The Jackson Institute will host a talk by Bill Alpert ’79, a senior editor at Barron’s, The Dow Jones Business and Financial Weekly, on Wednesday, April 20, at 7 pm in the GM Room, Horchow Hall. Alpert will discuss “Looting Russia’s Treasury and Laundering a Billion Rubles.”
Alpert is a senior editor at Barron’s, The Dow Jones Business and Financial Weekly, where since 1984 he has published feature stories, columns and investigative projects of use to investors. His exposes have inspired regulatory reforms in diverse areas, such as “back-door” stock exchange listings, for-profit colleges, and the proposed “Magnitsky list” law to sanction those involved in the death of Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. The federal government recovered billions of dollars in “false claims” prosecutions, after he showed how leading pharmaceutical companies and doctors were defrauding Medicare with phony price lists. Many stories have led to successful prosecutions for stock fraud. His Barron’s stories protected the savings of investors and pensioners by warning about deceptive stocks that later crashed.
The Australian Federal Police gave Alpert a commendation in 1999 for the assistance that his reporting provided to a money laundering investigation. His December 2011 story about payments by Russian billionaires to Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man was called the top scandal of 2011 by Novaya Gazeta. Collaborating with Novaya Gazeta and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Alpert helped trace the flow of corrupt loot through Eastern European money laundering channels.