Kremlin critic Bill Browder wants governments to step up efforts to get to the riches squirreled away by Russian oligarchs and linked to President Vladimir Putin by forcing the accountants, lawyers and others who set up murky legal and financial structures to become whistleblowers.
Browder, author of the nonfiction best-seller “Freezing Order: “A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath,” says Russia’s war in Ukraine has increased attention on how oligarchs are custodians of the Russian leader’s wealth.
“But the oligarchs are not naïve,” Browder told The Associated Press on Tuesday at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. “They’ve hired the best lawyers, 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-through.”
The founder of Hermitage Capital, an early investor in post-Soviet Russia, Browder raised the alarm after his Russian tax adviser, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison in 2009. He has become arguably one of the world’s biggest critics of Putin ever since.
Speaking to the AP in Davos, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda — a sharp critic of Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine — acknowledged it’s not easy to follow the “dark and dirty money” of Russian oligarchs.
“But we have to do this: To investigate and of course to freeze the assets as much as possible, and then afterward to find a legal...
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