Bill Browder on facing ‘Putin’s wrath’ for exposing corruption in Russia$1:
BILL BROWDER: So when you see an oligarch, a Russian oligarch who's on the Forbes list worth $20 billion, the reality is that that oligarch is only worth 10 and the other 10 belongs to Vladimir Putin.
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CHRYSTIA FREELAND: History will judge President Putin as harshly as the world condemns him today. Today, he cements his place in the ranks of the reviled European dictators who caused such carnage in the 20th century. The response by Canada and our allies will be swift, and it will bite.
MG: That was Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on the day that Russian forces invaded Ukraine. At that same press conference, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada was going to go after Russian oligarchs. Countries around the world have hit Russia with debilitating sanctions. Bill Browder knows what it's like to go after the oligarchs and the Kremlin. His work has made him the target of Vladimir Putin's rage. Bill Browder is the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and the author of Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath. I spoke with Bill Browder yesterday. Here's our conversation.
BILL BROWDER: Good to be here.
MG: What did you think of those words from Canada's deputy prime minister?
BILL BROWDER: Those are clear, unequivocal words which describe exactly how Vladimir Putin is, and I'm glad that she said them, I didn't hear them when she said them at that moment. But I'm glad to hear them now and I know Chrystia very well because we go back to the days when she was a journalist running the FTs bureau in Moscow, and I was a newly minted fund manager, and she was the only journalist brave enough to expose the crimes of the oligarchs. Back then, several decades ago.
MG: She talks in that set of remarks about biting sanctions. And we know that it's not just Canada, but many countries around the world have launched sanctions against Russia and have re-upped them and added new sanctions. How much of a difference do you think they will make to President Putin in this war?
BILL BROWDER: Well, sanctions are kind of like medicine, and if you have a disease, it all depends on when you start taking the medicine. If you take it early enough, you can knock out the disease before it comes full on. We should have done sanctions before Russia invaded, but there was not enough consensus in the international community to do that. Now that we're in the middle of the war, Putin is not going to back down. He has to show strength. He's in a certain sense, he's launched this war as a war of distraction so his own people don't pay attention to all of his misdeeds. And so the purpose of the sanctions now are to deprive him of resources to basically dry up the capital, the money, the dollars that he needs to pay for his war. And so the sanctions aren't going to see an immediate effect. We have to keep on doing the sanctions. We need to expand them so that he's fully economically encircled. And at that point, the sanctions will work because he won't have enough money to buy equipment to kill Ukrainians.
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