‘I was sentenced to 18 years in prison. I’ve been sued for libel. I’ve been sued for bankruptcy. I have people surveilling my offices. I’ve had death threats’ get justice in Russia. At the same time, he couldn’t find any international legal mechanism to hold the perpetrators to account. He appealed to the Obama administration who, trying to thaw fractious relations with the Kremlin, were sympathetic, but not keen to get involved. Then Browder discovered a constitutional point of leverage: he could go through the legislative rather than the executive branch. He took his story to Senators Ben Cardin and John McCain, and in 2012 Congress passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which barred 18 Russians allegedly involved in the scam from entering America and using its banking system. More names were added as the stolen money was traced (some of which was linked to Putin’s friend Sergei Roldugin, the cellist that the Panama Papers later linked to a money trail of billions). Estonia, Canada, Lithuania and the UK have since passed their own versions of the bill, and before leaving office, Obama signed the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, expanding the law to human rights abusers worldwide. ‘It’s widely acknowledged to be the single most powerful human rights tool that is out there,’ says Browder. According to Browder, a great deal of Putin’s personal fortune (which he estimates at $200bn) exists in the West, bound in a complex web of shell companies, oligarchs and shady deals. Naturally, then, Putin was exceptionally displeased at the passing of the Magnitsky Act, and retaliated by banning the American adoption of Russian children. He went for Browder personally too. ‘I was sentenced to 18 years in prison. I’ve been sued for libel. I’ve been sued for bankruptcy. I have people surveilling my offices. I’ve had death threats and kidnapping threats.’ These threats aren’t empty. Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning proved Russia has no qualms about murdering its enemies in the UK and some of the people associated with Browder have suffered mysterious accidents – some fatal. Nikolai Gorokhov, a Russian lawyer who represented the Magnitsky family, was thrown from his apartment building near Moscow, but survived. In 2012, shortly before he was due to give evidence in a money-laundering trial, whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny died while out jogging in Surrey. Beyond the drama of death threats and being tried in absentia, Browder says the Kremlin has launched a more insidious line of attack against him, propagating a theory that he went to Russia, became entangled in the corruption he ostensibly sought to expose, committed the uncovered tax fraud, and embarked upon a highprofile campaign to obscure his tracks. There are two central characters to this subplot. The first is director Andrei Nekrasov, who, having released anti-Putin films, then made The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes,
a documentary that portrayed Browder as a criminal and Magntisky as a conspirator. Nekrasov planned to premiere the movie at European parliament, but the parliament’s lawyers halted the screening after legal letters were sent from Browder and Magnitsky’s family claiming the movie was false and defamatory. Similarly, their lawyers wrote to the head of Washington’s Newseum to try to stop a screening there. The notion of a financier silencing an independent filmmaker with a reputation for attacking Putin sounds murky, but Browder denies that Nekrasov has ever worked objectively. ‘For a number of years he worked for Boris Berezovsky, and he made-anti Putin movies because he’d been paid. When Berezovsky died, he went to work for Putin.’ Browder’s scepticism seems credible when you consider who was behind the Washington screening of Nekrasov’s film: the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who ran a Russian NGO registered in Delaware, which claims to work on reopening the American adoption of Russian children – in other words, repealing the Magnitsky Act. Veselnitskaya is central to the latest twist in Browder’s story. In July 2017, as he was about to board a plane, he got a call from New York Times reporter Jo Becker, asking if he knew her. By the time he landed, their story had broken: Donald Trump Jr and others had met with Veselnitskaya during the election campaign after being promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. According to a statement, allegedly cobbled together by Trump and his advisors aboard Air Force One, the meeting focused on the American adoption of Russian children and so, once again, the Magnitsky Act. Browder, who has since testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, was suddenly linked to one of the biggest scandals clouding Trump’s presidency. Does he think the Russians were trying to influence Trump’s team beyond the Magnitsky Act? He doesn’t know, though he’s certain they would have been circling from all sides, trying to get to Clinton too. Echoing CIA director Mike Pompeo, who recently warned that Russia will try and target America’s impending midterms, Browder is also certain that the Kremlin will continue to inject itself into global politics. ‘Putin’s objectives are very clear. He wants to carry on with his own criminality in Russia and the surrounding states, and he doesn’t want anyone to get in the way and penalise him. ‘The European Union; Brexit; Catalonia… [he wants to] create enough domestic strife in any different situation and different country so nobody pays any attention to what he’s doing.’ It’s rumoured that special counsel Robert Mueller wants to discuss the Trump administration’s response to the Veselnitskaya meeting in a one-on-one meeting with the President. If so, Browder could suddenly have more than a sideline role. Who knows? But what is for certain is that, as he settles down to write his second book, and pressure the French government to pass a version of the Magnitsky Act, the Browder-Russia plotline is still very much unfolding.
78 | COUNTRYANDTOWNHOUSE.CO.UK | April 2018
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