Putin's worst enemy

NJ-born financier’s rights crusade makes him target of Russian leader

Bill Browder says he has spent the last decade “trying to avoid getting killed by” Vladimir Putin’s regime.

The Russian leader seems obsessed with the London-based financier and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management. Browder, 54, has launched a global crusade against corruption and human-rights abuses by the Kremlin, and Putin has used various international forums, such as this weekend’s G-20 summit, to go after Browder.

“Putin [far right] has completely lost his s--t,” Browder told The Post. “He’s frothing at the mouth like an alcoholic on the street corner.”

Putin has accused Browder (center) of everything from tax evasion to murder and has leaned on Interpol to extradite him to Russia seven times in the last nine years.

At a meeting with President Trump in Helsinki in the summer, Putin offered to allow US investigators access to the 12 Russian agents indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election in exchange for Browder. The offer was ultimately rejected by the US.

The New Jersey-born financier, who is now a citizen of the UK, was also the topic du jour at a controversial meeting at Trump Tower with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr., among others, during the presidential campaign.

Veselnitskaya told Bloomberg News that she had discussed Browder during the meeting and that Trump Jr. promised to bring it up if his father became president.

“It’s totally ludicrous, but it shows I have gotten under Putin’s skin,” said Browder.

But his notoriety may do nothing to save him from the fate of other Kremlin whistleblowers who have died under mysterious circumstances.

“Nothing protects me,” he said. “Putin could easily have me killed.”

Browder recounts the events that led to his battle with the Kremlin in his 2015 best-seller, “Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy.” Browder, who has degrees from the University of Chicago and Stanford, eventually became the largest foreign investor in Russia in the late 1990s. The all-out war with Putin began after he was refused entry into the country in 2005. Four years later, Browder’s tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblower who exposed a massive $230 million fraud committed by Russian government officials, was tortured and killed in a Moscow prison.

To strike back at the Kremlin and honor Magnitsky’s memory, Browder successfully lobbied the Obama administration to pass the Magnitsky Act in 2012. The law allows the US government to freeze assets and deny US visas to Russians who participated in the torture and murder of Magnitsky.

In December 2016, Congress passed a global version of the Magnitsky Act. Since then, 101 people, including 17 members of the royal court and the government of Saudi Arabia, have been sanctioned under the law for their alleged participation in the horrific, Oct. 2 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

“It’s a true rogue’s gallery of bad people,” said Browder, who is expecting that the European Union will adopt its own version of the Magnitsky Act next month.

The maverick human-rights crusader uses proceeds from Hermitage Capital “to work for justice” around the world, including handing out an annual human-rights prize in Magnitsky’s name. He paid to have “Red Notice” translated into Russian and made it available for free on the Internet, where it has been downloaded thousands of times, he told The Post.

For Browder, revolution clearly runs in the family. His grandfather Earl Browder was a longtime leader of the US Communist Party, persecuted in the US for his political beliefs during the Cold War. When his Russian-born grandmother lay on her death bed, US immigration officials tried to deport her, he said.

“I inherited the genetic anger at injustice that my grandfather had,” he told The Post.