Exclusive: Bill Browder Speaks Out on Putin, Sanctions
Bill Browder may seem like a mild-mannered financier, but he is, perhaps, nemesis number one for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The 53-year-old is the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, once the largest foreign investor in Russia. But in 2006, the authorities kicked him out of the country, calling him a threat to national security.
The American-born hedge fund manager, however, claims he was booted for exposing corruption. Browder’s partner in that effort was his tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who was imprisoned and died behind bars. Browder says that the charges against his attorney were false—and that he was murdered. And in 2012, the financier became the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that slapped sanctions on Russian oligarchs, to Putin’s great ire.
Canada has since passed similar legislation, and Moscow convicted Browder of tax fraud in absentia. In October, the Kremlin put him about Putin, corruption and his family’s history with the American Communist Party.
