Investing in Russia: “Get Out Now. It is Blood Money.”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Andrew Forrest, you did, and I mentioned it, basically in pulling back from your renewable investment in Russia. You called it blood money. It’s strong. It’s strong from somebody who is a businessman, a billionaire who’s made, you know, his fortune in the cold hard world of capitalism. You seem to — tell me about that, about why you said blood money.

ANDREW FORREST, AUSTRALIAN MINING MAGNATE: Well, Christiane, you’ve been with me on this campaign, the global campaign to defeat modern slavery, to finally send it back to the dark ages so it never raised its head. It’s attack on women, 130 — one in 130 women across the world are enslaved or have been seriously enslaved. I’ve been to Russia, you’ve known all about that, that I’ve spoken to the Russian leadership. I’ve spoken to the Russian people. Also, my most recent campaign to stop single use plastic, to stop poisoning our environment. I’ve worked a lot in Russia. I’ve spent a lot of time in Crimea, across the Ukraine, in Kyiv. My own daughter had education and work experience in Kyiv. We know Russians and we know Ukrainians, and we know there is no point to this war. Now, intelligent people, business people across Russia have tried to justify it to me. They point out, well, what happened in Syria, what happened in Afghanistan, I’m afraid it pales into insignificance of a dictator trying to take an entire another country for his personal ambition, his fixation with Peter the Great. His worship of that entity in history, which is a very topical figure. There’s incredibly mixed views about that individual. Putin has fixated on that individual. He cast himself in that mold. And I’m saying to every business person, there’s still 300 odd companies which are active in the Russian economy, which are foreign companies, I’m saying to them, hey, listen really carefully to world opinion. Shareholders, if you’re reaping rewards from Russia, you need to wait, because right now those rewards from feeding an army, and feeding a military which is persecuting and killing an entire civilian population. We have to pull out of Russia. I’m saying to my fellow chairman, my chief executives, my fellow investors, get out now. It is blood money. There’s no other way you can call it. You can try and justify it any which way you like, but there is a murderer at the helm, and we need to do everything to not support that murderer.