DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Kremlin critic Bill Browder wants governments to step up their efforts to acquire the riches hijacked by Russian oligarchs and linked to President Vladimir Putin through the accountants, lawyers and others who have set up shady legal and financial structures to force them to become whistleblowers.
Browder, author of the nonfiction bestseller “Freezing Order: “A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath,” says Russian war in Ukraine has increased attention to how oligarchs are the custodians of the Russian leader’s wealth.
“But the oligarchs are not naive,” Browder told The Associated Press on Tuesday at the annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “They’ve hired the best lawyers, the best asset protection specialists, and there are shell companies and trust companies and offshore companies and nominees and proxies – and the whole thing is extremely well thought out.”
The founder of Heritage Capital, an early investor in post-Soviet Russia, Browder sounded the alarm after his Russian tax adviser, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison in 2009. Since then, he has become arguably one of the world’s greatest critics of Putin. †
Speaking to the AP in Davos, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda – a sharp critic of Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine – acknowledged that tracking the “dark and dirty money” of Russian oligarchs is not easy.
“But we have to do this: examine the assets and of course freeze as much as possible, and then find a legal framework to use them for restructuring or recovery or just rebuilding Ukraine after the war,” he said.
Nauseda also called for more action to exclude Russia from the international payment system SWIFT.
“We have taken some partial steps, but this is not enough, and we need to exclude – or deactivate – more Russian banks – or de-SWIFT. Then we could probably expect that Russian society will start to feel the pain,” he said, referring to reports of support in Russia for Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Browder praised the Biden administration’s efforts to pressure Putin and his administration since the start of the war by freezing Russia’s central bank assets, haunting the oligarchs, halting technology exports to Russia and arms to Ukraine.
But when it comes to getting the money from Russian oligarchs, “we’re just scratching the surface,” Browder said.
“There are only 35 oligarchs out of 118 on the Forbes (richest people) list who are sanctioned by the US, EU, UK, Canada or Australia. We need 118,” he said.
Browder says their money is held in top banks in places like London, New York and Zurich, as well as in real estate, hedge funds and private equity funds.
“It’s right in front of our eyes and the amounts are unbelievably huge,” he said. “I estimate that since Vladimir Putin came to power, he and the 1,000 people around him have stolen $1 trillion from the Russian state. And that money is stored in our financial capitals.”
He acknowledged that what he sees as the solution is “quite radical” – forcing “the people who set up these structures, the enablers, the lawyers, the accountants, the trustees under the law to become whistleblowers for the government.”
“In other words, change all money laundering and sanctions laws to say that people involved in setting up structures for sanctioned individuals must provide the information to the government — or risk a penalty of fines and jail time,” he said. brewer.
Jacques Attali, a former top French civil servant and former president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, expressed hesitation about Browder’s idea.
For starters, “it must be said that a lawyer cannot do anything illegal — and that would be enough,” said Attali, an eminence grise at Davos. “A lawyer is necessarily at the service of his or her client.”
“You can tighten up legislation. You can’t ask a lawyer to report his or her client,” he said.
Vitaly Klitschko, mayor of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, supported the idea of taking further action against Russian oligarchs’ money, saying: “I think we should use every lever to stop the aggression, and it is no secret that the Russians the money for (Putin’s) army.”
“Right now, sanctions work quite well. Why? Because sanctions stop funding the Russian army,” Klitschko said.
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