Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is Bill Browder. The topic on The Nightly Show is gay marriage with panel members Lance Bass, Sally Kohn, Jessica Kirson, and Michel Faulkner.
Bill Browder is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, and a noted critic of Vladimir Putin. He is also now an author, on to discuss his book
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice
A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin’s corruption.
Bill Browder’s journey started on the South Side of Chicago and moved through Stanford Business School to the dog-eat-dog world of hedge fund investing in the 1990s. It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia.
In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder’s offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund’s companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder’s attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear.
Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei’s name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.
There is no gulag in today’s Russia. There are no show trials. Except, that is, for the tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky was beaten to death in 2009 in prison, where he was being held on trumped-up charges for alleging that state officials had robbed Russian taxpayers of millions of dollars. He was then tried and convicted posthumously of tax fraud. His brutal death capped off the era of Wild West capitalism in Russia—a period amply and engagingly described in “Red Notice” by Bill Browder, one of its chief American participants.
Voucher privatization was supposed to be a system in which every Russian citizen—all 150 million—would receive a privatization certificate exchangeable at public auctions for stock in one of the new companies. It turned into a scramble among insiders to “acquire” these vouchers by any means. This included, by Mr. Browder’s account, the closure of regional airports to prevent employees and rival elites from getting to the auctions in Moscow. With competition suppressed, the value of each voucher did not exceed $20. As Mr. Browder notes: “Since these vouchers were exchangeable for roughly 30 percent of the shares of all Russian companies, this meant that the valuation of the entire Russian economy was only $10 billion! That was one-sixth the value of Wal-Mart!” This is how the oligarchs were born. Men like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky gained control of whole industries for small sums.
Mr. Browder admits he was an early Putin enthusiast: He believed Mr. Putin would bring stability to the markets. He was also a minority investor in Gazprom, the oil giant that is Russia’s largest company, and he had been advocating for greater corporate transparency. Despite the fact that it was eight times the size of ExxonMobil and 12 times the size of BP, Gazprom was trading, Mr. Browder estimates, at a 99.7% discount to those companies per barrel of reserves. The reason? Rampant corruption. Mr. Browder considered getting Western investment banks to expose the fraud, but concluded that “their lips were so firmly planted on the asses of Gazprom’s management that they would never publicly acknowledge the egregious thefts going on under their noses.” The hedge-funder took it on himself to become an activist shareholder.
The tireless efforts of Sergei Magnitsky revealed this scam. But instead of going after the perpetrators, Russian authorities arrested Magnitsky in November 2008 and held him in pretrial detention for a year. He refused to recant, and as documents later revealed, he was beaten to death with rubber batons by eight officials in full riot gear. Mr. Putin said Magnitsky had died of a heart attack. The case against Mr. Browder and Magnitsky continued. Both were found guilty of tax fraud in March 2013—the first conviction of a dead person in Europe since 897, Mr. Browder writes, when “the Catholic Church convicted Pope Formosus posthumously, cut off his papal fingers, and threw his body into the Tiber.”
Robbed by the Kremlin
This sounds like it could be a good interview. It is not often you hear somebody from Wall Street complaining that a playing field is too corrupt for them.
Lance Bass is a pop singer, dancer, actor, film and television producer, and author known for being in the boy band 'N Sync. In July 2006, Bass revealed that he is gay in a cover story for People magazine.
Sally Kohn is a liberal political commentator, community organizer, and founder and chief executive officer of the Movement Vision Lab, a grassroots think tank. Kohn met her partner, Sarah Hansen, at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2003.
Jessica Kirson is a stand Up comedian, producer, writer, and actress. Starting her career in 1998, Kirson soon realized the extent of homophobia and gender bias in both the comedy field and nation at large.
“There are so many funny women who don’t get the stage time or money they deserve,” she points out. “If you label yourself as a lesbian comedian, unfortunately, you’re going to get pigeonholed. You’re not going to get a lot of things, and it’s going to be harder for you,” states Kirson.
Eventually, she made the decision to come out to her family. Kirson’s family was very accepting; they were more concerned about how she would be treated by the world, rather than the fact that she was a lesbian. Perhaps it is because of her family’s supportive reaction that Kirson often has a message for her audience at every show.
“I point out how a lot of people are angry, a lot of people are still racist and homophobic. I have ways of saying it where it’s funny, but it points out the truth. I really want people to walk away and think to themselves, ‘God, maybe I should be more accepting and kinder,'” she reflects. Comedy in Bloom: Coming Out of the Funny Closet
Michel Faulkner is a former New York Jets football player and was the 2010 Republican nominee for U.S. Representative for New York's 15th congressional district. He is the pastor for New Horizon Church in New York City.
African-American and conservative, Mr. Faulkner has a religious and political pedigree that includes a stint as a vice president at Liberty University under the tutelage of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and work on the campaigns of Michael R. Bloomberg, Rudolph W. Giuliani and George E. Pataki.
Even in a reliably Democratic district, Mr. Faulkner holds fast to a conservative platform: for lower taxes, against abortion rights, against same-sex marriage and for small government.
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This Week's Guests
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Th 2/5: Bob Odenkirk