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The reason is because he s putin s best friend from childhood, the godfather of putin s daughter and the person who introduced putin to his wife. he s a person who holds money for vladimir putin. so that s supposition based on evidence and intuition, that s not entirely fact based. it s notjust my evidence and intuition. it s the evidence and intuition of the united states government who sanctioned him. and i believe the european union did the same. this is the mafia we re talking about. they don t have, you know, corporate records like we do where you can go in and prove things. you have to. there s a law in the united states called the rico law which says when all these people start intermixing with each other, you can sue them for racketeering and you don t have to have the same level of evidence. same thing is true here. so, then, the question isjust how far do these sanctions on individuals need to go before you are, in effect, truly punishing vladimir putin and capturing the vast ....
And you said we need a guy who can impose some order here on this chaotic capitalism. and you thought vladimir putin was the guy. you even wrote a rather well known times article in which you said, you know, this authoritarian figure is just what russia needs. well, i d hoped he was. we all put our hopes into this guy. he had this blank face. he seemed like an uncharismatic technocrat and so. i m talking about regret. how much of it do you have? i was totally wrong. we were all totally wrong. george bush was totally wrong. tony blair was totally wrong. everybody was totally wrong about vladimir putin. it took me a little less time than most people in the west to understand that he s truly evil and we need to fight him. but we were all totally wrong. he fooled us all. and for people who don t remember the story, you, from 2005 on, were regarded as something of an enemy by putin, who d been in power for five years or so, because you kept banging on about the need to root out corruption ....
To be able to prove that he s rich. and so, he has what i call armshake or handshake agreements with these individuals who are basically trustees holding this money on trust for him. but as you, bill browder, are not in the room when these armshake and handshakes take place, how do you know that they do indeed result in vast amounts of putin money being held in the name of other people? well, a lot of different lea ks have come out since all these agreements were made. so, for example, there s a famous anti corruption activist in russia, alexei navalny. he did an investigation into putin s $1.1; billion villa on the black sea. and he has the receipts that show various oligarchs were sending money in to pay for that villa. similarly, in the panama papers that came out, there is a very famous russian cellist who was paid $2 billion by russian state banks and russian oligarchs. why would russian state banks and oligarchs pay a cellist $2 billion? the next richest cellist is yo yo ma, who ....
In the city of zaporizhzhia. now on bbc news, it s hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i m stephen sackur. as the russian war machine tries to inject momentum into its ukraine offensive, could it be crippled by the west s economic countermeasures? ten weeks of sanctions have seen foreign currency reserves frozen, oligarch assets seized and international businesses quit russia. but putin can still count on his oil and gas income, and there s no sign of economic pain forcing a rethink. well, my guest is bill browder, a former big time investor in russia turned anti putin ....
With the magnitsky act over the last decade. do you fear that the russians still have means to get at you? we know they have tentacles and the ability to strike at targets far from russian territory. they ve been after me since the moment that the magnitsky act was passed. putin has been uttering my name everywhere he has a chance. he wanted to do a trade, actually, with donald trump, didn t he? he suggested that the americans might engineer somehow to swap you for people that the americans wanted to interview in connection with the election interference in 2016. and then donald trump said, i think that s an incredible offer, which was truly remarkable. i wasn t so surprised by putin s statement cause he s been saying this stuff all along, but to have the most important man in the free world, the president of the united states, agreeing to that was absolutely horrifying. which comes back to, if the magnitsky act isn t effective, then why has putin been uttering my name? and he doesn ....