UNBELIEVABLE: George Soros Employee Owns Defective Switch-Vote Biden Machines

How did a close George Soros associate , a Quantum Fund VP, who lived in his NYC apartment get accepted for crucial voting machinery?

Soros Minion: How did a close George Soros associate , a Quantum Fund VP, who lived in his NYC apartment get accepted for crucial voting machinery? Especially after Soros’ unrelenting attack on the US justice system by funding leftist DAs? Brown was concurrently Vice-Chair of Soros Fund Management & Vice-Chair of Open Society Institute. Is Lord Brown George Soros’ favorite lieutenant?

Agent Provocateur Brown: So, what kind of person is Lord Brown? He secretly advances Soros’ goals. An adviser to billionaire Beny Steinmetz, Brown ruthlessly used his position to relay confidential information to Soros about Steinmetz’ company to ruin a business deal. Brown was sued and fined €90,000. Brown is also Anti-Brexit and a climate zealot. When criticized about his friendship with Soros, and living on his colossal farm, Brown claimed he was “doing God’s work.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermitage_Capital_Management

Hermitage Capital Management is an investment fund and asset management company specializing in Russian markets founded by Bill Browder and Edmond Safra. Chief Operating Officer is Ivan Cherkasov.[1] Hermitage Capital Management headquarters are in Guernsey, it also maintains offices in the Cayman Islands, London and Moscow.[2][3]

Its main investment fund, the Hermitage Fund created in 1996,[2] was rated as extremely successful after earning 2,697% between 1996 and December 2007.[4]

Hermitage describe themselves as an activist fund. Its main tactics include the exposure of corporate corruption in the companies it is holding, in the hope of improving managerial behaviour and lessen the significant discount that corruption has on share prices. Most famously, Hermitage has helped to expose several high-profile cases of corruption in Russia’s largest company Gazprom between 1998 and 2000. In October 2000, Hermitage reported that “investors are valuing this company as if 99 percent of its assets have been stolen. The real figure is around 10 percent so that’s good news.”[5]

In April 2007, the firm launched Hermitage Global, an activist fund focused on global emerging markets.

Since 2015, Hermitage has operated as a family office hedge fund based in London, having returned outside capital to investors. The focus of the fund is still in emerging markets.[6]

Conflict with Russian government

Although the fund’s founder William Browder was a supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin, in November 2005 he was blacklisted by the Russian government as a “threat to national security” and denied entry to the country. According to publication in The Economist, the fund was blacklisted because its management interfered with the flow of money to “corrupt bureaucrats and their businessmen accomplices” in Russia.[7]

In April 2008 because three of Hermitage Capital’s subsidiaries had been placed under control of Boily Systems, which is a British Virgin Islands (BVI) company[a] that CTL established in 2007 for G.S.L. Law & Consulting which is a firm in Russia, Hermitage Capital Management sent a letter to Commonwealth Trust Limited (CTL) claiming that thieves had taken control of Hermitage’s three subsidiaries.[8] One of the companies, Diron Trade LLP, a stolen Magnitsky company with a Great Britain postal box, assisted in more than $5.8 billion in money laundering transfers between Swedbank’s baltic subsidiaries and Danske Bank during 6 months in 2010 and 2011 according to SVT.[9]

As the New York Times reported in 2008,[10] over the next two years, several of his associates and lawyers, as well as their relatives, were victims of crimes, including severe beatings and robberies during which documents were taken. In June 2007 dozens of police officers raided the Moscow offices of Hermitage and its law firm, confiscating documents and computers. When a member of the firm protested that the search was illegal, he was beaten by officers and hospitalized for two weeks. Hermitage became victim of what is known in Russia as “corporate raiding”: seizing companies and other assets with the aid of corrupt law enforcement officials and judges. Three Hermitage holdings companies were seized on what the company’s lawyers insist are bogus charges.

On 8 October, 2008 Hermitage released a video on YouTube accusing Russian Police of fraud.[10]

On November 16, 2009 Sergei Magnitsky, a partner of the legal company Firestone Duncan, who was a representative and legal consultant for William Browder in Moscow, having been accused in tax fraud and imprisoned for 11 months, died in prison. In 2013 it was announced that Magnitsky will go on trial posthumously.

Opalesque.TV released a video on February 8, 2010 in which Browder reveals details of Sergey Magnitsky’s ordeal during his eleven months in detention.[11] In 2012 Hermitage filed a complaint with Cyprus anti-corruption agency Mokas regarding $31m funds illegally moved from Russia through a chain banks in Cyprus. However, in 2015 Cyprus police passed the documents to Russian investigators in the alleged tax-evasion case of Magnitsky and Browder, widely described as a set-up.[12]

In 2013, Hermitage closed its Russian fund which in 2005, had over $4 billion in assets under management. In 2013, the fund was evaluated as having less than $60 million in assets. Closing the fund led to a dispute between investors and HSBC which was a manager and trustee of the fund.[13]

In December 2017, Browder and Cherkasov were sentenced in absentia to 9 and 8 years of imprisonment respectively by a Russian court for tax evasion by Hermitage Capital Management and causing $58million of damage to the Russian federal budget.[14]

In April 2018, Natalia Veselnitskaya announced that on behalf of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation, she was investigating Bill Browder and Hermitage Capital, but denied working for the Kremlin.[15][16]

In May 2018, Bill Browder praised the Magnitsky amendment to the Proceeds of Crime Act released in the United States calling for “swift and robust action” adding that “top Putin oligarchs should be on that list”.[17] Also in May, Browder was briefly detained in Spain when a Russian arrest warrant for extradition placed him on Interpol’s Red Notice.[18]

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b15134y9lz49ms/seeing-red

So Browder called his chief financial backer and confidant, Edmond Safra, the legendary banker to the wealthy, who died in 1999. Safra’s counsel: “If we want to fight this, we do it properly. We go to war.” First, Browder hired bodyguards. Next, he talked to everyone he knew who had leverage with either Renaissance or Sidanco, including Safra’s friend, hedge fund manager George Soros, a significant investor in Russia, and Sir John Browne, CEO of BP, which owned 10 percent of Sidanco. . .

After graduate school, Bill worked briefly for the Boston Consulting Group, then for Robert Maxwell’s Central and Eastern European Partnership before joining Salomon in 1994. There he once parlayed a $25 million investment in Russian privatization vouchers into $100 million in six months.

But he left to start Hermitage in 1996 — and became embroiled in no fewer than 11 public rows with Russian oligarchs in less than five years.

It was a turbulent time. Russia’s default on its domestic debt in 1998 had created a climate of political and economic chaos that gave rise to a stunning display of outright corporate theft. The government had devalued the ruble, the stock market had crashed, and Russia had become a virtual pariah on international markets. The oligarchs saw that they had virtual carte blanche to do whatever they pleased.

“The default and devaluation sent the message from the state that it was okay to cheat,” says James Fenker, chief strategist at Troika Dialog, a Moscow-based brokerage. “The message was enthusiastically seized upon by the corporate sector. It was a crude and rude time — the nadir of corporate governance in Russia.”

Browder, meanwhile, had a mess of his own to deal with. Hermitage was devastated by the crash of ‘98. Its funds under management plummeted during a ten-month free fall from $1.38 billion to $165 million. Of the 42 funds then investing in Russia that had managed more than $10 million, only ten survived. “The party was over,” recalls Browder.

But he reasoned that Hermitage mostly owned companies that exported oil and were paid in dollars, while the bulk of their staff and capital expenditures were in devalued rubles, boosting their competitiveness. One catch: “I knew my investments were fundamentally sound, but I had to make sure they were not about to be stolen from me,” says Browder.

He had determined early on that the best assets in Russia were the large holding companies, not their so-called “daughter” assets: partially owned, separately listed subsidiaries that were often more widely traded than the illiquid holding companies themselves.

Browder’s emphasis on holding companies would pay off splendidly. Oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, CEO of Yukos Oil, began a concerted campaign to gain full control of their company subsidiaries, with many riding roughshod over investors in these daughter assets. Today just 15 companies control more than 50 percent of Russian output.

“Avoiding getting ripped off was the key to making money,” confides Browder. “The best investment policy was to try to align the fund’s interests with the oligarchs’.” The Hermitage Fund soared 196 percent in 1999 because of big gains on such holding companies as Lukoil and Yukos.

Postconsolidation, the Russian investment landscape has changed dramatically but not necessarily to Hermitage’s disadvantage. Consolidation was nasty, brutish and short. Most of the oligarchs behaved deplorably toward minority shareholders whose holdings they sought, through such unethical if not necessarily illegal stratagems as threats of massive share dilutions and implicit blackmail.

Now the oligarchs proclaim that they’ve undergone a conversion and become good corporate citizens. “Once you own 51 percent of something, you start behaving like an owner,” says Stephen Jennings, CEO of Renaissance Capital. “What’s the point of stealing money and risking going to prison if you can grow the market cap of your company and become seriously rich another way? Yesterday’s robber barons inevitably become today’s respected businesspeople.”

Browder’s scrappiness also played its part in inducing the oligarchs to go straight. For instance, in October 2000 Browder launched his biggest corporate battle — with Gazprom. Hermitage held a small stake but was wary of the oil and gas giant because of scuttlebutt that it was engaged in massive asset-stripping, with the enthusiastic participation of its chairman, former Russian prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin, and its CEO, Rem Vyakhirev.

On the other hand, this was Russia, and Gazprom was cheap. At the end of 2000 its market capitalization worked out to 5 cents per barrel of hydrocarbon reserves; by contrast, Exxon Mobil Corp.’s reserves had a stock market value of $13.68 per barrel.

Browder figured he could put a reasonable valuation on Gazprom, provided he could find out how much of the company had in effect been stolen through asset-stripping. The bureaucratic instinct of Russians provided Browder with the evidence he needed. Hermitage research chief Kleiner discovered records of transferred assets at the Federal Securities Commission and other agencies. A picture of corporate theft at Gazprom soon emerged. By October 2000 Kleiner was able to report that 9.65 percent of Gazprom’s assets had been looted — an amount equivalent to more than $5 billion.

Gazprom had salted away assets and cash flows into companies run by executives’ wives, sons, daughters, uncles and sometimes by the executives themselves. One company, Itera Group, has been a conspicuous beneficiary of Gazprom, rising to become the world’s third-largest oil and gas company. In 1999 Gazprom sold Itera 32 percent of a joint venture company called Purgas for $1,200; the value of the stake has since been estimated at $566 million. Between 1996 and 2001 Gazprom incrementally signed over its gas distribution business in the Commonwealth of Independent States to Itera, forgoing an estimated $1 billion in annual profits. Itera has reincorporated in the Netherlands Antilles.

The corruption, as bad as it was, wasn’t as awful as the market had imagined. Hermitage took a large position in Gazprom. But Browder decided that he couldn’t let Kleiner’s findings molder in a file cabinet. “What we discovered was so shocking,” he says, “that we started to selectively leak it to the press.”

Browder’s tactics attracted the attention of Alexander Dyke, a corporate governance specialist at the Harvard Business School. “It’s his use of the media I find interesting,” says Dyke. “It works in Russia, and what interests me is whether his approach could also work in the U.S. and other markets.”

Browder’s media campaign had an impact. In November 2000 he was able to arrange a meeting with Boris Fedorov, a former minister of Finance and part-owner of Russian brokerage United Financial Group, who served on Gazprom’s board as a representative of minority shareholders. Together Fedorov and Browder rounded up the legally required 10 percent of shareholders to call for an audit of Gazprom’s accounts.

At a December board meeting, CEO Vyakhirev refused point-blank to allow the audit. This infuriated Russian Economic Planning Minister German Gref, one of five Gazprom board members who represent the interests of the government, which owns 38 percent of the company. Gref told Vyakhirev that he had no choice but to consent to an audit. The CEO acceded, but on the condition that the board could choose its own auditor. Its choice: Gazprom’s existing auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, which would effectively audit itself.

But before PWC could report, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, sacked Vyakhirev, starting a purge of Gazprom’s old guard (Putin appointees now control the board).

PWC presented the results of its audit in June 2001, concluding that there was nothing untoward about the relationship between Itera and Gazprom. Browder dismisses the audit as “false and misleading,” and on April 16 this year, he sued PWC in Moscow. The suit was thrown out of court on the grounds that the only business relationship at issue was between Gazprom and PWC. Hermitage is preparing an appeal. PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman Dave Nestor says: “Mr. Browder is looking for publicity. There is no basis for a lawsuit against PricewaterhouseCoopers.”

Meanwhile, the process of recovering assets has begun, boosting Gazprom’s share price. Between October 2000, when Hermitage purchased its stake, and the end of July this year, the holding has returned 168 percent.

Gazprom might have been forced to reform even without Browder’s media barrage; the government has an interest in protecting its stake in the company. But observers praise Browder and Fedorov for promoting reform. Says Alfa Bank’s Gualtieri: “The revelations were so bad the government had to act. Using the Western media was a smart political tactic.”

Fedorov and Browder fell out, however, when UFG subsequently backed a dilutive share issue seemingly intended to benefit insiders at Sberbank, Russia’s dominant retail bank, in which Hermitage holds a 5 percent stake. Fedorov now expresses contempt for Browder. “He thinks he is a mover and shaker,” he says. “It’s pathetic. He thinks he single-handedly changed laws in Russia. No one in the government has ever heard of him.” Tensions between the two reached a peak this June when Browder ran against Fedorov for the minority shareholder seat on the board of Gazprom. Fedorov won easily.

Browder detects a change in Fedorov since Moscow took control of the Gazprom board. “Boris was a politician,” says the fund manager. “He put up a great fight for minority shareholders against the previous management. I don’t sense the same appetite now.”

The Russian government is the shareholder that Browder increasingly will be pitted against. He has large positions in Gazprom, Sberbank and monopoly electric utility Unified Energy Systems — in all of which the government is the biggest shareholder. The rewards of owning such companies are potentially huge: UES, for instance, trades at only about 10 percent of its book value. But the political risks are daunting. . .

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