Billion Dollar Hedge Fund Mgr Goes After Putin And Russia, This Time In Europe

Forbes

Bill Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management in London, is doing his best to embarrass Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Russian government once again.

After successfully and single-handedly lobbying for the passing of the Magnitsky Act in the U.S. Senate in November, Browder seems to have convinced European governments to go after alleged Russian criminals in the same way: by banning travel and access to bank accounts in their respective countries.

Browder’s colleague and friend, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer with the Moscow-based law firm Firestone Duncan, was arrested in 2009 for tax fraud affiliated with Hermitage. The billion dollar hedge fund was subsequently kicked out of Russia, and Magnitsky died in prison, a victim, it is widely believed, of poor treatment.

Late last year, Congress passed two laws that make life increasingly difficult for Russians currently on a “black list” at the U.S. State Department for their involvement in Magnitsky’s death. Under the so-called Magnitsky Act, both houses of Congress now have access to that list of Russians the State House had been inclined to keep under wraps out of concern of embarrassing The Kremlin.

Washington and Moscow are going through a revamp, or a reset, of bilateral relations and the current human rights scandals had put a strain in that relationship. Under the new law, Congress now knows which Russians to ban from traveling or having any type of financial business in the United States.

Immediately after its passing, Pavel Khodorkovsky, director of the Khodorkovsky Center in New York, told me that the idea was for some countries in Europe to pass similar legislation.

“It makes it harder for Russians receiving state money for bribes and other human rights crimes to travel or hide money outside of Russia, and we hope that makes those crimes of the state less attractive to the perpetrators,” Khodorkovsky told me.

His father, Mikhail, is the former CEO of Yukos Oil. Once on Putin’s hit-list, Mikhail is now serving time behind bars for tax evasion. Yukos Oil has been broken up and sold to Russian state owned energy companies, with the bulk of those assets acquired at a discount by Rosneft, the largest oil company in Russia.

Meanwhile, Browder has successfully lobbied like-minded European legislators to adopt the same laws as the Americans.

The European Parliament is now considering visa bans on certain Russians under investigation for human rights violations.

Back in October, the Parliament adopted a recommendation to the European Council on establishing common visa restrictions for Russian officials involved in the Sergei Magnitsky case and freezing their assets in Europe. There was broad parliamentary support for this recommendation, which comes at a time when Russian is actually still trying Magnitsky, posthumously, in the courts.

The European Parliament repeated this demand for punitive measures in December when it adopted the recommendations by Austrian Parliamentarian Hannes Swoboda on the negotiation of a new EU-Russia agreement. The issue is now on the agenda.

Parliamentary officials asked on Feb. 6 whether the Commissioner and 8 vice presidents shared the conviction of the need to establish a U.S. style list of Russian officials responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky. займ на карту без отказов круглосуточно hairy women https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php https://zp-pdl.com срочный займ