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Hedge-fund founder Bill Browder is hitting back, a week after the Helsinki summit press conference where Vladimir Putin asked Donald Trump to surrender the financier and human-rights activist to Russian interrogators. This week, Browder asked prosecutors in Estonia to investigate one of that country’s banks for handling what Browder says was $9 billion in laundered funds, including millions that he believes ended up in an account controlled by one of the Russian president’s friends.

The London-based financier has lived in fear of Russian retaliation for years, but Browder spent hours in front of television cameras after Putin singled him out. “I’m not backing down,” Browder told Barron’s. “I’m doubling down.”

Browder has gained Putin’s enmity by persuading the U.S. and other western nations to sanction Russian officials who Browder and the U.S. government say were involved in a tax-fraud scheme that hijacked Browder’s Russia-based corporations to steal $230 million from Russia’s Treasury in 2007. Some of that money was laundered through Estonian banks, says Browder in this week’s application to Estonia’s police, alleging that $18 million ultimately went to a Swiss account that was controlled by Sergey Roldugin, a well-known cellist and godfather to Putin’s eldest daughter.

Neither Putin’s presidential office nor Roldugin’s St. Petersburg music conservatory responded to requests for comment.

Before Russia booted him out, the U.S.-born Browder operated Russia’s biggest Western-backed hedge fund, Hermitage Capital. He was transformed into a human-rights crusader when Hermitage employee Sergei Magnitsky was arrested after bringing the 2007 tax-fraud scheme to the attention of Russian prosecutors. Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison.

The substance of Browder’s complaint to Estonian police largely tracks one he filed last week in Denmark, asking Danish authorities to look into Denmark’s largest financial institution, Danske Bank (ticker: DANSKE.Denmark), which is the parent of the Estonian bank through which Browder says the suspicious funds flowed.

“We are aware that the complainant filed a complaint with the Danish authorities,” Danske Bank spokesman Kenni Leth wrote Barron’s, “but it is entirely up to the authorities how to address the issue this time. We will—as we always do—have a constructive dialogue with the authorities if they want to discuss the matter with us.”

Estonian police told Barron’s that the work of their Financial Investigation Unit was confidential. “[H]ence we cannot comment on specific cases,” wrote press secretary Olja Kivistik. A week ago, Danish investigators also declined comment.

Browder first asked the Danish and Estonian authorities to look into his money-laundering allegations five years ago, but neither nation brought any enforcement actions. The new applications make use of financial records leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and first reported in 2016 as part of the “Panama Papers” articles published in a collaboration organized by the not-for-profit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Additional information about the alleged underground flow of Russian money through Danske Bank’s branch in Estonia came to light in 2017, when Barron’s and many other news organizations traced East European bank records, in stories coordinated by the not-for-profit Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

When Putin asked about questioning Browder, in exchange for letting U.S. investigators question 12 Russian intelligence officers indicted for hacking the Democratic presidential campaign in 2016, President Trump called the idea “an incredible offer.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders then said the Trump administration was considering Russia’s request to question Browder, along with Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia. But after a storm of bipartisan outrage, the White House reversed course and ruled out the idea.



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