Why Putin is itching to get his hands on Bill Browder
Bill Browder was headed for breakfast at his Madrid hotel when two men with shirts reading “Policia Nacional” suddenly approached him and took him into custody on a Russian arrest warrant.
Browder, a financier who had once been the largest foreign investor in Russia, had long been a thorn in Moscow’s side before he was detained that day in May 2018. Years earlier, Browder had discovered that many of the companies he had invested in were being robbed by oligarchs and corrupt officials. Unwilling to let this fraud go unchallenged, Browder, as detailed in his 2015 bestseller Red Notice, decided to fight back. He hired a local lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, who helped Browder uncover a multi-million dollar tax fraud involving Russian officials that went all the way up to President Vladimir Putin. Angered by the revelations, the Kremlin accused Magnitsky of fraud himself. He was detained and ultimately murdered in prison in 2009.
Horrified by what had happened, Browder publicized the case and lobbied for what became known as the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 U.S. law which allows for the freezing of assets of Russian human rights violators. In retaliation, the Russian government put Browder on trial in absentia, found him guilty of tax evasion, and issued what is known as an Interpol Red Notice for his arrest. Although several of these notices were eventually rejected by Interpol, that didn’t stop the Spanish police from attempting to arrest him on yet another warrant in Madrid that day. It was possibly the scariest moment in Browder’s life. [Continue reading…]