Kremlin critic urges squeeze on oligarch enablers
DAVOS, Switzerland — Kremlin critic Bill Browder wants governments to step up efforts to get to the riches squirreled away by Russian oligarchs and linked to President Vladimir
Putin by forcing the accountants, lawyers and others who set up murky legal and financial structures to become whistleblowers.
Browder, author of the nonfiction best-seller “Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath,” says Russia’s war in Ukraine has increased attention on how oligarchs are custodians of the Russian leader’s wealth.
“But the oligarchs are not naïve,” Browder told The Associated Press on Tuesday at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. “They’ve hired the best lawyers, best asset protection specialists, and there are shell companies and trust companies and offshore companies and nominees and proxies — and the whole thing is extremely well thought-through.”
The founder of Hermitage Capital, an early investor in post-soviet Russia, Browder raised the alarm after his Russian tax adviser, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison in 2009. He has become arguably one of the world’s biggest critics of Putin ever since.
Browder credited Biden administration efforts to put a squeeze on Putin and his government since the war began by putting a freeze on assets of Russia’s central bank, chasing the oligarchs, halting exports of technology to Russia and supplying weapons to Ukraine.
But when it comes to getting Russian oligarchs’ money, “we’re only scratching the surface,” Browder said.
“There’s only 35 oligarchs out of 118 who are on the Forbes (richest people) list who have been sanctioned by either the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada or Australia. We need to get 118,” he said.