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Thread: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

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    Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    Bigger than Clitton...

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018...tcmp=obnetwork

    Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference


    Putin: Bill Browder business associates didn't pay taxes

    Russian President Vladimir Putin alleges Bill Browder business associates didn't pay taxes in Russia or the U.S.

    After having his name invoked in a joint press conference with President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, businessman and Magnitsky Act advocate Bill Browder boasted that he has “hit the Achilles' heel of the Putin regime.”

    Browder, the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital, spoke to Fox News just minutes after Putin mentioned his name during the press conference Monday in Helsinki, Finland following his summit with Trump.

    “What this shows is that my advocacy of getting Magnitsky Acts all over the world passed—in seven countries—has hit the Achilles' heel of the Putin regime,” Browder told Fox News, referring to his push for Russia sanctions.

    Putin mentioned Browder while outlining a proposal to question the 12 Russian intelligence officers indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury for allegedly hacking Democratic targets during the 2016 election.


    Putin’s plan, which Trump called an “incredible offer,” was to question the 12 Russians indicted for allegedly meddling in the election, allowing Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team to be present -- if U.S. officials “reciprocate.” Putin suggested this would mean Russian agents could be present for questioning U.S. officers “of interest” to them.

    “So we can bring up Mr. Browder,” Putin said during the joint press conference, accusing his associates of illicit activity in Russia.

    “I’m not even an American citizen,” Browder told Fox News. “I’m a British citizen and have lived here for 29 years.”

    Browder has worked for years to advocate on behalf of his former business associate Sergei Magnitsky. Browder had hired the late Magnitsky to uncover details of massive $230 million financial fraud in Russia involving corrupt Russian government officials. Magnitsky was imprisoned and died in Russian police custody nearly a decade ago, allegedly beaten to death.

    In the wake of his colleague's death, Browder advocated for the Magnitsky Act, which was first passed in the U.S. in 2012. The Magnitsky Act brought sanctions against Russian oligarchs suspected of money laundering.

    FIRM BEHIND ANTI-TRUMP DOSSIER ALSO WORKED FOR RUSSIA, SENATE WITNESS SAYS

    Browder further claimed Monday that a Putin associate benefited from the financial fraud Magnitsky uncovered and added: “Putin should be interrogated for his role in that crime.”

    Browder testified last year before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his knowledge of the controversial firm Fusion GPS.

    Browder, during that testimony, claimed that the company worked on the infamous anti-Trump dossier while also working “on behalf of the Russian government” to fight the U.S. sanctions that had enraged Moscow’s elite—under the Magnitsky Act.

    FIRM WORKED ON TRUMP DOSSIER WHILE FIGHTING SANCTIONS FOR PUTIN-TIED FAMILY, KEY WITNESS SAYS

    Browder testified that Fusion GPS conducted a “smear campaign” against him in a bid to fight the Magnitsky Act. Browder also testified that that campaign was orchestrated by Natalia Veselnitskaya—the same Russian attorney who sought the highly scrutinized Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

    “They were talking about a repeal of sanctions so that Russian torturers and murderers could keep their money in America,” Browder testified.
    In retaliation for the U.S. passage of the law, Russia banned Americans from adopting Russian children.

    That June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was billed to the Trump campaign as one to discuss Russian adoption and potentially get dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Browder testified last year that adoption was “code” for talking about the Magnitsky Act.
    Jackie did it and you know it!

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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    William Browder’s Curious Path to Renown
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/willia...n_2596025.html


    [COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65098)]https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets...-161591930.jpg
    [/COLOR]

    In the explosive press conference between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, perhaps the most surprising bomb dropped was by Putin, when he accused William Browder and his associates of donating $400 million to Hillary Clinton’s campaign
    .

    Even before Putin bolstered Browder’s fame, he had been a darling of the American media and a frequent guest on various outlets including MSNBC, CNBC, and Fox News, where he gets introduced in glowing terms such as a “legendary investor” and “Putin enemy No. 1,” with implications that he’s a heroic figure.
    However, Browder’s past is more nuanced than the mainstream media lets on.
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets...510A2368_e.jpgU.S. President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin during a joint press conference after their summit in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)His grandfather was Earl Browder, who was the general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States, concurrent with Stalin’s rule as general secretary in Moscow. Earl traveled to Moscow and collaborated with the Russian government.

    William Browder explained his reaction to his grandfather in his own book, “Red Notice.” On the one hand, Browder wondered how he could become a capitalist. On the other hand, Browder wrote he wanted to “emulate” his grandfather.

    In one scene, while attending classes at Stanford in 1987, Browder hears a lecture by the head of the United Steelworkers union. Remembering his grandfather and feeling “inspired,” he requests a job with the union to “negotiate with its exploitative corporate employers
    .”

    Fast forward to 1998, and Browder is renouncing his American citizenship. He explained his motivation in an interview with Newsweek: “My grandfather was an American communist. … My family was viciously persecuted. … It just left a legacy of bad feeling about the rule of law.

    If Browder is to be taken at his word, his main problem with America is the allegedly hard-line stance taken against communism. This idea dovetails with a complaint Browder made in his book that Americans have been too “paranoid” to make the key differentiation between whether a person is a “good communist or a bad communist.”
    When the American media interviews Browder, his renunciation of American citizenship is rarely brought up.

    Investment Success

    In 1996, Browder helped found Hermitage Capital Management to invest money in Russia, where he then spent much of his time. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and people were getting rich making sweetheart deals with the Russian government.

    Browder explained in his book an extremely profitable deal he made with Sidanco, a Siberian oil company controlled by Vladimir Potanin, who was deputy prime minister of Russia. A colleague offered Browder a private deal to buy a chunk of Sidanco at prices “cheap beyond belief.” Bill did so and described the deal as “a home run.”
    The deal ran into a problem when other players in Sidanco tried to squeeze Browder out, but then the Russian Federal Securities and Exchange Commission stepped in to save him.
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets...-158372354.jpg
    President Barack Obama signs H.R. 6156, the Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, on Dec. 14, 2012, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)As Browder ran up his profits in Russia, contrary to what people may guess today, he was on friendly terms with the Kremlin. He wrote the article “Making the Case for Putin,” published in The Moscow Times in 2004.
    He even explained in his book that he had success because everyone thought of him as “Putin’s guy,” but shrugged it off as ridiculous, and felt that his agenda of fixing corrupt Russian companies incidentally aligned with Putin’s campaign against oligarchs. Browder describes continuing naively with the same activities until he got blindsided.

    In 2005, Browder was banned from Russia. Yet Hermitage Capital was still managing $4.5 billion worth of assets stuck inside Russia. He alleges that his team then “successfully removed its money from Russia without our enemies ever knowing.”
    Magnitsky

    Browder became most famous for the scandal that followed. Allegedly, Russians stole paperwork from the remnants of his company that they used in a fraudulent tax scam to profit $230 million from the Russian government.

    Browder and Russian entities became embroiled in a fight. The Kafkaesque part is that if Browder successfully defeated this scheme then the Russian government would be a beneficiary and recoup $230 million.

    As the fight escalated, a lawyer and accountant who was working on Hermitage matters at the law firm Firestone Duncan, Sergei Magnitsky, refused to bow to the Kremlin. He was arrested, tortured, and denied family visits and proper medical attention while he suffered from illness.

    Browder describes being in a constant state of distress for the well-being of his Magnitsky. To help him, he felt that what was needed was “media attention” to “get Sergei’s story above the fray.” He made a video titled “Hermitage Reveals Russian Police Fraud”—though oddly, he failed to personally mention Magnitsky a single time. The narrator brought up Magnitsky with a mere sentence at the end of the video.
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets...-157872419.jpg
    The snow-clad grave of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky with his portrait on the tomb (C) at the Preobrazhenskoye cemetery in Moscow on Dec. 7, 2012. (ANDREY SMIRNOV/AFP/Getty Images)When Magnitsky died, Browder began a blitz campaign fighting for justice for Magnitsky by influencing American policy toward Russia. He described a scene in his book where he testified before members of Congress, told the Magnitsky story, and brought people to tears. Congress adopted the cause. It could be the first time in history a person who renounced American citizenship successfully told Congress what law to pass.
    In Browder’s quest to change American foreign policy, he explained that he had “no idea” what he was doing, and it was Jonathan Winer who guided him, starting from their meeting in March 2010.

    Winer was a senior director at the lobbying firm APCO from 2008 to 2013. APCO was employed by Russian government entities during that time frame. Further, and perhaps relevant to Putin’s claims, APCO was an ally to the Clinton Global Initiative. In fact, Winer had ties to the Clintons going back decades to the time he worked in the State Department under President Bill Clinton.

    Browder and Winer prevailed. In December 2012, the Senate passed the Magnitsky Act, which would sanction selected Russians who abuse human rights. Browder expressed his satisfaction that justice was being done—saying, “There was something almost biblical about Sergei’s story. … Maybe God had intervened in this case”—but also pain for his loss. “More than anything I wished that Sergei were still alive,” he said.

    ‘Red Notice’

    Shortly thereafter, in a press conference in Moscow, Putin responded with criticism of Browder and the Magnitsky Act. Browder writes that when Putin mentioned his name, he knew his “life had changed forever.”

    In May 2013, Browder traveled to Norway to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum. At this time, Russia got Interpol to issue a “red notice” for his arrest. Browder explained that he learned about this, and as he left Norway, was worried about being sent to Moscow and “didn’t even want to think about the horrors” that would face him there. He passed through airport security without a problem and reached his home in Britain.

    The paradoxical aspect of the Interpol red notice was that this attack on Browder effectively built up his credibility, fame, and power. The Kremlin’s action was counter to a tactic they have often adopted against popular dissenters which includes ignoring, marginalizing, and even banning them from Russia.

    For instance, around the time when Putin joined the KGB, a world famous Russian dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, was expelled. Today, after a career of extra-human sacrifice and integrity, after criticizing Putin, he is living in relative obscurity in Britain. He was even framed for crimes to further marginalize him.

    Browder understood this and wrote about it: “putting me in prison would have made Putin just as much of a hostage to the situation as I was. If he did this, every Western head of state would have been forced to spend a third of their meetings with Putin arguing for my release.”

    Browder would do more damage to Putin in a Russian jail, or even dead, than he causes Putin alive. Both Browder and Putin understand this. Putting their behavior in context shows that the situation isn’t as simple as Browder and Putin repeatedly tell everyone it is.

    In February 2015, Browder’s saga took another curious twist when lawyers tried to subpoena him and he responded by jumping out of his car and sprinting away into the night. That was captured on tape and put onto YouTube.

    The lawyers who approached Browder represented Russian businessman Denis Katsyv and alleged that Katsyv was facing legal problems due to erroneous information coming from Browder. Browder’s lawyer explained that the subpoena attempt was “harrowing” because of concerns he had over his personal safety.

    Browder was deposed a few months later, regarding the legal case United States v. Prevezon Holdings Ltd. It was an opportunity for him to raise awareness about humans rights abuses and bring bad guys to justice. However, far from being forthcoming, the deposition transcript shows Browder often wouldn’t or couldn’t give details to support his allegations. The deposition takes on, at times, a comical feel as lawyers ask Browder, “You read English, right?”, and, “That’s just a crack, right? You were just being sarcastic?”

    Still, notwithstanding every twist of this complex and serious saga, the mainstream media continues to present Browder in the most simplistic terms.
    The only thing declared necessary in the Constitution & Bill of Rights is the #2A Militia of the several States.
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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    https://100r.org/2017/10/magnitsky/

    The Raid

    On June 2, 2007, Russian tax investigators raided the offices of Hermitage and Firestone Duncan. They seized Hermitage company documents, computers and corporate stamps and seals.
    In a statement to US senators, Browder said that interior ministry officials “seized all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of the funds that I advised. I didn’t know the purpose of these raids so I hired the smartest Russian lawyer I knew, a 35-year-old named Sergei Magnitsky. I asked Sergei to investigate the purpose of the raids and try to stop whatever illegal plans these officials had.”
    Magnitsky, however, had been Browder’s Firestone Duncan accountant for a decade.
    In questioning by Russian investigators in 2006, Magnitsky said he was an auditor on contract with Firestone Duncan. Though Browder continued to say Magnitsky was his lawyer in this summer’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, two years ago, in his testimony in the US government’s Prevezon case, Browder told a different story.


    He was asked if Magnitsky had a law degree in Russia.
    “I'm not aware that he did,” Browder said.
    Did he know if Magnitsky “went to law school?”
    “No,” Browder answered.

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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    must be over the target

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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    More on Browder

    https://jimmysllama.com/2017/10/27/10252/


    Browder Week

    BY LLAMA ON OCTOBER 27, 2017


    There are a lot of things that chap my hide these days and nearing the top of that list is Hermitage Capital CEO Bill Browder. Half of America appears to be in love with this guy and if you don’t believe me check out the hashtag BrowderDay. One account I saw using this hashtag enthusiastically announced that they would be naming their next cat after him while another echoed their sentiments with, “Ha!!! I was thinking the exact same thing today!!!” Similar tweets followed: “Thank you, Sir” and “Yes. You will be lauded as one of the people who told the truth to help us out of the insanity. Thanks. For Segei, and US.” I found this one to be particularly amusing mainly because Louise Mensch happily endorsed it:
    https://i2.wp.com/jimmysllama.com/wp...39%2C300&ssl=1

    In fact, you’ll notice that Louise Mensch has used the BrowderDay hashtag more than once (she claims she started it) and that alone should make you stop and think. But it’s not even the whole Mensch thing that makes my skin crawl. It’s the entire charade that’s been put on by Browder, the Western media, and the U.S. government to portray Browder as some sort of anti-Russian hero. In reality, the stories you read or hear about him are half truths being shoveled down your throat in an effort to sell the government’s foreign policy and to create Russian hysteria. They’ll even try to sell you on the idea that Browder is some sort of patriot but I hate to break it to you he’s not even an American citizen. He denounced his citizenship back in 1998 in order to avoid paying taxes on the piles of money he was stealing from Russia. That’s right. He essentially stole from the both the American and Russian people. Boy, what a patriot.

    More disturbingly, Browder is a convicted criminal in Russia who has inexplicably, for years, wielded enough power here in the States to direct congressional legislation. I mean, what? And the so-called evidence the U.S. government has used to push Russian sanctions (the Magnitsky Act) or to file federal charges against Russian companies like Prevezon has been based on unverified, unsourced evidence stemming from Browder. Do you understand what I’m saying? What I’m saying is that over the course of the last eight years or so, an American who denounced his citizenship almost twenty years ago has handed over unsourced documents to the U.S. government and unverified testimony to Congress, and both Congress and the Southern District of New York (Preet Bahara to be exact) acted on this so-called evidence. If that’s not insane I don’t what is.

    Then there’s the mind-boggling support the liberals are throwing behind this guy. It seems he’s become their new personal Jesus and as much as I’d like to support their little fantasies it appears they’re missing a huge chunk of Browder’s familial history. I mean, Browder has more ties to Russia than Putin’s dog so I have to wonder why liberals aren’t running for their safe space. Take for instance the start of this interview: It’s a perfect example of how Browder usually describes his grandfather, Earl Browder. He tells the same story, almost verbatim, about his grandfather in every interview, speech, and congressional appearance as if it’s scripted. But here’s the part he always leaves out: Thanks to the Venona documents that were released by the U.S. government it appears Earl Browder worked for or at least with the NKVD/KGB under the alias Rulevoj (“Helmsman”).
    Furthermore, it appears other family members were also involved in Soviet espionage including his brother, William Browder, and sister, Marguerite. Below is a memorandum about Marguerite’s ties to the NKVD written by Earl Browder himself.

    https://i0.wp.com/jimmysllama.com/wp...34%2C300&ssl=1
    : “The Secret World of American Communism,” By Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, pages 241 – 242

    Then there was his niece, Helen Lowry a.k.a. Elza Akhmerov and her husband, Iskhak Akhmerov who were also, yup, you guessed it, Russian spies. Akhmerov was actually considered “One of their service’s most successful officers” so kudos to him. All of these family members operated within the United States at one time or another and according to historian Herbert Romerstein, Lowry and Akhmerov’s daughter, Elena, and Akhmerov’s son, Robert, from a previous marriage were also employed in the service of the NKVD. Do you understand now why I think it’s absurd that the liberals support him?

    And speaking of family members, what about Browder’s father, Felix Browder? I don’t think he was a spy but he was a brilliant mathematician who was born in Moscow, Russia, received his PhD from Princeton University at age 20, and appears to have had ties to the U.S. government. In 1999, Bill Clinton awarded him with the National Medal of Science because as the Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Rita Colwell put it, “The contributions of these scientists are so profound, so connected to our everyday lives and so lasting that these medals go only a short way to express the gratitude the nation owes them.”

    I’m sure one of the reasons Rita Colwell had nothing but good things to say about Felix Browder included the fact that Browder had played a “critical role” in establishing the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), the same science center that was given $22 million in seed money from the NSF. According to their website, DIMACS is “a multi-institution partnership led by Rutgers University. It includes over 350 members at Rutgers and elsewhere who work together with DIMACS staff to organize and implement DIMACS programs in research, education, and outreach.” When they say partnership that includes:

    • AT&T Labs
    • Applied Communication Sciences
    • NEC Laboratories America
    • Nokia Bell Labs
    • Princeton University
    • Rutgers University
    • Avaya Labs
    • HP Labs
    • IBM Research
    • Microsoft Research
    • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
    • Stevens Institute of Technology
    • Yahoo Labs

    They also appear to do work for the intelligence community including Homeland Security. This is how DIMACS described one of their projects, “Monitoring Message Streams,”
    “This large multi-player research project is sponsored by the intelligence community. It is concerned with developing methods to monitor huge streams of text data for messages and to identify clusters of messages on events of interest.”
    They also work on author identification of anonymous documents, bioterrorism, “communication and information privacy,” “biosurveillance data monitoring” and “unmanned aircraft systems.” The bottom line is that Felix Browder was a big man on campus at DIMACS and was assuredly in contact with government agencies. After his death last year, the Director Emeritus of DIMACS, Fred Roberts, stated that Browder had “continued to play an important role as DIMACS grew and developed,” so with all of this said I have to wonder why Bill Browder talks ad nauseum about his KGB grandfather but rarely if ever speaks about his own father’s achievements or links to the U.S. government.

    Browder also doesn’t like to talk about the part he played in the economic rape of Russia during the 1990s, his business partners’ criminal backgrounds, his own criminal behavior involving asset skimming, tax evasion, illegal bankruptcy, or his criminal convictions. Instead, he’s a master at spinning tales like someone out of Rumpelfuckingstilson and remember, he never, ever tells you the entire story. He has a flair for the dramatic and you may have noticed how often he likes to tell everyone that he’s Putin’s number one enemy in that annoying, soft spoken tone of his and yet here he is, still very much alive and kicking.

    What Browder does like besides rainy days, walks on the beach, and slow jazz is bragging about the corrupt Russian companies he attacked while failing to disclose that his adoption of shareholder activism was merely a corporate tool used to line his and others’ pockets. As for his claims of being a human rights activist, one has to wonder why he never talks about his partner’s suspicious death or the alleged murder of one of his sources. When I started reading his book, Red Notice, a few months back I thought to myself, “I’ll give this guy a chance to come clean, to apologize to Russia for his insatiable greed and to make amends to the American people for dictating U.S. foreign policy for over eight years,” but in the book’s four hundred odd pages those things never came. In fact, after wanting to light my laptop on fire six pages in I have to wonder about those who made it through the entire thing and still believe this guy is some kind of hero.

    Perhaps it’s because Americans are just as narcissistic as Browder. Or, maybe it’s because he seems to be an expert at lying through omission and has never come clean about the things he’s done. That’s where I come in. By drawing on Browder’s own writings, court documents, and testimony under oath, I’m going to tell you exactly what Bill Browder has been up to for the last few decades. If Americans want a #BrowderDay they should be careful about what they wish for because I might just give them a #BrowderWeek. Or two.

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    The only thing declared necessary in the Constitution & Bill of Rights is the #2A Militia of the several States.
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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    Clintons, Larry Summers, Edmond Safra, 4.8 billion IMF $ disappears . . Where’s all the money?
    https://jimmysllama.com/2017/11/10/10269/

    Where’s All The Money? Nov.10, 2017

    https://i0.wp.com/jimmysllama.com/wp...34%2C534&ssl=1[/COLOR]
    With Russia, the Mueller indictments, Fusion GPS, the Dirty Dossier, the Paradise Papers and, gasp, Vault 8 (finally!!) grabbing the headlines these days it’s hard to focus on other things, especially when those “other things” happened almost twenty years ago. Nevertheless, if you have any interest in Bill Browder or the Clintons you may want to tear yourself away from Twitter for a moment and follow along because 1998 and 1999 were spectacularly interesting years. When Russia defaulted on its loans in August, 1998, Browder’s shenanigans came to a screeching halt and his firm not only lost its partner, diamond magnate Beny Steinmetz, it lost a shiz ton of money for its investors. Additionally, $4.8 billion in missing IMF funds and a money laundering investigation into the Bank of New York exposed the unfathomable depth of the Russian oligarchs’ greed, the Russian mafia’s vast web of corrupt activity, and the ungodly amount of capital flight pouring out of Russia and washing through U.S. banks. All of this of course happened on Bill Clinton’s watch whose administration turned a blind eye to overt corruption and money laundering. I doubt one has to wonder long if the Clintons got their cut for looking the other way. The other interesting part of this story is that Bill Browder has been completely silent about his partner’s involvement in the IMF scandal but, then again, he does like to hide the truth, doesn’t he?

    As I have mentioned previously the Clinton administration, Harvard, Soros, and USAID were behind Russia’s privatization program during the 1990s and one of the main characters behind the Harvard Institute for International Development(H.I.I.D.), was Larry Summers whose background is fairly extensive; former Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist of the World Bank between 1991-1993, Senior U.S. Treasury Department official until later promoted to Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, and the director of the National Economic Council for Obama between 2009-2010. Finally, he became president of Harvard University between 2001-2006 after tearing up Russia with the rest of his Harvard cronies.

    Summers worked closely with Jeffrey Sachs, Russians Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, and former World Bank consultant, Jonathan Hay, who was appointed H.I.I.D’s general director in Moscow. According to Janine R. Wedel via thenation.com, Hay “assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece.” This cozy little group of co-conspirators helped direct everything from the Russian voucher program and the State auctions to IMF funds earmarked for Russia. And speaking of vouchers, don’t forget that the majority of Russian citizens had no idea that they had to take their vouchers to auctions in order to invest in newly privatized State companies. Most citizens simply sold them (to buy food) to guys like Bill Browder who was given $25 million from Salomon Brothers to purchase and then invest them. Not that it would have mattered anyways had they known because the Harvard-Chubais clique made sure that the auctions were rigged and only select Russians and foreign entities such as Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.) and George Soros were allowed to participate in them. As Wedel put it, the program “favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates working in Russia’s nascent markets.”

    Bottom line? A handful of individuals like George Soros and Russian oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Roman Abramovich were able to purchase Russian energy and communication companies for peanuts. “Thanks America,” said almost no Russian citizen during the 1990s…or ever since.

    As insanely corrupt as things became in Russia the Clinton administration continued to place the program at the forefront of its Russian foreign policy and they spun it as a success over and over again. Meanwhile, there was the IMF money. As Summers, Hay, and Chubais were rigging auctions, they continued to direct billions in taxpayer dol—er, I mean US-IMF-World Bank funds to Russia even though their government was saddled with foreign debt which they couldn’t possibly climb out from under. I mean, once you took into consideration the corruption, capital flight, and the fact that some of the IMF funds were spent on things like Yeltsin’s reelection campaign and the Chechen War, how could they? That’s right, the U.S. inadvertently paid for Yeltsin’s reelection and funded Russia’s war while, get this, the CIA, unbeknownst to American taxpayers, was also funding the Chechen separatists and radical Islamists. Who’s says you can’t play both sides of a slaughterfest, am I right? And just when you think this story can’t get any worse, the Clinton administration continued to push for more loans despite the corruption, misused funds, and the fact that some of the money simply up and disappeared. Poof. Just like that. Enter the IMF’s missing $4.8 billion.

    In early to mid-1998, there were serious congressional misgivings about giving Russia more money but the IMF caved under pressure from the Clinton administration and authorized a $22.6 billion package. The first installment of $4.8 billion was sent out on August 14, 1998, and it immediately disappeared through a maze of shell companies and foreign bank accounts. You may be asking yourself right now who was arrested and prosecuted for this unbelievable crime but don’t bother. No one was prosecuted. Ever. Like, never ever. The case was investigated and during a September, 1999, House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearing, Chairman Jim Leach stated,
    “According to press reports, it was the filing of a SAR [Suspicious Activity Report] by one of the banks that will be represented at this hearing, Republic National Bank of New York, that helped alert law enforcement authorities to the massive funds flow from Russia into other New York money center banks.”
    That’s right. Apparently Bill Browder’s partner, Edmond Safra, and his bank, Republic National, were the ones to blow the whistle on Bank of New York. Yet, after being questioned by Leach specifically about the IMF funds the Managing Director and Deputy Counsel of Republic National Bank, Anne Vitale, replied,
    “We have not seen IMF transfers of any significant amount at all going through. One of the things with our wire transfer report is to search for names appearing in the press. Now I have a staff member who puts in the names appearing in the press to see whether the wire has gone through Republic with that name on it. We have not seen substantial IMF transfers. What we have seen is very, very minimal.”
    Good ol’ Larry Summers also testified at the hearing and stated,
    “With respect to Bank of New York there is no evidence that there were any IMF funds diverted.”
    Of course there wasn’t. Folks, do you see what’s happening here? No one’s at fault so there’s no one to prosecute. And despite Summers’ testimony that Bank of New York was innocent and Vitale’s alleged belief that Republic National’s SAR did not include any activity involving the IMF funds, three months after the Committee hearing media outlets like the UK’s Independent pushed the story that Edmond Safra’s Republic National Bank blew the whistle on BONY, “Mr. Safra’s American bank unmasked the embezzlement of international aid to Moscow last year.” Additionally, two years after the hearing RFE/RL reported that a Swiss magistrate was looking into suspcious activity regarding the IMF money and Runicom, a Swiss affiliate of Sibneft. At the time, Sibneft was owned by Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich. Oleg Lurie also reported on the Swiss investigation in the March 2003 edition of Johnson’s Russia List and noted that the $4.8 billion loan originated at the U.S. Federal Reserve bank on August 14, 1998, but for whatever reason it was never sent to the Central Bank of Russia but rather to Edmond Safra’s Republic National. From there the money was transferred to multiple accounts (See Lurie’s article. For RFE/RL’s earlier account on the money trail go here):

    • “$2.35 billion were transferred to the Bank of Sydney…part of the money transferred to the Bank of Sydney was placed in an account of a company which was 25% owned by a daughter of President Boris Yelsin, corporate account that was partially owned by Yeltsin’s daughter.”


    • “$2,115 million was converted into pounds sterling and transferred to the National Westminister Bank – here the trace of money disappears.”


    • “$780 million and $270 million was transferred on August 14 and August 18 respectively to the Credit Suisse bank.”


    • “$1.4 billion were transferred to the notorious Bank of New York and further to its Geneva branch, Bank of New York-Intermaritime. The money entered the account of a Russian ‘United Bank’ owned by Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky…the IMF money was immediately transferred to the account of the Swiss RUNICOM company, owned by Roman Abramovich.”

    It seems that until Swiss magistrate Laurent Kasper-Ansermet started investigating the missing IMF funds in January, 2000, the Clinton administration tried to keep a lid on where the funds were originally deposited and where the funds went. According to Kaspwer-Ansermet the funds were “deposited in an account of the Republic National Bank of New York. From there I am trying to trace where they went.”

    So yeah, it appears Summers and Vitale both lied although I’m not surprised based on their backgrounds. As I discussed earlier, Summers was knee-deep in the disgustingly corrupt privatization program while Vitale on the other hand was a former assistant attorney in the Southern District of New York where she had “prosecuted money laundering, narcotics and organized crimes cases,” now working for Republic National. Of course one has to wonder what a former federal prosecutor was doing at Republic National Bank after the New York Magazine’s 1996 spread on Safra’s ties to the Russian mafia but who am I to judge her obvious corruption, right? And as if that’s not shady enough, spoiler alert after Safra died in 1999, HSBC took over Safra’s Republic National Bank (and Safra’s shares in Bill Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital) and Vitale went to work for HSBC as special litigation counsel. So there’s that.

    It seems that every character involved in these scandals is shadier than the next and that definitely includes Bill Clinton and his administration who stonewalled the Swiss investigation. A September, 2000 Congressional Report entitled “Russia’s Road to Corruption,” reported that the Swiss magistrate,
    “…formally requested assistance from the U.S. government [Clinton administration] in his investigation into the Bank of New York case in September 1999 and began a series of detailed requests for information and assistance in January 2000 but to date has received little cooperation.”
    Wait, what? The Clinton administration held up an investigation? Imagine that. And it wasn’t just the IMF scandal they tried to bury, it was the billions of dollars that had been money laundered through the Bank of New York for years. If you’re not familiar with this story, here goes: The case was tied to Russian mafia kingpin Semion Mogilevich, his bank, Inkombank, and oligarchs Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky—the same guy who owned the account that received some of the stolen IMF money (for more detailed information you might want to read this or this). All three men had ties to BONY through its top executives and a shell company called Benex. Benex of course also had ties to Marc Rich, Grigory Luchansky, Nordex, Bruce Rappaport, and Inter-Martime Bank but who’s got that kind of time?
    As to when the U.S. government and Intelligence agencies knew about the corruption in Russia, there’s Karon von Gerhke-Thompson. Ever hear of her? Of course you haven’t because the last agency that wants you to know about her is the CIA. According to Gerhke-Thompson’s testimony during the September, 1999 hearing,
    “As early as July 1993, the CIA believed that financial aid from the U. S. and international lending institutions to support Russia’s transition was being laundered through front firms into offshore banks. A substantial amount of the laundered money was believed to be in safe havens in offshore banks or was used to establish offshore businesses and joint venture partnerships with Westem firms. According to Mr. V, Konanykhine and Khodorkovsky were key players to unraveling the ties between the KGB, senior government officials and Russian organized crime families.”
    As early as 1993.
    Folks, they knew. They all knew. The administration knew. The Intelligence agencies knew. Even the IMF knew. And yet the U.S. government kept sending billions of dollars to Russia. It’s like anything the Clintons get involved in ends up like a kegger party gone horribly criminal and their shenanigans could probably take up a few seasons of COPS. It’s that ridiculous. And if Mueller wants to go after Paul Manafort for things that happened a decade or two ago then Americans should demand that a serious investigation take place into the missing IMF funds. Naw, I’m kidding. Americans should demand it, period. Additionally, it would be nice if the ICIJ would release something along the lines of the “Clinton Papers” because we all know that Bill and Hillary made some serious cash out of all of this and most likely hid it offshore. But don’t count on that happening anytime soon.

    So what was Bill Browder’s take on all of these events? For one, he never mentions in his book that his partner’s bank, Republic National of New York, was involved in the IMF debacle which is beyond weird in and of itself. If Edmond Safra was such a hero by reporting the money laundering, stolen IMF money, and Russian corruption wouldn’t it only make sense that Browder would mention that? Well yeah, but no, he didn’t. In fact, I’ve never seen him mention it. Going back to his book, rather than talk about it he pointed his greedy little fingers at the oligarchs and cried about how much money he lost,

    “The bailout package [IMF money] may have been big, but it was viewed by the Russian oligarchs not as a backstop but as a massive piggy bank that they could use to convert their rubles into dollars in order to get that money as far away from Russia as possible…when the dust finally settled the fund [Hermitage Capital] was nursing a $900 million losses and a 90 percent drop…It’s hard to describe what it’s like to lose $900 million…It was also a public humiliation.”

    Ugh, cry me a river, Browder. In his book he went on to say that he only had one choice at that point and that was to stay in Russia in order to gain back all of the money his clients had lost. In other words, very wealthy and powerful people lost a lot of money at the hands of Bill Browder and he was willing to break the law to get back that money.

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  10. #7
    .999 Unobtanium Horn's Avatar
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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    All of this of course happened on Bill Clinton’s watch whose administration turned a blind eye to overt corruption and money laundering.
    Is it just me or was the world better off turning a blind eye to money laundering?

    I'm just comparing now to then, or Now when u need to pay some corrupt middleman 10% of your earnings to validate that your money is ligitimate fiat Not money.

  11. #8
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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    Browder appears well connected to the Jewish mafia

    https://twitter.com/stranahan/status...045455872?s=20



    https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images...2d1yLX_x96.jpg

    It’s 2:15 AM in Budapest — Q & A on #Browdergate. It’s THE biggest coverup EVER. In Plain Sight!

    Periscope video






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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    Quote Originally Posted by monty View Post
    Browder appears well connected to the Jewish mafia
    Of course he is, how else is he bot busted and in prison? Just like many many others.
    Jackie did it and you know it!

  13. #10
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    Re: Ahh! Bill Browder fires back at Putin after press conference

    Bro Nathanael is on the Browdergate trail

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