For a period of time, I had the most golden life you could ever imagine because I was cleaning up Russia, I was making money for my clients and myself hand over fist... And it turned out that when we started publishing these stories and exposing the oligarchs, we were doing it at a really weird and opportune moment, which was the moment that Vladimir Putin had come to power. He was fighting with the same guys that we were fighting with. The oligarchs were stealing power from him at the same time they were stealing money from us. And saved them three months of their own work by doing this analysis for them. And they would publish these stories. I should point out: I’ve never met Vladimir Putin. I’ve never spoken to him in my life... neither then, nor now, or any time in between. But this was one of these situations where your enemy’s enemy is your friend. So Vladimir Putin was busy fighting with the oligarchs because they were stealing power from him. I was fighting with the oligarchs because they were stealing money from me. And so every time I would come up with one of these scandals, he would step in – in some kind of very heavy-handed way – and stop them from doing what they were doing. For a period of time, I had the most golden life you could ever imagine because I was cleaning up Russia, I was making money for
it eventually became the largest investment fund in the country, with $4.5 billion under management. And in the process of doing my investments, I discovered that every single company that I was investing in was basically being robbed blind by the management and the oligarchs who controlled the companies. And so let’s say I owned 1% of a company. I didn’t really have 1% of anything because the oligarch who owned 51% of the company was literally siphoning 100% of the profits out the back door for his own benefit. And so I decided to try to challenge that corruption, to fight the corruption. And I didn’t have a lot of tools at my disposal. It wasn’t like you could go to the Russian SEC and say, “Look at these terrible things. You need to prosecute somebody,” because the Russian SEC was neither prosecuting anybody or even had the ability to. And I couldn’t go to the police. I couldn’t go to the parliament. I couldn’t go to anywhere. But the one interesting lever that I had was that I was good at doing research. I had a good team of investment analysts, and I knew a lot of journalists in Moscow. And so we would research how they went about stealing the money. It wasn’t as opaque as you might think. Russia’s an incredibly bureaucratic country, and all the bureaucracy gathers information and keeps it somewhere... So we were able to figure out who was doing the stealing, how they were doing the stealing, when they were doing the stealing, and where it was going to. And then, we’d take that information and I’d share it with the journalists that I had met and knew. And of course the journalists loved me because I
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American Consequences
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