Indefatigable, bloody-minded, a sort of virtuous pain-in-the-arse Ancient Mariner, Browder continued to lobby senators, journalists and anybody who would listen to him. The Obama administration had “reset” relations with Russia and didn’t want to rock the boat. Instead, Browder took advantage of an obscure law passed by president George W Bush in 2004, which allows the US to impose visa sanctions on corrupt foreign officials.īrowder took his campaign to Washington, where the state department gave him short shrift.
Since they occupied high positions in Russia’s interior ministry and FSB spy agency there was little prospect of this happening. In the wake of Magnitsky’s murder, he began a campaign to bring his killers to justice. Still, there is no doubt that Browder has succeeded in annoying Putin in a way that few have. Or the murdered Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in a Mayfair hotel with radioactive green tea. Or Alexei Navalny, the Moscow opposition leader, currently under house arrest. There is the late Boris Berezovsky, another tycoon who fell out with Russia’s grudge-bearer-in-chief and decamped to London, playing Trotsky to Putin’s Stalin. They include Michael Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch whom Putin (pictured) jailed and sent to Siberia. (A Russian court later jailed him in absentia for nine years.) In truth, there are quite a few pretenders to the exalted post of “Putin’s No 1 Enemy”, as he describes himself. Its title refers to the extradition request served by Russia on Interpol, demanding Browder’s arrest. Red Notice is a dramatic, moving and thriller-like account of how Magnitsky’s death transformed Browder from hedge-fund manager to global human rights crusader. He believed the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. Magnitsky – a family man with two small boys, who liked Beethoven – refused to leave. When the Kremlin got nasty, most of the lawyers fled. Once a Putin fan, Browder found himself in trouble in 2005 when he was deported from Russia. That this happened was down to one man: Bill Browder, a US-born financier and the CEO of a successful asset management company. Magnitsky’s case was to become the most notorious and best-documented example of human rights abuse in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. Magnitsky – who suffered from pancreatitis and gall stones – spent months in pain. The same officials had Magnitsky arrested he was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment. He found evidence that a group of well-connected Russian officials had stolen a whopping $230m. I n 2008 a young Russian lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive tax fraud.
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