Most people know Bill Browder as the tireless anti-Putin human rights crusader who has had a free run of Western media over the past ten years or so as he drums up publicity for himself. He's the (always unverifiable) source for a vast trove of exposes on Putin's Russia. If you "know" that Putin has squirrelled away $200 billions or maybe even 400, or maybe even more, you know it because somewhere you read or heard Bill Browder making that (always unverifiable) claim.
Yesterday Bill's one-man road-show suffered its first serious setback, when the German Press Council rejected his complaint over alleged inaccuracies in a story that Der Spiegel ran late last year. The Spiegel story poked some embarrassingly large holes in Browder's version of the events surrounding the demise of his former accountant, Sergei Magnitsky. As such, it covered much of the same ground previously tilled by Andrei Nekrasov in his documentary, "The Magnitsky Act - Behind The Scenes."
While Browder was successfully able to bury Nekrasov's film, he didn't fare so well in his claim against Der Spiegel. Not only did the German Press Council reject his claim, they pointedly stated that much of the Browder narrative around Magnitsky falls well short of being "factually verifiable."
That's a polite way of calling Bill Browder a liar liar pants on fire.
That happened yesterday. Today I typed "Bill Browder news" into the Googlator. There is not so much as a whiff of the Der Spiegel/German Press Coucil story to be found!
How is such a thing possible???
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