Bill Browder Quotes
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.
Browder, Bill. Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice. Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Putin was the then Russian President. Corruption was rampant.
At the fall of the Soviet Union, the sell off of much of the state assets to private enterprise fell into the control of a few, so called oligarchs. Many of these looted the enterprises that they controlled. None the less, they were considered leading citizens and many were politicians.
He was addressing the technique of the Special Prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the relationship between the Donald Trump presidentical campaign and the Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential Campaign
William Felix Browder is an American-born British financier and political activist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which at one time was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. The Hermitage Fund was founded in partnership with Republic National Bank, with $25 million in seed capital. The fund, and associated accounts, eventually grew to $4.5 billion of assets under management. In 1997, the Hermitage Fund was the best-performing fund in the world, up 238%. The primary investment strategy of Browder was shareholder rights activism. Browder took on large Russian companies such as Gazprom, Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco. In retaliation, on November 13, 2005, Browder was refused entry to Russia, deported to the UK, and declared a threat to Russian national security.
