Bill Browder

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Bill Browder (2011)

William Felix "Bill" Browder (born April 23, 1964 in Chicago ) is a British entrepreneur. He is co-founder and CEO of the fund company Hermitage Capital Management . Browder has been a sharp critic of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2007 .

Life

Browder was born in Chicago in 1964 as the son of the American mathematician Felix Browder (* 1927 in Moscow ) and his wife Eva (* 1929 in Vienna ) of Jewish descent into a left-wing political academic family. Browder is also a grandson of the US-born communist union leader Earl Browder and the Russian-Jewish lawyer Raissa Berkman. Andrew and William Browder (* 1934, American mathematician) are his uncles.

Bill Browder lives in London and is a British citizen. He married his wife Melanie in the Marble Arch Synagogue in London. Their son Joshua Browder became known at a young age with the Internet platform DoNotPay . Bill Browder studied economics at the University of Chicago and received at the Stanford Graduate School of Business 's Master of Business Administration . He later worked for the Boston Consulting Group and Salomon Brothers . Their son Joshua Browder became known at a young age with the Internet platform DoNotPay.

In 1996 he founded, together with the banker Edmond Safra , the Hermitage Capital Management , based in Guernsey . The fund company was at times one of the largest Western investors in Russia and in 2005 had assets worth 4 billion US dollars . Browder had defended Putin's actions against oligarchs longer than others and had been one of his advocates.

Browder's relationship with Russia and President Putin

Browder is considered a sharp critic of the Kremlin , which aims to overthrow Russian President Vladimir Putin. Browder called Putin et al. a. as a " sociopath , cold-blooded killer" and a "criminal dictator without big difference to Hitler, Mussolini or Gaddafi." In February 2015 published Browder his book Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (dt Red Notice edition : How I Became Putin's Public Enemy No. 1 ). Here he insinuated that the Russian President was “not a friend of the Jews”. Browder interprets the fact that Putin made numerous personal donations to Jewish institutions and maintains personal relationships with influential Jewish public figures as a tactical approach: “He (Putin) has numerous allies among the extreme right who are extremely anti-Semitic . However, Putin is smart enough to know who to ally with and who not. He knows that when he allies with Jewish personalities, he allies with a very powerful group of people from all over the world. "

In November 2005, Browder was refused entry into Russia at Sheremetyevo Airport . In 2007, his companies in Russia were liquidated and the Russian authorities accused Browder of tax evasion and illegal appropriation of Gazprom shares . His auditor Sergei Magnitsky , who worked for Browder's company and allegedly disclosed suspected fraud by officials amounting to around 200 million euros, was arrested in November 2008 and died on November 16, 2009 in a prison in Moscow under unexplained circumstances. Together with the dead Magnitsky, Browder was sentenced in absentia by a Russian court in July 2013 to nine years in prison for tax evasion. The attempt by the Russian authorities to put Browder on the international wanted list failed. The international police organization Interpol said the allegations against Browder were politically motivated and contrary to Interpol's rules.

After Magnitsky's death, Browder campaigned for the responsible Russian officials to be punished; he describes himself as a victim of a conspiracy, both on the part of the Russian authorities and of criminal groups. Browder's lobbying campaign, which, according to the Federal Agency for Civic Education, produced a number of convincing evidence of corruption in tax authorities and other government agencies, led to the enactment of the “Magnitsky Act” in the USA in 2011, which banned 60 Russian officials from entering the country the European Parliament followed suit. After Browder had explicitly praised Putin's policies up to 2005, he has been warning investors from Western countries against investing in Russia in various publications and interviews since 2007.

The filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov produced a documentary film on the death of Magnitsky (“The Magnitsky Case”) for the Arte broadcaster . In the documentation, Nekrasov, contrary to Browder's version, came to the conclusion that Browder's company and its auditor Magnitsky did not intend to investigate corruption at the time. Browder described this as a lie and threatened the producing station with lawsuits, whereupon the broadcast was canceled. Nekrasov criticized this, stating that he had no agenda during the filming, but the facts did not allow any conclusion other than that the case was about tax evasion by Hermitage Capital Management. During the same period extensive public campaigns were carried out by Russia, including a. Browder was suspected of espionage and charged with fabricating the Magnitsky assassination in order to discredit Russia.

On December 29, 2017, a Moscow court sentenced Browder to nine years in absentia. It found him and his business partner Ivan Cherkassov, who had emigrated from Russia, guilty of deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion. The two should also pay a fine of 4.2 billion rubles (60.7 million euros).

In November 2018, the Russian government tried to put Browder on the international wanted list with the allegation of poisoning four people in Russia.

On November 23, 2019, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported on its research into the credibility of Browder's statements on the Magnitsky case. The medium comes to the conclusion that the statements made by Browder do not stand up to closer scrutiny. After Browder lodged a complaint with the Spiegel editor-in-chief and the German Press Council, the newspaper felt compelled to comment on the case again and to reiterate the doubts about Browder's statements documented in the article. In it, Der Spiegel presented, among other things, some documents that are supposed to prove the findings of the article.

Web links

Commons : Bill Browder  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bill Browder: Red Notice: How I Became Putin's Public Enemy No. 1 , Chapter 2, dtv Verlagsgesellschaft, October 2016
  2. ↑ Be careful of Putin, he is a true enemy of Jews , article by Sandy Rashty, The Jewish Chronicle, November 5, 2015
  3. ^ Jewish Kremlin critic faces 'absurd' new charges by Russian prosecutors , Nataliya Vasilyeva, The Times of Israel , November 20, 2018
  4. ^ The terrible torture death of a Russian lawyer , article by Mikhail Fishman, Die Welt, November 28, 2011
  5. ↑ An Enemy of the Kremlin Dies in London , The Atlantic, January / February 2017
  6. ↑ Be careful of Putin, he is a true enemy of Jews , article by Sandy Rashty, The Jewish Chronicle, November 5, 2015
  7. ↑ Putin accuses British anti-corruption campaigner Browder of three murders , Guardian, November 19, 2017
  8. ^ Guilty verdict against dead Russian whistleblowers , Der Tagesspiegel, July 11, 2013
  9. ↑ Interpol rejects Russia in the Browder case , Tageblatt of July 27, 2013
  10. ↑ http://www.bpb.de/internationales/europa/russland/155734/analyse-russlands-reaktion-auf-den-magnitsky-act-und-die-behaben-zum-westen
  11. ↑ With love from Moscow , Die Welt from April 1, 2006
  12. ^ How major investor Browder failed in Russia , Wirtschaftswoche from August 26, 2010
  13. ↑ a b By James Panichi: MEPs dragged into Russia film row. In: politico.eu. May 3, 2016, accessed May 3, 2016 .
  14. ↑ European Music Council: EU and US duped on Russia corruption, film-maker claims. In: euobserver.com. Retrieved on May 3, 2016 (English): "Nekrasov's documentary - The Magnitsky Act - Behind the Scenes - does not accuse Browder of tax fraud or espionage."
  15. ↑ Russian court sentenced Bill Browder to prison . Spiegel Online, December 29, 2017
  16. ^ Prosecutors spit poison , Novaya Gazeta, November 19, 2018
  17. ↑ SPIEGEL ONLINE: Russia: The Magnitsky case - story without a hero. Retrieved December 14, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Allegations of the investor Bill Browder: Why the mirror sticks to the Magnitsky research . In: Spiegel Online . December 13, 2019 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 14, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Browder, Bill
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Browder, William Felix (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago