After his arrest in Madrid, the financier explains why he’s one of the Kremlin’s main enemies

The knock on the door of his Madrid hotel room came at 9.40am on Wednesday morning. Two Spanish national police officers and the hotel’s general manager stood apologetic in the corridor: “Mr Browder, I’m afraid you’re under arrest.”

Ten minutes later Bill Browder, an American-born financier and arguably the Kremlin’s No 1 foreign enemy, was in the squad car tweeting furiously on the way to the police station. He was being detained on an arrest warrant issued by Russia, plainly intended as the first step in his eventual extradition to Moscow.

“The Russian government doesn’t like me; Vladimir Putin doesn’t like me,” says Browder, now safely back in his adopted home city of London. “Why? Because I came up with a new way to deal with his abusive behaviour that seems to have a disproportionate effect on him. He’s really, really sore about it.”

For a decade, until he was deported in 2005, Browder lived in Moscow and ran Russia’s most successful investment fund. Soon afterwards, a small group of corrupt officials effectively hijacked his fund, Hermitage Capital Management, and used it to perpetrate a massive tax fraud, stealing $230m.

Bill Browder: the Kremlin threatened to kill me Read more

Three years later, Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer hired by Browder, uncovered the money trail. He was thrown into jail, denied medical treatment – he suffered from gallstones and pancreatitis – and in 2009 was beaten to death by guards in his cell. Aged 37, he left a wife and two young sons.

Browder was horrified. Since those responsible were high-ranking officials in the interior ministry and FSB security services, there was zero chance of obtaining justice in Russia. Instead, he launched an ambitious campaign to persuade first the US, then a lengthening list of other countries, to hit where it hurts.



“It’s a kleptocracy,” he says. “And stealing lots and lots of money, they have to keep it safe somewhere and go spend it somewhere. By coming up with the idea of imposing visa bans, freezing assets, denying access to banks ... It puts that whole model at risk.”

The US Magnitsky Act, naming 18 corrupt officials, became law in 2012, and similar legislation has been passed in Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Gibraltar and, early last month, in the UK. Seven more countries – Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Australia, South Africa, Ukraine – are on course to follow.

“But Putin is a man who always has to retaliate when he feels slighted,” says Browder, sipping mineral water in a north London cafe. “So ... he’s tried a number of things against me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A portrait of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, held by his mother. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Far worse things than arrest tend to happen to Russians who annoy Putin’s Kremlin. Britain “woke up to the dangers of Russia” in March, Browder said, when Sergei and Julia Skripal fell victim to a brazen assassination attempt in Salisbury using a military grade nerve agent.

“But look ... Alexander Perepilichnyy, who was a whistleblower in the Magnitisky case, ‘mysteriously’ dropped dead in Surrey in 2012 – except there was nothing mysterious about it: he was murdered. Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in 2006 ... There are more.”

With foreigners, however, it’s more complicated. “If I’m killed, it would create a massive international political scandal, almost an act of war, and they know that,” says Browder. “So they would like to kill me in a way they can get away with.

“If I die in a prison in Russia, they they can say: ‘Oh, he slipped in the shower.’ That’s their goal, and their main method is to abuse the mechanisms of international law. That’s what this Madrid business was about.”

Browder – who was in Madrid to meet José Grinda, an anti-corruption prosecutor, in connection with a money-laundering investigation – was released barely two hours after his arrest. “They looked a bit disappointed,” he said. “But they contacted Interpol, and Interpol said sorry, you have to let the guy go.”

Nonetheless, the warrant executed in Spain on Wednesday was Russia’s sixth targeting Browder in as many years, despite a 2013 Interpol decision that they were “predominantly political” so should not be acted upon by the international police organisation’s member countries.



Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) In the back of the Spanish police car going to the station on the Russian arrest warrant. They won’t tell me which station pic.twitter.com/Xwj27xC7Zd

Interpol said on Friday that the latest non-compliant Russian request for cooperation in detaining Browder was deleted from its central databases in October 2017, and should also have been deleted from those of its members - suggesting the error was the Spanish police’s.

But the system, Browder says, needs reform: “Interpol was set up to catch fugitives, not act like the long arm of Putin going after his enemies.” A German MEP has written to Interpol demanding it deny Russia access to its network if it continues to abuse it by unilaterally circulating requests relating to the campaigner, and a broader campaign is being organised.



Browder is heartened, though, that attitudes to Russia appear to be hardening, at least in Britain, after the Skripal case. Parliament is clearly “seething”, he said, and Theresa May’s speech on the incident was “extremely tough. But now she needs to follow up with action.”



The Chelsea football club owner, Roman Abramovich, may have taken up Israeli citizenship this week because of his UK visa problems, but “even assuming that’s policy, does ‘not renewing a visa’ measure up against a chemical weapons attack?”

Having himself faced death threats, Browder finds western agonising over the “niceties” of whether or not the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko should have gone along with the Ukrainian secret service’s plan to fake his own death this week to be absurd.

“Far too many people have been killed by Putin already,” he says. “If you ask me whether I prefer a purist approach towards the information war or having Mr Babchenko dead, I know my answer. Russia is going to make stuff up no matter what. We should just save lives where we can and debunk their nonsense.”

Timeline Poisoned umbrellas and polonium: Russian-linked UK deaths Show Hide Georgi Markov In one of the most chilling episodes of the cold war, the Bulgarian dissident was poisoned with a specially adapted umbrella on Waterloo Bridge. As he waited for a bus, Markov felt a sharp prick in his leg. The opposition activist, who was an irritant to the communist government of Bulgaria, died three days later. A deadly pellet containing ricin was found in his skin. His unknown assassin is thought to have been from the secret services in Bulgaria. Alexander Litvinenko The fatal poisoning of the former FSB officer sparked an international incident. Litvinenko fell ill after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium. He met his killers in a bar of the Millennium hotel in Mayfair. The pair were Andrei Lugovoi – a former KGB officer turned businessman, who is now a deputy in Russia’s state Duma – and Dmitry Kovtun, a childhood friend of Lugovoi’s from a Soviet military family. Putin denied all involvement and refused to extradite either of the killers. German Gorbuntsov The exiled Russian banker survived an attempt on his life as he got out of a cab in east London. He was shot four times with a silenced pistol. He had been involved in a bitter dispute with two former business partners. Alexander Perepilichnyy The businessman collapsed while running near his home in Surrey. Traces of a chemical that can be found in the poisonous plant gelsemium were later found in his stomach. Before his death, Perepilichnyy was helping a specialist investment firm uncover a $230m Russian money-laundering operation, a pre-inquest hearing was told. Hermitage Capital Management claimed that Perepilichnyy could have been deliberately killed for helping it uncover the scam involving Russian officials. He may have eaten a popular Russian dish containing the herb sorrel on the day of his death, which could have been poisoned. Boris Berezovsky The exiled billionaire was found hanged in an apparent suicide after he had spent more than decade waging a high-profile media battle against his one-time protege Putin. A coroner recorded an open verdict after hearing conflicting expert evidence about the way he died. A pathologist who conducted a postmortem examination on the businessman’s body said he could not rule out murder. Scot Young An associate of Berezovsky whom he helped to launder money, he was found impaled on railings after he fell from a fourth-floor flat in central London. A coroner ruled that there was insufficient evidence of suicide. But Young, who was sent to prison in January 2013 for repeatedly refusing to reveal his finances during a divorce row, told his partner he was going to jump out of the window moments before he was found.

Skripal poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were were found unconscious on a bench in the Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury after 'suspected exposure to an unknown substance' which was later identified as chemical weapon novichok. In the aftermath Theresa May blamed Vladimir Putin and expelled 23 Russian diplomats who were suspected of spying. Two Russian men using the identities Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov were named as suspects. They appeared on Russian TV to protest their innocence.

The Skripals survived. However a local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after spraying novichok on her wrists from a fake Nina Ricci perfume bottle converted into a dispenser, which had been recovered from a skip by her partner Charlie Rowley.

Browder says he was initially a fan of Putin, who “came in promising to get rid of the 22 oligarchs who had stolen 40% of Russia, impoverishing everybody so they could buy their villas and yachts and jets and so on. But then it became clear what his goal really was.”



And so Browder finds himself a hedge fund CEO turned human rights activist, campaigning against the man he calls “the biggest oligarch of all”. Magnitsky’s widow, Natasha, collaborates with him, and Browder is working on US college applications for his late lawyer’s son.

“He had such integrity,” Browder says of Magnitsky. “He could easily have done what everybody else does: cut a deal. But he didn’t. A good man who died, because he worked for me. You don’t forget that.”