Bill Browder Puts Putin on Notice with Exposé of Corruption

Bill Browder不能得到足够的宣传。上世纪90年代末和21世纪初，他担任莫斯科埃尔米塔奇资本管理公司（Hermitage Capital Management）负责人时，利用媒体曝光了俄罗斯大型国有油气公司Gazprom猖獗的资产剥离行为，并在弗拉基米尔•普京（Vladimir Putin）政府代表股东进行干预时大发雷霆。

Today, Browder, 50, is a sworn enemy of Putin, and he’s betting that publicity can keep him alive and achieve a measure of justice for his friend and lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered for exposing high-level corruption in Russia.

布劳德作为后苏联时期俄罗斯最杰出的西方投资者的兴衰大致轮廓众所周知，但他在新书中详细叙述了这一点Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.

布劳德在从伦敦的家到纽约的图书巡回访问中接受采访时说，写书“比我做过的任何事都难——管理对冲基金更容易”。他决定自己的书不会像床头柜上的书堆一样没人读，于是找了他18岁的儿子大卫做非正式编辑，一次给他一章作为反馈。“如果我能让他保持兴趣，”他解释道，“我知道我可能会让全世界都对我感兴趣。”

他从来没有。布劳德的故事既是一个不太可能的个人发现的故事，也是对俄罗斯在普京统治下沦为一个无法无天的盗贼统治的一个该死的揭露。

布劳德是美国中西部一个左派家庭的后裔（他的祖父厄尔·布劳德在20世纪30年代和40年代领导美国共产党），他年轻时叛逆，决定成为一名资本家，在芝加哥大学获得工商管理硕士学位，并前往俄罗斯寻求名利。1992年，他在摩尔曼斯克的一个渔船队接受了一项投资银行业务，这让他看到了潜力：俄罗斯的私有化代金券计划对俄罗斯所有公司的估值仅为100亿美元，而俄罗斯目前是世界第八大经济体。

布劳德在1996年用已故金融家埃德蒙萨弗拉的2500万美元创办了Hermitage。多亏了他的精明和坚持不懈的研究，他发掘出了股价大幅偏低的股票，并将Hermitage变成了全球表现最好的基金，截至1997年底，该基金的资产规模达到10亿美元。俄罗斯1998年的违约几乎让他一蹶不振，但布劳德一路奋起，赢得了两场不太可能的战役：1998年，在石油公司西丹科（现隶属于俄罗斯国家石油公司）发行稀释性债券的问题上击败寡头弗拉基米尔·波塔宁（Vladimir Potanin）；1998年，在剥离价值数十亿美元的天然气资产的问题上，面对俄罗斯天然气工业股份公司（Gazprom）2001

他说：“这些家伙都趾高气扬，好像他们是最坏的家伙，事实上，他们的吠叫声远远大于他们的咬。“在这种情况下，我或许获得了太多的信心。”

Browder’s biggest mistake was considering Putin to be an ally. The president had tipped the Gazprom case in Hermitage’s favor by sacking the company’s CEO and installing Alexey Miller with a remit to secure the company’s assets. Browder even welcomed the 2003 arrest of Yukos Oil Co. boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky, seeing it as the beginning of the end for a small group of oligarchs that had stolen the country’s wealth. “I was cheering because I thought things were finally going to get back to normal,” he says. “One down, 21 to go.”

Reality finally hit home in November 2005, when Browder was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on his return from a weekend in London, held for 15 hours and thrown out of the country.

At this point Browder’s story of investing bravado turns into a thriller as compelling as any John le Carré spy novel. He succeeded in spiriting Hermitage’s then-$4.5 billion in capital out of Russia and moving his key staff to London, but he failed to anticipate the depravity of corrupt Interior Ministry officials. They fraudulently reregistered several Hermitage shell companies, reclaimed $230 million in taxes that Hermitage had paid and arrested Magnitsky on trumped-up charges of fraud. After a year of brutal treatment in Russia’s modern-day gulag, Magnitsky was beaten and left to die in an isolation cell.

“Everybody said you’re crazy to take on the oligarchs,” Browder recalls. “I took on the oligarchs, and everything was okay. And so I started to think that all this stuff was just prejudice and the reality was much less severe. And it turned out that everyone was right from the beginning: It was crazy to go to Russia, and it absolutely was crazy to take on the oligarchs. The consequences have been literally fatal.”

Browder tried to turn Hermitage into an emerging-markets fund, but in 2013 he returned investors’ money; today he runs the firm as a family office. His main obsession is bringing Magnitsky’s killers to justice. His passionate lobbying persuaded the U.S. Congress to pass the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, which bars 34 people implicated in the lawyer’s murder from visiting the U.S. or using the country’s banking system. Last year the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for similar sanctions.

早些年，布劳德的傲慢和高调策略激怒了许多竞争对手，但他揭露腐败和追查杀害马格尼茨基的凶手的努力赢得了他的赞赏。“他是个英雄，”总部位于纽约的Firebird Management的联合创始人伊恩•黑格（Ian Hague）表示。Firebird Management是后苏联时期俄罗斯的另一个先驱投资者，该公司继续管理着俄罗斯约4亿美元的资产。“我认为没有一个人比他对俄罗斯的正面影响更大。总有一天他们会在那里为他造一座雕像——等他们清醒过来的时候。”

Browder isn’t holding his breath for that. He worries about his own security, mindful of the murder by polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of Russia’s FSB secret service, at a London hotel in 2006. In 2012, Alexander Perepilichnyy, a Russian exile who provided Browder’s team with information about the fraud against Hermitage, was found dead on a roadside near his home in the southwest London suburb of Weybridge. And in 2013, Russian authorities put Browder on trial in absentia — and Magnitsky posthumously — for tax evasion. They even tried to issue an international arrest warrant through Interpol — the Red Notice of the book’s title — only to be turned down.

Browder can’t see any change for the better in Russia while Putin is in power. The president’s penchant for doubling down rather than backing down means that repression at home and aggression abroad are likely to get worse, and Browder urges the West to draw a firm line inUkraineand arm the Kiev government.

“Putin’s backed himself into a corner by stealing so much money that he’s afraid of his own people,” he says. “He started this war because his presidency was shaky. He saw what happened to the Ukrainian president and realized that the same thing could happen to him very easily.”

布劳德警告说，任何试图廉价收购俄罗斯资产的投资者都应该三思而后行。随着卢布的持续下跌，莫斯科很快就会实施资本管制，并将摇摇欲坠的企业国有化。西方国家对俄罗斯企业实施的经济制裁有望让企业盗窃的糟糕日子重现。布劳德说：“当俄罗斯企业关闭资本市场时，企业就没有动力表现自己。”。“这是1998年之后发生的事情，现在也会发生同样的事情。俄罗斯的公司治理将变得更糟，因为西方投资者不再重要。”

对布劳德来说没关系。俄罗斯的市场对他来说已经不重要了。如今，他把所有的钱都放在了北美和欧洲，尽管管理这些资金比他作为人权活动家的新职业更重要。

“I think it’s more interesting to fight for justice than to fight for money,” he says.