Who Exactly IS Bill Browder?
Why has Bill Browder’s incredible Magnitsky story never once been questioned by Western politicians and damning evidence suppressed.
Browder first employer was Robert Maxwell in London, father of Ghislaine. Soon after Maxwell apparently fell of his yacht and drowned.
Browder then went to work for banker Edmond Safra, whose Republic Bank of New York, was involved in a $5 billion money laundering scheme to steal IMF money from the Yeltsin govt in Russia. Safra discovered the scheme and informed the authorities, soon after he died in a mysterious fire in his Monaco penthouse.
According to New York investigative journalist Lucy Komisar:
“A 100Reporters investigation, published in 2014, illustrated how Russian titanium company, Avisma, in which Browder was an investor, used an Isle of Man shell company to “buy” titanium at fake low prices and sell it abroad at higher market prices, cheating both minority shareholders and Russian tax authorities. A lawsuit showed Browder knew that was the business plan.”
“According to corporate documents, Browder’s holding company, Hermitage Capital Management, was built on corporate registrations authored by the Mossack Fonseca law firm. That firm is the source of more than one million documents made public by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in its Panama Papers investigation, involving assets hidden through the use of shell companies and secret offshore accounts. Its disclosures have led to resignations by government officials worldwide, criminal investigations and charges of corruption against bureaucrats and business leaders.”
“Mossack Fonseca set up two companies in the British Virgin Islands, Berkeley Advisors and Starcliff, to hold shares in Hermitage. The Browder family home in Princeton, New Jersey, is registered by a Mossack Fonseca shell, Pepperdine Holdings Ltd. Browder’s $11-million vacation home in Aspen is also “owned” by a shell registered in an agent’s name. The US taxes offshore earnings. In 1998, Browder traded his US citizenship for one in the UK, which does not.”
Browder’s unscrupulous business practises continued in Russia.
Using seed money from Safra, Browder formed Hermitage Capital, to invest in Russia, using the company to buy privatisation coupons, distributed to the Russian people as their share of the old Soviet state owned corporations., such as Gasprom. Browder took advantage of desperate people who could hardly feed themselves, buying their shares for cents in the dollar, then moving them through Cyprus shell companies to sell in the West at a vastly inflated price, while engaging in tax evasion schemes to minimise tax in Russia itself.
Browder had engaged the services of Consulting Firm Firestone-Duncan in 1996, a Russian company which used the name of Jameson Firestone, and his late partner Terry Duncan who was killed in the violence surrounding the 1993 assault on the Russian Parliament by Boris Yeltsin. Accountant Sergei Magnitsky was one of the founding partners, specialising in various tax minimisation schemes, such as regional tax breaks for hiring disabled Afghan war veterans in the southern region of Kalmyrka. The problem was Browder was greedy, he had Magnitsky create shell companies and claimed to have employed these obviously unqualified people as stock market specialists.
When the scam was discovered he was expelled in 2005 (why not arrested?) and after a series of raids, and investigations, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested, charged with tax evasion, and left to rot in pre-trial detention. Only after he died of natural causes, Browder and US funded “investigative” journalists, the Organised Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP), who apparently only ever find corruption by Russians, concocted a fabricated story about a “young lawyer” who he hired in “2007”, who “investigated” corrupt Russian tax officials, who “stole his companies” to perpetrate a $230 million “Russian Tax Fraud”, who “killed” Magnitsky in prison for revenge, insinuating the orders came from President Putin himself.
This pattern of people associated with Browder dying is becoming a pattern.
Browder then used this BIG LIE to ensure he could never be extradited for his crimes, he was in fact found guilty in 2013, and sentenced in absentia to nine years in prison. Browder used this fabricated story to give eager US politicians the perfect means to “punish” Russian officials, via the fundamentally arbitrary, without any due process, “Magnitsky Act”.
Many innocent Russian officials, tax inspectors, prosecutors and others, were on the word of Browder alone, sanctioned for their “role” in the “murder” of Magnitsky. No due process, no recourse, no fair trial, no presumption of innocence, demonstrates Browder’s naked hypocrisy claiming to do this in the name of Human Rights, all were sanctioned as the first shots in the New Cold War as a prelude to the Obama Administration’s regime change operation in Ukraine.
The fact that all doors are opened to Browder, the entire Western media reported his story as gospel, Putin was demonised for some completely made up story, and Browder conveniently sanctioned all the Russian tax inspectors who were desperate to come to the west to recover the billions Browder stole from Russia. They were labeled as accessories to the “murder” that never happened, and were barred from travelling to the West.
When liberal Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov agreed to make Browder’s story into a film, halfway along, he discovered from original Russian documents, that Browder had been altering translated material, fraudulently changing Magnitsky’s autopsy report, and that there was no record of Magnitsky ever reporting a tax fraud. On the eve of the screening on German television, Browder brought down the legal hammer, having it banned, not only in Germany, but in almost every nation in the West. Ironically, it was in only the US, with its constitutional freedoms, where there was a single screening, attended by a pack of US government employees, like staffer Kyle Parker, acting as Browder’s heckler squad.
“The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes”
Through the 2017, Robert Otto email hack, it became clear that the State Department was engaged in a massive effort to villfy Nekrasov, and doing damage control by threatening MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian to bury a story based on Nekrasov’s evidence.
Browder somehow had every mainstream media organisation suppress a Deposition in the Southern District of New York, after Browder was ordered court ordered to appear, after evading three subpoenas, after he had provided the US Attorney Preet Bharara concocted evidence accusing Russian national Denis Katsyv, of the very “Russian Tax Fraud” that Browder himself was eventually found guilty of perpetrating in Russia.
Of course we could all be completely mistaken, Browder could be a victim of a “Russian conspiracy”, don’t take my word for it, watch Browder’s six hour deposition from 2015:
Videotape of the Deposition of William Browder
US vs Prevezon Holdings, 15 April 2105, SDNY.
Here is the Official Court Transcript which shows the Video transcript is faithful and has not been manipulated after the fact:
Official Transcript of The Deposition of William Browder
https://100r.org/media/2017/10/Browder-Deposition-April-15-2015.pdf
Unfortunately, this also demonstrates that almost the Entire US Congress was either duped, or more likely heard what they wanted to hear, but either way a false story had been used to sanction innocent people, and did enormous damage to US-Russian relations.
The great late Professor Stephen F. Cohen was fully aware of Browder’s scam, but he was continually ignored.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/cold-war-news-not-fit-to-print/
Other articles from the Nation exposing Bill Browder and his major but unreported role in Russiagate.
Compare Browder’s demeanor from his Deposition to his appearances in the Mainstream media, not a single word of his outrageous statements are ever questioned.
A body language expert examined Browder’s behaviour and concluded something was very off, he was simply memorising words as if from a script, with and despite his hyperbolic language, his movements on que, indicate he never expects to answer a single uncomfortable question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuIg9MVWTOo
Lucy Komisar’s ground breaking article on Browder for the Washington DC based anti-corruption project “100 Reporters” documents the entire fabrication and and massive media cover-up in great detail:
https://100r.org/2017/10/magnitsky/
Finally, evidence suggests that Browder was part of the setup of the Trump team in the so-called Trump Tower meeting: http://bit.ly/2wptI8q in a conspiracy which likely included his personal attorney, and DC lobbyist, Jonathan Winer, who was Christopher Steele’s handler at the US State Department since 2011. Also unreported, Browder had an appeal hearing, attempting to bury his deposition and disqualify defense council Baker-Hostetler, on the morning of 9 June 2016, the day of the Trump Tower meeting, a hearing that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, for Denis Katsyv, specifically came to the US to attend. The Trump Tower meeting was an afterthought, after Rob Goldstone, set up the meeting using the tactic of lying to both Don Jr and Veselnitskaya’s go-between Emin Agalarov, when all she wanted was advice on how to tell the Congress about Browder dragging her client through US Federal Court for years, on the basis of false evidence. Given Goldstone’s testimony, his admission of telling complete lies, like the “Dirt on Hillary”, it’s not difficult to imagine he had been working for person’s unknown.
Watch this Browder testimony to the US Senate, responding to softballs from Sen Lindsey Graham, where Browder’s hubris takes over, giving the game away:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzzMyhrAenY&feature=youtu.be&t=104
So I still ask “Who is Bill Browder?”
Jeffrey Epstein’s specific crimes aside, is Browder just another construct of the Intelligence Agencies? Where does he get the leverage to silence all his critics and have instant access to a compliant media at a minute’s notice, and is free to tell his lies and spew his Russophobic vitriol to Parliaments across the globe, including Australia in May 2020. Not only without question, when he smears scrupulously honest journalists like Komisar, the politicians “believe” Browder, again because his story has been specifically tailored to give cynical politicians the excuse to sanction anyone on the planet, on the basis of “Human Rights” violations. Apart from being grossly unfair, a violation of national sovereignty, in the countries affected, which are never Western, it simply convinces the populace that “Human Rights” are a sham.
These questions need to be asked, by the people of any so-called democracy, God knows no media or politician will, before any nation passes any poisonous legislation based on the word of Browder.
by Brett Harris.
