When I set up my investment fund in 1996, I was aware that Russia was a chaotic place, but I didn't realize how corrupt Russia was. I discovered that the companies I was investing in were having all the money stolen from them. Big companies like Gazprom, which you've probably heard of, were losing billions of dollars, in some cases many multiples of billion of dollars, from the company through corrupt schemes. I felt this was both a morally incorrect thing and a financially incorrect thing for anybody who had an interest in Gazprom, so we went out and started to do research on how they went about doing the stealing of the money.
We spent anywhere from three to six months, in different cases, doing what we call forensic research. We took that research and shared it with The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The New York Times, Businessweek, etc., and the newspapers all published the stories, and then there were many more stories about that. As a result of that particular incident, the CEO of Gazprom was ultimately dismissed from his job because of this publicity.
We went out doing this in a number of other cases, and as a result of that we ended up infuriating people with very close links to the top of Russian government. Because of that, they ended up making a decision to expel me, and they used the national security provisions in their law to do that.