Born into privilege in the U.S, the now-British author continues the account of Russian high finance maleficence, international money laundering and murders that he first exposed in his 2015 book Red Notice. There is some overlap with the information in that book, so that it is not entirely necessary to have read the earlier work to understand this one.
Browder is the CEO of Hermitage Capital, a remarkably profitable international hedge fund that invested up to $4 billion in Russian enterprises in the 2000s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. However when he exposed massive fraud and money laundering schemes reaching to the highest levels of Putin’s regime, he became persona non grata in Russia, was harassed and eventually expelled from Russia, and his Russian lawyer, Sergie Magnitsky was jailed, tortured, and murdered in November 2009. A string of other murders and attempted murders of Russian dissidents and workers exposing the corruption, several being friends of Browder, followed and Browder was arrested on trumped up charges through a Russian filing with Interpol.
The most frightening aspect of this scary tale of international intrigue is the extent to which the Russian campaign of disinformation was successful in casting Browder as a criminal, often accepted in the highest levels of the United States government while he was working tirelessly to get a Magnitsky Act passed to freeze the foreign assets of the real criminal money launderers. (Hence the name of this book.) This was particularly harsh after Donald Trump became president; at one point at a Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki, the Putin proposal to extradite Browder, a British citizen, to Russia in exchange for release of 12 Americans held in Russian prisons was taken seriously by Trump.
Browder also had the bad luck of facing a demented U.S judge who could not comprehend the issues being argued and ruled against him. The international law firm BakerHostetler seems to fit the popular image of ruthless mercenary unscrupulous parasites; they delegated the same fittingly named amoral lawyer, John Moscow, who had defended Browder earlier, to later argue against his interests. But should we be surprised by this action by the firm that also had a constant revolving door relationship with the Trump’s administration?
In relation to passage of the Canadian Magnitsky Act in October, 2017 Browder notes: “The Canadian Magnitsky Act was a major milestone…..Many nations are either too proud or too anti-American to follow the United States, but there is no such thing as being anti-Canadian. I knew this move would open the floodgates and that a cascade of other countries would soon adopt Magnitsky Acts of their own.” (As they did, a total of 37 countries as of the time of writing). A flood of fuzzy pride filled me on reading this praise for Canada until I reflected that my being a Canadian is simply a matter of chance.
Readers like me will have some difficulty following the money trails documented here: they are as impossible to follow and serpentine as the disinformation trails laid down by Putin’s Russian oligarchy. The many foreign names that this monolingual anglophone found difficult to pronounce and remember added to my confusion. Nevertheless the story is compelling and frightening, reading like an international spy thriller novel. I found no reason to doubt Browder’s version of events and I greatly admire his courage and integrity, even though I have a hardwired distrust of anyone working in the murky world of international high finance.
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Thanks, Vera.
The Passionate Reader 