Dirty money: how Australia’s biggest banks are being used to clean millions in Russian mafia funds

It seems impossible that Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, would use Australia as a location to launder mafia money, but Bill Browder has the proof – and it’s made the billionaire businessman Putin’s public enemy number one.

Sunday Night’s Matt Doran meets Browder in a secret location in London, flanked by bodyguards. He’s always in fear of his life – it’s not just paranoia; Russia has a history of executing its enemies on foreign soil.

“They don’t forgive, they don’t forget, and they will track you down anywhere in the world,” Browder explains. “They’ll kill you and they’ll kill your family if necessary.”

If there was any doubt about Browder being a marked man, Putin took the extraordinary step at last month’s summit with President Trump of naming Browder as one of Russia’s most wanted.

He also receives death threats almost daily.

Yet Bill Browder wasn’t always a target. In fact, he was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, with $4 billion in funds. He fell out of favour when he began to protest the corruption that was making Vladimir Putin a rich man.

“I think he is worth about US$200 billion,” Browder tells Sunday Night. “All his money is the proceeds of crime. Putin is not only the richest man in the world, he is the most powerful crime lord in the world as well.”

In 2005, Bill Browder was expelled from Russia, escaping with most of his considerable fortune and re-establishing his investment business in London. He was determined to continue exposing corruption, even though he knew being in another country was no guarantee he’d be safe from Putin’s henchmen.

On Christmas Eve, 2007, two petty criminals with stolen documents arrive at Moscow Tax Office Number 28, falsely claiming they own three of Bill Browder’s Russian companies. They meet the corrupt head of the department, ask for a $230 million tax refund – and are swiftly given the money.

It was the largest tax refund request in the history of Russia, and it was approved and paid out the next day, no questions asked.

From his London hideaway, Browder hires a gutsy young Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to find out how they pulled off the monumental fraud and what happened to the money. Yet within a few months, Sergei Magnitsky is arrested and thrown in jail.

“They wanted to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the $230 million and he did so under my instruction,” Browder reveals. “He was under extreme pressure, and it got worse. His health completely broke down, he went into a terrible downward spiral and instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell.”

They eventually chained Magnitsky to a bed, and eight guards with batons beat him to death.

Heartbroken but resolute, Bill Browder is determined to find out what happened to his friend. Unexpectedly, he gets a tipoff that will break open the case – a mysterious informant wants to speak.

The informant turns out to be Alexander Perepilichny, a rich Russian hiding out with his wife in a grand mansion outside London. The informant turns out to be Alexander Perepilichny, a rich Russian hiding out with his wife in a mansion outside London. He confesses that he helped launder the stolen $230 million, and reveals to Browder the corrupt tax official received a bribe worth more than $30 million that included villas in Moscow and Dubai.

Alexander Perepilchny has supplied Browder with proof of exactly how the $230 million had been stolen – and more importantly, how the money has been hidden, with millions of it laundered in Australia.

Perepilichny made one big mistake – he thought he was safe in England, out of reach of the Russian mobsters he was bringing down. Just weeks before Perepilichny was to testify about the money laundering, he dropped dead on a country road in England – victim, or so it seemed, of a heart attack.

But Browder believes it was something more sinister. “I believe he was poisoned.”

Alexander Nekrassov is a former Kremlin advisor, who says he doesn’t speak for Russian President Vladmir Putin, but does deny any Kremlin involvement in the deaths of either Sergei Magnitsky or Alexander Perepilchny.

“A lot of people die all over the world for strange circumstances,” he rationalises.

These suspicious deaths tied to the Kremlin could possibly be dismissed if they weren’t happening with such frightening regularity. The most notorious – the execution of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko by his own colleagues at the FSB, the successor to the dreaded KGB – still resonates today.

Story continues