Fraudster Bill Browder still a "Putin expert" at CBC

Bill Browder was one of the hyenas who swooped in on Russia in the '90s to teach the locals the ins and outs of the capitalist system. He was the front man for a couple of Israeli billionaires of shady repute, whose "Heritage Capital" took the struggling Russian treasury for billions.

Once Putin came to power, Browder was originally a fan. That changed when Putin began reining in the oligarchs and the foreign carpet-baggers. 

Things got a little too warm for the likes of Browder, and he soon enough skedaddled out of the country under a cloud of scandal.

Wanting to fluff up his PR profile, Browder retained highly-regarded Russian film-maker Andrei Nekrasov to make a documentary about how he had been hounded out of Russia by corrupt officials because he had exposed their corruption. Nekrasov, a well-know Putin critic, agreed.

Somewhere along the line, the PR project went off the rails. The Putin critic gradually came to the conclusion that Bill Browder was full of shit.

The doc that resulted, The Magnitsky Act - behind the scenes, has caused Browder no end of grief. His reputation in Europe has more or less gone down the shitter. No reputable news outlet there would call on him as a Russia expert.

But there he was on the CBC this morning, still being passed off as Putin's number one enemy.

Brodie Fenlon's team at CBC needs to take a few dollars out of the DEI training budget and put it into fact checking.