William Browder on the State of Law in Putin's Russia

In this lecture, William Browder, author of New York Times bestseller Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice, will give a firsthand account of corruption, dirty politics, and murder in Russia, as told by one of Putin’s Most Wanted. November 2009. An emaciated young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, is led to a freezing isolation cell in a Moscow prison, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight police officers. His crime? To testify against the Russian Interior Ministry officials who stole $230 million of taxes paid to the state by one of the world’s most successful hedge funds. Magnitsky’s brutal killing has remained uninvestigated and unpunished to this day. His farcical posthumous show-trial brought Putin’s regime to a new low in the eyes of the international community. Red Notice is a searing exposé of the wholesale whitewash by Russian authorities of Magnitsky’s imprisonment and murder, and the shadowy heart of the Kremlin. Bill Browder – the hedge fund manager who employed Magnitsky – takes us through his battles with ruthless oligarchs in the turbulent landscape of post-Soviet Union Moscow, to his expulsion from Russia on Putin’s orders. William Browder is Chief Executive Officer of Hermitage Capital and author of Red Notice. He was the largest foreign investor in Russia until November 2005, when he was suddenly denied entry to the country and declared “a threat to national security”. Since 2009 when his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison, Browder has been leading a global campaign to expose the corruption and human rights abuses endemic in Russia. As a result of this campaign, the ‘Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act’ was signed into US law in 2012, imposing visa bans and asset freezes on certain officials involved in Magnitsky’s death. Praise for Red Notice A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the culture of corruption and impunity in Putin's Russia today, and Browder’s heroic example of how to fight back. – US Senator John McCain