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Browder built the largest foreign fund in Russia, then publicized how oligarchs stripped value from state companies. His activist transparency campaigns eventually made him an enemy of the Kremlin and got him expelled.
Browder's lawyer Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a $230 million tax fraud by officials, was jailed, and died after being denied medical care. The killing turned an investor into a full-time human-rights campaigner.
Browder argues that freezing the assets and travel of specific corrupt officials hurts kleptocrats where broad sanctions fail. This logic produced the Magnitsky Act and its global imitators.
The memoir shows how ordinary investment logic breaks down where courts, police, and tax authorities serve private theft. Rule-of-law absence, not market risk, becomes the decisive variable.