Book 4 - Red Notice by Bill Browder

Reading date - April 2020

This is the first book I bought during lockdown and it was on the Kindle (totally different to parents saying 'the Facebook', by the way..)

I read this book in April, before I even thought of keeping a blog as I didn't think we would be where we are now.  If I had known, I'd have kept notes about it!

I knew very limited things about Bill Browder, but I knew about Sergei Magnitsky by virtue of the field of work I'm in..which sounds very sexy, but when you're up until four a.m. trawling through emails trying to find a smoking gun..sexy is the last thing you are.

Generally, I am against Kindle books because I love the feeling of an actual book in my hand and I would say my number one hobby is spending hours and hours in old bookshops and at book markets.  Also, with a Kindle, you can't physically see the book getting thicker on the left and thinner on the right.  For me, that's a bit of the satisfaction I get with reading a book.

Yeah, ok...can we get on with the book?? Yes, we can.

Not to be patronising or anyfink BUT a Red Notice is a notice from Interpol which is like an international arrest warrant that you can't ignore.  Well..you CAN ignore it if you've got a strong network of political influence around you that will protect you.  This is something outside the reach of the majority of us..

The book starts even before Browder was born, starting with his Communist father and grandfather.  Browder has a cushy life, goes to college and decides to become a capitalist because he wants money..fair enough, he's honest enough to say it.  So he starts work and decides that there is a gap in the market in the murkier countries of western Europe.  He gets himself sent out there and find out that Russia is a gold mine for companies that are being privatised.  

I won't bore you with the ins and outs of what he does but he becomes very wealthy.  Then Putin (complete with shitty trousers in bag...who?!) comes into power and takes an instant dislike to people obtaining wealth that he could have.  He comes after Browder with some trumped up charges that he hasn't been paying enough tax.  

The Red Notice comes out for Browder which he is able to ignore because he has, by now, got lots of powerful people on his side.  Browder employs Magnitsky to look into the accounts and see what is going on.  He finds massive gaps which show how money has been mis-managed and effectively stolen by the govt.

Browder tells Magnitsky to get out of the country but he refuses to leave.  He is chucked into prison.  This was the hard bit of the book for me..I realise how narrow-minded and shallow it is for me to say that this is the hard bit of the book when I haven't been subject to the torture he faced or that his family faced being constantly given the runaround when trying to see their husband or child.

Magnitksy falls ill and is tortured.  He dies as a result of his injuries.  As a result of his death, Browder wants to bring about the "Magnitsky Act" which would stop the perpetrators of his murder coming into the US to spend the money they were paid.  I believe it was amended to apply not just to Russians but globally and it allows for freezing of assets and denial of entry to the US for people the US sees as human rights abusers... good thing no US citizens have ever gone abroad and abused human rights *cough* Abu Ghraib *cough* (but then America is the king of "do as I say, not as I do").

Sergei had children which Browder moved to the UK so they have a safe haven and he has paid for all their education..which is a nice thing to do but I still think he could have been a bit more forceful in making Sergei leave the country when he knew how at risk he was of being killed.

I finished this book in a matter of days as I couldn't put it down and it would have been my book of the year had I not read the next book, which is about a matter very close to my heart and caused me a great deal of anger when reading it.  It took all my might to not deface some of it or rip some of the pages out.

Red Notice is one of the very few books I gave a five star review to on my GoodReads.

You can read more about the Act here: 



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