Putin hinted he wanted Trump to give him access to one man - and it reveals his greatest weakness

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Putin hinted he wanted Trump to give him access to one man - and it reveals his greatest weakness

bill browder putin

Sky News/Reuters

Bill Browder's advocacy for the Magnitsky Act poses a serious challenge to Putin's foreign fortune.

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  • Vladimir Putin mentioned Bill Browder's name at his joint press conference with Trump in Helsinki on Monday.
  • Browder is a financier behind the Magnitsky Act, which authorizes governments to sanction Russian human rights offenders and freeze their assets.
  • The act is believed to threaten much of Putin's personal wealth, which is tied up in foreign assets.
  • Putin offered to allow US officials to interview Russians suspected of interfering with the 2016 elections in exchange for interviewing people close to Browder.

Vladimir Putin spontaneously singled out one man who poses a unique threat to the Russian leader's massive fortune at Monday's press conference, and it may hint at one of Putin's greatest weaknesses.

The man in question is Bill Browder, a US-born British financier behind the Magnitsky Act, which authorizes governments to sanction human rights offenders in Russia, freeze their foreign assets, and ban them from entering the signing country.

Many of these Russians are tied to Putin's government, and much of Putin's personal wealth is believed to be tied up in those foreign assets.

On Monday, Putin suggested allowing US officials to interview Russians suspected of interfering with the 2016 elections in exchange for interviewing people close to Browder.

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Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin

Chris McGrath/Getty Images

The Russian president told reporters, while standing alongside Donald Trump:

"We can meet you halfway. We can make another step. We can actually permit representatives of the United States, including the members of this very commission headed by Mr Mueller, we can let them into the country. They can be present at questioning.

"In this case, there's another condition. This kind of effort should be mutual one. Then we would expect that the Americans would reciprocate. They would question officials, including the officers of law enforcement and intelligence services of the United States whom we believe have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia. And we have to request the presence of our law enforcement.

"For instance, we can bring up Mr Browder in this particular case. Business associates of Mr Browder have earned over $1.5 billion in Russia. They never paid any taxes. Neither in Russia nor in the United States. Yet, the money escapes the country. They were transferred to the United States. They sent huge amount of money, $400 million as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.

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"Well, that's their personal case. It might have been legal, the contribution itself. But the way the money was earned was illegal. We have solid reason to believe that some intelligence officers, guided these transactions. So we have an interest of questioning them.

"That could be a first step. We can extend also it. Options abound. They all can be found in an appropriate legal framework."

Bill Browder

Getty Images/ AFP/ Bertrand Guay

Browder.

Putin is "seriously rattled"

Browder wrote in response that Putin's offhand remark showed he was "seriously rattled" by the Magnitsky Act's growing popularity around the world.

He wrote in Time: "Putin almost never utters the names of his enemies - except for mine, which he lately seems to utter at every opportunity. To my mind, this can only mean that he is seriously rattled."

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The Obama administration signed the act into law in 2012, while other countries including the UK, Canada, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have signed similar versions of the act.

Britain signed a second version of the Magnitsky Act in May, following the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in southern England, that would allow the government to impose sanctions on human rights violators. A previous version of the act from 2017 only allowed the government to freeze the assets of human rights violators.

Browder told The Washington Post on Monday: "This is an incredibly powerful tribute to the power of the Magnitsky Act. This shows I've found Putin's Achilles' heel, that he's very rattled by it.

"For a guy who's supposed to be a former KGB spy, he's got a terrible poker face."

The act was named after Browder's lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who Browder says was put in pretrial detention, tortured, and killed in Russian custody in 2009..

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Hillary Clinton Vladimir Putin

REUTERS/RIA Novosti/Pool/Alexei Nikolsky

Then-Secretary of State Clinton and Putin in the Novo-Ogaryovo presidential residence in March 2010.

Putin's 'pants on fire' Clinton allegation

Putin's claim that Browder donated $400 million to Clinton's campaign was baseless, PolitiFact and The New York Times both reported.

As a British citizen, Browder cannot legally donate to US candidates in a personal capacity.

However, the New York-based Ziff Brothers investment firm, with whom Browder has worked, previously donated to Clinton campaign, Democratic National Committee, and the Clinton Foundation - but those sums totaled about $1.1 million, Politifact said.

"The exaggeration is so great, we rate this claim Pants on Fire," the fact-checking site said.

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Browder, who was at one point Russia's largest foreign investor, was deported from Russia in 2005 after exposing corruption in the country. Russian authorities called him a threat to national security, and a Russian court sentenced Browder in absentia to nine years in prison on fraud and tax evasion last year.

Moscow has issued six requests to Interpol to arrest and extradite him, Browder previously said, but the agency has routinely ignored those requests in the past. Browder was briefly arrested in Spain in May, but neither Interpol nor the Spanish National Police denied that it was due to a Russian extradition order.

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