Hermitage Capital Management is an investment fund and asset management company specializing in Russian markets founded by Bill Browder and Edmond Safra. Chief operating officer is Ivan Cherkasov. Hermitage Capital Management headquarters are in Guernsey; it also maintains offices in the Cayman Islands, London and Moscow. Its main investment fund, the Hermitage Fund created in 1996, was rated as extremely successful after earning 2,697% between 1996 and December 2007. Hermitage describe themselves as an activist fund. Its tactics include the exposure of corporate corruption in the companies it is holding, in the hope of improving managerial behaviour and lessen the significant discount that corruption has on share prices. Most famously, Hermitage has helped to expose several high-profile cases of corruption in Russia's largest company Gazprom between 1998 and 2000. In October 2000, Hermitage reported that "investors are valuing this company as if 99 percent of its assets have been stolen. The real figure is around 10 percent so that's good news." In April 2007, the firm launched Hermitage Global, an activist fund focused on global emerging markets. Since 2015, Hermitage has operated as a family office hedge fund based in London, having returned outside capital to investors. The focus of the fund is still in emerging markets. Conflict with Russian government Although the fund's founder William Browder was a supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin, in November 2005 he was blacklisted by the Russian government as a "threat to national security" and denied entry to the country. According to publication in The Economist, the fund was blacklisted because its management interfered with the flow of money to "corrupt bureaucrats and their businessmen accomplices" in Russia. In April 2008, because three of Hermitage Capital's subsidiaries had been placed under control of Boily Systems, which is a British Virgin Islands (BVI) company that CTL established in 2007 for G.S.L. Law & Consulting which is a firm in Russia, Hermitage Capital Management sent a letter to Commonwealth Trust Limited (CTL) claiming that thieves had taken control of Hermitage's three subsidiaries. One of the companies, Diron Trade LLP, a stolen Magnitsky company with a Great Britain postal box, assisted in more than $5.8 billion in money laundering transfers between Swedbank's baltic subsidiaries and Danske Bank during 6 months in 2010 and 2011 according to SVT. As the New York Times reported in 2008, over the next two years, several of his associates and lawyers,