia? And the next day from FedEx, I got a bunch of pre-signed travel authorization slips.

And we just ignored the whole everything. We just operated outside the normal protocols. say, and got money invested. And you're right, that that has been, you know, what I've learned about life is that it's not about all this, all the niceties. It's always about the substance. And it's about, you know, and as we learned, we had money to invest and we were looking to buy assets that were trading cheaply. It didn't matter all this other stuff. And that's what we did. And for then on, in all different aspects of my career, it's always been about just the substance, not the form.

I love the idea of the substance and set of the forum. And I want to come back to that theme as well throughout the rest of our talk here. Because when I'm reading the, when I'm reading Red Notice, these voucher auctions where you have to buy things, this isn't show up, have a meeting, sign some documents. There's a series of escrow bank wires. This is duffel bag full of millions of dollars in vouchers for cash that are stoutes. The vouchers are stacked on the table at like some abandoned bus station or something. And meanwhile, this auction that's supposed to be public is not being publicized well because the executives want to take it. There's police roadblocks to keep you from getting there because they know you're coming and that you're going to be able to outbid them.

I mean, this is Wild West type of corporate dealing. This is not let's have a fair auction and find out who can offer the most to our company. This was already cronyism, right? So the way it worked was, and this is different than any other type of auction that you've ever been to, So once you got your voucher, you can either get your voucher from the government if you're a Russian or you could buy a voucher at one of these voucher exchanges where they buy and sell these things, which as you say were like cleared out church halls or bus stations or whatever. And once you got your voucher, then you had to, you then were invited at different moments in time to submit your voucher to buy shares of companies. And the way that the voucher auctions work is that like every week or so, the Ministry of Privatization would announce a whole bunch of different companies that had different blocks of shares for sale.

And they didn't bother telling anyone what these companies did or how big they were or what their financial information was. And so, you know, a lot of Russians had no idea, like, what the oil companies were. They were all a state secret like six months earlier. And so it was this crazy thing where, you know, people all recognize the name of their car. Everyone drove around these cars called Wadaas, which were made by a company called Avtovaz. And so when people were going to submit their vouchers, they,

would submit their vouchers for the things they recognize, like the car company. But here's how it worked. If you showed up with one voucher and you were the only person who showed up with a voucher and they were selling 10% of a company, then you can get that 10% of the company for one voucher. If a million people showed up with a million vouchers, then they divide up the shares among those million voucher holders. And so it's the only type of auction I've ever seen in my life where you didn't know

the price you're bidding when you bid. And what this created was this incredibly. a weird set of things where like the most commonly known companies were overpriced, but almost everything else, which nobody knew what it was. You bid your vouchers, and then five weeks later, you get the result, and the result was you'd make 500% just in those five weeks. And it was just really an odd way of doing it. And as you said, and so there were people who were like,

the managements of some of these companies or some shady oligarchs or whatever who didn't want, who wanted to buy stuff cheaply, they would do tricks. So, for example, there's a company called Sergut Neftagas, one of the largest oil companies in the world. Nobody had ever heard of it, but those who had, in order to participate in the voucher auction, you would have to get on a plane to Siberia to a town called Sergut. And so the management of Sergut and Eftagas didn't want anyone competing with them to buy their own shares cheaply. And so what do they do? the night before the voucher auction, they closed the airport.

That's a subtle move, Bill. Hey, how do we keep these people out? Oh, yeah, we could change the address. No, just literally don't let the plane land. And there's like no way you can drive to Surgo. It's like, you know, it's like driving from like New York to San Francisco. You know, it's like Russia's a big country. And there was another one where they block the road and put burning tires on the road.

And so this is how they played all these games out there. and it was completely, absolutely Wild West, chaos, gold rush type of situation. And these oligarchs, by the way, for people who don't know the term oligarch, it's essentially some super wealthy robber baron type. Usually what we're talking about here are Russian oligarchs. These are the guys that sort of had a similar game maybe as you. Of course, a lot of them would say, oh, okay, I'm just going to buy one of the national oil companies because I'm friends with people in the government and I can secure finances.

from wherever China or some other thing, and they just sort of strip the assets and things like that. And you're kind of forced to work with these people because now they're in or you're in their arena, right? You're starting to own things in Russia. You're starting to become a corporate presence there. What are these people like? What are you doing with these? These people seem dangerous.

They're wealthy because they're gangsters. They're gangsters. So first of all, I wasn't working with them. I own shares of their company. So these guys would own like, yeah. To be clear, you were working around them, not with them. I ended up working against them. So these guys were owned like 51% or 75% of these companies and I own one or two percent of these companies. And I just did the math and I said, okay, this is an oil company. He's got so much oil. Here's the market value of this company. If you compare it to BP or Exxon, it trades in a 99.7% discount for barrel of reserves. Wow, that's pretty cheap. I want to own those shares.

I would own the shares, and then I would discover that it's cheap, but it's actually cheap for a reason. And the reason is because these oligarchs are a bunch of crooks, and they were stealing all the assets and stealing the cash flow out the back door. And so I wasn't working with them. I was working against them trying to stop them from stealing from me and the other shareholders. And I became a shareholder activist in Russia to try to get them stopped doing that. It's unbelievable. You go to war with these guys. you end up essentially embarrassing them and all these things go public.

And now you've got bodyguards, right? You went from this kind of annoying guy who's buying stuff that they want, showing up. So how did he get here? And now you're kind of on their radar in a much more negative way. And these are people that I, back to the theme of courage, I don't know how many people would have thought, that's fine. I'll deal with this. So after Solomon Brothers, after that whole incident with,

the task force meeting where everybody was going to take my credit, I ended up leaving Solomon and starting my own business called Hermitage. And I started the Hermitage Fund and I started investing in the Hermitage Fund. And my fund was just a spectacular success from day one. And I made a lot of money for a lot of people. And then one day, an oligarch, a guy named Vladimir Patanin, tried to increase the number of shares of a big oil company. that I had invested in and do so in an offering where he sold the shares to his cronies at a huge, huge discount to the market value and excluded me and the other minority shareholders. So he's trying to dilute the value of your shares by just printing more, essentially?

Printing more and giving them to himself for almost nothing. And so I had a position at the time that was worth $100 million before he did this. And basically, it was going to be worth $25 million. dollars afterwards the money going to him and his friends. Wow. So they're going to take away $75 million for me. That really put me in a difficult spot for a couple reasons. One, because if I allowed him to do it, then everyone else would say, wow, we can do that too.

No one's going to, this guy is just a pushover. And two, I had a lot of people's money, a lot of investors' money that I was looking after and I was responsible for. And he was going to be stealing their money. And three, this being in Russia and starting this business had really been my dream and my dream had come true and I'd become successful. I'd become one of the biggest players in the Russian market. And basically, this would have ended my existence. And so I took a decision which nobody had ever taken before, which was to take on one of the oligarchs and challenge him and fight him and stop it from happening.

And so I ended up going out and taking him on and I ended up with 15 bodyguards. I had 15. 15. It was amazing. When I was going from the office to my home, there was a lead car, a lag car, a side car, three-armed guys in my car. And when we got close to the home, the lead car would peel off, get there soon, sooner than the rest of us. They would go and scout the rooftops for snipers.

They would look for bombs under the cars, parked to. in front of the building. They would secure the stairwells and then the rest of them would come and escort me into the apartment. And then I had two guys with automatic weapons sitting in my living room. It was very, very intense, very scary. It's scary and it's just hearing it now all at once is completely ridiculous. I'm just envisioning you coming home after they've done a bomb search and they're walking through your stairwell and they're thinking like, okay, well, we know that Bill had microwave macaroni and cheese late last night because I'm in his kitchen and then you're sitting on your couch and there's these two, I'm picturing these two huge guys with machine guns.

And you're like, so, um, Netflix? You know, what's going on at your house? You, you didn't have any privacy, nothing. No, no, it was no privacy. I mean, the worst part was, you know, getting up in the morning. You know, I mean, it was, it had to be sort of almost a military operation getting out, you know, so we said we're leaving at eight o'clock. And I was like not, not looking like I was going to be ready at eight o'clock.

You know, these guys would be banging on my bedroom door. Like, come on, guy. You know, it's getting close to the time we're supposed to be leaving because, you know, once they secured my exit, that that took them like a good half an hour of big operation. And so, you know, it was not a, it was not pleasant time at all. And I had, you know, some friends thought, wow, this is really cool, Bill. I told them, no. No. Nothing cool about it.

There was only one upside to having bodyguards, which was that I'm a regular tennis player. and in Moscow they have these big indoor tennis courts. And I had a regular tennis time that I didn't play. And the guys who were playing on the tennis court before me, pre-bodyguard, would always like play over their time. So, you know, at 6 o'clock I was supposed to be playing. And it'd be like, you know, 6.07 and they were still finishing up their set. But by the time when I had my bodyguards, like they were off the court at exactly 559, no problem.

Yeah. When the guys with machine guns show up, I think we're just going to call the game. How's that sound? Yeah, exactly. Man, what are you thinking at this point? You were 33 or thereabouts when this is happening. And there's a part of me that's like, okay, I get it, young bravado. It sounds like there's a strategy here knowing if you don't fight back, you're never going to succeed over there because you'll look like a punk, right?

Oh, all I have to do is dilute this guy. Yeah, just whatever. Let him buy what he wants. We'll print 100 million more shares. And then he's just going to lose his shirt and eventually he'll look. he'll go away, you know, this foreign punk, right? What was the fear here? And how much did the fear even register?

Because at 33, you might be thinking, yeah, this is great. I got bodyguards. This part's a little inconvenient, but I'm killing it out here. I'm killing it. No, no, I thought I was going to get killed, not killing it. But I realize that, I mean, basically, if I allowed them to get away with it, you know, Russia is like a prison yard. And everybody is going around, you know, with puffing up their chests.

staring each other down. And if you show weakness, then everyone will jump on you. And that's the end of the story. You'll just end up being, you know, being somebody's bitch. And I didn't want to be anyone's bitch. And so I was going to make sure that that wasn't going to happen. And so it was a horrifying experience. I wouldn't ever want to have to repeat it.

And unfortunately, I've had to repeat it a number of times. But, you know, being in the line of fire, you know, it was a necessity if you wanted to be there at all. And it wasn't like, if, If you had asked me before I ever went to Russia and said, here's a picture of what's about to happen, you want to go to Russia still, I probably would have said no. But once you're out there and you have the responsibility that I had, I didn't really feel like I had any choice. How did you learn this type of courage and this type of this ability to stand up under pressure? I mean, I'm looking at your family history, but in preparation for this interview.

And I'm thinking your dad must have been pretty courageous and also not quite immune, but at least resilient to outside pressure because his dad, your grandfather, was, and this might be too strong a word, but in a way, kind of a reviled figure in American political history, the chief communist in the height of, I guess, McCarthyism, not really a good position to be in. Yeah, my grandfather, Earl Browder, was the general secretary of the American Communist Party from 1932 to 1945. He ran for president against Roosevelt in 1936, 1940 on the communist ticket. He was put in jail by Roosevelt in 1941. And then there was demonstrations all over America by African Americans who were big supporters of my grandfather.

And they eventually pardoned him a year later. And then he was expelled from the Communist Party by Stalin in 1945 for being too much of a capitalist. list, and then he was viciously persecuted by McCarthy, as you mentioned, in the 1950s. And so, you know, I guess I don't know whether it's genetic or, you know, nature or nurture, but somewhere in my family, we had a, you know, we had all of this outsider stuff going on and fighting the system. And my father, you know, my father was a genius mathematician. He was one of the best, sort of objectively, one of the best mathematicians of all time. And he couldn't get a job in any university in America because of who his father was.

And he ended up getting drafted into the army. And then they said, once they got him in the army, they said, oh, my God, you're a security risk. Look at your father. Made him pump gas for three years, even though he was a genius mathematician from Princeton with a math degree, PhD in math. So he eventually found his way out of his mess and became a famous. mathematician and won the National Medal of Science under Clinton. But we've had a lot of different types of adversity in our family. And I guess that's probably where it comes from. But who knows how one deals with these types of situations. But what I know is that I was not going

to let this guy get away with stealing my client's money. And I fought him. And amazingly, at the end of the fight, we won. I got the securities regulator of Russia to Canada. the dilutive share issue a couple months after the whole process started, and I won. And my position was made whole. It's just unbelievable the amount of pressure. I think back to times in my life that had a lot of pressure, even recent ones where I had what I think is a lot of pressure. And I'm just looking at what you've gone through here.

I'm thinking, this is not the type of courage that you learn just by going, well, one day at a time. I mean, you had to have gotten this by being raised in a family where, The motto was just resilience in every part of your life. You know, it's hard for me to look at it objectively. What I can say is that, you know, in my own psychology, I'm not the kind of person who buckles under pressure. And in a certain way, I almost thrive under pressure.

And I was able to deal with the situation. It didn't feel good at the time. I can promise you that. And I can remember the feeling of absolute visceral relief when I got on a British Airways flight and the plane landed in London. And I knew that once I was in London, no one was going to blow me up or machine gun me down or do whatever they were going to do. And then the horrifying feeling of bracing myself getting back on the plane to Moscow while this was all going on. Unbelievable. Yeah, I can definitely imagine. I don't know if I would be able to set foot back in Russian. Of course, they end up getting you in a way in the end because you lose $900 million

when the corrupt slash inept Russian government defaulted and just sends the ruble into freefall. At this point, though, in your life, how did that feel at the time? It's so much money. But then it just seems like a number to those of us outside of this. But losing $900 million overnight. I mean, what is going through your mind at that point? Well, let's first put it in perspective. I had a billion dollars under management.

The Russian government defaulted on their bonds. They devalued their currency by 75%. And my $1 billion portfolio went down $900 million. So I lost 90% of my client's money in a very short period of time. So $900 million, of course, is a lot of money, but 90%. So I was down 90%. And for me, that was just the worst. And for me, the worst part about it all was that I had gone around

proselytizing about why people should invest in my fund in Russia, that Russia was going to do well, this was going to be a great opportunity, you should invest with me. And so people did. And then all of a sudden, I lose them 90% of their money. And I felt absolutely mortified, ashamed of myself, and dedicated to doing whatever I had to do to get their money back for them. And that was in August of 1998. And I thought, strangely and naively, I thought, okay, well, I've lost them all this money, but it's not a lost cause because the companies that I was investing in, these were oil companies. They all sold their oil in dollars.

And the oil price hadn't gone down and just stayed the same, maybe rose a little bit. But they all paid for their costs, these oil companies, pay their workers and paid for equipment and paid for all the stuff in rubles. and the ruble has just devalued by 75%. And so if you're running a company and your revenues are seeing the same and your costs have just gone down by 75%. What does that mean? It means your profits go up dramatically, explode. And so I thought, okay, all I have to do is stick it out. The devaluation is going to really play to my advantage and I'm going to ride it back up again and everything's going to be all right.

And it probably would have been except that the companies were run by these oligarchs. and these oligarchs are not nice people. And the only thing that it ever kept the oligarchs in check in any small way was the idea that they could get money from Wall Street, that there's all these bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley running around with their hairman's ties and their fancy suits telling these Russian oligarchs, hey, we can get you some free money on Wall Street. but don't cheat your minority shareholders. And so the oligarchs were thinking, okay, what should I do? I want to steal, but I want that free money on Wall Street. They say, okay, I'm going to get that money from Wall Street,

and then I'll steal later. So that was their sort of plan. And then all of a sudden, in 1998, the Russian market collapses, goes down 90%. The bankers on Wall Street with their fancy ties were no longer picking up the phone when their oligarch friends were calling

because they didn't want to show their boss. says they had anything to do with Russia. And the oligarchs said, wait a second, all those promises of free money have just evaporated. So there's no longer any reason not to cheat people. And there's never been any punishments against cheaters in Russia. And so these oligarchs who have no moral boundaries said, well, we might as well just cheat everybody on everything. And so while I was sitting there with my last 10 cents on the dollar, a down 90%, hoping for recovery because of this better economic situation, with a cheap ruble, and all of a sudden these oligarchs were just stealing all the money for

themselves, and they were going to steal my last 10 cents on the dollar. And so I had to become a full-fledged outright shareholder rights activist in order to protect the last 10 cents on the dollar that I had after the defaults in devaluation. Where did you get the courage to stand up to that type of activity? Because I just feel like this would have broken most people, and they'd say, look, I'm down to 10 cents on the dollar. These guys are coming after me. I have physical threats to my security. Maybe it's time to call it a day. You said you don't, you'd ever been one to buckle under pressure, but where are you getting the strength at this point? The strength came a lot from the feeling of huge shame and responsibility for having lost everybody, everything and not wanting to be a sort of certified

failure by putting my tail between my legs and leaving Russia. And I should point out that I had this poker game. I played poker with a bunch of expats and a few Russians every Thursday night in Moscow. And there was about 12 or 13 people that sort of filtered in and out of the poker game. And by the time after the default and devaluation came, I was the only one left from my poker group in Moscow. Everyone else had left. They'd all gone to greenier pastures. And I was just sitting there, but I was so so upset with what I had had gotten everybody into that it wasn't it was really my sense of responsibility for everybody else and and the deep shame that I felt and the disappointment people had in me that that I felt like I needed to write this situation and that's what

sort of inspire me to to fight back and to try to get this get everybody out of this mess and it was very real and and so I I did I got I fought back big time of course we when you're fighting back, the best thing to do is inlist help. But there's a story in Red Notice that made me think that even that is a huge challenge over in Eastern Europe and in Russia, because there's this story where you see this man having a seizure in the road and nobody wants to stop. And your driver even, he didn't want to stop. And it turns out that if you help someone on the side of the road in Russia, somehow the police might come and blame you, can you take us through this? Because I feel like this story is really interesting.

indicative of the mindset of folks in a place like Russia. I don't mean ordinary Russians, but it sort of seemed like a microcosm of the environment, especially for you at that time. Yeah. So as I mentioned, I played a lot of tennis. And it was late in the afternoon on a Saturday. And I was with my girlfriend at the time. We were in the back of my car.

We were driving my driver, Lexi. It was getting dark. It gets dark really early in the afternoon there. It was sort of a mushy, gray, dark, snowy day. And we're coming along towards the tennis court. And I noticed ahead, there's some big thing that looks like someone that dropped a big sack, a truck and left a big sack in the middle of the road. And as we're slowing down, and I notice that it's not a sack.

It's a guy. It's a man, like laying in the middle of a road. And I should point out that this is like a six-lane. lane road, three lanes on each side. There's no intermediate thing on the road. It's just a guy in the middle of the road. And cars were just driving fast. It was dark. And I was terrified and mortified for this guy. And I, what is, oh my God. And so I, we were about to, the light had changed and we were about to start going. And I order my driver to stop. And I said, we have to help this guy. And he doesn't want to stop. And we have this argument. And he stops. And I get out of the car to help the guy.

and my girlfriend comes out and then my driver feels guilty. He's not helping, so he comes out and we, and we drag this guy, he's unconscious, and we drag him to safety to across the road. And as we're dragging him, he kind of comes back to life. It turns out that he had had an epileptic seizure, and we get him to a snowbank, and we rest him on the snowbank. He starts coming back, and he's very grateful that we helped him.

and all of a sudden, as we're sort of kind of getting him back into like a proper situation, three police cars come at us right out of nowhere. Of course, they weren't there to help him when he was in the middle of the road, but they come out of nowhere. And they immediately, they start shouting at me. They realize I'm a foreigner, so they don't come at me. Then they go after my driver, Alexi, and they accuse him of hitting this guy while driving the car. And the guy who now can talk and he says, no, that's not what happened. I was, I'm an epileptic. I had a seizure. They helped me. And the police didn't want to hear any of it. And they just kept on going after my driver. And it was only fortunate that my driver had formerly been a colonel in the Moscow traffic police. And so he was able to get out of this mess. Had he not been, he would have been arrested for hit and run or drunk driving. And all this basically for helping out somebody who was in need. And the moral of the story was that in Russia, it's like every

man for himself. Nobody wants to help because nothing good happens to anybody who does help. And that is, and I understood after that why he didn't want to stop because he knew that that's what would have happened. And it really tells you a lot about the horrific dysfunction of Russian society, that that's how things work out there. Good Samaritan gets put in jail. And so how, what does this type of thing mean for enlisting help with what you're going through? Because if this is what's happening sort of man on the street, is this mindset pervasive throughout the rest of the country's dealings financially in business? I mean, are you looking at trying to enlist help and people are going, oh, my, come on, man. I'm not doing that. Did you face resistance of that sort? Well, so one of the biggest

targets of our anti-corruption campaign was Gasprom, the national gas company, which basically was being robbed blind by the management. And we started to try to take them on. And we encountered sort of actually two different types of psychologists. One is the one you just described where people were both pessimistic and cynical and would say to me all the time, why do you think you can change anything, Bill? You know, that's stupid. You're a fool.

Only fools are thinking this kind of stuff. That was one of the things I'd encountered. I also encountered something else, which was very interesting, which was when we were doing our research into how the stealing was going on at gas prom, I wanted to go and ask people. I wanted to effectively conduct interviews of people who knew the story. And I made a list of people to interview and I started organizing these lunches and dinners and breakfasts with these people. And the first meeting, I discovered the most interesting thing, which is when I asked the question, tell me about the stealing, the guy just started spilling his guts to me. And the reason he did was that during the Soviet times, the richest person in Russia was maybe six times richer than the poorest person.

You might have had a bigger apartment, maybe a Dacha, which was like a country house, maybe a driver. But that was about it. By 1999, when we were doing this research into the stealing and gas from, the richest person in Russia was 200. 150,000 times richer than the poorest person. 250,000 times, from six times richer. From six times to 250,000 times over a 10-year period. And it poisoned the psychology of the entire country because almost nobody participated in this. Everyone was basically ripped off by these horrible people.

And so people were furious about it and somehow needed to get it off their chest. And so we got a lot of a huge amount of information from these. meetings because people were just so angry about what had happened that they were ready to share all this information with us. And so on one hand, people are hugely pessimistic, not thinking that there's any chance anyone can do anything or change anything. On the other hand, people are just furious about it and we're looking for some way to feel a little bit better, you know, maybe share some information. Who knows what will happen? The stories in Red Notice are in, it just gets worse, I mean, not worse, but more and more unbelievably incredible. I mean, these

these oligarchs, Putin, it says, Game of Thrones. I mean, these guys are getting thrown in jail. People are pilfering. They're getting persecuted politically. And you're not, by any, stretch, immune to this. I mean, you found out that the FSB, aka kind of KGB reincarnate, they want to strip your assets. They want to strip your properties. They start raiding your offices.

And I don't want to get too in the weeds on Russian raider attacks in how companies get stolen and asset stripping and things like that. because it's just, it's a left turn here. But you are even trying to have meetings with other business contacts, and you're wearing a wire because you know there's something crooked going on, and you find out they're jamming your signals with state-of-the-art anti-CIA espionage gear. Even though you were in it before, this must also just be next level, because now you're not fighting the mafia. You're fighting, it's like finding out that somebody who doesn't like you

is actually a covert operative for the CIA or something. and you're just at a whole different level of conflict. So after this whole gas problem thing, I was expelled from Russia and declared a threat to national security. And after that, my offices were raided by the police. They seized our documents. After that, the documents seized by the police were used to fraudulently re-register our investment companies. And after that, I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to help me investigate it. And he discovered that the purpose of the...

of the raid was to try to steal all of my money, which they didn't succeed in doing. But they ended up stealing from using our stolen companies, they ended up stealing $230 million of taxes that we had paid in the previous year from the Russian government. And this is where the situation went completely off the rails from a cynic, I've never seen such a cynical thing that government officials and police officers using our companies that they stole money, $230 million from their own government. and where the story gets so twisted it was that we, Sergei and I exposed the crime.

We wrote criminal complaints to every different law enforcement agency in Russia. I went on TV and the radio and explained it all to the world. And Sergey then gave sworn testimony to the Russian version of the FBI. And instead of going after the people who committed the crime that we had discovered, a crime against the Russian citizens, the same people who Sergei testified against came to his home, arrested him, put him in pretrial detention, and then tortured him to try to get him to 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 heat, no window panes in December of Moscow to, he almost froze to death.

They put him in cells with no toilet as a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. They move from cell to sell to sell in the middle of the night. And the purpose of all this was to try to get him to withdraw his testimony against the police officers and then to sign a false confession to say that he stole the $230 million and did so on my instruction. And they thought, oh, you know, here's a guy. He buys his Starbucks in the morning. He wears a blue suit and a white shirt and a red tie. And he sits, he works in the tax practice of an American law firm.

He'll buckle in a week. And it turns out that they got him wrong completely. He's the most principled guy in the world. And for him, the idea of perjuring himself and bearing a false witness was much more horrific than whatever physical pain they were inflicting on him. And he just refused to sign their false confession. And so the torture just increased and increased and increased until his health started to break down.

And after about six months in prison, he ended up with. getting terrible pains in his stomach. He ended up losing 40 pounds. He was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones, a very extremely painful affliction. And he eventually was prescribed an operation, which was supposed to happen on the 1st of August 2009. And about a week before his operation, they came to him again, again asked him to sign a false confession. Again, he refused and they abruptly moved him into a different prison, a maximum security prison called Boutirka, which is considered to be one of the harshest, toughest prisons in Russia. And at Boutirka, they had no medical facilities.

And at Boutirka, his health completely broke down. He went into a horrific, painful, downward spiral, ear-piercing, pancreatic pain. And they refused them all medical attention at Boutirka. He and his lawyers wrote 20 different requests from medical attention. Every one of their requests was either ignored or rejected in writing. And then finally, on the night of November 16, 2009, Sergei Magnitsky went into critical condition. On that night, the Boutirka authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore. And so they put him in an ambulance and sent him to a different prison facility.

But when he arrived at the different prison, instead of putting him in the emergency, room of their medical wing. They put him in an isolation cell. They chained him to a bed and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergei Magnitsky to death. It was November 16th, 2009, eight years and a few months ago. Sergey Magnitsky was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children. This tragic doesn't describe this type of situation at all. And he seems like the most courageous man that I've ever heard of. What do you, I mean, he didn't, all he had to do is retract his statement and, and incriminate himself, but at least maybe he would have survived or had some sort of

different outcome for himself and his family, but he, he did not do that. He stuck true to his principles in the face of this horrific pain and torture. How do he, how did he do that? Do you have any insight into how he was even able to do that? I think I agree with you that he is truly the bravest, most courageous man I've ever, ever met. And the decisions that he had to make to overcome this situation to not go along with what they wanted to do are just incredible. He was really a man of steel. And it's not, you know, if you looked at him, you wouldn't, you know, he's not some type of,

you know, enormous, you know, muscle man or something like that. You know, it's all about his integrity, his principle, and, and he defied all of their expectations. They figure everybody buckles, everybody capitulates, everybody compromises. And Sergei has had a character that wouldn't allow him to do that. And I believe that one day in the future, when in a different world, when Putin is not in power, they will build monuments to Sergei Magnitsky in Russia for his defiance of criminality and corruption, which, you know, he's truly a saint, this man. It really is unbelievable, not only what happened to him, but how he withstood that. It's just the details, we just glossed over everything in the interest, of course, in time.

But in red notice, there's just so much that goes into him resisting and having the courage to resist making a false confession in the face of this horrific pain. And it's really, it truly is unbelievable and it sparked you to become not only an activist in the financial sector in Russia and elsewhere. But now this has morphed your mission at this point. What was going on in your head when this happened? Because now this is, at this point, has transcended the share values and the acquisition of companies and the corporate raiders that are coming after you. And even your own physical security, at this point, the mission, the vision, the resistance, if you will, just becomes, it doesn't just go up a level. This escalates times 100. This is so much deeper and bigger now than it was before.

Yeah, on the morning of November 17th at 745 a.m., I got the call from Sergei's lawyer that he had been killed in police custody. And it was the most horrifying, life-changing, soul-destroying news that I could have ever gotten. It was like a knife going right into my heart. And when I got that call, I realized that everything had changed and changed forever. I could not carry on just trying to make money when something's so. horrific, so evil and so terrible happened to Sergei Magnitsky and happened effectively as my, he was, he was killed as my proxy. He was killed because he was my lawyer. And I made a vow on that morning to Sergey Magnitsky's memory, to his family and to myself that I was going to go after the people

who killed him and make sure that they faced justice. And for the last eight and a half years, that's what I've been doing and trying to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky. So you're going to the States to present this to human rights organizations, the Magnitsky Law, which is essentially, tell us, tell us about the Magnitsky Law and how you're going about this. You're letting your business wane a lot at this point because you just can't sleep without justice in this case. I put my business interest aside completely. There was no longer any interest in trying to make money. This was all about trying to get justice at this point. And I tried originally to get justice inside of Russia. But, the Russian authorities completely circled the wagons. They promoted and gave special honors to some of the people who were most complicit in this crime. And in the most shocking miscarriage of justice, they put Sergei Magnitsky on trial three years after they murdered him in the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia. And they put me on trial as his co-conspirator and sentenced me to eight years in absentia. And so it became clear that there was no possibility of getting justice in Russia. And so I said, let's get justice outside of Russia. But how do you get justice outside of Russia? There actually weren't any rules of justice that one could rely on.

And so I looked at this whole story, and I thought to myself, okay, the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky killed him for money. They killed him because he exposed the theft of $230 million. And those people don't keep that money in Russia. They keep that money in the West. And we've seen them in New York. We see them in Miami. We see them in London.

We see them in the Swiss Alps. We see them in the Code Dazur in France. They're everywhere. They're buying properties. They're sending their kids to school. They're sending their parents for medical operations. They're using the banks. They're using the property.

They're buying the yachts. And I came up with this idea, which I took to Washington, of freezing the assets and banning the visas of the people who killed Sergey Magnitsky. And I took this idea to a democratic sense. Senator named Benjamin Cardin of Maryland and a Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona. And I told them the story which I've just shared with you today. And I said, can we ban their visas and freeze their assets? And they said yes. And that was the beginning of the Sergey Magnitsky Act. And they introduced it into Congress in the fall of 2010. And two years later,

it went for a vote. And it passed the Senate 92 to 4. It passed the House of Representatives, 85% and on December 14th, 2012, President Obama signed it into law, the Magnitsky Act. They're now 49 people on the Magnitsky list. Those 49 people can't enter the United States. Their assets in the United States are frozen. And most importantly, they're put on something called the Treasury OFAC sanctions list, which means that no bank in the world will touch them because no bank wants to be in violation of U.S. Treasury sanctions.

I'm proud to say that it didn't stop. This campaign didn't stop in the United States. I went to Canada. Canada passed the Magnitsky Act last October. I took it to Britain. Britain passed it last May. I took it to Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. All three countries have passed it. It's now on the parliamentary books to be voted on in Ukraine, in South Africa, in Gibraltar. And I'm now teeing up Sweden, Holland, and France. And let me tell you something. We figured out the perfect tool to go after Putin in his regime because previous sanctions, the previous sanction policy would penalize the population, but the elite could always

like fly in their own jets with caviar and champagne and whatever they needed. But this is just the opposite. It doesn't touch the population. It just goes after the evil elite. And they hate it. They hate it with such a passion that Putin made this single largest foreign policy priority to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Talk about taking it straight to the top.

I have this, man, I'm not laughing at the situation, of course, but I am smiling at the idea that you, this is like fighting a dragon or something. I just, you just this little guy. I mean, granted, you had a bunch of funds and things like that that have been decimated, but you're going up against a strong man of the world, one of the superpowers in the world. And you're saying, actually, I'm going to kick you right in the junk. I know how to do it and you aimed and you did it. And I don't know if I would have had the stones to do.

I wouldn't have, no, I know. I would not have had, most people would not have had the stones to do this. Because this is, you've got one of the most powerful tyrants in one of the world's major powers. And now you are the person that probably is stuck in his cross so deep that he would do anything to get you out. Well, he wants to kill me. I've been threatened with death on numerous occasions. I've been threatened with kidnapping illegal rendition. The Russians have put me on the Interpol,

most wanted list to issue red notice for me six times. The Russians have, I live in London. They've approached the British government 12 times for mutual legal assistance and extradition. I've been sued in numerous courts around the world. I've been surveilled. They make movies about me, trying to defame me. There's probably 250 people working in some

the Russian government at any given time with a sole project of trying to destroy me every which way they can. Okay, so how does that feel having a family and knowing one of the most powerful tyrants and one of the world's major superpowers is trying to silence you and destroy you? Because the Red Notice, of course, is so named because of the Interpol Red Notice, which is an international arrest warrant. This is an arrest warrant that if accepted by Interpol, you could just, you could drive into Canada from New York State and they could detain you and send you to Russia where you would certainly perish. And Red Notice, the book has so many people who are intimidated into silence. How are you able to go up against Putin, a murderer, one of the most powerful men in the world, without just giving into the intimidation yourself?

Well, the moment you give into the intimidation, that's when you die. You know, it's to fight it is to stay alive. And to fight it is also an important part of my mission. for Sergei. Sergei, just remember that Sergei was fighting the same guys in a much, much more precarious situation. He was in their custody when he was fighting them. He was

defying them. And he died doing that. And it's my duty to Sergei and my duty to myself to not give in. And I have to say that I'm not unhappy. I'm actually very happy. I feel energized.

And as much as I have to fear them, They've got to fear me because I now have many, many people on my side all over the world. Many governments are on my side. And most importantly, truth and justice are on my side. And that's a very, very powerful force. So what are you doing now? I mean, the Kremlin spends a lot of time, money, effort, energy to combat the consequences of the entire scandal surrounding Sergey Magnitsky's murder.

but this seems like something that you might never be through. And in red notice, you say, whatever you do in a crisis when it first hits defines it forever. And it seems like this crisis in your life and in the life of, of course, Sergei and his family, this is a crisis that just doesn't seem like it will stop as long as these laws affect these powerful people in Russia that are so firmly entrenched.

Well, what I'm doing now is pushing forward further. I want to get every country in the world to pass a Magnitsky Act. I'm also wanting to make sure that any money that these people stole that's kept in the West is frozen and expropriated by the law enforcement. And I want to make sure that everybody in the world knows who Sergey Magnitsky was and what sacrifice he made for the good of his country and for truth and justice. And that's what I'm doing. And we're succeeding. Laws are being passed. Money is being frozen.

The story is being told. And this story is a defining story for Vladimir Putin, because Vladimir Putin wants to pretend that he's some type of patriot, some type of nationalist for Russia. But what this story shows is that a real patriot, Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a massive crime against his country, wasn't rewarded for his work, but was murdered for his work. And the people who stole the money from Russia were promoted, honored, and protected. And that pretty much destroys the whole myth of Vladimir Putin, which is why he hates this thing more than anything else. How can people get involved? How can we get involved without being necessarily a political activist? Is there anything that we're listening right now, we should keep in mind?

It's not just remember Sergei Magnitsky. Is there more to it that we can do, that we can be aware of? Share the story. You know, when this is now at the center of the point. political debate in America. The Russians showed up, a Russian lawyer showed up in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, right after Donald Trump was nominated in the Republican nomination. And she came to him, came to Donald Trump Jr. and said, we want the Magnitsky Act to be repealed. And so we need, everybody needs to know about what the Magnitsky Act is, why it's there,

and to make sure that if there's any movement whatsoever towards repeal, that everyone screams bloody murder and it's all about awareness. And so I'm glad and grateful for you to have me on your show. And I hope that other people who hear this will just keep an eye on that Magnitsky Act and keep an eye on what's going on so that nothing like that ever happens. Bill, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your story. It's incredible. And of course, the book, Red Notice gets into so many other details. Like I said, it reads like a spy thriller half the time. And I really appreciate your time and I applaud your efforts at going after this injustice because this really is you really could have just said my thoughts and prayers are with Sergei Magnitsky. You could have maybe taken care of the

family a little bit and then gone on with your life and continued investing and making money and really put it behind you and that's not what you did. You decided to sacrifice a lot, a lot, your personal security, everything, to make sure that you could sleep at night. Well, it's, it's, I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I didn't do what I'm doing right now because it was so toxic what they did to Sergei Magnitsky and the only way that I can I can feel like a decent human being is to fight these guys and fight them right to the end. Thank you so much. Thank you. So Jason, I told you this is going to be insane and I just my mind is so blown. In the book, we left out half more of the things that are happening in the book or they talk about

everything that's happening to him. I mean, just the KGB or the FSB's rating his offices and the people who are prosecuting him are also the police in charge of this, but they're also the investors that are involved in the tax fraud. I mean, the corruption is just so thick and this guy's right in the middle of it and he's still standing strong going to Washington and going to Europe with Russia chasing him down and he's going right for their economic jugular. It's just incredible. You know, when you sent me this book originally, I'm like, okay, this is, you know, Jordan's Russia thing. I'll give it a shot, though. And oh, my God, what a book.

Yeah. And what a story. And yeah, we've got the Reader's Digest version of, you know, the highlights of the book, but there's so much more depth to his story. And this guy, I mean, hats off to Bill Browder for everything that he's done for his friend. It's incredible. Oh, special thanks to Albany and Associates. Albany's done everything from writing Iraq's media regulatory system to diagnosing social issues to improving stability in Somalia. They promote civil society in Libya post-Arab Spring.

They helped me book Bill on this show. And this is a company that Jason kind of sounds like, remember watching McGiver back in the day? And you didn't quite understand what the company did, but you just knew it was badass. And they had all this kind of intrigue stuff going on. That's Albany and Associates. They do a lot of stability work overseas. They do a lot of design, advising, working in things like media law, grassroots, media outreach. And it's just their rap sheet is amazing.

Bosnia, Kosovo, Ukraine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen. These guys are all over the place. These are guys that want to have a beer with at some point just to hear the stories that they can't tell. And I think that might be a show in and of itself at some point down the line. So special thanks to Albany Associates.com is where they're at. Albanyan Associates. unbelievable. I didn't even know companies like this existed, but as we do this show, and we are starting to get an inside look at a part of the world. I just never knew existed, Jason.

Great big thank you to Bill Browder. The book title is Red Notice. It'll be linked up in the show notes. And of course, if you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Bill on Twitter. We'll have that linked in the show notes. And I'd love to hear from you via email. Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com or I'm on Instagram at Jordan Harbinger. That'll all be linked up in the show notes for this episode, which of course, soon enough can also be found at jordan harbinger.com. This episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty, booking back office and last minute miracles by Jen

Harbinger, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. This is a new show, but as many of you know, I've been around for a long time. I did another show for 11 years, and if you know people that are interested in subjects like this, if you know people that listened to our other shows over at The Art of Charm, we would love it if you would share this, bring them over to the new show. We're trying to rebuild the audience from scratch. It's quite a daunting task. And we'd love it if you would rate and review the show in iTunes, of course, as well. So share the show with those you love and even those you don't. We've got lots more in the pipeline, and we're very excited to bring it to you. In the meantime,

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