Red Notice by Bill Browder

Most members gave this page-turner five stars. Comments included "I couldn't put it down", "each chapter escalates the interest" and "entirely credible". Some of us felt it was a little repetitive and that Browder was not a born writer but these were small concerns in what was in the main a really "good read".

The book is a fascinating look at an American who grew up rebelling against his past (his Grandfather was the leader of the American Communist Party) and became a highly successful hedge fund manager in Russia, after the collapse of the USSR.

Eventually, he is falsely expelled from Russia but then works from the UK to take on the oligarchs who subsequently raid his Russian office and steal his companies.

Ultimately he becomes a vehement human rights campaigner after one of his Russian tax accountants who fought to expose the corruption in the Putin administration is falsely arrested and killed in jail by Russian police.

In the book, Browder himself is rather unlikeable in his naked capitalist days. He comes across as egotistical. One member felt that wives one and two certainly would have come second in the scheme of things. However, to give him his due, he is self deprecating at times, includes information that doesn't always put himself in the best light, and is open about who he is.

It could be argued that he and the oligarchs were on the same trajectory in pursuing the considerable financial spoils available in an ignorant and naive, newly minted capitalist Russia. Yet Browder's decisiveness, ability to see an opportunity, networks, media skills, and street creds do seem remarkable (if all are to be believed, since it is Browder writing the history). And when put to the cause of human rights these skills become ennobling.

It is the tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, of course, who is the true hero of this book in standing up for the truth and his own values, despite his torture and eventual death in prison at the hands of his tormentors. Yet his actions and death are so tragic and unjust as to make something of Browder in return.

Through Browder's considerable efforts, the Magnitsky law was enacted by legislators in the United States in 2012. The political machinations involved are fascinating to read in themselves. Subsequently, other countries across the world including the UK and Canada have passed similar Acts.

To quote Wikipedia, The Magnitsky Act, formally known as the Russia and Modova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, is a bipartisan bill passed by the US Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama, intending to punish Russian officials responsible for Magnitsky's death in Moscow. The law, which applies globally, authorises the US Government to sanction those who it sees as human rights offenders, freezing their assets and banning them from entering the US. The list of persons affected by the law has grown considerably and now includes Saudis involved in the assassination of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

In Australia, the International Human Rights and Corruption (Magnitsky Sanctions) Bill 2018 was introduced into Parliament in December 2018 but disappointingly lapsed at the dissolution before the election in April 2019.

Browder fears he is still pursued by Putin and says he wrote the book in part to ensure that if he was "disappeared", the authorities would know where to start looking.

Who is Bill Browder?

William (Bill) Browder is an American-born British financier and economist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, an investment fund that at one time was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. Born into a Jewish family, he grew up in Chicago, the son of a mathematician and the grandson of Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s.

He earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1989 and entered the financial sector. He started his London career in the Eastern European practice of the Boston Consulting Group in London. He renounced his US citizenship because of the vicious persecution by US authorities towards his family during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. (And possibly to avoid US taxes on his foreign investments, too.)

Browder and Edmond Safra founded Hermitage Capital Management in 1996. In 2005, after ten years of highly successful business deals in Russia, Browder was blacklisted by the Russian government as a threat to national security and denied entry to the country.

Since the events outlined in the book, his ongoing vocal criticism of Putin has seen him detained for periods, most recently in Spain in 2018 by a Russian arrest warrant (a Red Notice).