Based on true events and investigations, it exposes the scale, scope, shameless audacity and corruption of Putin and his cronies. In these years, Browder made a fortune, turning Hermitage into the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. When our meeting was over, I felt confident that we had gained another ally in the West—and that Putin’s Russia had lost a few more shreds of its tattered credibility. A few minutes later, the senior officer who’d presented the charge sheet re-entered the room, translator in tow, both with heads bowed. But rather I feel fewer mentions of family skiing vacations in Aspen and all the trans-continental jet setting might have made space for some more interesting analysis.

I may not have been kidnapped, but I was now in the Spanish criminal justice system on a Russian arrest warrant. I thought of my 10-year-old daughter, Veronica, whom I had promised a similar trip, but who might now have to wait a very long time. I told her all about the room, how extravagant and ridiculous it was, and how I wished she were with me.

At times the book reads like a John Le Carre or Len Deighton spy thriller from the 1970s and 80s and occasionally I expected George Smiley to appear. By the glint in Prosecutor Grinda’s eye, I could see that he would take what I was telling him seriously. The Russians did try Browder and an associate in absentia in a Russian court and he was convicted of crimes, but it was the hostile legal cases he faced in the country of his birth that are the most shocking. I noticed there was a light out at the far end of the hall, and that there was a small stain on the manager’s lapel.

It was a time of wild profiteering, as post-Soviet state assets were sold off on the cheap, and a venal oligarchy was created.He led me to his office, where I told him the story about Sergei Magnitsky, my Russian lawyer, that I’d told so many times before. He handed me a room key with both hands cupped in a vaguely Japanese manner and stepped from behind the counter. If you read these books you’ll know more about what’s happening in Russia than not only the people in your neighborhood, but many on TV! Once adopted, however, the Magnitsky law remained mostly unused in the US, and particularly in the UK.

I would encourage anyone interested in what goes on in high places to read this book and be educated in such matters. In the end, I am not so much glad that I read this book as I am grateful to it, and to Author Browder, for showing me that people who live in a principled way and advertise their intentions clearly can, and do, effect change for the better. He scanned my passport and fed the credit card—a Black American Express Card to which I’d recently been upgraded—into a chip reader. Currently, 34 different countries have this Act in place and over 500 sanctions have been made under the law.I also appreciate how the author explained the intricacies of financial crimes and money laundering in simple terms. Amid the horrors being reported every day from Ukraine, it also provides a highly readable insight into the true nature of the regime that is responsible for them. Twenty-five more officers raided the Moscow office of Browder's American law firm, Firestone Duncan, seizing the corporate registration documents for Hermitage's investment holding companies.

Nothing really surprises me today about corrupt politicos, I think they are all pretty much corrupt, and selling their souls for new soles! I mean some of the stuff would be laughed at if written for a movie - like the attorney who fought the good fight but eventually becomes corrupted by Russian money is named . There will never be enough people in the world with the courage that he, and those that experienced all this and continue to fight, possesses. From their perspective, they’d successfully tracked down and arrested an international fugitive wanted by Interpol, which probably didn’t happen every day at this little police station in central Madrid. The continuing story of Bill Browder's prodigious efforts to bring retribution to Putin and the Russian oligarchs who murdered his colleague Sergei Magnitsky and have stolen billions from the people of Russia.I leave this this book feeling frustrated that many avoided the consequences of their actions, greed prevailing regardless of the murders, blackmail and coercion and that Putin is still in power, that Trump is once more attempting to grab the presidency and that we seem to be on the verge of something even more terrifying unless these people are stopped.