Hermitage Reveals $230 Million Stolen From Russian People
October 8, 2009
Today, October 8, 2009, investigators from the Russian Interior Ministry announced charges against Hermitage Capital Management’s legal adviser, Sergey Magnitskiy, and allegations against Hermitage’s CEO, William Browder.
These charges and allegations have been fabricated and brought directly in response to Hermitage and Magnitskiy implicating certain Interior Ministry officials in the theft of $230 million from the Russian budget.
Due to the high level of corruption in the Russian Interior Ministry, along with the arbitrary powers they posses, many Russian newspapers have been afraid to write about the Interior Ministry’s role in this fraud. In an environment like this, where the freedom of the press is compromised, it is necessary to use new channels of communication to fight corruption in Russia. In order to avoid putting Russian journalists at risk, we are, therefore, releasing the following YouTube video to lay out story in full.
The New York Times: Major Investor in Russia Sees Wide Fraud Scheme.
July 30, 2009
By ANDREW E. KRAMER MOSCOW
William F. Browder, once the largest foreign investor in the Russian stock market, filed court documents in New York this week contending that other Western investors in Russia had colluded with the authorities to steal hundreds of millions of dollars through tax refunds and then laundered the money through New York banks. Mr. Browder has hired the law firm of John D. Ashcroft, the former United States attorney general, to represent him in New York in a request for a subpoena for bank wire transfer and other records that Mr. Ashcroft contends will prove Mr. Browder’s allegations.
The filing is a new twist on Mr. Browder’s case, which began almost four years ago. His lawyers say the wire transfers will show a fraud larger than previously disclosed — remarkable even by the standards of Russia.
In its sweep and scale, the case has echoes of the Bank of New York money-laundering scandal in the late 1990s, though this time there are no allegations that American banks other than the subsidiary of a Russian investment company were involved. Mr. Browder was expelled from Russia in a politically tinged visa refusal in 2005, and relocated his business, Hermitage Capital Management, to London. Later, he said subsidiary companies he had formed in Russia to invest in Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, were used by others to acquire a fraudulent tax refund of $230 million.
The Washington Post: Corruption Taints Courts In Russia
June 24, 2009
By Philip P. Pan
A special European investigator issued a stinging report Tuesday that alleges widespread political abuse of the Russian courts and urges countries not to extradite people to Russia if they might be denied a fair trial.
The conclusions by Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a former German justice minister, are likely to further strain Russia’s relations with the Council of Europe, which commissioned the probe and is locked in a standoff with Moscow over the future of the European Court of Human Rights.
Russia joined the council in the 1990s, but it has recently attacked the court’s impartiality and is the lone council member blocking a plan to streamline its operations. The court, based in Strasbourg, France, acts as an appeals panel of last resort for residents of 47 member countries.
The New York Times: An Investment Gets Trapped in Kremlin’s Vise
July 24, 2008
William F. Browder was one of the most prominent foreign investors here, a corporate provocateur who brought the tactics of Wall Street shareholder activists to the free-for-all of post-Soviet capitalism. Until, that is, the Kremlin expelled him in 2005.
Mr. Browder then focused on protecting his billions of dollars of stakes in major Kremlin-controlled companies, like Gazprom, and on fighting to return to a land where he had deep and unusual family ties. So when he ran into Dmitri A. Medvedev, the country’s future president, at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, he saw his chance.
In a brief conversation at a dinner at the Swiss resort, he pressed Mr. Medvedev for help in regaining his Russian visa. Mr. Medvedev, then a top aide to President Vladimir V. Putin, agreed to pass along his request.
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