Mr. William Browder:

The US legislation has three basic components - the publication of the names, the banning of the visas and the freezing of the assets. There is a different threshold of proof for freezing assets than for banning visas. With regard to the deadline, the legislation says there is 120 days from the date of the president's signature, which was on 14 December, for the law to be implemented. In theory - and things never work in practice as well as they work in theory - 13 April is the date on which the US State Department will publish a list. That is a Saturday and, therefore, 15 April is the first business day after that. I was in Washington and I have been in touch with the State Department. They are actively working on not just the Magnitsky case because this includes all other cases. That is important and I want to stress that. Magnitsky is the touchstone that surrounds this issue and the sanctions will apply to all gross human rights abuses in Russia. That is the first date on which there will be a list. The State Department was specific with me and they said this is an ongoing process. There will be, perhaps, on 16 April another human rights abuse that will lead to someone being added to the list. The reason the Russian regime is so terrified is this is open-ended. This is a process, which, hopefully, after all this push back will start working automatically in a law enforcement manner as opposed to a political manner. People will just start getting used to the fact that if they engage in human rights abuse, they will lose their visa.

With regard to the forensic investigation, this comes back to the question whether I am doing this alone. All sorts of people have come forward at all sorts of times with all sorts of different types of things. A journalist from Nezavisimaya Gazeta, one of the main opposition newspapers, gathered a great deal of data in Russia. An NGO, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, found information in Moldova. A whistleblower, who had been a member of the criminal group but fell out with the other members, came forward and gave us a bunch of information about assets in Switzerland. We went to the New York courts and got a subpoena, which allowed us to get banking information on dollar transfers through US banks and various other things. We put this all together and that allowed us to come with $135 million of the $230 million. It allowed us to write these criminal complaints, which led to different asset freezing orders and will lead to many more. This is just the beginning of the process.