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Magnitsky Act-

Bill Browder: 'You don't just risk losing your money in Russia, you risk dying'
Nicole SinclairMarkets Correspondent,Yahoo Finance•July 19, 2017

Bill Browder, formerly the largest foreign investor in Russia, at one point made an 850% return in 18 months investing in the country. But in an interview with Yahoo Finance, Browder vehemently warned investors against following his lead.

“You don’t just risk losing your money in Russia, you risk dying in Russia,” Browder said. “I don’t say that lightly.”

Browder lost 90% of his investors’ money in 1998 when his assets fell from $1 billion to $100 million following the Russian financial crisis. But that wasn’t the worst thing that happened to him in his ventures.

He went on to rebuild his fund, growing assets from $100 million to $4.5 billion, while pointing out misdeeds from Russian oligarchs. Later, he was detained at the Moscow airport and banned from the country. And the local lawyer he hired to handle his affairs, Sergei Magnitsky, was found to have been tortured and killed. This prompted Browder to lobby for what became the “Magnitsky Act,” which freezes assets and bans visas of Russian human rights violators.

“Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer, is dead,” Browder said. “They tried to kill the families’ lawyer by throwing him off a fourth floor apartment building. A member of the Russian opposition who’s helped us with the Magnitsky campaign was poisoned within an inch of his life. A whistle blower who came forward died jogging outside his home in Surrey. They kill. And they kill lots of people. And all it takes is one wrong step doing business in Russia and you’re dead.”

“I came from this family of communists and I decided to rebel as a teenager and became a capitalist,” Browder said. “When the Berlin Wall came down, I said if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America, I want to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bill-browder-dont-just-risk-losing-money-russia-risk-dying-215450000.html