Preview: The lesson about Putin and the war on Ukraine we MUST learn from the murder of Sergei Magnitsky

Bill Browder is an American-born British financier and political activist. He is the CEO and cofounder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which at a time was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. 

On 13 November 2005, the offices of Hermitage were raided. Mr Browder was refused entry to Russia, deported to the UK, and declared a threat to Russian national security. 

Sergei Magnitsky, head of the tax practice at Firestone Duncan, (Mr Browder's American law firm), was assigned to investigate the purpose of the raids. He discovered that while the seized documents were in the custody of the police, they had been used to fraudulently re-register Hermitage's holding companies to the name of an ex-convict. 

Mr Magnitsky was subsequently arrested by Russian authorities and died in prison, having been denied proper medical treatment. Mr Browder calls the death "murder". 

After Mr Magnitsky's death, Mr Browder lobbied for Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act,  a statute intended to punish Russian human rights violators, which was signed into law by President Obama in 2012. The following year, both Mr Magnitsky and Mr Browder were tried in absentia by a Russian court Russia for tax fraud. 

Unsurprisingly, both men (Mr Magnitsky had died four years prior) were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment. This was the first time in the modern era that a dead man had been tried and convicted.

Interpol rejected Russian requests to arrest Browder, saying the case was political. In 2014, the European Parliament voted for sanctions against 30 Russians believed complicit in the Magnitsky case. This was the first time it had taken such action. 

In 2015, Mr Browder told the story of his prosecution and persecution by the Russian state, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin's corruption, in Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice. (Simon & Schuster, 2015). 

Freezing Order is a sequel to Red Notice, published by Simon & Schuster in 2022. We'll post Mr Browder's dire warning to the West, excerpted from the "Afterword" to Freezing Order, later today. Many thanks to Agent 5 for sending us not just a link, but the book itself!