Rapacious Putin: Three books revealing the depth of his corruption. ..

[JHan]

The man our President-Elect admires and who he might pattern himself after:

Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No 1 Enemy by Bill Browder

"In 2008 a young Russian lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive tax fraud. He found evidence that a group of well-connected Russian officials had stolen a whopping $230m. The same officials had Magnitsky arrested; he was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment. Magnitsky – who suffered from pancreatitis and gall stones – spent months in pain. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. One day his condition grew critical. Guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat him to death.

Magnitsky’s case was to become the most notorious and best-documented example of human rights abuse in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That this happened was down to one man: Bill Browder, a US-born financier and the CEO of a successful asset management company. Once a Putin fan, Browder found himself in trouble in 2005 when he was deported from Russia. He hired a team, including Magnitsky. When the Kremlin got nasty, most of the lawyers fled. Magnitsky – a family man with two small boys, who liked Beethoven – refused to leave. He believed the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic misjudgment."

*snip*

Inadvertently, Browder had found Putin and co’s Achilles heel, and a model that might be used against other mid-ranking human rights abusers. In Soviet times, the politburo lived quite a bit better than the average Soviet citizen. It had special shops and holidays on the Black Sea. In Putin’s Russia, however, the difference was vast: top bureaucrats were worth millions and enjoyed international lifestyles. They owned property in London and Florida. They sent their kids to British private schools. What was the point of stealing all that money if you could only spend it in Sochi, with its scruffy, pebbly beach?

The Magnitsky law drew an apoplectic, asymmetric response from Putin. He ended the adoption of Russian babies by childless American couples. And, in a twist that might have been written by Gogol, the Kremlin put Magnitsky on trial. That he was already dead was apparently not a problem. In summer 2013 a judge convicted him of tax evasion, announcing a surreal verdict to an empty barred cage.

*snip*

"The story of Russia’s scandalous privatisation programme under Boris Yeltsin is familiar. Facing defeat in the runup to the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin gave state assets away cheap to the oligarchs. In return they got him re-elected. Browder, meanwhile, piled into the Russian stock market. By 1997 Hermitage had become the best performing investment fund in the world, and its CEO hailed as a financial superman. But he failed to anticipate Russia’s 1998 crash; in its aftermath, oligarchs screwed western investors like Browder by diluting their shares in Russian companies. Browder fought back and when Putin became president in 2000 hailed him as an ally in the fight against oligarchic malfeasance. In reality, the new president wasn’t interested in cleaning up Russia. His goal was simple: to redistribute the states’s abundant resources among his KGB friends.

Red Notice offers a scant and less than convincing account of these years when Browder talked up Russia in western forums. He now admits he was “naive” to take Putin at face value. And yet it’s impossible not to admire him for his subsequent pertinacious campaign against the officials who caused his lawyer’s death.

The British government wasn’t much help, we learn. (Browder, based in London, is a UK citizen.) Two interior ministry officials – Artem Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov – allegedly orchestrated the $230m fraud, stealing taxes paid by Hermitage to the Russian state. Browder found out where the money went – on Range Rovers, Moscow real estate and tacky properties in Dubai. A Russian living in the UK, Alexander Perepilichnyy, offered further clues as to how the officials had routed the “rebate” via a Moscow tax office.

In November 2012 – just as the Magnitsky act was passed – Perepilichnyy collapsed and died while jogging outside his Surrey mansion. He was 44. His cause of death is still a mystery."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/26/red-notice-how-i-became-putin-no-1-enemy-bill-browder-review


Also The Red Web by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan – Russia’s attack on internet freedoms: A masterful study of the struggle between the Kremlin’s desire to control information and the unruly world of ordinary digital citizens

Soldatov and Borogan argue that Snowden’s unexpected presence in Moscow – he was trying to get to Latin America – was a gift to the Kremlin. Snowden might have hoped that his revelations would trigger a debate inside Russia over domestic internet surveillance, and its limits, as they had in most of the western world. (The exception is Britain, where details of the government’s mass data-scooping were met with a yawn.)

Instead, the Russian authorities gleefully used Snowden and his leaks as a pretext to roll out new repressive measures. Russia’s federal agency for supervising communications, Roskomnadzor, blacklisted sites under a deliberately fuzzy law prohibiting “extremism”. Bloggers with more than 3,000 followers were forced to register with the government. Independent news portals, including one run by former chess champion Garry Kasparov, were banned. All this was done under the banner of “digital sovereignty”.

Meanwhile, Sorm was beefed up. Another law compelled phone companies and internet providers to keep data for 12 hours, so the state might examine it. The FSB got a new and powerful weapon too: deep packet inspection or DPI. This allows the agency to read everyone’s emails and to weed out websites belonging to those it deems to be politically unacceptable."Moscow turned up the heat up on foreign platforms too. Soon after Putin seized Crimea, it asked Twitter to close the account of the far-right Ukrainian party, Pravy Sektor. Twitter complied. The response generally from western tech giants to the Kremlin’s onslaught against free speech was remarkably spineless. Google, Twitter and Facebook all scurried to Moscow to meet with government representatives.

Soldatov and Borogan are scathing about Snowden’s response to all this. Apart from one question to Putin during a 2014 televised phone-in, when he asked about Russia’s surveillance practices, Snowden has been silent. He doesn’t comment on Russian affairs. He gives interviews to visiting Americans and others, but won’t meet Russian reporters or Moscow-based foreign correspondents. Soldatov and Borogan tried to see him and failed.

In Snowden’s defence, his reluctance to criticise the Kremlin is understandable: he is a man with few options. Negotiations to cut a deal with the US administration petered out some time ago, and if he returns home Snowden faces espionage charges that don’t allow him a public-interest defence. One suspects he would like to say more about Russia’s internet clampdown. And Snowden is this century’s most important whistleblower, not a Russian agent, as his lazier critics have claimed.

Still, Soldatov and Borogan suggest he has failed to rise to the challenges of his situation. Snowden is fond of quoting the UN declaration of human rights, they note, but ended up in a country with a miserable human rights record. For months, they add, he pretended he wasn’t in Russia “but just somewhere”. In the words of Stas Kozlovsky, the leader of Russia’s Wikipedia community, which were said in sorrow not anger: “Snowden could have done good things globally, but for Russia he was a disaster.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/02/the-red-web-review-andrei-soldatov-irina-borogan-review-russias-attack-internet-freedoms

And: Every major business that sprouted up in Russia in the early 1990s had the help of former KGB officers—and their money. by Karen Dawisha

"In explaining the system’s workings, Dawisha enumerates the standard shenanigans of crooked regimes: bribetaking from domestic and foreign companies seeking business permits; kickbacks from inflated no-bid contracts for state projects; privatization deals rigged to enrich cronies who will later be cash cows for the Kremlin; illicit exports of raw materials purchased at state-subsidized prices and sold for a killing; “donations” from oligarchs eager to keep feeding at the government’s trough; real estate scams yielding mega-profits and palatial homes; money laundering; election-fixing; labyrinthine offshore accounts; lucrative partnerships with the mob; and the intimidation, even elimination, of would-be whistle-blowers.

To prosper, Russia’s superrich must demonstrate absolute loyalty to the president. As Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other tycoons have discovered, the punishment for defiance is severe.

Dawisha won’t disappoint readers seeking examples of industrial-size sleaze. She reckons Putin’s private wealth at $40 billion and lists among his prized possessions yachts, planes and palaces — along with a $700,000 wristwatch collection for good measure. As for the Friends of Vladimir, Dawisha writes that “more than half of the $50 billion spent on the Sochi Olympics simply disappeared into the pockets of Putin’s cronies.” The Rotenberg brothers, Putin’s childhood chums, alone garnered $2.5 billion of the outlay for the games.

Russia’s roster of 110 billionaires remains remarkably static, even as the wealthy in other countries rise and fall. What these plutocrats share are longstanding, close connections to Putin. And not a few are former K.G.B. operatives themselves."

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/books/review/putins-kleptocracy-by-karen-dawisha.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-putins-kleptocracy-by-karen-dawisha-1412118992