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

by Bill Browder

In 1991, just as Maxwell had generated a huge scandal in Britain, Salomon Bothers had done the same in the United States. In the previous autumn, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) caught some top Salomon traders trying to manipulate the US Treasury bond market.

Russia wound up with twenty-two oligarchs owning 39 percent of the economy and everyone else living in poverty. To make ends meet, professors had to become taxi drivers, nurses became prostitutes, and art museums sold paintings right off their walls.

I’d grown up associating South Africa with apartheid and racism, so I had no desire to visit.

Dude you grew up in America where there was apartheid and racism

The moral is simple: when it comes to money, Russians will gladly—gleefully, even—sacrifice their own success to screw their neighbor.

Losing love was a lot harder than losing money.

She was never committed from the beginning

It could have been a great home, but it lacked a woman’s touch and I kept almost no personal belongings there. It was a cold, sterile, and uninviting place, which just added to my isolation.

When the Russian government turns on you, it doesn’t do so mildly—it does so with extreme prejudice.

215 clients withdrew more than 30 percent of the assets from the fund. In my business this is what’s called a run on the fund, and like a run on a bank, once it starts it’s almost impossible to stop.

I’d had to develop a thick skin to absorb bad news and not lose confidence.

I decided to put Vadim and four other analysts on planes to Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Turkey, and Thailand to see if they could come up with interesting investing ideas.

One was a phone company in Brazil that had a valuation of three times its previous year’s earnings,

Turkish oil refiner that traded at a 72 percent discount to the asset price of other refineries;

traded at a 60 percent discount to its ne...

the World Economic Forum. You can just sign up.”

Hermitage’s anticorruption work at Gazprom was probably the catalyst that had led to my Russian expulsion,

We had become the victims of something called a “Russian raider attack.” These typically involved corrupt police officers fabricating criminal cases, corrupt judges approving the seizure of assets, and organized criminals

Russian stories never have happy endings.”

Proclamation Seventy-seven Fifty. It allows the State Department to impose visa sanctions on corrupt foreign officials. Bush created it in 2004.

Jackson-Vanik amendment. This thirty-seven-year-old piece of legislation, put in place in the mid-1970s, imposed trade sanctions on the Soviet Union to punish it for not allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate.

Jackson-Vanik had to go, and the Obama administration fully supported this idea. If the president could have repealed Jackson-Vanik by himself, he would have. But in order to get the law off the books, he needed an act of Congress.

We’ll tell the administration that we’ll block Jackson-Vanik repeal unless they stop blocking Magnitsky.

The last time a dead person had been prosecuted in Europe was in 897 CE, when the Catholic Church convicted Pope Formosus posthumously, cut off his papal fingers, and threw his body into the Tiber River.

a Potemkin court. This is Russia today. A stuffy room presided over by a corrupt judge, policed by unthinking guards, with lawyers who are there just to give the appearance of a real trial, and with no defendant in the cage. A place where lies reign supreme. A place where two and two is still five, white is still black, and up is still down. A place where convictions are certain, and guilt a given. Where a foreigner can be convicted in absentia of crimes he did not commit.