Russian President Vladimir Putin Is World’s Richest Person, Has Wealth More Than Bill Gates & Jeff Bezos Combined
It has been a couple of days, Jeff Bezos surprised the whole world by unseating the Bill Gates, world’s richest person. However, Gates reoccupied his position within few hours, as Amazon met immediate loss of $ 2.7 billion, which sums utmost 2 percent fall in share values at the stock market.
In between the tracks of this intriguing race, another person’s name has come onto the roll. To everyone’s surprise, it is Times’ one of the most powerful man ‘Vladimir Putin’. According to Hermitage Capital Management CEO Bill Browder, Gates and Bezos are nothing compared to Putin’s net worth, his personal itself sums up to near $200 billion.
Browder, who made the claim before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, is one of the best authorities on Putin’s business dealings, he is seen with Putin from the inception of the political career of both.
It was at the time of the 1990s, Browder was a major investor in Russia, according to Newsweek, he took stakes in former state-run enterprises such as Gazprom. During the same period, Browder cooperated with Putin in anti-corruption efforts, but eventually found himself targeted by Putin.
That conflict eventually led to the jailing and death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, and in turn to the Magnitsky Act sanctions against certain Russian oligarchs by the U.S.
In his testimony, Browder also added that Putin amassed his vast wealth by using political strength to persuade Russians who made similar investments to simply hand over large chunks of their holdings to him. He added that Putin has a personal interest in reversing the Magnitsky Act, since many of those impacted by it “hold money for him.”
Putin earlier in 2012 tried to pull back against the Magnitsky Act by imposing restrictions on Russian adoptions to the U.S. Those adoptions, followed by extensions, and the Magnitsky sanctions reported various conversations between Russian representatives and the Trump administration. If whatever Browder has told is true, then we can believe that Russia’s interference in the U.S. election is partly in taking advantage of the victory to defend Putin’s vast wealth carrying Russia’s interests all together.