FOLLOW THE MONEY
AS WE WATCH THE MURDEROUS carnage 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 endemic corruption. The more senior you are, the richer you get. And the most senior person, Vladimir Putin, has become 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 firm in Russia. My business model was simple: buy deeply undervalued shares in Russian companies, expose these companies’ corruption, and then watch their share prices rise as the companies were forced to clean up. It worked like a charm. However, 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 profit of $1 billion, paying $230 million 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
