32 Time April 25/May 2, 2022
As we wATch The murderous cAr-
nage that Putin has unleashed against
innocent Ukrainians, we are all trying
to understand his motivations. Some
say he’s reacting to NATO expansion;
others contend that Putin can’t abide a
Western-leaning Ukraine. Still others
offer that Putin so laments the break-
up of the Soviet Union that he wants to
reassemble it.
From my perspective, it’s not due to
any of these reasons. It’s simply about
money. Unlike most other governments,
Russia’s is not there to serve the people,
but to enrich senior officials through en-
demic corruption. The more senior you
are, the richer you get. And the most
senior person, Vladimir Putin, has be-
come the richest. I estimate his wealth
to be well north of $200 billion.
I’ve seen how Russian corruption
works with my own eyes. For a decade,
between 1996 and 2005, I ran the largest
foreign investment frm in Russia. My
business model was simple: buy deeply
undervalued shares in Russian compa-
nies, expose these companies’ corrup-
tion, and then watch their share prices
rise as the companies were forced to
clean up. It worked like a charm. How-
ever, as you can imagine, the oligarchs
and corrupt officials who were doing the
stealing weren’t too happy with me. In
November 2005, I was kicked out of the
country and declared a threat to Russian
national security.
I moved to London and regrouped
with my small team. We also went about
liquidating the fund’s Russian assets. In
2006, our holding companies reported
a proft of $1 billion, paying $230 mil-
lion in taxes to the Russian treasury. I
was done with Russia.
But Russia was not done with me.
In 2007, my office in Moscow was
raided by the Russian Interior Minis-
try. All of our documents were seized,
and these were used to perpetrate a
highly complex tax rebate fraud scheme
to steal $230 million from the Russian
treasury that our investment holding
companies had previously paid.
My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discov-
ered the crime, testifed against the of-
fcials involved, and in retaliation was
arrested. He was held for 358 days, tor-
tured, and killed on Nov. 16, 2009, in
Russian police custody. He was only 37
years old. He left behind a wife, a 7-year-
old son, and a loving mother.
Since then, it has been my life’s mis-
sion to get justice for Sergei. Unfortu-
nately, it was impossible to get justice
in Russia. The Russian government pro-
moted the people who had killed Ser-
gei, giving them state honors. Three
years after Sergei’s murder, the Rus-
sian government put him on trial in the
frst ever case against a dead man in
Russian history.
This story is a microcosm of what
happens every day in Russia. You need
to multiply the crime that Sergei dis-
covered by 1,000 to begin to appreci-
ate how much has been stolen by Putin
and his cronies.
The problem for Putin is that this
level of corruption is unsustainable.
Russia presents itself as a democracy
to its people. And those people are the
ones deprived of health care, educa-
tion, paved roads, and a decent standard
of living so that senior officials in the
Putin regime can enjoy yachts, private
jets, and villas in the south of France.
No matter what Russian propagandists
peddle, eventually people will get angry.
Putin looked around, and what he saw
frightened him. In Kazakhstan, another
corrupt dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev,
was ousted in January. In Belarus, Presi-
dent Alexander Lukashenko was almost
ousted following the fraudulent 2019
election. It was only because of Putin’s
intervention that Lukashenko is still in
power.
So Putin dug into the dictator’splaybook and started a war. Now, in-
stead of the Russian people being mad
at him, they can be mad at “Nazifed”
Ukrainians, or the U.S., or NATO.
So far, he seems to be succeeding,
with his approval ratings in Russia
around 83%.
It is now plain that Putin is evil. This
is not breathless hyperbole. It is fact. He
has no regard for human life and only
lusts over power and money. In his cal-
culus, money is power, and vice versa.
Amazingly, Putin himself has now
been sanctioned by the West. But fnd-
ing the whereabouts of his money is no
easy task. I’ve spent the last 14 years
trying to understand the dark money
flowing out of Russia. Once we found
it, there was a huge price to pay.On April 3, 2016, the British newspa-
per the Guardian published an article
titled, “Revealed: the $2bn offshore
trail that leads to Vladimir Putin.” The
author was part of a consortium of 370
journalists from 80 countries report-
ing on a data leak known as the Panama
Papers.
Central to the leak were over 11 mil-
lion documents held by the Panamanian
law frm Mossack Fonseca. The fles re-
vealed fnancial details of hundreds of
thousands of offshore companies and
accounts belonging to wealthy people
from around the world.
The articles were divided by country,
and each country had a star. In Russia,
that star was a classical cellist named
Sergei Roldugin.
Roldugin wasn’t just a cellist, but
also Putin’s best friend, going back to
the 1970s. Even though Roldugin pro-
fessed to drive a used car and play a sec-
ondhand cello, he controlled companies
that had accumulated billions of dollars
of assets since Putin took power, effec-
tively making him the richest musician
in the world.
A quick Google search reveals that
the richest musicians are Jay-Z, Sir
Paul McCartney, and Sir Andrew Lloyd
Webber, who are each worth around
$1.25 billion. Yo-Yo Ma is probably the
world’s wealthiest cellist, and he’s worth
“only” about $25 million.
How had Roldugin become so
wealthy? The answer, in my opinion, is
that this cellist was serving as a nominee