US billionaires bankroll anti-Bush ads

Update: Soros's foundation left 'paralysed' after raid (11/12)

Guardian -Tuesday, November 11

"Two of the world's richest men have pledged up to $5m for an anti-George Bush advertising campaign in an effort to oust the US president in next year's presidential election.

The international financier George Soros and Peter Lewis, chairman of the US motor insurance firm Progressive Corp, are prepared to spend £3m between them on television ads criticising the president.

They have pledged to donate 50 cents for every $1 raised for a planned $10m campaign being put together by the online activists Moveon.org."

Soros's foundation left 'paralysed' after raid

Business Report South Africa - November 12, 2003 Fifteen years since it started work in post-Soviet Russia, US billionaire George Soros's foundation has been "paralysed" after 50 camouflage-clad men seized its Moscow offices and removed computer records and archives.

Yekaterina Geniyeva, the head of Soros's Open Society Institute in Russia, told journalists yesterday that the raid, ordered by the building's owner ostensibly because of a dispute over rent, appeared to be politically motivated.

The raid, at about midnight on Thursday, came just days after Soros publicly criticized the jailing of Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky as "persecution" that would force business to submit to the state.

The organisation had lost all information on its 1,000 grant recipients.