Who is incidentally the grandson of CPUSA's Earl Browder, with some interesting associations in his own right:
HIS GRANDFATHER was chairman of the U.S. Communist Party in the 1930s and early '40s until he was ousted for his "revisionist" thinking. Today William F. Browder, MBA '89, is revising some other thinking about Russia, making his mark in Moscow's nascent capitalist system. In April 1996, armed with $25 million from private investors, Browder formed the Hermitage Fund, called by Business Week "one of the best-performing offshore funds this year." The fund closed last summer after growing to $816 million. Browder is now working on Hermitage II, also aimed at investors who can stake more than $1 million each on stocks such as oil company Lukoil, phone company Rostelekom, and Sherbank, which now holds 75 percent of Russia's bank deposits.
Andrew Capon, "Seeing red: fund manager Bill Browder's anger at Russian companies' treatment of shareholders in spurring reforms. It's also making him rich.", Institutional Investor International Edition, Sept 2002 v27 i9 p65(4):
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So Browder called his chief financial backer and confidant, Edmond Safra, the legendary banker to the wealthy, who died in 1999. Safra's counsel: "If we want to fight this, we do it properly. We go to war." First, Browder hired bodyguards. Next, he talked to everyone he knew who had leverage with either Renaissance or Sidanco, including Safra's friend, hedge fund manager George Soros, a significant investor in Russia, and Sir John Browne, CEO of BP, which owned 10 percent of Sidanco.
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BROWDER DIDN'T GO TO RUSSIA EXPECTING TO become an agitator for good corporate governance. After graduating from business school in 1990, he was drawn to Eastern Europe by the fall of the Berlin Wall and by a curious family connection: His grandfather, Earl Browder, had been the leader of the U.S. Communist Party between 1932 and 1945 and had met his Russian wife while taking part in the fractious Communist International debates in Moscow in the 1920s. He died in 1974.
His son, Felix, Bill's father, became a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago. After graduate school, Bill worked briefly for the Boston Consulting Group, then for Robert Maxwell's Central and Eastern European Partnership before joining Salomon in 1994. There he once parlayed a $25 million investment in Russian privatization vouchers into $100 million in six months.
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Browder's emphasis on holding companies would pay off splendidly. Oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, CEO of Yukos Oil, began a concerted campaign to gain full control of their company subsidiaries, with many riding roughshod over investors in these daughter assets. Today just 15 companies control more than 50 percent of Russian output.
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Erin E. Arvedlund, "An Investor and Gadfly in Russia.", The New York Times, March 14, 2004 pBU2 col 04:
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He says he honed his confrontational style with the help of another mentor, Edmond J. Safra, the multibillionaire founder of Republic National Bank in New York.
In vivid contrast to Mr. Browder's far-left forebear, Mr. Safra was the ubercapitalist who befriended him and bankrolled the Hermitage Fund, the hedge fund that Mr. Browder opened in 1996. It is now one of the largest hedge funds dedicated to Russia, with $1.4 billion in assets.
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In the 1990's, he picked a fight with an oligarch, Vladimir Potanin, over Sidanco, an oil company, concerning a share issue that would have diluted minority holdings. Russian securities officials canceled the disputed share issue, saving the Hermitage Fund alone $63 million.
''More or less everybody hates me,'' he said, rattling off a list of people and companies who have been targets of his shareholder battles, including Anatoly B. Chubais, chairman and chief executive of UES, the Russian electricity monopoly; Rem I. Vyakhirev, the former chairman of Gazprom, the Russian natural-gas monopoly; and the American accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. ''But I'm not here to be liked.''
Mr. Browder does not wage all his battles alone. His latest effort -- a lawsuit filed this month in a Siberian regional court against Surgutneftegas, Russia's fourth-largest oil company -- was filed jointly with Russia's Investor Protection Association and a large group of Surgutneftegas minority shareholders, including two other hedge funds, Prosperity Capital, based in Moscow, and the Firebird Fund, based in New York.
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''Under Putin, the political winds have shifted in favor of investors, even if only at the margins,'' said Ian Hague, a partner at the Firebird Fund.
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As for his personal politics, Mr. Browder says he is ''not a Communist'' like his grandfather. He's a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party in the United States. When he does argue politics with American relatives, he said, ''the one thing we all agree on is that we have to get rid of George Bush.''
"Back in June 2005, as part of a criminal case launched against Rosukrenergo, the former head of Ukraine's Security Service, Alexander Turchinov, stated the a part of the non-Russian shares of RUE were controlled personally by former President Leonid Kuchma and former Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich, and that the managers of the shares were respectively, Pinchuk and Akhmetov. The billionaires supported Yanukovich in his losing bid against now President Victor Yushchenko. Turchinov later said that Kuchma and Yanukovich had resold their shares to Gazprom, but also indicted he had information that the shares were resold to their managers via Cyprus, Hungarian and Swiss offshore entities. The investigation abruptly ended in mid-August 2005 and Turchinov was removed from his post."