I'm here to speak about Russia and my fight with Russia
and the fact that the Russian government murdered my lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Now, whenever I give a talk about this fight that I'm involved in,
the first question that pops up in people's minds is,
"How did this guy with an American accent end up in this whole situation?"
So let me tell you a little bit about myself and then let me tell you the story of Sergei Magnitsky.
I'm indeed from America but I come from a very unusual American family.
My grandfather was a labor union organizer from Wichita, Kansas, and he was so good at organizing the union
that the Russians said, "If you like labor unionism, then you're going to love communism. Why don't you come to Russia?"
He went to Moscow in 1927. He met my grandmother in Moscow, who was a Russian woman,
and my father was born there. Then they returned to America in 1932, where he became head of the American Communist Party for the next 13 years.
He ran for president twice on the Communist ticket.
So if you come from a family of communists, and you're going through your teenage rebellion as I did,
how do you rebel from a family of communists?
I put on a suit and a tie and I became a capitalist.
I graduated from business school in 1989, which was the year that the Berlin Wall came down
and I said to myself, "If my grandfather was the biggest communist in America,
I'm going to go become the biggest capitalist in eastern Europe," and so I moved to Europe.
I eventually set up an investment fund, called Hermitage Fund, in Russia, which was to invest in the stock market of Russia.
My fund became very, very successful very quickly.
As I was settling into this profession, I discovered that all of my investments in these Russian companies--
and these were very large state-owned companies like Gazprom and others
--I discovered that all the money in these companies was being stolen by the managements of these companies,
and as an investor if all the money in your company is being stolen then it's not a very good thing.
So I said to myself, "How am I going to fight the stealing that's going on inside these companies?"
I had no political skills or anything like that, but I had one very good skill among my staff,
which was to research how they did this stealing and then to take that research
and to share it with the international media.
So for about a four year period we would do these big forensic studies
on how stealing would go on in these state-owned companies in Russia,
and then we would share it with The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Businessweek, etc.
This had a remarkable effect on the value of my portfolio because when we exposed the corruption,
the share prices went up, and so I felt very happy.
I also felt very happy that I was getting the bad guys. There's nothing more gratifying than getting the bad guys.
I had a perfect life for about four years when I started this, until 2005.
In 2005, the people who I had been exposing apparently had had enough,
and as I was flying back to Moscow after living there for 10 years,
and having created, by the way, the largest foreign investment fund in the country,
I was stopped at the border. I was detained for 15 hours
and then I was deported from Russia and declared a threat to national security.
At that point is where the terrible story begins,
and what I'm about to describe to you is truly one of the most horrible things that I can think of to happen,
and I'm sure that other stories here as well are like that.
Eighteen months after I was expelled, 25 police officers raided my offices in Moscow.
Twenty-five more officers raided the office of my American law firm.
They were looking specifically for the stamps, seals, and certificates for our investment holding companies.
They grabbed all these documents, they took them away,
and the next thing we knew, we no longer owned our investment holding companies.
The police had seized the documents and stolen our investment holding companies.
At this point--I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a business man--I went out and hired a team of lawyers. I hired seven lawyers,
including a young man named Sergei Magnitsky. He was a 36 year-old lawyer from an American law firm,
and one of the smartest lawyers I knew in Moscow.
I asked Sergei to investigate and figure out what this was all about. Sergei went out and investigated.
He came back and he said, "Not only have these people stolen your companies, but through a very complicated scheme,
these people have stolen $230 million of taxes that you paid to the Russian government.
They tried to steal your money, they didn't succeed,
but they ended up stealing the taxes that you paid to the Russian government."
I was amazed that a group of police officers, apparently tax officials and criminals could steal $230 million from the Russian government.
So we decided that it must be a rogue operation,
because how could it possibly be authorized to steal government money by government officials?
We figured if we exposed it, if we put it out into the open and we exposed how they went about stealing the money,
that the good guys would get the bad guys and that would be the end of the story.
We filed nine different criminal complaints with all the different law enforcement agencies in Russia
and we thought to ourselves, imminently the SWAT teams and helicopters would be out getting the bad guys.
Well it turned out that there are no good guys in Russia, only bad guys.
Instead of the SWAT teams and helicopters going after the bad guys,
they opened up criminal cases against all seven of our lawyers from four different law firms.
I'm trained as a fund manager, not as a soldier,
and the idea of putting people in harm's way is something that I don't have the psychological capacity to do,
so I immediately asked each one of my lawyers to leave Russia, to come to London at my expense
and stay in London at my expense to get out of harm's way.
It wasn't an easy conversation to have to ask people to leave their own country on a moment's notice and to go into exile,
but six of my seven lawyers accepted my invitation and came to London.
I would say that they did so under duress--nobody really wanted to go and they were very reluctant to do it,
but six of the seven lawyers accepted my invitation.
The one who didn't was Sergei Magnitsky. He was about a decade younger than the rest.
He hadn't seen the capriciousness of the Soviet regime as a grown up and he didn't know how bad things could get.
He stayed. He said, "I haven't broken any laws, I'm not going to leave."
He stayed in Russia, and then he did something remarkably brave.
In October 2008, he testified against the police officers who raided our office.
He testified against them, providing detailed evidence basically proving their complicity.
One month after his testimony on November 24, 2008,
two officers who had reported to one of the people he testified against
came to his home at 8 in the morning, in front of his wife and two children,
arrested Sergei, put him in pre-trial detention, and then began to torture him to get him to withdraw his testimony.
They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds and left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation.
They put him in cells with no heat and no window panes in Moscow in December so he nearly froze to death.
They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up.
They would regularly miss feeding him for up to 36 hours.
After six months of this mistreatment and torture, he began to get sick. He developed very severe pains in his stomach.
He lost 20 kilos and he was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones.
An operation was scheduled for August 1, 2009, to deal with this illness.
One week before the operation was supposed to happen,
he was abruptly moved from the prison that had the medical facilities
to a prison called Butyrka, which is a maximum security prison considered to be one of the toughest in Russia
and most significantly for Sergei, Butyrka has no medical facilities.
At Butyrka, his health completely broke down. It went into a terrible downward spiral. He went into constant agonizing pain.
They refused him all medical treatment.
He wrote, desperately, 20 different requests in writing to every different branch of the Russian penal, judicial, and law enforcement system
asking for medical attention. Every single one of his requests was either ignored or rejected in writing.
Then on the night of November 16, 2009, 358 days after he had been arrested, he went into critical condition.
On that night, the prison authorities decided to move him to a prison that had a medical facility.
But when he arrived at the new prison, instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell,
and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat him for one hour and 18 minutes until he died at the age of 37.
How do we know all this? We know this because Sergei Magnitsky wrote it all down.
He did something that was unprecedented in the Russian prisons,
which was, every day, when something bad happened to him, he wrote it down in the form of a criminal complaint.
He wrote 450 criminal complaints in his 358 days in detention,
which documented right down to the detail, who did what to him, when, how, where, and why.
As a result of these 450 complaints,
we have the most well-documented human rights abuse case that's come out of Russia in the last 35 years.
This is not a matter of conjecture. This is a matter of evidence, the evidence from Sergei,
and since then corroborating evidence from the Russians' own documenting of all of the ways they treated him.
We figured, because we have such a well-documented case, they would have to punish the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky.
It seemed impossible that they couldn't.
It was a well-publicized, well-documented case. But they didn't.
Instead the Russian authorities did something very horrible,
which was that they said, "Sergei Magnitsky wasn't sick. There was no violence involved in his death.
There wasn't a single person involved in doing this to him."
Instead, they ended up promoting the officers who were most involved, giving them state honors, and then most shockingly,
they put Sergei Magnitsky on trial after he was dead,
in the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia.
If we can't get justice inside of Russia, let's get justice outside of Russia. That's what we said.
How do we get justice outside of Russia?
The way we get justice outside of Russia is the people who committed this crime didn't do this for religion or ideology or ethnicity.
They did this for money. And the people who do this type of thing for money don't like to keep their money in Russia.
They like to keep it in the West. They like to travel to the West. They like to send their kids to school in the West.
We said to ourselves, if we can take away their ability to do this, this is some type of justice.
It's not real justice, but it's some type of justice.
I went to Washington and I ended up getting Senator Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, and Senator McCain, a Republican from Arizona,
to sponsor what's been known now as the Magnitsky Act,
which imposes visa sanctions and asset freezes on the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky.
The Magnitsky Act was launched as a proposal in October 2010 and it touched the Russian people in a way that nobody expected.
Every other victim started coming forward to Washington and saying,
"This is the most powerful tool you could use against these people.
My father, my brother, my sister, my son was killed under similar circumstances.
Could you please add the people who did this to the bill?"
So they widened the bill not just to include Sergei Magnitsky, but to include others.
The bill was passed last December with 92 senators against 4 in the Senate, 89% in the House of Representatives.
President Obama signed the bill on December 12. This is now the new technology for fighting human rights abuse:
targeted sanctions, visas, and freezing their assets.
This doesn't necessarily need to be just for Russia. This can be for everywhere.
There's a big appetite in Washington to do this for the rest of the world. We're rolling this out across Europe.
I would encourage everybody here to join me in this campaign to use this as a tool for fighting human rights abuse in a global world
where people are moving around and taking their money around.
This is the one thing that really touches them.
I can tell you how much this has touched them because Putin has now gone completely out of his mind about this.
I am now the single number-one enemy of the Russian state because this thing really truly touches them.
Thank you.