Bill Browder Quotes

Russia is a mafia state today, and Putin is its top godfather.

Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn't set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.

Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.

Putin is like Al Capone.

There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.

Putin can't afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.

We have more billionaires than any country but the United States. And Putin can imprison any one of them at a moment’s notice. Do you think he is poor?

Germany is a despotism, with mock constitutionalism. There is the dictature of capitalism represented by junkerdom, militarism, and police. All independent organizations of working men were forbidden.

Fig leaves of democratic procedure … hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship

He [Rafael Trujillo] had his torture chambers. He had his political assassinations. But he kept law and order, cleaned the place up, made it sanitary, built public works, and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us.

The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption.

Rather than abide by the rule of law, Maduro and his cronies follow mafia-style practices, intimidating the opposition by targeting their family members.

In 2003, I warned of a 'creeping coup' in Russia against the forces of democracy and market capitalism in Russia.

Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. It's kleptocracy, it's corruption, it's a nation that's really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy.

The worst criminals of our time are the US and UK governments. Both are devoid of all integrity, all honor, all mercy, all humanity. Many members of both governments would have made perfect functionaries in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

As far as the opposition to Jayalalitha was concerned, it was that she was misusing authority for personal corruption, denying people their liberties, attacking the opposition with violence, and there was nobody who could challenge her.

I'm not a big fan of Putin. I'm not a big fan of Russia.

Political leaders in Belarus are routinely repressed, and their voices are muffled: Tsikhanouskaya was running for president because her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, was arrested before he could start his own presidential campaign.

When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities.

To put it in plain language, Russia is that country where the name of a writer appears not on the cover of his book, but on the door of his prison cell.

The Yanukovych regime is a mafia, which regularly threatens, imprisons, murders, or disappears political opponents as well as those whose possessions it covets.

Fidel Castro's most scandalous show trial was not mounted against a political figure but against a writer: Heberto Padilla. In 1971, after 38 days of detention, Mr. Padilla was forced to 'confess' at the Cuban writers' union to the charges of 'subversive activities.'

The story started over a decade ago when I ran Hermitage Capital Management, the largest investment firm in Russia. I was very successful, but when I started to complain publicly about corruption at the companies in which my fund invested, President Vladimir Putin had me expelled from the country and declared a threat to national security.

I grew up in a dictatorship in a very Catholic country.

It doesn't matter whether you're guilty or not in Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines.