July 8, 2019 – On June 20th, the Wall Street Journal ran this article by reporter Kristin Broughton, “Financier Bill Browder Plays the Long Game to Expose Russian Money-Laundering.” The paper invited comments to mo*******@ws*.com
, so I sent this, first explaining my background as a prize-winning journalist on financial crime whose past stories have been published by the Journal.
June 17, 2019 – In May I was thrown off the IRE Investigative Reporters list because one of its influential members, OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Project) objected to my posts about William Browder, the tax fraudster who cheated Russia of $100 million and whose fake stories OCCRP has posted for years. Details here.
June 1, 2019 – This is a new and startling Russian charge that William Browder orchestrated the $230 million 2007 tax refund fraud. It claims that Browder organized the use of Hermitage shell companies to claim a fake tax refund in December 2007. He has blamed Russian tax officials for the scam, saying their collaborators re-registered the companies and carried out the legal scam.
May 31, 2019 – What happens when a US lawyer files a court statement that is perjured? Jonathan Winer, a Washington DC counsel to convicted tax evader William Browder, filed a declaration this week supporting a legal petition of Browder‘s Hermitage Capital Management to get banks operating in the US to provide documents he says he needs to defend himself against Russian charges of tax evasion.
May 29, 2019 – William Browder, the owner of the Hermitage Fund, who was run out of Russia in 2006 for tax evasion, is still battling Russian law enforcement authorities attempting to collecting on multi-millions of dollars of tax he failed to pay during his decade as the country‘s largest foreign investor. He has just gone to court in New York to counter yet another Russian indictment for tax evasion. Case 1:19-mc-00262-JMF Document 6-1 Filed 05/28/19
May 11, 2019 – The Tax Justice Network, organized in 2003 to fight offshore tax evasion and corruption, has censored a podcast its founding director recorded when I spoke at the Offshore Alert Conference in November in London. I didn’t write about this before now, because I though the TJN leaders might change their minds. But it turns out they are either cowardly or corrupt.
May 7, 2019 – The OCCRP, a Bill Browder acolyte and stenographer “news organization,” just got me kicked off, GLOBAL-L, a supposedly nonpolitical journalists‘ list, because I quoted from Browder‘s 2015 deposition in US Federal Court SDNY (Southern District of NY) in the Prevezon case showing OCCRP is a Browder collaborator.
May 4, 2019 – When journalists, pundits and analysts promote the Browder hoax, one usually has no chance to confront them with facts. They ignore emails. But April 15th, I had the opportunity to ask one. The speaker was Robert D. Blackwill, Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations. It was an event to promote his report, “Trump‘s Foreign Policies Are Better Than They Seem.”
March 5, 2019 – This is the audio of the panel on the Browder/Magnitsky hoax that filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, Browder tax-fraud collaborator Jamison Firestone of Firestone Duncan, and I spoke at in November 2018 in London. It was called “The Sergei Magnitsky Case: Fact vs. Fiction.” Andrei and I spoke fact, Firestone repeated Browder’s fiction!
Feb 27, 2019 – This is my radio interview today on Fault Lines with Lee Stranahan and Garland Nixon, the latest in a series blowing the whistle on convicted tax cheat and fraudster William Browder. Browder, who used offshore shells to move and launder profits on which he evaded taxes, was invited by the tax committee of the European Parliament to talk about how to combat offshore tax evasion. French member of parliament Nicolas Bay, the only truth-teller there, asked why he had gotten Andrei Nekrasov’s film The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes banned from a screening at the parliament. Browder was enraged!
Feb 19, 2019 – The European Parliament‘s tax committee a few weeks ago invited an admitted tax cheat, William Browder, and welcomed him as an honorable guy who could tell them how to solve the problem that he, evidence shows, represents. It seemed surreal.
The European Parliament created the Tax3 committee to deal with issues raised by the Panama Papers, Luxleaks, Paradise Papers and the like. And Browder, who set up his Russian investment fund on a network of offshore shell companies in Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, including one listed in the Panama Papers, was the chief expert at the Jan 29 hearing.
Jan 22, 2019 – To Sven Giegold, German Green member of the European Parliament who heads the Greens-Left caucus on corporate, financial and offshore corruption. We met in 2003 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, when we both were founding members of the Tax Justice Network, set up to fight international tax fraud. I am concerned that the Parliamentary Assembly, a sister organization of the European Parliament where you serve, has Jan 22 adopted a major resolution to urge member countries to pass “Magnitsky Acts” of the sort the US passed in 2012 that would build higher the barrier to the Russians‘ attempt to collect on tax cheat William Browder‘s offshore tax scams.
Jan 10, 2019 – Lies exposed on my Fault Lines interview today: Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel’s declarations that William Browder’s accountant Sergei Magnitsky was arrested for exposing a tax fraud by Russian officials. Echoed by a US Justice Department indictment of Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnitskaya, who defended the Russian company Prevezon, target of a political attack by the DOJ on behalf of Browder. Both claims are fabrications based on no evidence.
The Trump Tower meeting gets another intriguing layer
By Philip Bump Washington Post, Dec 20, 2018
“…..When they met, Trump Jr. didn‘t get what he was hoping for. Veselnitskaya, working from prepared notes, walked through an intricate and tangential accusation that a businessman named William Browder had allegedly committed tax fraud in the United States and Russia, as had one of Browder‘s partners, Ziff Brothers Investments, owned by Dirk, Edward and Daniel Ziff. (Notes Manafort took during the meeting and provided to investigators match the narrative above.)
Dec 9, 2018 – At a Council on Foreign Relations meeting on journalism Dec 5, I asked Stephen Engelberg, editor of ProPublica, and Brian Stelter, media reporter and anchor of CNN, why media didn’t report NBC’s killing Ken Dilanian‘s exposé of William Browder’s fake Magnitsky story.
Nov 30, 2018 – This is an analysis of the worst William Browder acolyte article I have seen to date, by Marie Brenner, published by Vanity Fair, November 11, 2018. It eschews evidence and simply writes what Browder says as a stenographer would do. The full text is here. Below are the most egregious excerpts with my comments marked **. They are extensive, as the piece is replete with fakery.
Nov 2, 2018 – I spoke today on Fault Lines radio about how Mikhail Khodorkovsky and William Browder scammed Russian energy sector companies by Khodorhovsky getting control of Yukos oil through rigged auctions in the corrupt Yeltsin regime and then using transfer-pricing to cheat minority shareholders and Russian taxpayers and Browder buying shares in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom through cutout companies to evade rules that banned purchases of its stock in Russia by foreigners.
Oct 24, 2018 – Waiting for William Browder’s Red Notice to be listed as fiction. Red Notice, p 276-7: “That night, at 12:15 a.m., the voice mail alert on my BlackBerry vibrated. Nobody ever called my BlackBerry. No one even knew the number. I looked at Elena and dialed into voice mail.…I heard a man in the midst of a savage beating. He was screaming and pleading. The recording lasted about two minutes and cut mid-wail.”
Oct 4, 2018 – The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists which with 95 other media organizations last November published a major report known as the Paradise Papers about offshore corruption. Now it is asking “our much-valued readers, what do you want to know about the impact of the Paradise Papers? Do you have a lingering question?” Answer: That is part of your ongoing offshore corruption inquiry. This focuses on the first part, the Panama Papers. Why don‘t you investigate William Browder‘s Mossack Fonseca connections?
Le Temps, Geneva, Aug 23, 2018 – (English translation follows French.) Le rapport de l‘ancien parlementaire socialiste sur l‘affaire Magnitsky a été jugé partial et inutilisable par le juge new-yorkais William H. Pauley III. Une passe d‘armes qui illustre le gouffre entre systemes judiciaires américain et européen. (English translation follows.)
Aug 21, 2018 – This is my interview today on Fault Lines with Garland Nixon and Lee Stranahan. I took the open letter in Time that William Browder wrote to President Trump before his meeting with Russian President Putin and simply transposed it. For example, Putin values money far more than human life became Browder values money far more than human life.
Aug 17, 2018 – The New Yorker story about Browder: How do you get credibility for a story that is mostly lies? You throw in a few negatives about the person you are going to white-wash. Then you repeat all his unproved assertions as if they were fact. And you don‘t bother to provide evidence. And you ignore the major story you ought to be telling.
William Browder sent you a letter before your meeting with President Putin, and I‘d like to offer you a perspective about Mr. Browder that you probably aren‘t getting elsewhere. I am copying the form of his letter, but substituting Browder where he wrote Putin, and including facts you and the public probably don‘t know. Though there are indications your State Department does know.
