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Anti-corruption campaigner, Bill Browder, has called for a total US visa ban for British lawyers who he alleges to be ‘enabling’ Russian oligarchs. A long-time critic of Russian President, Vladimir Putin, US-born financier Browder said a US visa ban would ‘strike at the heart of what has become a persistent problem of using the UK legal system against reporters and whistleblowers’.
Browder has hinted that US visa sanctions could be aimed at legal and financial specialists who are known to have assisted oligarchs with hiding their assets, but his initial proposed blacklist would focus on UK lawyers involved in libel cases.
The anti-corruption campaigner said: “There’s this industry. It will be pretty hard to legislate away the idea that a plaintiff can hire a lawyer to sue for libel, because how do you define what’s good and what’s bad?”
“But if you identify a lawyer who has been doing this on a regular basis – going after people – the United States does not have to give them a visa to come to this country,” Browder added.
Capitol Hill influence
Browder is known to have huge influence on Capitol Hill. US senator, Ben Cardin, recently described Browder as a ‘hero to many’ in the Senate amid his work in the passing of the Magnitsky Act - an Obama-era bipartisan bill named after Browder’s former tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in police custody in Russia in 2009.
The act enabled the US to punish officials linked to Magnitsky’s death, while authorizing the US to sanction human rights offenders and ban them from entering America.
Browder said he is ‘seeking the backing’ of Congress members and senators in order to write a letter to the US Department of State (DoS) with the names of specific lawyers, whose US visas he thinks should be revoked. However, he stopped short of naming the lawyers that should face sanctions.
The anti-corruption campaigner has argued that targeting oligarch-enablers, such as accountants and lawyers, would be an effective way of tracing assets, half of which Browder claims ‘find their way to Putin’s coffers’, as part of a Kremlin pact with Russian oligarchs.
Smart law enforcement
Browder said: “There’s going to be a whole lot of smart law enforcement work looking at sanctions evasion now. These people have been running circles around us in the past. They have set up the most robust asset protection mechanisms with trustees, holding companies, nominees and proxies offshore.”
According to Browder, the task of finding the oligarchs’ money is ‘virtually impossible’, adding that he would like to add an amendment to sanctions law to hold accountants, bankers, lawyers, and other financial advisers accountable – including possible prison time – if it’s proven that they have set up structures to help hide assets and evade sanctions.
Browder said: “Very quickly the whole system would become very transparent.”
Among the anti-corruption campaigner’s recommendations is for the US to create a list of law firms, PR firms and investigative firms involved in ‘enabling dictatorships and oligarchs to persecute journalists’ and prohibiting the US government from doing business with such firms – canceling the US visas of ‘foreign enablers’.
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