Bill Browder was a highflying businessman in Moscow, until Putin turned on him. His new memoir details how dangerous it is to end up on the strongman's bad side. In 2013 I went to London’s notorious libel courts to gaze with anger and despair on yet another case that should never had come to trial. Pavel Karpov was suing Bill Browder, an investment fund manager, who had launched a devastating campaign against corrupt officials who had driven him out of Russia, and tortured and murdered his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. The retired major from Putin’s Interior Ministry Police was appalled to be on Browder’s sanctions list. His luxuriously expensiv... read full review

A gripping account of murder, high finance and the Russian president’s Achilles heel   In 2008 a young Russian lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive tax fraud. He found evidence that a group of well-connected Russian officials had stolen a whopping $230m. The same officials had Magnitsky arrested; he was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment. Magnitsky – who suffered from pancreatitis and gall stones – spent months in pain. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. One day his condition grew critical. Guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat him to deat... read full review

The grandson of the head of the American Communist Party commits the ultimate act of rebellion: He gets a business degree from Stanford. From there, he goes on to build the biggest hedge fund in Russia. After exposing widespread government corruption, he gets expelled from the country. While he’s gone, the Kremlin raids his fund and perpetrates an elaborate financial fraud. The lawyer investigating the crime is tortured and dies in prison. He avenges his lawyer’s death, exposing a cover-up at the highest levels of the Putin regime. Here’s the craziest part: It’s all true, as told by that Stanford M.B.A., Bill Browder, in his new memoir, ... read full review

Bill Browder arrived in Moscow in the spring of 1996 with $25 million to wager in the fledgling Russian stock market. Over the next few years, he earned his clients a 700 percent return, lost almost everything in the 1998 financial meltdown, and won it all back and more in the boom that followed. At the peak, his Hermitage Fund had $4.5 billion in assets, making him the country’s biggest foreign portfolio investor and the market’s most enthusiastic cheerleader. Then things began to go horribly wrong. “Red Notice” is the riveting account of Browder’s journey through the early years of Russian capitalism. A red notice is a global arrest warran... read full review

A lot of books these days claim to lift the lid on the dark arts of the men in the Kremlin. Black deeds on Red Square are hot stuff in publishing. Just like the Tudors, there's always some new angle. However, many of these peeks inside the Kremlin are samey. They start with a cover of a Romanov eagle, or a shot of Moscow taken from a sinister angle and segue into a cautionary tale of how the unwary author fell in and out of love with Mother Russia. At first sight, Bill Browder's book is just another exposé. And, it is hard at first to warm to the author, a turbo-charged capitalist who roared off east in the hunt for rich pickings in the rubbl... read full review

Ah, the mid 1990s. Memories. The Soviet Union was no more, and fashionable academics were writing books about how the world had reached the “end of history,” a time when the old ideological disputes would fade away, because everybody now understood that multi-party republics and capitalistic economic systems [with softened social-democratic edges] were the way to go. Policy wonks translated this vision into the “Washington Consensus,” a set of rules for how underdeveloped or war-torn countries could develop and join the club of the peaceful and developed. Boris Yeltsin, the flawed founder of post-Soviet Russian politics and a man with a flair... read full review

Late in the process of publishing this book its author sat down for lunch with George Clooney. Clooney was with his wife, Amal. It was said afterwards that they wanted to meet Bill Browder to talk about an anti-corruption law for Britain similar to one he has already pushed through the US Congress; a law that would freeze assets and ban visas for thieving Russians. Maybe that did come up. It would certainly be a good thing. But I’ll eat my Bic if George and Bill didn’t spend the starter and the main course and most of pudding talking about film rights. More than any other book to have emerged on mob rule in Russia since the fall of Communism,... read full review

The timing of Bill Browder's new book, “Red Notice,” is quite impeccable. After years of craven appeasement, the West finally realized the failure of its “reset” policies with Russia. “Red Notice” provides a powerful glimpse of what’s been taking place in Putin’s Russia, while the world looked the other way. As the hedge fund manager, Browder was hugely successful with Hermitage Capital Management, a company he founded in Russia in 1996. It became the largest investment fund in the country. Browder was the prime example of succeeding the right way – without chicanery, fraud or embezzlement. This was the surefire way of irritating corrupt Russ... read full review

Bill Browder has written a book that is by turns gripping, chilling, and moving—a book that impels a reviewer to pile one outraged adjective upon another. Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice (Simon & Schuster, 2015) is a scathing indictment of Putin’s brutal kleptocracy, which Browder and the people connected to his firm, Hermitage Capital, experienced firsthand. Browder, the grandson of Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party who ran for president twice on the Communist ticket, rebelled and became a capitalist, though he still felt the pull of Eastern Europe. His first major deal was f... read full review

One man who has experienced the Kremlin’s darker side and has been instrumental in developing a targeted sanctions policy against Russia is Bill Browder, a hedge fund manager turned human rights activist. If Dawisha’s book is a clinical dissection of Putin’s regime, Browder’s Red Notice is an impassioned personal broadside against the Kremlin. The first part of his book recounts his rollercoaster years as a US-born financier who moved to Moscow in the 1990s, built up the biggest foreign investment fund in Russia and was then thrown out of the country in 2005 after exposing systematic corporate corruption. Even in his own telling, Browder does... read full review

The capitalistic grandson of a noted US communist meets turmoil in today’s Russia. Bill Browder made piles of money as a foreign investor in Russia. At least, he did until the Russian government expelled him in 2005 for continually pointing out the country’s corrupt business practices. With Browder out of the way, two police officers then hijacked his company, Hermitage Capital, and set in motion an elaborate $230 million tax refund scam. An American with British citizenship, Browder was nervy enough to believe he could use the Russian courts to refute the government’s contrived case against him. But when Browder’s Russian lawyers followed th... read full review

The way to think about Russia, Bill Browder told me in Moscow in 2004, using a comparison he recycles in Red Notice, is as a giant prison yard. Vladimir Putin, he argued then, had no choice but to destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the yard’s top dog and country’s richest man. One of a tribe of Western financiers who traversed a hermetic circuit of offices, guarded apartments, upscale restaurants and the airport, Browder would berate reporters for banging on about human rights abuses or atrocities in Chechnya. Putin was already Putin, for anyone who cared to notice — autocratic, corrupt, nationalistic — but, for Browder, Russia was an oil-powered ... read full review

For years, Bill Browder was a winner in Russia’s markets. Then he was expelled from the country and his lawyer was murdered. There is no gulag in today’s Russia. There are no show trials. Except, that is, for the tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky was beaten to death in 2009 in prison, where he was being held on trumped-up charges for alleging that state officials had robbed Russian taxpayers of millions of dollars. He was then tried and convicted posthumously of tax fraud. His brutal death capped off the era of Wild West capitalism in Russia—a period amply and engagingly described in “Red Notice” by Bill Browder, one of its chief America... read full review

EVEN by the flawed standards of the Russian legal system, the events that played out in Moscow’s Tverskoy district court in July 2013 were a farce. After a trial lasting four months, the two accused were found guilty of massive tax fraud. Yet the cage in the courtroom from which they were meant to learn their fate was empty. One of them was in ­London, the other was in his grave.  The dead man was Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer beaten to death by his guards in Moscow’s Butyrka jail more than three years earlier; his co-defendant was Bill Browder, the multimillionaire American investor who employed him. The message of their conviction ... read full review

In the early 1990s Bill Browder invested $2,000 in a handful of Polish companies being privatized after the collapse of Communism. Eastern Europe was dipping a toe into the cold bath of free-market capitalism, and Mr. Browder, fresh out of Stanford University’s business school, wanted to jump in, too. His small investment quadrupled in value within the year and went on to repay him tenfold. “For those who don’t know, the sensation of finding a ‘ten-bagger’ is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine,” he writes in “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.” “Once you’ve done it, you want to re... read full review

This is the tale of an accidental activist. An American goes to Russia in the Wild East 1990s. He makes a pile of money investing in the stock market, runs afoul of Vladimir Putin and his thugocracy of thieving oligarchs, and gets deported. His lawyer is killed. Instead of lying low, he fights back. He becomes an international crusader for justice. The same skills that brought him financial success — stubbornness, creativity, and media savvy — now bring about an act of Congress. Not a proverbial one, but an actual act passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Obama. Bill Browder, the unexpected hero and author of this su... read full review

There is an unpalatable certainty about life in London these days: a middle-aged man who has made money in Russia will every so often fall off a balcony, keel over in his bathroom, or otherwise die prematurely in a mysterious way. Bill Browder, who used to be the largest foreign investor in Russia and made hundreds of millions of dollars over there, sincerely hopes to avoid the same grisly fate. But his would-be assassins show all the signs of being as cunning as they are determined. In the absence of any other means of foolproof security, therefore, his chief defence against low railings or undetectable poisons may well be telling his story ... read full review

Bill Browder: 'Putin is a mafia don'  The former financier's autobiography is a gripping account of his rise and fall from Russia - and his fight for justice. Bill Browder is angry. Angry in a quiet, measured kind of way, but angry all the same. He is also full of guilt.  ‘My main regret was going to Russia in the first place, because it ended up with a man dying,’ he says.  There are people Browder blames more than himself for the death of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was denied treatment for a painful pancreatic condition, beaten up and then left to die in a Russian jail cell in 2009 after he uncovered a $230m (£151m) government fra... read full review

Red sky in the morning. A salutary tale of robbery and redress. BILL BROWDER was a happy man in 2003. He had the perfect job and was making himself rich. He bought underpriced shares in badly run Russian companies and chivvied the management into behaving better so the share price would go up. It worked. Between the depth of Russia’s financial crash in 1998 and the end of 2003, his investment fund had grown more than 12-fold. What could go wrong? Plenty, it turned out, including expropriation, beatings, intimidation and death. “Red Notice” is a sizzling account of Mr Browder’s rise, fall and metamorphosis from bombastic financier to renowned ... read full review

Written by Norman Pearlstine. Investor Bill Browder pulls back the curtain on Putin’s culture of corruption. The jacket note for Bill Browder’s Red Notice calls it “a real-life thriller about an American-born financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the people responsible in the Kremlin.” The description is accurate as far as it goes. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a $230 million fraud perpetrated by Russian government officials against one of Browder’s companies in 2008. He was jailed after disclosing the fraud and subsequently killed while in pri... read full review

Browder was a successful businessman, a pioneering investor in the emerging market that was Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. In the 1990s, savvy investors were seeking out his hedge fund as a way to get in on astonishingly undervalued, newly privatized businesses in Russia. But along with privatization came the oligarchs, powerful Russians who took control of previously government-operated entities. After operating successfully for years, Browder ran afoul of the oligarchs and the government. He was suddenly persona non grata, expelled from Russia, leaving his company at the mercy of a tax scam—$230 million in fraud committed b... read full review

An American-born financier spins an almost unbelievable tale of the "poisoned" psychology afflicting business life in Vladimir Putin's Russia.By 2000, Browder, founder and CEO of the Hermitage Fund, helmed "the best performing emerging-markets fund in the world." Taking full advantage of the unprecedented investment opportunities available during post-Soviet Russia's transition from communism to capitalism, a gangland business atmosphere where oligarchs operated with impunity, Browder's firm became the biggest investor in Russia's stock market. He owed his rise in part to his willingness to fight back, to alert Western business contacts, to i... read full review

Subtitled "How I Became Putin's No 1 Enemy," this is a jaw-dropping account of the Russian authorities' cover-up of the imprisonment, torture and murder of a brave young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who testified against the Russian Interior Ministry regarding the conspiracy to steal $230m worth of taxes paid to the state by one of the world's most successful hedge funds. The fund's founder, who employed Magnitsky, tells of his transformation from hotshot financier to human rights activist, campaigning for justice for his friend. Walter Isaacson, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and Georffrey Robertson QC are among those urging us all to read ... read full review

In Russia the gangsters are running the government, according to this fascinating firsthand story of state criminality and persecution. Browder, founder of the hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management (and grandson of American Communist Party leader Earl Browder), made his fortune investing in under-priced, privatized ex-Soviet companies and prodding their corrupt managers to divulge the true about their assets. The enmity of Russian oligarchs – and, eventually, Vladimir Putin – got him expelled from the country, whereupon his companies were seized by a group of police officials and used to steal $230 million from the Russian Treasury. When... read full review