Telegraph | Bill
Browder has described himself as "Putin's No 1 enemy". Now the Russian
president had added weight to that claim by singling out the British
investor at his controversial summit with Donald Trump on Monday.
The UK-based financier appeared to be part of what the US president
called an "incredible offer" by Vladimir Putin to assist American
investigators in their prosecution of 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking crimes during the 2016 presidential election season.
"He offered to have the people
working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect
to the 12 people," Mr Trump told reporters during a news conference in
Helsinki following his joint summit with Mr Putin.
The special counsel investigating potential coordination between the
Trump campaign and the Kremlin charged a dozen Russian military
intelligence officers on Friday with hacking the Democratic National
Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then releasing the stolen
communications online as part of a sweeping conspiracy to meddle in the
election.
While Mr Trump did not elaborate on the Russian leader's "incredible offer," Mr Putin himself suggested that special counsel Robert Mueller
could ask Russian law enforcement agencies to interrogate the suspects.
He said US officials could request to be present at such questioning in
line with a 1999 agreement on mutual legal assistance in criminal
cases.
However,
there was a catch: Russia would expect the US to return the favour and
cooperate with interrogations of people “who have something to do with
illegal actions on the territory of Russia”. Mr Putin highlighted the
case of Mr Browder.
"No journalist had asked about me," Mr Browder wrote in Time. "He
just brought me up out of the blue ...To my mind, this can only mean
that he is seriously rattled."
The American-born Jewish businessman,
who has held British citizenship for the past two decades, was last year
sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison on fraud and tax
evasion charges.
More pertinently, he was also the driving force behind The Magnitsky Act, a 2012 US law targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses. It was named after Sergei Magnitsky,
his lawyer whose investigations in 2008 uncovered a web of alleged tax
fraud and corruption involving 23 companies and $230 million. He
later died in Russian custody.
