A Conversation With Bill Browder
my clients and myself hand over fist, and I was doing it in a much more powerful way than anyone could’ve ever envisaged because why would some guy from the South Side of Chicago have all this ability to get Putin to do stuff? Well, it just turned out to be this weird confluence of interests. But the problem was that Putin wasn’t doing this because he wanted to make Russia a better place. Putin was doing this because he wanted to defeat the oligarchs. And so he decided to go for broke at the end of 2003. In October 2003, the richest man in Russia, a man named Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who owned the oil company Yukos, was on his private jet and had just landed in Siberia on his way to some business meetings for his oil company. His jet was surrounded by a bunch of secret policemen from Russia’s FSB, which is the successor organization to the KGB. They arrested him. They brought him back to Moscow. They put him on trial. And they allowed the television cameras to come into the courtroom and film the richest guy in Russia on trial sitting in a cage. And this had a profound impact on the other oligarchs of Russia, who thought to themselves, “Wait a second, I don’t want to go sitting in that cage.” And so they went to Putin in the summer of 2004, after Khodorkovsky was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, and they said to Vladimir Putin, “Vladimir, what do we have to do so we don’t have to sit in a cage?” And Putin said, real simply, “50%.” Not 50% for the Russian government, not 50% for the presidential administration of Russia, but 50% for Vladimir Putin.
At that moment, Putin became the richest man in the world. And at that moment, all of my interests were no longer in confluence with his but were directly in opposition. And as I continued to expose corruption, instead of going after his enemies, I was going after his own personal financial interest. And that was the lead-up to November 5, 2005. As I was flying back to Russia, I was stopped at the border. I was detained in the airport detention center, arrested and put in the airport detention center, kept there for 15 hours, and then deported the next day, 15 hours later, and declared a threat to national security. Dan Ferris: You spent 15 hours just in a cell at the airport? Bill Browder: So, they put me in the cell, the airport detention center, and I didn’t know at that point whether I was being arrested or deported. Nobody told me what had happened. They weren’t communicating with me. I was just a detainee as far as they were concerned. And I thought, “Wow, maybe I’ve been pushing things too hard here in Russia. God, I sure hope that they don’t send me to Siberia.” And so my thinking at the time was: If they were going to be deporting me, they would deport me back to London, and the flight back to London the next day was at 11:00 a.m., the first flight back to London. And so I thought to myself, at about 9:30 in the morning, after sort of sitting up there all night, “If they’re going to deport me, they’re going to come and get me at 9:30 for an 11:00 flight because surely they’re going to have to process my papers” or do whatever one does in one of these deportation situations. And so I started banging on the
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June 2020
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