A Conversation With Bill Browder
killed Sergei Magnitsky and make them face justice. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years. And at first, it didn’t seem like we were going to get any justice. The Russian government completely and absolutely circled the wagons. Vladimir Putin got involved personally in the cover-up. They gave promotions and state honors to the people who were most complicit. In the most shocking miscarriage of justice, they put Sergei Magnitsky on trial three years after they killed him, in the first- ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia. They found him guilty. I was put on trial as his co-defendant in absentia. I was also found guilty. It was clear that we needed to get justice outside of Russia. And that’s when I came up with this idea, which is that the people who killed him didn’t kill him for religion or ideology – they killed him for money. They killed him for $230 million of money. And I know that the people who stole that money don’t keep that money in Russia. They keep that money in dollars in the West. They keep it in New York banks and British banks and Swiss banks. They buy properties on the Côte d’Azur in France, Belgrave Square in London, and South Beach in Miami. They send their kids to boarding school in Switzerland and their girlfriends on shopping trips to Milan. And I came up with this idea that if we could take that away from them, if we could freeze their assets and ban their visas, that may not be true justice for torture and murder, but it would hit them where it counts and it would be a lot better than the total impunity that they were enjoying up until now.
It was by far the most horrible, life-changing, traumatic, soul-destroying news I could’ve ever gotten. Bill Browder: It was by far the most horrible, life-changing, traumatic, soul-destroying news I could’ve ever gotten. Sergei Magnitsky was killed as my proxy. They killed him because they couldn’t get to me. And he lost his life in my service, and he would be still alive today if he hadn’t been working for me. And he lost his life trying to do the right thing. And so when I was finally able to sort of cut through the fog and hysteria of heartbreak enough to think clearly, it was obvious to me what I needed to do, which was to put aside everything else I was doing in my life and to devote all of my time, all of my resources, and all of my energy to go after the people who Dan Ferris: Absolute horror. And after that moment, what was your initial reaction, Bill? Did you just swing into action right away? I can’t imagine that you weren’t absolutely overcome at that point. On that night, the Butyrka authorities don’t want to have responsibility for him anymore, and so they put him in an ambulance, send him to a different prison that had a medical wing. But when he arrives at the different prison, instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell, they chain him to a bed, and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat Sergei Magnitsky until he died. That was November 16, 2009. Sergei Magnitsky was 37 years old. He left a wife and two children.
“”
84
June 2020
Made with FlippingBook Publishing Software