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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Browder
Read between
January 21 - January 22, 2023
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”
he was slipping his own mobile into a Faraday bag, a small black satchel that blocks all phone signals. That way, if his phone had been hacked, no one could listen in.
There are many reasons why someone would set up an offshore company. Sometimes they do it for anonymity or personal safety reasons, sometimes to make it easier to invest in multiple countries, but sometimes, offshore companies are created for more nefarious purposes. The leak even revealed that I owned a few offshore companies that had been set up by Mossack Fonseca. Unlike some of the other companies in the leak, however, mine had been set up for legitimate estate-planning purposes, and were fully disclosed to Western tax and regulatory authorities.
Roldugin wasn’t just a cellist, but also Putin’s best friend going back to the 1970s. Even though Roldugin professed to drive a used car and play a secondhand cello, he controlled companies that had accumulated billions of dollars of assets since 2000, effectively making him the richest musician in the world.
In one scheme, an oligarch allegedly paid tens of millions of dollars to one of Roldugin’s offshore companies for “investment advisory services.” It was difficult to explain why a billionaire with access to firms like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Credit Suisse would want to pay an offshore company owned by an obscure Russian cellist this much money for investment advice.
Another report claimed that a different oligarch had “sold” an “asset” worth well over $100 million to a different Roldugin company for $2. In a third scheme, it was reported that a Roldugin company received a line of credit for more than $500 million from an offshore affiliate of a Russian state bank. Roldugin’s company allegedly didn’t provide any collateral or security for this massive credit line.
Putin needed others to hold his money so that no paper trail led back to him. For this, he needed people he could trust. In any mafia-like organization, these people are rare birds. There is no commodity more valuable than trust. Roldugin was one such person for Putin.
The Magnitsky Act says that Russian human rights violators will have their assets frozen in the West.
I’d experienced enough of these types of conversations to know that when a young staffer promises to bring it up with their boss, they have no intention of mentioning it to anybody.
Rohrabacher was close to 70, often wore a sweater vest like Mr. Rogers, and looked like a jolly uncle out of a Norman Rockwell painting. He couldn’t have appeared more harmless, but there he was, using his position as a US congressman to assist the Russian government in their cover-up of a political murder.
It was a stroke of genius to choose the one venue in Washington that would defend his right to show a Russian propaganda film under the auspices of freedom of speech. In retrospect, threatening a libel suit against a museum dedicated to the First Amendment might not have been such a clever idea.
The reality is that the US government is so mammoth, siloed, and bureaucratic that in order for anything to happen, someone extremely important has to intervene and declare, “This is unacceptable. Stop it, now.”
It’s one thing for Russians to act the way they do. Their society is so harsh and unforgiving that in order to get through life, most people are either getting screwed or screwing someone else—and often both. There are few rewards for doing what is right. It takes exceptional individuals like Sergei Magnitsky, Boris Nemtsov, and Vladimir Kara-Murza not to descend reflexively into nihilism, dishonesty, and corruption.
Everyone is entitled to a legal defense, but this wasn’t about the law—it was an active Russian disinformation campaign. For these people to use their considerable knowledge, contacts, and skills to assist Putin’s cronies in exchange for nothing more than money was even more contemptible than the actions of the Russians themselves. Many Russians can’t help what they do. But Americans like these can, and they act with full cognizance.
Foreign Agents Registration Act, which says that anyone trying to influence US policy on behalf of a foreign government is legally required to register with the Department of Justice. It was enacted in 1938 to help prevent Hitler’s agents in the United States from spreading Nazi propaganda in the run-up to World War II. Now we faced Putin’s agents in the United States spreading Russian propaganda, apparently without a worry in the world.
No one could figure out why Trump was so pro-Putin. It wasn’t a stance that would win him more votes. Most Americans have a negative view of Russia and especially of Putin. Nor would Trump get more support from the Republican establishment, which for decades had been more hawkish toward Russia than the Democrats. On the surface, it appeared that Trump was acting irrationally, but what I’ve learned over the years as an investor is that almost everyone behaves rationally. If someone does something that appears irrational, it just means you don’t have all the information.
An FSB source told me the Russians have been collecting videos of Trump with women since ’87. There’s a ton of these things. And they’re not pretty.”
Vadim had identified 43,112 transactions showing that $200 million connected to the $230 million had been laundered through 20 shell companies with accounts at Danske Bank’s lone Estonian branch, in Tallinn.
(Berlingske was one of Scandinavia’s oldest newspapers, first published on January 3, 1749; it also happened to be one of the longest continually published papers anywhere.)
