A Conversation With Bill Browder
Canada, in the United Kingdom, in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and in Kosovo. But the biggest prize is coming up in the European Union, which we’re working on right now and would get us 27 countries in one go. And then the other big prize is Australia. And so this is a lifelong mission. The Magnitsky Act has morphed into a piece of legislation not just for Sergei Magnitsky, not just for Russia, but for bad guys everywhere in the world. And so the Magnitsky Act is now applied all over the world, to death squads in Nicaragua, to generals in Myanmar that are doing the persecution and genocide of the Rohingya. It’s being applied to bad guys in all sorts of places all over the world. And every country is now starting to pick this thing up, and it’s really becoming probably the single most powerful new technology for dealing with human rights abuse and kleptocracy in the world. And it’s named after Sergei Magnitsky. We’ll never be able to give Sergei his life back, but his legacy is an enormous one, where his sacrifice and his death has led to this incredible tool which really upsets, scares, and deters dictators and kleptocrats and oligarchs from doing bad things. And for that his life wasn’t a meaningless life... it was a meaningful life.
buying something in Russia. I’m going to guess that you have a message for them... Bill Browder: The message is obvious, which is that it’s a totally uninvestable country. You’re not buying value if there’s no way that you can sort of have access to your assets if they’re going to steal them from you at any point arbitrarily. And moreover – and I was a value investor, and I still am a value investor – when I started investing in Russia, and it was trading at a 99.7% discount, the idea was that it was at such a steep discount that you could make money if there’s any kind of positive trajectory. If it goes from horrible to bad, you can make a lot of money. Well, now we’re nowhere near a 99% discount. We’re probably at like a 60% discount. And it’s deteriorating. And you never make money buying cheap stuff in a negative catalyst situation. And so there’s no logical reason as a value investor to invest in Russia unless you’re just totally speculating on a short-term move in the market. As an investor – and trading and investing are two different things – but as an investor, you’re looking for some type of rerating that’s going to happen over some period of time. And what I would predict is that there’s going to be a derating that happens in Russia as the rule of law continues to deteriorate, your property rights are no longer there, and it doesn’t matter how cheap stuff is.
Dan Ferris: I know some value investors who every now and then get a little bit excited about
Bill Browder’s book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice , is a page-turner that you won’t be able to put down. The story is real and gut-wrenching. Get your copy on Amazon here.
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June 2020
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