The Browder affair is a heady
upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international
crime.
ISRAEL SHAMIR • JUNE 20, 2016
William F. Browder, Chief Executive
Officer Hermitage Capital Management. Copyright by World Economic Forum
swiss-image.ch/Photo by Michael Wuertenberg. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Chapeau, Mr Browder! Hats off for
this incredible man. Last month, he succeeded in stopping a film screening in the European parliament and took off a few
articles from American web sites. This week, he turned the only US screening of
a film critical to his version of events into a ruckus. No freedom of speech for his enemies! His lawyers
prowl around and issue summons to whoever digs in his sordid affairs. His hacks
re-wrote his Wikipedia entry, expunging even discussions of the topic: despite hundreds of edits, nothing
survived but the official version. Only a few powerful men succeed purifying
their record to such an extent. Still, good fortune (a notoriously flighty
lady) is about to desert Mr Browder.
Who is this extremely influential
man? A businessman, a politician, a spy? The American-born Jewish tycoon
William Browder, says The Jewish Chronicle, considers himself Putin’s Number One enemy. For him,
Putin is “no friend of the Jews”, “cold-blooded killer” and even “criminal
dictator who is not too different from Hitler, Mussolini or Gadhafi”. More to a
point, Browder is the man who contributed most to the new cold war between the
West and Russia. The roots were there, still he made them blossom. If the US
and Russia haven’t yet exchanged nuclear salvos, do not blame Browder: he tried.
For a valid reason, too: he was hit by cruel Hitler-like Mr Putin into his most
susceptible spot, namely his pocket. Or was there even a better reason?
Browder, a grandson of the US
Communist leader, came to Russia at its weakest point after the Soviet collapse,
and grabbed an enormous fortune by opaque financial transactions. Such fortunes
are not amassed by the pure of spirit. He was a ruthless man who did as much as
any oligarch to enrich himself.
Eventually he ran afoul of Mr Putin,
who was (and is) very tolerant of oligarchs as long as they play by the rules.
The oligarchs would not be oligarchs if they would found that an easy
condition. Some of them tried to fight back: Khodorkovsky landed in jail,
Berezovsky and Gusinsky went to exile. Browder had a special position: he was
the only Jewish oligarch in Russia who never bothered to acquire the Russian
citizenship. He was barred from returning to Russia, and his companies were
audited and found wanting.
As you’d expect, huge tax evasion was
discovered. Browder thought that as long as he sucked up to Putin, he’d get
away with bloody murder, let alone tax evasion. He was mistaken. Putin is
nobody’s fool. Flatterers do not get a free ride in Putin’s Russia. And Browder
became too big for his boots.
It turned out that he did two
unforgivable things. Russians were afraid the foreigners would buy all their
assets for a song, using favourable exchange rates and lack of native capital,
as had happened in the Baltic states and other ex-Communist East European countries.
In order to avoid that, shares of Russian blue-chip companies (Gazprom and
suchlike) were traded among Russian citizens only. Foreigners had to pay much
more. Browder bought many such shares via Russian frontmen, and he was close to
getting control over Russian oil and gas. Putin suspected that he had acted in
the interests of big foreign oil companies, trying to repeat the feat of Mr
Khodorkovsky.
His second mistake was being too
greedy. Russian taxation is very low; but Browder did not want to pay even this
low tax. He hired Mr Magnitsky, an experienced auditor, who used loopholes in
the Russian tax code in order to avoid taxes altogether. Magnitsky established
dummy companies based in tax-free zones of Russia, such as pastoral Kalmykia,
small, Buddhist, and autonomous. Their tax-free status had been granted in
order to improve their economy and reduce unemployment; however, Browder’s
companies did not contribute to economy and did not employ people; they were
paper dummies swiftly bankrupted by the owner.
Another Magnitsky trick was to form
companies fronted by handicapped people who were also freed from paying tax. In
the film, some of these persons, often illiterate and of limited intelligence,
told the filmmaker of signing papers they could not read and of being paid a
little money for the millions passing through their account.
(Mr Browder does not deny these
accusations; he says there is nothing criminal in trying to avoid taxes. You
can read about Browder and Magnitsky tricks here and here, and learn of the ways they attacked companies using
minority shareholders and many other neat schemes.)
Eventually Magnitsky’s schemes were
discovered and he was arrested. Ten months later, in 2009, he died in jail. By
that time, his patron Mr Browder was abroad, and he began his campaign against
Russia hoping to regain his lost assets. He claimed Mr Magnitsky had been his
lawyer, who discovered misdeeds and the outright thievery of government
officials, and was imprisoned and tortured to death for this discovery.
The US Congress rushed in the
Magnitsky Act, the first salvo of the Cold War Two. By this act, any Russian
person could be found responsible for Mr Magnitsky’s untimely death and for
misappropriation of Browder’s assets. His properties could be seized, bank
accounts frozen – without any legal process or representation. This act upset
the Russians, who allegedly had kept a cool $500 billion in the Western banks,
so tit for tat started, and it goes to this very day.
The actual effect of the Magnitsky
Act was minimal: some twenty million dollars frozen and a few dozen
not-very-important people were barred from visiting the US. Its psychological
effect was much greater: the Russian elite realised that they could lose their
money and houses anytime – not in godless Putin’s Russia, but in the free West,
where they had preferred to look for refuge. The Magnitsky Act paved the road
to the Cyprus confiscation of Russian deposits, to post-Crimean sanctions and
to a full-fledged Cold War.
This was painful for Russia, as the
first adolescent disillusionment in its love affair with the West, and rather
healthy, in my view. A spot of cold war (very cold, plenty of ice please) is
good for ordinary people, while its opposite, a Russian-American alliance, is
good for the elites. The worst times for ordinary Russian people were
1988-2001, when Russians were in love with the US. The oligarchs stole
everything there was to steal and sold it to the West for pennies. They bought
villas in Florida while Russia fell apart. That was bad time for everybody: the
US invaded Panama and Afghanistan unopposed, Iraq was sanctioned to death,
Yugoslavia was bombed and broken to pieces.
As the Cold War came back, some
normalcy was restored: the Russians stopped the US from destroying Syria, and
Russian officials learned to love Sochi instead of Miami. For this reason
alone, Browder can be counted as a part of the power which eternally wills evil
and eternally works good. The Russian government, however, did not enjoy the cold
shower.
The Russians denied any wrongdoing or
even political reasons for dealing with Browder. They say Magnitsky was not a
lawyer, just an auditor and a tax code expert. They say that he was arrested
and tried for his tax avoidance schemes, and he died of natural causes while in
jail. Nobody listened to them, until they demanded that Browder testify under
oath. He refused. For two years lawyers tried to give him a summons, but he was a quick runner. There are funny videos showing Browder running away from summons.
Some good sense began to seep into
American minds. The New Republic wondered: if Browder was indeed the victim of persecution in
Russia and had enlisted the U.S. justice system to right the balance, why was
he so reluctant to offer his sworn testimony in an American courtroom?
Enter Mr Andrey Nekrasov, a Russian dissident filmmaker. He made a few films
considered to be highly critical of Russian government. He alleged the FSB blew
up houses in Moscow in order to justify the Chechnya war. He condemned the
Russian war against Georgia in 2008, and had been given a medal by Georgian
authorities. He did not doubt the official Western version of Browder-Magnitsky
affair, and decided to make a film about the noble American businessman and the
brave Russian lawyer fighting for human rights. The European organisations and
parliamentarians provided the budget for the film. They also expected the film
to denounce Putin and glorify Magnitsky, the martyr.
However, while making the film, Mr
Nekrasov had his Road to Damascus moment. He realised that the whole narrative
was hinging on the unsubstantiated words of Mr Browder. After painstaking
research, he came to some totally different conclusions, and in his version,
Browder was a cheat who run afoul of law, while Magnitsky was his sidekick in
those crimes.
Nekrasov discovered an interview
Magnitsky gave in his jail. In this interview, the accountant said he was
afraid Browder would kill him to prevent him from denouncing Browder, and would
make him his scapegoat. It turned out Browder tried to bribe the journalist who
made the interview to have these words expunged. Browder was the main
beneficiary of the accountant’s death, realised Nekrasov, while his
investigators were satisfied with Magnitsky’s collaboration with them.
Nekrasov could not find any evidence
that Magnitsky tried to investigate the misdeeds of government officials. He
was too busy covering his own tax evasion. And instead of fitting his
preconceived notions, Nekrasov made the film about what he learned. (Here are some details of Nekrasov’s film)
While the screening in the EU
Parliament was been stopped by the powerful Mr Browder, in Washington DC the
men are made of sterner stuff. Despite Browder’s threats the film was screened, presented by the best contemporary American
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who is 80 if a day, and still going
strong. One has to recognise that the US is second to none for freedom of speech
on the globe.
What makes Browder so powerful? He
invests in politicians. This is probably a uniquely Jewish quality: Jews
outspend everybody in contributions to political figures. The Arabs will spend
more on horses and jets, the Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like
politicians. The Russian NTV channel reported that Browder lavishly financed
the US lawmakers. Here they
present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand dollars was
given by Browder’s structures officially to the senators and congressmen in
order to promote the Magnitsky Act.
Much bigger sums were transferred via
good services of Brothers Ziff, mega-rich Jewish American businessmen, said the
researchers in two articles published on the Veteran News Network and in The Huffington Post.
These two articles were taken off the
sites very fast under pressure of Browder’s lawyers, but they are available in
the cache. They disclose the chief beneficiary of Browder’s generosity. This is
Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind
Magnitsky Act legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called
the Cardin List. Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton,
also a cold warrior of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent
member of Israel Lobby.
Browder affair is a heady upper-class
Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime. Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish,
not only Browder, Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary
of the scam that (according to Browder) took over his Russian assets is another
Jewish businessman Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York
court as is well described in this thoughtful piece).
Browder began his way to riches under
the patronage of a very rich and very crooked Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born
Jewish businessman who assumed a Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million
dollars from his company pension fund before dying in mysterious circumstances
on board of his yacht in the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli
Military Intelligence, Ari Ben Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent
for years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the Israelis about Israeli
whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many years in
Israeli jails.
Geoffrey Goodman wrote Maxwell “was almost certainly being used
as – and using himself as – a two-way intelligence conduit [between East and
West]. This arrangement included passing intelligence to the Israeli secret
forces with whom he became increasingly involved towards the end of his life.”
After Maxwell, Browder switched
allegiance to Edmond Safra, a very rich Jewish banker of Lebanese origin, who
also played East vs West. Safra provided him with working capital for his
investment fund. Safra’s bank has been the unlikely place where the IMF loan of
four billion dollars to Russia had been transferred—and disappeared. The
Russian authorities say that Browder has been involved in this “crime of the
century,” next to Safra. The banker’s name has been connected to Mossad:
increasingly fearful for his life, Safra surrounded himself by Mossad-trained
gunmen. This did not help him: he died a horrible death in his bathroom when
his villa was torched by one of the guards.
The third Jewish oligarch on
Browder’s way was Boris Berezovsky, the king-maker of Yeltsin’s Russia. He also
died in his bathroom (which seems to be a constant feature); apparently he
committed suicide. Berezovsky had been a politically active man; he supported
every anti-Putin force in Russia. However, a few months before his death, he
asked for permission to return to Russia, and some negotiations went on between
him and Russian authorities.
His chief of security Sergey Sokolov
came to Russia and purportedly brought with him some documents his late master
prepared for his return. These documents allege that Browder had been an agent
of Western intelligence services, of the CIA to begin with, and of MI6 in
following years. He was given a code name Solomon, as he worked for Salomon
Brothers. His financial activity was just a cover for his true intentions, that
is to collect political and economic data on Russia, and to carry out economic
war on Russia. This revelation has been made in the Russia-1 TV channel
documentary Browder Effect, (broadcasted 13.04.2016), asserting that Browder was
not after money at all, and his activities in Russia, beside being very
profitable, had a political angle.
The documents had been doubted for
some linguistic reasons discussed by Gilbert Doctorow who comes to a reasonable conclusion: “Bill
Browder[‘s]… intensity and the time he was devoting to anti-Russian sanctions
in Europe was in no way comparable to the behaviour of a top level
international businessman. It was clear to me that some other game was in play.
But at the time, no one could stand up and suggest the man was a fraud, an
operative of the intelligence agencies. Whatever the final verdict may be on
the documents presented by the film “The Browder Effect,” it raises questions
about Browder that should have been asked years ago in mainstream Western media
if journalists were paying attention. Yevgeny Popov deserves credit for
highlighting those questions, even if his documents demand further
investigation before we come to definitive answers”.
We do not know whether Browder is, or
had been, a spy. This should not surprise us, as he was closely connected to
Maxwell, Safra and Berezovsky, the financiers with strong ties in the
intelligence community.
Perhaps he outlived his usefulness,
Mr Browder did. He started the Cold war, now is the time to keep it in its
healthy limits and to avoid a nuclear disaster or rapid armaments race. This is
the task we may hope will be entertained by the next US President, Mr Donald
Trump.
This article was first published
in The Unz Review.
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
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