Bill Browder

Sir William Felix Browder, (born 23 April 1964) is an American-born British financier and political activist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which was formerly the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. The Hermitage Fund was founded in partnership with Republic National Bank, with $25 million in seed capital. The fund, and associated accounts, eventually grew to $4.5 billion of assets under management. In 1997, the Hermitage Fund was the best-performing fund in the world, up by 238%. Browder's primary investment strategy was shareholder rights activism. Browder took on large Russian companies, such as Gazprom, Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco. In retaliation, on 13 November 2005, Browder was refused entry to Russia, deported to the United Kingdom, and declared a threat to Russian national security.

In June 2007, the Moscow offices of Hermitage Capital and of Browder's American law firm, Firestone Duncan, were raided by Russia's Interior Ministry. The corporate registration documents for Hermitage's investment holding companies were seized. Browder assigned Sergei Magnitsky, head of the tax practice at Firestone Duncan, to investigate the purpose of the raid. Magnitsky discovered that while those documents were in the custody of the police, they had been used to fraudulently re-register Hermitage's holding companies to the name of an ex-convict. Magnitsky was subsequently arrested by Russian authorities and died in prison.

The reregistration of the Hermitage holding companies was an intermediate step before the perpetrators used those companies to apply for a fraudulent $230 million (~$334 million in 2024) tax refund, awarded on 24 December 2007.

After Magnitsky's death, Browder lobbied for Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, a law to punish Russian human rights violators, which was signed into law in 2012 by President Barack Obama. In 2013, both Magnitsky and Browder were tried in absentia in Russia for tax fraud. Both men—Magnitsky had died four years prior—were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment. Interpol rejected Russian requests to arrest Browder, saying the case was political. In 2014, the European Parliament voted for sanctions against 32 Russians believed complicit in the Magnitsky case; this was the first time it had taken such action.

William Felix Browder was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and he grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son of mathematician Felix Browder, and the grandson of communist leader Earl Browder. He attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from which he graduated with a degree in economics. He earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1989 and entered the financial sector.

Browder's paternal grandfather, Earl Browder, was born in Kansas in 1891. He was a radical and had lived in the Soviet Union for several years from 1927 and married Raisa Berkman, a Jewish Russian woman, while living there. After his return to the U.S. in 1931, Earl Browder became the leader of the Communist Party USA from 1930 to 1945 and ran for U.S. president in 1936 and 1940. After World War II, Browder lost favour with Moscow and was expelled from the U.S. Communist Party.

Earl and his wife Raisa had three children, all sons, and all three became mathematicians who headed the mathematics departments of top American universities, including Bill Browder's father, Felix Browder, who married Eva (Tislowitz). Felix was a mathematics prodigy who had entered MIT at 16, acquired his bachelor's degree in two years, and by the age of 20 received a Ph.D. from Princeton. Despite his intellectual and academic pedigree, Felix could not find academic work during the McCarthy era, as he was the son of the onetime head of the Communist Party USA. After a series of job rejections in the 1950s, he was championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady who was then chairman of the board of Brandeis University; she overrode the rest of the board who were afraid to hire him, and he gained a position at Brandeis. Felix went on to chair the mathematics department at the University of Chicago, and in 1999 became the president of the American Mathematical Society.

Browder started his career in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group in London, then worked for Robert Maxwell's Maxwell Communication Corporation, and after that managed the Russian proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers.

In 1998, Browder became a British citizen and relinquished his U.S. citizenship. He cited that he did so because of "a legacy of bad feeling about the rule of law" as a result of his family having been "viciously persecuted" by U.S. authorities in the 1950s, citing especially his communist grandfather, Earl Browder, who was imprisoned twice during the era of McCarthyism.

Browder and Edmond Safra (1932–1999) founded Hermitage Capital Management in 1996 for the purpose of investing initial seed capital of $25 million in Russia during the period of the mass privatisation after the fall of the Soviet Union. Beny Steinmetz was another of the original investors in Hermitage.

After the 1998 Russian financial crisis, Browder remained committed to Hermitage's original mission of investing in Russia, despite significant outflows from the fund. Hermitage became a prominent activist shareholder in the Russian gas giant Gazprom, the large oil company Surgutneftegas, RAO UES, Sberbank, Sidanco, Avisma, and Volzhanka. Browder exposed management corruption and corporate malfeasance in these partly state-owned companies. He has been quoted as saying: "You had to become a shareholder activist if you didn't want everything stolen from you".

In 1999, Avisma filed a RICO lawsuit against Browder and other Avisma investors, including Kenneth Dart, alleging they illegally siphoned company assets into offshore accounts and then transferred the funds to U.S. accounts at Barclays. Browder and his co-defendants settled with Avisma in 2000; they sold their Avisma shares as part of the confidential settlement agreement.

A film by Andrei Nekrasov, The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes (2016), available on YouTube, according to The Daily Beast, "absolves the Russian government of any responsibility for Magnitsky's death" and claims that Browder was behind the $230-million tax-rebate fraud. The Washington Post commented in an editorial: "The film is a piece of agitprop that mixes fact and fiction to blame Magnitsky for the fraud and absolve Russians of blame for his death."

Several of the key figures interviewed in the movie have declared it mendacious. The Washington Post described it as part of "a campaign to discredit Mr. Browder and the Magnitsky Act".

Some European theatre screenings and a television broadcast of the film were cancelled after threats of libel suits from Browder. According to Browder's 2017 testimony to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya hired a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Chris Cooper of the Potomac Group, to organise its US premiere. Over Browder's objections, the Newseum in Washington, D.C. held a screening in June 2016 hosted by Seymour Hersh. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)'s office actively promoted the screening, sending out invitations from the office of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats, which Rohrabacher chaired at the time; he was described by The Daily Beast as "a long-standing Russia ally".

On 16 July 2018, during a joint press conference with President Donald Trump in Helsinki, Finland, Vladimir Putin stated that Browder had funnelled $400 million to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, an effort that he claimed involved members of the U.S. intelligence community who, Putin said, "accompanied and guided these transactions." The statement was made after Putin said he would allow special counsel Robert Mueller's team to come to Russia for their investigation—as long as there was a reciprocal arrangement for Russian intelligence to investigate in the U.S.

Putin said:"Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia and never paid any taxes neither in Russia nor the United States and yet the money escaped the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent [a] huge amount of money, $400,000,000, as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. (Later, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office spokesman Alexander Kurennoy clarified that it was not $400 million, but rather $400,000.) Well that's their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself but the way the money was earned was illegal. So we have solid reason to believe that some [US] intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest in questioning them." The Washington Post and The New York Times rated Putin's claim about the funding "false," noting that there was no evidence to substantiate it. Politifact gave it a "pants on fire" rating. Browder, in his own article for Time, called the accusation "so ludicrous and untrue that it falls into delusion." He maintains that Putin continues to make false allegations against him in response to Browder's involvement with the Magnitsky Act. Browder also says that he is a British citizen and no longer American, therefore Trump would be unable to respond to Putin's request.

Browder, Bill (2015). Red Notice: How I became Putin's No. 1 Enemy. London: Corgi/Penguin Random House/Transworld. ISBN 9780552170321.

Browder, Bill (2015). Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy. Bantam Press. ISBN 978-0593072950.

Browder, Bill (2015). Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (Reprint ed.). Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4767-5574-8.

Browder, Bill (2022). Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1982153281.