Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Reversal of fortune

University of Chicago Magzine

William Browder, AB’85, was once the biggest capitalist in Russia. After his lawyer was tortured and died in jail, he became one of the Kremlin’s fiercest enemies.

It seems so long ago now, the moment he thought he’d escaped the worst. In 2007, almost two years after being stripped of his visa and expelled from Russia—his home and headquarters for nearly a decade, the place where he made an immense, improbable fortune—investment banker William Browder, AB’85, was on the phone with his lawyer, listening to him explain the huge fraud Browder had narrowly avoided. The scheme had been elaborate, involving a series of phony court filings secretly expropriating $1 billion from his firm, Hermitage Capital Management, to organized criminals and corrupt government officials.

But when the perpetrators arrived at the banks to claim the money they’d stolen, they found nothing there. The accounts were empty. Wary after his expulsion, Browder had quietly withdrawn everything. Weeks after the failed theft, his lawyer pieced together what had happened. “And I began to laugh sort of nervously, but happily,” Browder recalls, “because we had successfully avoided this them grabbing our assets.” His lawyer, a 36-year-old Russian named Sergei Magnitsky, didn’t laugh.

Instead he warned Browder, “Russian stories never end this way.”

For Magnitsky, the story ended in death. Looking deeper into the attempted theft, he uncovered another crime, a $230 million tax fraud linked to the same shell companies and the same criminals and corrupt officials who’d tried to defraud Browder’s firm. When Magnitsky reported what he’d found to the authorities, he was arrested and accused of the crime himself. He died almost 12 months later in a Russian jail cell, sick and thin and bruised. Investigators later concluded that he was tortured.

For Browder, anguished and transformed by Magnitsky’s death, the story isn’t over. Once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, whose conduct typified to some the recklessness and rapacity of post-Soviet capitalism, Browder has become a crusader for human rights. Once among Vladimir Putin’s most vociferous cheerleaders, firm in his belief—despite others’ skepticism, and despite Putin’s own encroachments on business and civil liberties—that the Russian president was acting in the best interests of his people, Browder has now become a vehement enemy of the Russian state.

Mostly, he’s earned Russia’s ire by telling Magnitsky’s story to anyone who will listen. For three years Browder has lobbied Western governments to enact sanctions against the Russian officials involved in Magnitsky’s detention, brutal treatment, and death—laws “naming names, banning visas, and freezing accounts,” as he puts it. His relentlessness led to the Magnitsky Act, signed into US law last December, which prevents complicit Russian officials from visiting the United States or investing money, depositing assets, and owning property here. It also freezes their current assets. Vigorously opposed by the Kremlin, the Magnitsky Act has soured US relations with Moscow and earned Browder a fresh round of death threats and reprisals from the country where he once lived.