Wednesday, November 29, 2017

What I'm Reading - Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

Normally, I wouldn’t think twice about reading a book about high finance.  But this is no ordinary book.  The Boston Globe’s review of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice “a tale of an accidental activist.”  This is a very accurate description of Bill Browder’s tale of Russian corruption and murder.  A “red notice” that gives the book its title is a tool a country uses to let other countries know they wish to arrest a person with an eye toward extradition.  It is a tool that Vladimir Putin’s regime uses to silence its critics outside of Russia.  The custom is this – if a country issues a red notice, countries that participate in Interpol [which is every country except North Korea] are obliged to honor the wishes of the requesting country.  The police don’t have to arrest the subject of a red notice, but countries cut the individual in question off from their bank accounts and, in theory, the entire global financial system.

The book tells of Browder’s story.  His grandfather, Earl Browder, was a Communist who ran for President of the United States twice [1936 and 1940].  Bill Browder himself was the son of left-wing academics.  But somehow, this son of academics with Communists in his family closet was interested in pursuing a life in business.  He worked for Bain Capital and the Boston Consulting Group.  it was at the latter group that he expressed an interest in making some kind of business mark in Eastern Europe, a place where his Communist grandfather had spent a lot of time.  Soon after beginning work in the London offices of BCG, the Iron Curtain crumbled.  There would be opportunities galore to help ex-Communists become capitalists. 

Later, as an employee of Salomon Brothers, he found many opportunities for foreign investment in Russia.  the Russian government had decided to give away most of the state’s property to the people. The government was going about this in a number of ways, but the most interesting was something called voucher privatization.  The Russian government granted each citizen one privatization certificate.  These certificates were exchangeable for shares in Russian companies.  And the companies for which the shares were literally being given away were very undervalued.  One of the higher-ups at Salomon Brothers got wind of what Browder found about Russian investment opportunities, and decided to drop lots of money in Russia.  Soon Salomon Brothers became the owner of $25 million worth of the most undervalued shares that had ever been offered anywhere in history.  Having made this mark at Salomon Brothers, Browder decided the time was right to form his own company, Hermitage Capital.

The book starts with a deportation.  Bill Browder was the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital.  Since its founding in 1996, Hermitage Capital made a lot of money for a lot of people.  In 2000 the firm had been ranked as the best performing emerging-markets fund in the world.  In November 2005, Browder had taken a flight from the United Kingdom [his adopted home] to Moscow, where his company managed approximately $4.5 million worth of assets.  His main approach to investing had been shareholder activism. In Russia that meant challenging the corruption of the oligarchs, the twenty-some-odd men who were reported to have stolen 39 percent of the country after the fall of communism and who became billionaires almost overnight.  The oligarchs were stealing from their own companies, and Browder made it his mission in life to expose corruption among these Russian oligarchs in order to do right by his investors. 

Flights from London to Moscow were routine for Browder, but this flight in November 2005 was different – he was denied entry into Russia.  He was sent back to whence he came – London.  Browder tried to find out why he was suddenly persona non-grata in a country he routinely visited.  At first, he thought it was some bureaucratic screw-up.  Then he was told the Russians refused entry into their country on the grounds of “national security.”  Browder made a lot of enemies in Russia, but as long as those enemies [the aforementioned oligarchs] were also enemies of Vladimir Putin, Browder could crusade against corruption in Russia to his heart’s content.  After the arrest and conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man and an opponent of Vladimir Putin, Browder continued to name and shame the rich people who were kleptocrats.  Unbeknownst to Browder, these kleptocrats were “friends of Vladimir”.  Browder crossed a line he didn’t know existed.  Soon the Russian FSB wanted to deprive Hermitage of all of its assets.

Who was Sergei Magnitsky, and what was his “crime”?  Sergei Magnitsky was the head of the tax practice at law firm of Firestone Duncan.  He was an expert on Russian tax law.  Browder described his knowledge as “encyclopedic.”  After Browder pissed off the wrong people, he was being investigated [and eventually charged with] tax fraud.  Bill Browder retained his services, and in so doing Magnitsky uncovered $230 million of tax fraud involving some of the companies stolen from Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital.  He discovered that some of Hermitage’s companies had been “stolen”.  The new “owners” of the stolen companies tried to get rebates of taxes paid by the Hermitage companies before they were stolen.  These rebates were paid.  

How does one “steal” a company?  The police raided Hermitage’s offices, seized a ton of documents, and then used a convicted killer to fraudulently re-register their companies.  The police took the company’s original seals, certificates of ownership, and registration files.  Once stolen, the new owners could act just like any other owners of a company. They could run it, liquidate it, take its assets, relocate it.  After that was accomplished, Hermitage became victims of what is called a “Russian raider attack.”  These typically involved corrupt police officers fabricating criminal cases, corrupt judges approving the seizure of assets, and organized criminals hurting anyone who stood in the way. 

What happened to Sergei Magnitsky?  After exposing the largest case of tax fraud in Russia’s history, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested by Russian police.  The charge – tax fraud.  In November 2008, Russian police arrested Magnitsky.  He didn’t think the Russian authorities would do anything to him because he hadn’t done anything wrong.  He was wrong.  The same people that he discovered were defrauding the Russian people were the same people investigating his case.  During his detention, he was denied bail.  The Russian Interior Ministry fabricated a “report” that Magnitsky had applied for a UK visa and had bought an airplane ticket to Kiev, and so he was labelled a flight risk.  He was refused any contact with his family.  He was subject to terrible living conditions.  He nearly froze to death in his cell.  As his detention dragged on, Magnitsky got very sick.  The doctors where he was detained diagnosed him with pancreatitis, gallstones, and cholecystitis.  A week before he was to undergo an ultrasound exam, he was moved to another facility that was not equipped to handle illnesses like those that afflicted Magnitsky.  He asked for medical treatment but was refused.  They deliberately withheld medical treatment from him. 

On October 14, 2009, he submitted a formal twelve-page testimony to the Interior Ministry in which he documented the full extent of the financial fraud. He provided names, dates, and locations.  On November 12, 2009 Magnitsky finally had his day in court. He first read his complaint about not receiving adequate medical care. The judge rejected it. He then read his complaint about the fabrication of evidence in his case file. The judge rejected this as well. As he began to read the complaint about his false arrest, the judge cut him off midsentence and rejected it too. In total, she rejected more than a dozen of Magnitsky’s complaints.  After his hearing was over, Magnitsky’s medical condition became critical.  He was transferred to a place called Matrosskaya Tishina to be treated.  But instead of being taken to the medical wing, Magnitsky was taken to an isolation cell and handcuffed to a bed.  Eight guards in full riot gear entered the cell and beat Sergei Magnitsky to death.  The “official” version of Magnitsky’s death was that he died of “heart failure, with no signs of violence.”

Executive Inaction vs. Congressional Action.  Throughout the Obama Administration, the President was rarely hesitant to take executive action to remedy a problem when faced with Congressional inaction.  In the case of Sergei Magnitsky’s murder by Russian police, the script was flipped.  When Bill Browder visited the State Department’s Office of Russian Affairs, he suggested the State Department use something called Proclamation 7750 against those Russian officials implicated in Sergei Magnitsky’s death.  Created during the Bush Administration in 2004, Proclamation 7750 allows the State Department to impose visa sanctions on corrupt officials.  Since the fall of Communism, corrupt Russian officials travelled across the globe, spending money like it was their last days on Earth.  Restricting travel for these individuals would get the Kremlin’s attention.  But when presented with this option, the State Department balked.  They didn’t want to upset the apple cart.  It was more important for them to document the Magnitsky problem that to actually do anything about it. 

Browder approached Senator Ben Cardin [D-MD] with the details of the Magnitsky case.  Sen. Cardin was chairman of the US Helsinki Commission, an independent government agency whose mission is to monitor human rights in former Soviet Bloc countries.  Once Browder gave Sen. Cardin all the details of the Magnitsky case, he pledged to provide any and all support to Browder’s efforts to sanction the Russians.  Sen. Cardin wrote to Secretary of State Clinton, asking her to invoke Proclamation 7750.  Attached to the letter was the list of the sixty officials involved in Sergei’s death and the tax fraud, and next to each name was his or her department affiliation, rank, date of birth, and role in the Magnitsky case.  The State Department ignored Sen. Cardin’s letter. 

Browder then testified before the House Human Rights Commission.  Rep. Jim McGovern [R-MA] chaired the commission.  After he heard the story of Sergei Magnitsky, he decided to up the ante.  He promised that not only would he support Sen. Cardin’s efforts on Magnitsky’s behalf, he would introduce legislation to codify the contents of Sen. Cardin’s letter to Secretary Clinton, and to make Obama say “no” during an election year.  Sen. Cardin and Rep. McGovern worked together on the Magnitsky Act.  Sen. Cardin told Browder he needed some Republican co-sponsors for the draft bill to go anywhere.  Thus cued, Browder got a meeting with John McCain, who agreed without hesitation. 

Context:  The effort to pass the Magnitsky Act came in 2012, an election year.  During one presidential debate, Mitt Romney was asked what he considered to be the United States’ biggest geopolitical threat.  Without hesitation, he answered “Russia”.  President Obama retorted “the 80s called, and they want their foreign policy back.”  If the Obama Administration supported passage of the Magnitsky Act, it would be admitting the “reset” policy was a failure.  The last thing any political campaign wants to do is to admit failure to anything.   But still they resisted.  However, the Obama Administration wanted to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment so that American businesses can be competitive in Russia when it became part of the World Trade Organization.  But he needed help from Congress.   Since Jackson-Vanik was still public law, President Obama couldn’t unilaterally get rid of it – he needed Congressional help.  He was told in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t support the Magnitsky Act, he wouldn’t get what he wanted regarding Jackson-Vanik.  John Kerry, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations committee, tried to stonewall its passage – he wanted to succeed Hillary Clinton at Foggy Bottom.  But once the Administration heard of the quid pro quo [I’ll give you Jackson-Vanik repeal for support for Magnitsky], Kerry’s stonewalling stopped.  The Magnitsky Act passed both houses of Congress with overwhelming [veto-proof] majorities.  President Obama had no choice but to sign it into law, which he did in December 2012.

How did Vladimir Putin react?  Not well.  The Magnitsky Act is a source of extreme resentment by Putin.  But he’s really pissed because the law penalizes those whom he allows to continue their acts of corruption without any consequences.  He’s been trying in his own way to get the Magnitsky Act repealed.  But so far, the only concrete “retaliation” has been to ban American families from adopting Russian children.  One other action taken by Russia – they put a dead man on trial.  In March 2013, Bill Browder and Sergei Magnitsky [who had been dead since November 2009] were tried for tax fraud.  Not even Stalin put dead people on trial.  Of course, the two were found guilty.  Browder was sentenced in absentia to a nine-year prison term.

Though not covered in this book, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump, Jr. at Trump Tower to lobby for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act.  Since the Magnitsky Act was enacted, Vladimir Putin has made its repeal one of his top foreign policy priorities.

Browder had the last laugh.  “We found their Achilles Heel.  Following the money and freezing the money is by far the most effective tool there is when dealing with a kleptocracy.”  Since the Magnitsky Act became law, other countries have followed suit.  Among the most recent, Canada’s Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act became law on October 19th of this year.  Putin’s reaction was "the issue is simply used for fanning anew anti-Russian hysteria."  he US Magnitsky Act has since been broadened to be world-wide.

Score one for the good guys…


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