As Western leaders struggle to curb Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, there may be no one with keener insight into the Russian leader’s mindset than Bill Browder.
Browder was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, as head of the Heritage capital management fund. But the American-born financier was banned from Russia in 2005 after arousing Putin’s wrath with his investigations into Russian government corruption. Browder’s courageous Moscow lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was imprisoned for months, tortured and beaten to death for exposing the perpetrators of a $230 million corruption scheme that was falsely blamed on Browder.
Since then, the financier has made it his life’s work to seek justice for Magnitsky — and to expose Russian global corruption and money laundering schemes that track back to the Kremlin. His efforts led Congress to pass the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned Russian officials responsible for his lawyer’s murder, and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Act, authorizing the U.S. government to sanction foreign government officials for human rights offenses.
