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But the purpose of sanctioning them and in effect vladimir putin himself is not to change his mind. he s not going to change his mind. he might have, by the way, if we had done it in advance, if we had done it ten years ago. but he s not going to change his mind right now. the purpose of sanctioning him is to say we don t want you to have the money either in russia, with the central bank reserves, outside of russia with your own savings, to be able to pay for this war. but as you just said to me at the beginning of this conversation, the key money, the money that really matters is going in day after day, week after week, from the energy resources that russia sells, not least to europe and other western allies. and it amounts to, you said, up to $1 billion a day. now that s going to go into russia whether putin is ....
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 ....
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 ....
To isolate putin and his regime economically, for much more than a decade. you ve, as it happens, just got a new book out, freezing order, which is about some of your experiences taking on putin. but this goes back to a decision you took in the late 1990s to get involved with russia. you saw massive economic opportunity as an investor in russia, and you rode the tiger in the sense that you saw vladimir putin as a guy, not only that you could do business with, but you believed would deliver riches for you and your investment company, hermitage capital. do you now deeply regret that? well, so, i went out there and i thought first that russia was in a total state of chaos. i went there before putin total chaos. putin comes in. yeah, but you didn t i mean, you made money out of the chaos, but then you began not to like the chaos ....
You think he s worth up to $200 billion us. i said that back in 2017. i think it s much bigger than that now. the world s richest man? by far. even elon musk, by the way, admits that he s no longer the world s richest man, that vladimir putin is. right. well, we re never going to be able to prove that with pieces of paper. but nonetheless, even if we accept your contention that that s the truth and that if you get your way with the expansion of the targeted sanctions, putin s wealth will, in effect, be frozen and taken from him. what difference would that make? i spoke very recently to a man you know well, mikhail khodorkovsky, former head of yukos energy company in russia. now a long term anti putin campaigner, just like yourself. and he says that, in the end, hitting the oligarchs doesn t make much difference. they are, to quote him, putin s footmen. they will not influence him. so even if you freeze that money, freeze putin s money, too, the war machine can rumble on. well, first ....