Browder On Business In Russia
- Going after information in Russia is like hurtling down a rabbit hole. Ask a question, get a riddle. Track a lead, hit a wall. Nothing is self-evident or clear.
- When it comes to money, Russians will sacrifice their own success to screw their neighbour.
- Russian business culture is closer to that of a prison yard than anything else.
- In prison, all you have is your reputation. Your position is hard-earned, and it is not relinquished easily. This is the calculus that every oligarch and politician lives by.
- Russia is one of the most bureaucratic places in the world.
- The Russians have great skill in talking without saying anything.
Browder On Hermitage
- It’s hard to describe how small $50,000 is to an investment banker.
- In a short time, our portfolio grew from $25 million to $125 million.
- Ordinary shares of Russian companies were trading at a 90%-99% discount compared to similar companies in the west.
- You’re lucky if you find a stock at a 30%-50% discount. 90% is unheard of.
- The Hermitage Fund was ranked the best-performing fund in the world in 1997.
- If the tide goes out in one place, then it goes out everywhere.
- Losing love is a lot harder than losing money.
- By the end of 2003, the fund was up more than 1,200%, salvaging the losses from ‘98.
- The feeling of finding a ‘ten-bagger’ must be the financial equivalent of cocaine.
- Exploit any avenue that can help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
- Never let a suited corporate hack steal your business away from you.
- In any major crisis, what you do in the first few hours defines it forever.
- The best way to answer difficult questions is to find the people who know the answers and interview them about it.
Browder On Privatisation
- During privatisation the valuation of the entire Russian economy was only $10 billion! Yet, Russia had 24% of the world’s natural gas, 9% of the world’s oil and produced 6.6% of the world’s steel, among many other things.
- Instead of 150 million Russians sharing the spoils of privatisation, Russia wound up with 22 oligarchs owning 39% of the economy.
- Post-Soviet Russia saw some of the most profitable investments in history.
- 20~ men were reported to have stolen 39% of Russia after the fall of communism, becoming billionaires almost overnight.
- To move from communism to capitalism, the Russian government had decided to give away most of the state’s property to the people.
- The oligarchs engage in asset stripping, dilutions, transfer pricing and embezzlement, to name but a few of their tricks.
- Raider attacks involve corrupt police officers fabricating criminal cases. Corrupt judges were approving the seizure of assets, and organised criminals hurting anyone in the way.
Browder On Russian Authorities
- When the Russian government turns on you, it doesn’t do so mildly.
- Russia is still a sovereign state that most Western governments cooperate with.
- The FSB doesn’t just issue arrest warrants, it dispatches assassins.
- Kazan’s police force has a reputation of being one of the most corrupt in Russia.
- The Russian Interior Ministry was not a reputable police organisation, but rather a collection of officials abusing their positions to perpetrate massive financial frauds.
- A strategy out of the FSB playbook is to create a character with a believable story. Then have this person pass valuable information to his target, wait for the target to disclose this information publicly, then show how the information is false.
- Russia is such a decentralised country. The power of an influential businessman in some areas rivals that of the Moscow Interior Ministry.
- The total value of assets owned by Kuznetsov was $2.6~ million. Kuznetsov would have had to work for 145 years on his official Interior Ministry salary to earn this.
- The Russian government couldn’t have cared less about a couple of paragraphs in a US-government human rights report.
- Butyrka is like Alcatraz, only worse.
- When the mass graves of Katyn Forest were discovered in 1943, the Soviets claimed that Germany was responsible for the murder of 7,000 Polish prisoners.
- Interpol has a reputation for cooperating with authoritarian regimes to chase down enemies.
- Interpol’s red notice effectively prevented me from travelling. Russia was betting that this travel ban would stop the Magnitsky sanctions from spreading to Europe.
- I’d suspended disbelief, wishfully thinking that Russia was beyond the principle of massive state-sponsored lying, but it wasn’t.
- You can be untouchable by law enforcement, but not by the court of public opinion.
Browder On The Magnitsky Act
- In the west, you might last two hours before you crawl to casualty with gallstones. Sergei had to deal with untreated gallstones for four months.
- Sergei was a religious man, and he would not violate God’s ninth commandment; ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’.
- Every prisoner has his own way of dealing with the adversity of being in jail, and Sergei’s had been to write everything down.
- Sergei’s story has given everyone in Russia, as well as millions of people around the world, a detailed picture of the real brutality of Vladimir Putin’s regime.
- Visa sanctions and asset freezes are how you fight authoritarian regimes today.
- The rumour in Washington was that John Kerry was blocking the Bill (Magnitsky Act) because he wanted to be Secretary of State after Hillary Clinton resigned.
- From 2009-2015, 13,000~ bills had been proposed, and only 380~ made it out of the committee and voted into law in the USA.
- While there is nothing wrong with pursuing a life in commerce, that world now feels like watching TV in black and white for me.
- There is no feeling as satisfying as getting some justice in a highly unjust world.
- No matter how scared you are at any particular moment, the feeling subsides. Your body can’t feel fear for an extended period.
- They say there are five stages of grief. Recognising the pain is the vital one.
- Over the last decade, Americans had adopted over 60,000 Russian orphans.
- Nobody knows how much hardship one can endure until one is forced to handle it.
Browder On The Soviet Union
- The Soviets severely penalised independent thinkers, hence over the 70 year period of communism the work ethic of Russians was destroyed.
- In Soviet times, the wealthiest person in Russia was x6~ richer than the poorest. By the year 2000, the wealthiest person had become x250,000~ richer than the poorest.
- During soviet times the FSB was universally known as the infamous KGB.
- Russians are familiar with hardship and suffering – not with success and justice.
- Russians adore children.
- Russia was the world’s sixth-largest importer of US beef.
- Russian stories never have happy endings.
- I cannot forecast the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest - Churchill.
Browder On Vladimir Putin
- When Putin became president in 2000, the actual power of the presidency lay with the oligarchs, regional governors and organised-crime groups.
- Putin’s golden rule: stay out of politics, and you’ll keep your ill-gotten gains.
- As a show of symbolism, Putin allowed cameras into a courtroom to film Russia’s richest man as he sat silently in a courtroom cage.
- Putin now has the oligarchs in his pocket, he has consolidated his power and, by many estimates, he has become the richest man in the world.
- Putin never mentions his enemies by name.
- Unpredictability is Putin’s modus operandi.
- Putin put a dead man on trial (Sergei Magnitsky), not even Stalin, a man responsible for the death of 20~ million Russians stooped to that level.
- When Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, instead of dismantling the machine of lying and fabrication, he modified it and made it all the more powerful.
- I knew that when my name passed Putin’s thin lips, my life had changed forever.
- If there is no man, there is no problem - Stalin.