‘I always assume they are trying to kill me’
Bill Browder tells Joe Shute why he is ‘Putin’s number one enemy’ – and why he believes the Third World War has already begun
Earlier this week, as police combed the streets of Salisbury, piecing together clues of an alleged Russian hit on British soil, former hedge fund manager Bill Browder sat in front of the Commons culture select committee and made a startling admission. “I believe they want to kill me,” the crisply suited 53-year-old businessman told MPS. “If they kill me in a very brazen way and don’t get away with it, there will be big repercussions. They haven’t figured out a way yet where they can kill me and get away with it.”
We meet a few days later in the central London offices of Browder’s firm Hermitage Capital Management. Us-born but a British citizen for the past two decades, in the Nineties he ran the most successful investment fund in Russia. But in 2005 he was deported and his fund expropriated by a cabal of corrupt officials.
Browder’s Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, began to investigate the money trail and uncovered a suspected $230million (£153million) had been stolen. After reporting his findings to the authorities, Magnitsky himself was arrested and died in custody in November 2009. Official reports said the 37-yearold father-of-two died from heart failure and toxic shock caused by severe pancreatitis. Browder tells it differently: that he was tortured and beaten to death.
Ever since, Browder has devoted his life to exposing corruption in a country he calls “a gangster state”. Not for nothing has the plainspeaking Browder described himself as “Putin’s number one enemy”.
His Magnitsky Act, intended to impose visa sanctions and asset freezes on corrupt officials, has now been introduced in seven countries, including Britain, the US and Canada. This week, Gibraltar became the latest country to pass the law. The thick oak table we are sitting around may be a reminder of Browder’s former money-spinning life, but for the past three years he and his staff of a dozen or so have been solely focused on campaigning.
In spite of the hum of office life through the surrounding frosted glass, Browder admits he is living in a “war zone”. He and his colleagues have received numerous death threats: text messages and voicemails from unregistered Moscow numbers. One quoted Michael Corleone, the gangster kingpin from the film The Godfather: Part II – “If history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.”
They are not just anonymous threats. Browder told MPS this week that at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few years ago, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, told reporters in a briefing: “It is a shame Sergei Magnitsky is dead and Bill Browder is still alive and running around.” In 2015, he says, US intelligence authorities alerted him to an illegal rendition plot being formulated against him.
He has been convicted twice in absentia of tax evasion and fraud by courts in Russia since being deported. Most recently in December, when he received a
‘They haven’t figured out a way yet where they can kill me and get away with it’
‘Nobody would allow such a brazen action without the full approval of Putin’
nine-year sentence in addition to another nine years received in 2013.
Only a few weeks ago, he was briefly detained and questioned at the Swiss border returning from giving a speech to the UN.
“I live a life that is very different to most other people because all my actions are underlined by the assumption that the Russians are trying to kill me,” he says. “I’m pretty much used to the risk I’m taking. I’m not being emotional, nor am I exaggerating. It’s a real situation.”
For obvious reasons, Browder is unwilling to discuss much of his personal life. He has put in place numerous security measures to protect himself and his family. On occasion, his surveillance operatives have clocked others trying to monitor his movements. “Generally, it is not paranoia,” he says.
His hope is that his high profile and extensive network of political contacts act as some sort of life insurance against an obvious assassination attempt. “Because I’m personally familiar with many members of parliament and the Government, I think there would be a spectacular political reaction,” he says.
What, then, of the extraordinary events this week? Despite the various conflicting theories posited about who may have been responsible for the nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his 33-yearold daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury late last Sunday afternoon, Browder is convinced only one person could have been behind it.
“There is only one possible scenario,” he says. “It came from the very top. Nobody would ever allow such a brazen action without the full approval of Putin.”
He admits that until this week, he had not heard of Skripal, a colonel in Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, turned MI6 informant who arrived in Britain as part of a high-profile spy swap in 2010 and is currently in a critical condition in hospital along with his daughter.
“Whatever his offences were, they are only 1/1000th of why they attacked him,” Browder says. “The message is, if you cross the line, we’re going to kill you. We’re going to kill your family. And in the most heinous way.”
As was the case after the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, another Russian spy, the Russians have denied any involvement in the Salisbury poisoning. In 2007, Britain charged former FSB spy agency officer Andrei Lugovoi – who is now a pro-kremlin MP – with Litvinenko’s murder, but he was never extradited.
Browder is withering about Britain’s diplomatic response so far and calls the threat issued by the Foreign Secretary – and reiterated by the Prime Minister – to boycott this summer’s World Cup “highly offensive” in lieu of proper action, such as rounding up sleeper agents and freezing assets of those connected to the regime. But he insists he will reserve judgment until the investigation progresses.
For years, he says, Britain has been far too feeble in its dealing with the Russians. While 49 people have been subjected to the US Magnitsky law, incurring various financial and travel restrictions, in Britain not a single name has so far been added since it became law in May 2017. “Britain continues to lay out the welcome mat for Russian gangsters, government officials and oligarchs connected to those people,” Browder says.
He has welcomed calls from, among others, the Labour MP Yvette Cooper, the chairman of the home affairs select committee, for police to reopen investigations into 14 suspicious deaths in Britain linked to Russia in recent years.
Prominent among them is Alexander Perepilichny, a Russian financier turned whistleblower who collapsed and died in 2012 while jogging outside his home near Weybridge, Surrey. The 44-year-old, who approached Browder’s firm with information on the people behind Magnitsky’s murder, had taken out an
£8 million life insurance policy just months before he died.
Despite information from US intelligence agencies that there was Russian involvement, Surrey Police ruled out murder. “I believe there was probably some sort of political direction from the Foreign Office saying they didn’t want trouble with Russia,” Browder says.
Now, he hopes, the gloves are off and says he has amassed “a lot of knowledge and information” on the death, which he would be willing to share with the British authorities should the case be reopened.
“I think we will uncover an absolute shocking failure on behalf of the British law-enforcement establishment dealing with Russian crimes in this country,” he says.
According to Browder, this latest attack on British soil must mark a watershed moment – when Britain no longer turns a blind eye.
“The Third World War has already started,” he says. “That’s how they view it. We just haven’t woken up and discovered we are at war.”