Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice

At a meeting in Switzerland between several Russian billionaire oligarchs, who already control nearly 40% of Russia’s newly privatized industries, they agree to engineer the re-election of the unpopular Boris Yeltsin. “In exchange,” Browder writes, “they would get whatever was left of the unprivatized Russian companies for next to nothing” (91). This deal symbolizes the rampant corruption of Russian privatization.

An oligarchy is a small group of people who control a country. When the Soviet Union collapses, Russia privatizes all its industries, which had for decades been owned and operated by the government. The system to do so quickly becomes corrupted, to the point where a dozen or so men manage to corner nearly 40% of Russian industrial resources—oil and gas companies, mining operations, banks, and so on. These men become known as the oligarchs for their tremendous power and influence. One of the oligarchs, Vladimir Potanin, tries to raid Hermitage’s investments, and Browder fights back. For a time, this benefits Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, who uses Browder’s crusade to put pressure on the oligarchs, bring them to heel, and extract huge sums of money from them.

Sidanco is a newly privatized oil company that Hermitage Capital believes is highly undervalued, like so many other new firms emerging during Russian privatization. Hermitage’s investment pays off wonderfully, but the company’s officers engineer a stock offering that will effectively steal Hermitage’s Sidanco profits. Browder fights back, beginning a years-long battle with corrupt Russian officials that culminates in the departure of Hermitage Capital from Russia, the murder of Browder’s attorney Sergei Magnitsky, the Magnitsky Act, and multiple Red Notices against Browder.

After Hermitage attorney Sergei Magnitsky is tortured and murdered in a Russian prison in 2009, Browder lobbies the US Congress for a law that will refuse via entry into America for the persons involved in Sergei’s death. The Magnitsky Act becomes a worldwide cause celebre, enacted not only in the US but in other countries. The European Parliament passes similar sanctions against the Russian conspirators. The Act, then, functions as the culmination of Browder’s long fight for justice for Magnitsky, and also symbolizes both Russian corruption and Western democracies’ methods of stopping it from spreading.