Book review: Red Notice How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy
No bartender surreptitiously emptying powder into a glass of champagne? Check. On a far more serious note, we should highlight the fact that Bill Browder — the subject of our scrutiny — is actually one of Vladimir Putin’s most prominent critics, and therefore, a very sharp and painful thorn in his side.
Described by the Washington Post as ‘bullish’, Browder — in Ireland recently on a whistlestop if not whistle-blowing tour to promote his rivetting book, Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No 1 Enemy — comes across as the extreme opposite.
Wearing an expensive-looking coat with a neck fur trim, he is clearly a cultured, yet rooted individual. Interestingly, he sits with his back to a wall in the restaurant rendezvous point, but he doesn’t seem overly wary or spooked.
The former Hedge Fund manager is right to be concerned for his safety. He arrived in Moscow in the mid-’90s with over $20million to play with on the burgeoning Russian stock market.
By the end of the ’90s, he had earned his clients a 700% return, lost everything in the 1998 financial crisis, and then won it all back again in the subsequent boom. At its height, Browder’s Hermitage Fund had $4.6billion in assets. Not for nothing was he regarded as Russia’s largest foreign portfolio investor.
By the mid-2000s, however, it wasn’t only worms that had turned. Run-ins with Putin (intially over Moscow-based company Gazprom, one of the world’s largest extractors of natural gas) increased to the point where Browder had his visa revoked.
He then quickly discovered that three of his companies were being rifled by high ranking tax officials and police officers. His lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, filed a criminal complaint against these officials, was promptly arrested and then beaten to death in his cell by prison guards.
Red Notice, then, is Browder’s campaigning way of revenge and retribution, a true story so like a work of thriller fiction it bears asking the question: do some people think he’s made it all up?
“Everyone believes me,” says Browder, unperturbed at the Devil’s Advocate query, “and the reason they do is because everything that has been written about in the book has already been documented; it’s all provable, but the information was never pieced together before in a chronological or narrative form that would allow people to understand how it all fitted together. What is in the book can’t be disputed, but the new thing is the feeling you get when you read all of the facts.”
Which is equal parts disbelief and horror, isn’t it? And anger adds Browder. Telling the story, he says, is a crucial part of the campaign, as important as the political aspect of getting sanctions approved (which occurred in December 2012, as the American government passed the Magnitsky Act, which imposed a US asset freeze and travel ban on a list of officials involved in the lawyer’s mistreatment), and as important as the criminal justice aspect of making sure that the people who committed the crime faced the consequences.
“A very simple and quantifiable way of how this book will make an effect,” notes Browder, “is that when I first embarked on the awareness campaign, if I was lucky enough to get an article in the newspaper about it — and we were in newspapers such as the Financial Times, and other international publications — not many people actually read the articles. And if they started, they might just read the first two paragraphs, and then go on to something else.
“The difference between a newspaper article and a book that people want to read is that with the latter you get a good part of a working day of someone’s time. If you can keep them engaged, you can leave people with a lasting impression. And the impression I want to leave people with is firstly, the legacy of Sergei, and secondly, of what Putin is up to.”
Browder is no pussycat, of course, and behind his civil attitude surely resides a very tough nut. Yet even he seems surprised that his life/career has transformed so tumultuously from successful businessmen to human rights crusader. The two don’t really mix, do they?
A rare smile from a man who has every right to be serious. “There is probably no other hedge fund manager in the world that became a human rights activist. That said, it’s part of my own personal development that I was faced with a malicious injustice that was so heartbreaking I didn’t really have any choice but to try to do something about it.
“I enjoyed my life as a hedge fund manager. It was exciting, it was lucrative, it was engaging and all of the things you would have wanted it to be, but staring into the heart of darkness, and dealing with that, took much greater priority than being a businessman. Basically, what I learned was that fighting for justice is infinitely more meaningful than fighting for money.”
Could the Bill Browder in a previous existence have ever imagined himself being able to make such a life changing decision? He shakes his head.
“When I was at Stanford Business School, I could never have imagined myself giving up a career as a hedge fund manager to be a human rights activist, but that’s what I’ve done. I can say I’ve been blessed by having a successful career that has allowed me the financial independence to do this. I can feed myself and my family, and carry on doing it.”
He is at pains to point out that he didn’t write the book to make money — indeed, all monies earned from the book are going towards the campaign and helping the Magnitsky family.
“This book hasn’t anything to do with making money for me at all. In fact, it’s probably one of the most unprofitable things I’ve ever been involved in — the Stanford rule book has been ripped up completely!”
The difference between Putin and other heads of state, Browdersays more somberly, is that Putin uses his position to maximise his wealth rather than act in the national interest.
“He’s a kleptocrat. His main purpose is to steal as much money as possible, so he’s effectively a criminal Mafia-style boss, but he’s different from most Mafia groups in Italy or New York in that he’s not at odds with the law enforcement mechanisms of his country because he controls them. You have a man that controls all of the powers of a sovereign state both domestically and internationally, which makes him, I believe, the most dangerous man in the world because he has his finger on the nuclear trigger. He’s so keen on self-preservation, and doesn’t care about the consequences to any people — Russians or otherwise — that he will do almost anything.”
And so another obvious question: why is Browder still alive? Whatever calculus Putin has used, he concludes, is that the cost of killing him, or the repercussions of such an act, are greater than any benefits. One presumes that is why Browder doesn’t walk around flanked by bodyguards? At this, a frown appears, and the shutters go down.
“I don’t want to go into too much detail about how I secure myself. Most security has nothing to do with bodyguards, but rather what you know about your opponents, and what they know about you. We’ll just leave it at that, shall we?”
