Posts Tagged ‘“The appearance of Power (Capital) attracts Power (Capital)”’
Hermitage Capital, Hamilton Securities, and Time to Speak Up… [Publ. Sept. 20, 2012. See Also “Comments”]
Post title Hermitage Capital, Hamilton Securities, and Time to Speak Up… [Publ. Sept. 20, 2012. See Also “Comments'”]. ** (short-link ends “-18o”)
Summer 2022 Blogger INTRO/UPDATE
(This UPDATE has sections and ends where I’ve marked it, followed by the title & link again, then the post as (unless marked otherwise) as written and published Sept. 2012. The “10,800” word count above doesn’t include about 2,000 words in “Summer 2022 Blogger Intro/Update” (I quoted, rather than linked to, Wiki, and some testimony by Bill Browder from June 2009 relating to this post).
In this post I contrast the wide public shock and outrage about what a U.S. ex-pat (William Felix Browder, “Bill Browder”) discussed and wanted the U.S. Congress to address and correct what Russia had done to his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in an Act of Congress (although Browder had by then long since abandoned his U.S. Citizenship for British, in 1998-199) with my own — and not mine only — shock and outrage about what’s already going on HERE, in the U.S.A. (in some of the same years: 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s) (and, still is) both economically and regarding the human rights abuses exercised within and around our primary government institutions, especially the courts.
It was appropriate to say ten years ago, and I believe still is. Meanwhile, this is a fascinating and historically relevant story line about national priorities and international connections/investments.
Browder’s extraordinary family history, talent and connections: His paternal grandfather Earl was leader of the American Communist Party 1930-1945, and with his wife, married in Russia, had three essentially genius (mathematics, physics) sons (See the Wiki!), including math prodigy (Bill’s father FELIX, who suffered from McCarthyism — until Eleanor Roosevelt, then Chairman of the board of Brandeis University, championed him. Names like MIT, Princeton, University of Chicago, Bell Labs, University of Boulder, Colorado; Stanford MBA, Boston Consulting Group (London), particle physics, throughout the wiki…. No sisters or daughters are mentioned…
William Felix Browder (b. 1964) Wikipedia, see the Magnitsky Act (for my post, Sept.20, 2012)
William Felix Browder (born April 23, 1964)[1] is an American-born British financier and political activist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which at one time was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia.[3][4][5] … …
William Felix Browder was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and he grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He is the son of mathematician Felix Browder, and the grandson of Earl Browder. He attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from which he graduated with a degree in economics. He earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business[18] in 1989 and entered the financial sector.[19]
And (also from that Wiki):
Browder’s paternal grandfather Earl Browder was born in Kansas in 1891.[1] He was a radical and had lived in the Soviet Union for several years from 1927 and married Raisa Berkman, a Jewish Russian woman while living there.[1] After his return to the United States in 1931,[1] Earl Browder became the leader of the Communist Party USA from 1930 to 1945 and ran for U.S. president in 1936 and 1940.[9] After World War II, Browder lost favor with Moscow and was expelled from the U.S. Communist Party.[1]
Earl and his wife Raisa had three children, all sons, and all three became mathematicians who headed the mathematics departments of top American universities[1] including Bill Browder’s father Felix Browder who married Eva (Tislowitz). Felix was a mathematics prodigy who had entered MIT at 16, acquired his bachelor’s degree in two years, and by the age of 20 received a Ph.D. from Princeton.[1] But during the McCarthy era, he could not find work because he was the son of the onetime head of the Communist Party USA.[20][21] After a series of job rejections in the 1950s, he was championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady who was then chairman of the board of Brandeis University; she overrode the rest of the board who were afraid to hire him, and he gained a position at Brandeis.[1] Felix went on to chair the mathematics department at the University of Chicago, and in 1999 became the president of the American Mathematical Society.[1]
Felix Browder was renowned in the field of nonlinear functional analysis—a branch of mathematics with wide applications to such fields as physics, engineering, and finance. He was instrumental in establishing a science and technology center in conjunction with Princeton University and Bell Labs. In 1999, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton, for his “key role in the explosive growth of nonlinear functional analysis and its applications to partial differential equations in recent years”.[1]
Bill Browder has one sibling, Tom Browder, who entered the University of Chicago at 15, and became a leading particle physicist.[1] Bill Browder’s son Joshua is the founder of DoNotPay, a startup that helps to automate certain legal services.[22]
In case the opening phrases and points of reference in my title are not familiar: William Browder’s voice and testimony before the U.S. Helsinki Commission, in 2009. I’ll quote it again below, but added some font emphases (bold, highlighting, underline etc.) here:
I trust most readers will remember some major-shockwave “economic events” of 2008//LGH:
Testimony of William Browder. Commission on Security & Cooperation in Europe the U.S. Helsinki Commission. June 23, 2009
Hermitage Capital and Shareholder Activism
Speaking before you today carries on a family tradition of sorts. My grandfather, Earl Browder, was the head of the American Communist Party and appeared before his fair share of Congressional committees over the course of his lifetime. He had met my grandmother during his travels in the Soviet Union, so you could say that Russia and populist politics were in my blood. As the family rebel, however, I decided to go to an American business school and ultimately went back to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union to build a business.
I founded Hermitage in 1996 in partnership with the late Edmond Safra as a way for western investors to invest in the Russian stock market. The firm ultimately grew to become the single largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, with some $4 billion under management in 2006, a substantial portion of which came from U.S. institutional and individual investors. One of the big reasons for the firm’s success was our strategy of investing in the stocks of companies that were out of favor due to bad management, corruption, shareholder rights abuses or outright theft. We would then work to change management, stop fraud and defend the interests of minority shareholders through shareholder activism. If we were successful in improving corporate governance, the market would ultimately recognize this. As the company came back into favor, its stock price would rise, our investors would profit and the Russian economy would be better off for having a more productive, transparent economy. For several years it was a win-win situation for everyone except corrupt corporate management and their partners in government.
Due to weak courts and legal protections, our biggest leverage was often the bully pulpit of the press. Since 1996 we waged dozens of high-profile public activist campaigns targeting mismanagement and corruption at some of the largest companies in Russia. These included Gazprom (the state-controlled natural gas monopoly), Unified Energy Systems (the national electricity utility), Sberbank (the largest bank in Russia) and Surgutneftegas (the fourth-largest oil company in Russia).
Most of the companies we sought to reform were controlled by the Russian government, …
(Next comments are still my Summer 2022 Blogger Intro/Update):
In July/Aug. 2022 I had reason to republish (Twitter) two posts from Feb. 2013. One of them referred to a post (My POV on the Center for Family in Transition) from Sept. 2012; another referred internally to a post called “Stunning Validation of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson” (Re: The origins of psychoanalysis/Freud’s archives, a.k.a. “The Assault on Truth.”
In writing those, I documented direct connections with these developed fields of practice to the current (US) family court system which attempts to internationalize (alongside fatherhood promotion and domestic violence/child abuse prevention) continue. I’m not sure that anyone else has made these connections — of family court professionals and their associations to individuals helping propound and propagate two MAJOR fields of practice in the USA, and schools to provide PhDs in those fields, and government-sponsored major careers in the same fields.
Looking to reformat (for easier reading) “My POV on the Center for Family In Transition” Searching on my Admin Dashboard for another Sept. 2012 post to clean up its formatting, I saw what an ACTIVE month it was.
This Hermitage Capital/Hamilton Securities post and one other had the most tags. In 2022 (that is, nearly ten years after I composed this piece, a time I remember well in my life, as well as I remember writing most of it), Russia is making war on the Ukraine, we’ve come through a “game-changing” pandemic and strife-filled/contested change of U.S. Presidency, and major price increases nationwide, i.e., inflation, and the Family Court Reform coalitions have coalesced even more (closed ranks) to continue the same kinds of censorship of public-private entity collaboration to (on the surface) fund BOTH sides of a gender war — while now the usage of the word “woman” itself is under strategic attack for redefinition as not particularly exclusive to human beings born with an XX (i.e., no “Y”) chromosome.
And alleged feminists, who ought to be as concerned about the corrupt (not “flawed” or slightly broken) family courts as about deprivation of abortion privileges (although that’s NO small deal), and journalists covering such stories, still fail to show the larger contexts, the financial incentives, and attempt to keep the public puzzled, under-informed, fiscally illiterate, and without vocabulary to distinguish (let alone recognize) and ENTITY from a NON-ENTITY, especially when so many of the latter are facilitated (and their websites and publications, and sponsorships) within major universities, public and private, to perpetuate their beliefs — not necessarily ours.
THIS post will shed some light on THAT practice. Just take your time reading it, or read it in sections.
I am no longer as tuned in to some of the points of reference (individuals here, but I certainly am to basic principles raised in the post). Not counting my formatting (lack of) expertise , especially around quotes, from what I can see a decade later on a quick review, I stand by this post and still recommend reading it, both for points raised and for how I expressed them (the phrasing, and questions asked).
That said, it’s a dense 10,800 words, not a quick read! From the edits below, and because it’d already been reformatted (to add white background, borders, title link, etc.) I can see I thought enough of the work on this post to update it and refer to it again in (at least) 2014 and in 2019. And now, 2022. I have not changed any content, just this time, expanded the “tags” image and reminded people they can see both tags and comments below the bottom of this post.
If it makes sense to you, or to rebut any parts of it, please link, tweet, refer others let me know. I will probably respond faster on Twitter (@LetUsGetHonest) than to a comment here (I only get email alerts & don’t check email as often). Thanks for your consideration. //LGH. Aug. 1, 2022.
~~ (END of Summer 2022 Blogger UPDATE)~~
Again:Post title Hermitage Capital, Hamilton Securities, and Time to Speak Up… [Publ. Sept. 20, 2012. See Also “Comments'”]. ** (short-link ends “-18o”)
Next image: these tags indicate some, not all, the content. Two tags are complete sentences, a few refer to books about empires past. Screenshot was taken 1/1/2019 after I tweaked this post in anticipation of posting excerpts on Twitter, or adding a new post on current events relating to The Magnitsky Act passed in 2012 at the urging of ex-pat U.S. Citizen (see “taxes”) now British hedge fund investor/manager (see Hermitage Capital), Bill Browder.
Tags as active links (clickable) are available below the bottom of post content. While I was enthusiastically adding these tags, I’m not sure how many were used elsewhere in the blog…
Tags to my Sept 20, 2012 post (some added Jan 1, 2019) on Hermitage, Hamilton Securities, Bill Browder, Magnitsky Law, and more generally, on the landscape of control. Bottom of image reflects previous & next post titles, showing some of my subject matter focus at that time.
How valuable is life? Does it depend on whose life? Where’s your outrage and action?
I apologize for my inability (so far) to say this in a concise, trademarkable format. I tend to the conversational: “Consider this!”
I caught a hair-raising fragment of a Charlie Rose show; however, this horror story from Russia is NOT unique to Russia, IF we have ears to hear the Hamilton Securities and other similar stories.
Charlie Rose Hears Businessman’s Horrific Russian Nightmare That Has Enraged The U.S. Congress
Posted on September 20, 2012 by Brent Lambert
William Browder (born 1964) is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management. The other night he sat down with Charlie Rose and proceeded to share his shocking and devastating story about his experience in Moscow that led to the imprisonment, torture, and eventual death of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Although Browder was a supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin, in 2006, after ten years doing business in the country, he was blacklisted by the Russian government as a “threat to national security” and denied entry to the country. The Economist has accused the Russian government of blacklisting Browder because he interfered with the flow of money to “corrupt bureaucrats and their businessmen accomplices”. And when you interfere with the corrupt Russian government your life instantly becomes a living hell. The story that Bill Browder shares with Charlie Rose is so unbelievable it’s hard to imagine that something like this is still possible in 2012.
Is it?…. Not for me…
As Browder explains, his experience has enraged members of the U.S. Congress who are pushing through The Magnitsky Law, named in honor Sergei, which would impose a visa ban and asset freeze against the officials responsible not only for Magnitsky’s murder but also for other human rights abuses, including against individuals who “expose illegal activity” carried out by Russian officials or who seek to “defend or promote internationally recognized human rights and freedoms.” This includes journalists who have been murdered when they have dug too close to powerful officials or oligarchs. It includes human rights activists who have been beaten and crippled or killed for exposing the mistreatment of their fellow Russians.
To learn more about how organized crime has permeated every facet of the Russian Government be sure to visit Russian-Untouchables.com. You can also read Bill Browder’s full story in his own words by reading his gut-wrenching personal story which he wrote for The Financial Times in 2009 entitled “They Killed My Lawyer.”
It is gut-wrenching. But, by comparison, what would you call “The Franklin Coverup“** — that also was gut-wrenching, involved the unconscionable, and resulted in several people involved in exposing it meeting their deaths by violent means.
(From a diff’t site, regarding Private Investigator Gary Caradori; the year is 1991; after his plane was blown out of the sky, with father, 8-year-old son [and evidence he had just phoned this Senator about before the flight home] on board):
Senator Schmit submitted an affidavit stating that he had been warned that Caradori’s life was in danger. He also wrote a letter to the National Transportation Safety Board regarding the missing backseats of Caradori’s plane: “… I do not know anything about sabotage, but I have been told that a phosphorous type bomb would, in fact, vaporize metal and any other material with which it came in contact and that unless someone knew what they were looking for, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect…. I am sure there will be those who will scoff at such a suggestion, but there have been entirely too many violent deaths associated with this investigation….” http://franklinscandal.com/franklinscandal_caradoriinfo3.html (see also “info2” & “info1” urls for previous pages).
[This section + next four annotated (2X2) black-background images from FranklinScandal.com added 1/2019 and deal specifically with Gary Caradori’s evidence and sudden violent death with his son. DeCamp (Wm.Colby longtime friend) in The FranklinCoverup wrote that Colby, assigned to investigate Caradori’s death, also died in completely out-of-character circumstances.]
-
- From “FranklinScandal.com” re: Gary Caradori (events 1989-1990), 4 annotated images
[Resuming the Sept. 2012 blog text..]
How invested are you, really — in the belief that that’s THERE but HERE it’s much better and significantly different; in the belief that THAT would NOT take place here (or that it has not). In other words, do you still believe in US sovereignty?
Congress is outraged and ready to pass a law – but this is NOT a U.S. Corporation — the company headquartered in Guernsey and has an office in the Cayman Islands and Moscow. Yet the US Congress inherently moral about human rights abuses, is so enraged about the pilfering of its assets, and torture and murder of its attorney(s) . . . not that human rights abuses aren’t outrageous, but . . . . .
But I have to still ask the hard question — why is Congress protecting a non-US firm, while at the same time — and let’s quit pretending, OK? — selling off the assets of its own people who reside here, also treating horribly those who expose local corruption, and running (very profitably) a prison population which is not only a virtual slave labor force, but also a great investment for those who have no conscience about ongoing rapes and sexual assaults of minors in its cages (Correction Corporation of America)? (Read how Alex Friedman, Prison Legal News, an ex-CCA prisoner and now CCA shareholder, obtained 20% of shares to do something about the situation).
Bear with me if it’s a language or concept stretch; but we all ought to know stuff like this.
How often do you run across a website with a warning like this? As a “U.S. Person” I cannot even access this site! Does that include the “About Us” page? [[I’m not seeking information for purposes of purchase or joining…]]
Our warning and disclaimer below is addressed to you whether you access our site for yourself or for somebody else. You must draw this caution to the notice of anybody for whom you access the Hermitage Capital Management site (the “Site”) and/or who may access the Site using your password and who is thus not compelled to register as a new user.
The Site contains data and facts on investments. These are provided for information only. Hermitage Capital Management Limited reserves the right at any time without notice to (a) change or withdraw the content or format of any part of its site and/or (b) vary or withdraw references or connections to other parts of the Internet and/or (c) restrict your access to parts of the Site.
The format and contents of the site are the copyright property of Hermitage Capital Management Limited. All rights herein are reserved.
Units or shares in the fund(s) described on this or the following page(s) are not available for sale in any jurisdiction in which such sale would be prohibited.
US Investors
If you are a US citizen or resident, or represent a trust which is subject to taxation under US Internal Revenue Service requirements, or represent a partnership or corporation organised under the laws of the United States of America or any state, territory or possession thereof (“US Persons“) you are prohibited by law from buying investments other than those authorised for sale by the SEC. Units or shares in the Funds for which information is provided on this site are not authorised for sale by the SEC and are therefore not available for sale in the United States or to US Persons. Although the information provided on this site is not an invitation to subscribe for shares or units in such Funds, US persons may not access this site.
Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History 