name. In any event, we served him the subpoena and he ran away. He dropped it on the ground and he ran away. He jumped in his car and went back to his mansion.
At that point he tried to suppress—tried to quash the subpoena on the grounds it hadn't been properly served. We didn't get a video, but there are sworn affidavits from my servers in the court record about the service. But he objected to it on a number of grounds. A, he continued to insist he had nothing to do with the United States and didn't come here very often even, though we caught him here, clearly has cars in Colorado. He also said that you can't serve a subpoena for a case in New York in the state of Colorado, it's outside the primary jurisdiction. He also began to raise questions about whether Baker Hostetler had a conflict of interest because of some previous work he did with one of the Baker lawyers.
This led to a long, drawn-out discovery battle that I was in the center of because I served the subpoenas and I helped find the information for the first set of subpoenas that lasted, you know, through 2014. This was, you know, a lot of what I did. This was—the main focus was on trying to get William Browder to testify under oath about his role in this case and his activities in Russia.
All of this—his determined effort to avoid testifying under oath, including running away from subpoenas and changing—frequently changing lawyers and making lurid allegations against us, including that, you know, he thought we were KGB assassins in the parking lot of Aspen, Colorado when we served the subpoena, all raised questions in my mind about why he was so determined to not have to answer questions under oath about things that happened in Russia.
I'll add that, you know, I've done a lot of Russia reporting over the years. I originally met William Browder back when I was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal when I was doing stories about corruption in Russia. I think the first time I met him he lectured me about—I was working on a story about Vladimir Putin corruption and he lectured me about how have Vladimir Putin was not corrupt and how he was the best thing that ever happened to Russia. There are numerous documents that he published himself, interviews he gave singing the praises of Vladimir Putin. At that time I was already investigating corruption in Putin's Russia.
So this made me more curious about the history of his activities in Russia and what that might tell me about corruption in Russia, and as part of the case we became curious about whether there was something that he was hiding about his activities in Russia. So through this period while we were attempting to get him under oath we were also investigating his business practices in Russia and that research—and I should add when I say "we," I mean the lawyers were doing a lot of this work and it wasn't—I can't take responsibility or pride of place on having done all this work. We were doing it all together. It was a—you know, there were a number of lawyers involved, other people.
In the course of doing this research into what he might not want to be asked about from his history in Russia we began to learn about the history of his tax avoidance in Russia and we began to deconstruct the way that his hedge fund structured its investments in Russia and, you know, we gradually accumulated through public records, not all from Russia, that he set up dozens of shell companies in Cyprus and other tax havens around the world to funnel money into Russia and to hold Russian securities.
He also set up shell companies inside of Russia in order to avoid paying taxes in Russia and he set up shell companies in a remote republic called Kalmykia, K-A-L-M-Y-K-I-A, which is next to Mongolia. It's the only Buddhist republic in Russia and there's nothing much there, but if you put your companies there you can lower your taxes. They were putting their companies in Kalmykia that were holding investments from western investors and they were staffing these companies—they were using Afghan war veterans because there's a tax preference for Afghan war veterans, and what we learned is that they got in trouble for this eventually because one of Putin's primary rules for business was you can do a lot of things, but you've got to pay your taxes.
In fact, William Browder famously said in 2005 at Davos everybody knows under Putin you have to pay your taxes, which is ironic because at the time he was being investigated for not paying taxes. Ultimately they were caught, some of these companies were prosecuted, and he was forced to make an enormous tax payment to the government of Russia in 2006.
I will add that Sergei Magnitsky was working for him at this time and all of this happened prior to the events that you are interested in involving the Russian treasury fraud and his jailing. This precedes all that.
But returning to the detailed discussion of my work, we investigated William Browder's business practices in Russia, we began to understand maybe what it was he didn't want to talk about, and as we looked at that we then began to look at his decision to surrender his American citizenship in 1998. At that point somewhere in there the Panama papers came out and we discovered that he had incorporated shell companies offshore in the mid 1990s, in 1995 I believe it was in the British Virgin Islands, and that at some point his hedge fund's shares had been transferred to this offshore company.
This offshore company was managed—several of his offshore companies were managed by the Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca, M-O-S-S-A-C-K, Fonseca, F-O-N-S-E-C-A, which is known now for setting up offshore companies for drug kingpins, narcos, kleptos, you name it. They were servicing every bad guy around. And I'm familiar with them from other money laundering and corruption and tax evasion investigations that I've done.
I'll note parenthetically that William Browder talks a lot about the Panama papers and the Russians who are in the Panama papers without ever mentioning that he's in the Panama papers. This is, again, a public fact that you can check on-line.
So that's an overview of the sort of work I was doing on this case. In the course of that I also began reaching back, I read his book Red Notice to understand his story and the story of his activities in Russia. I'll add also that I was extremely sympathetic for what happened to Sergei Magnitsky and I told him that myself and I tried to help him. It was only later from this other case that I began to be curious and skeptical about William Browder's activities and history in Russia.
MR. FOSTER: Can I ask you a follow-up question. I appreciate the narrative answer, but at the very beginning of the narrative you talked about beginning this journey by interviewing—conducting an interview of the case agent who said he'd gotten all of his information—the case agent or the attorney, the primary person at the DOJ, you said they got all their information from Bill Browder. Can you tell us who that was and who conducted the interview?
MR. LEVY: Mr. Simpson should definitely answer that question. I just want to make sure for the record that he hadn't finished his answer. He can talk more extensively about the litigation support that he provided for Baker—
MR. FOSTER: We're happy to get into that if he wants to do that. We're just coming up at the end of our hour.
MR. LEVY: No problem.
MR. FOSTER: and I wanted to get that follow-up in before—
MR. LEVY: No problem. No problem at all.
BY THE WITNESS:
A. I'll just finish with one last thing and I'm happy to answer that question.
So in the course of this, you know—I mean, one of my interests or even obsessions over the last decade has been corruption in Russia and Russian kleptocracy and the police state that was there. I was stationed in Europe from 2005 to 2007 or '8. So I was there when Putin was consolidating power and all this wave of power was coming. So it's been a subject that I've read very widely on and I'm very interested in the history of Putin's rise.
You know, in the course of all this I'll tell you I became personally interested in where Bill Browder came from, how he made so much money under Vladimir Putin without getting involved in anything illicit. So I read his book and I began doing other research and I found filings at the SEC linking him quite directly and his company, Salomon Brothers at the time, to a company in Russia called Peter Star, and I had, as it happens, vetted Peter Star and I knew that Peter Star was, you know, at the center of a corruption case that I covered as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. When I went back into the history of Peter Star I realized that Bill Browder did business