Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

BILL BROWDER

Red Notice
http://www.billbrowder.com/reviews

New York Times bestseller
Sunday Times bestseller

New York Times Sunday Book Review, 18th March 2015:

The grandson of the head of the American Communist Party commits the ultimate act of rebellion: He gets a business degree from Stanford. From there, he goes on to build the biggest hedge fund in Russia. After exposing widespread government corruption, he gets expelled from the country. While he’s gone, the Kremlin raids his fund and perpetrates an elaborate financial fraud. The lawyer investigating the crime is tortured and dies in prison. He avenges his lawyer’s death, exposing a cover-up at the highest levels of the Putin regime.

Here’s the craziest part: It’s all true, as told by that Stanford M.B.A., Bill Browder, in his new memoir, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.” It’s a riveting account — and really, how could it not be? — marred only by Browder’s perhaps justifiable but nevertheless grating sense of self-importance.

A cocksure math whiz, Browder rebels against his lefty family — his grandfather Earl Browder twice ran for president on the Communist ticket — by embracing capitalism. Even so, his affection for his grandfather runs so deep that when his boss at a consulting firm asks him where he would like to be posted, he says Eastern Europe.

So in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder found himself on assignment in Poland, where the government had begun privatizing state-owned companies and selling their shares at ridiculously low valuations. It was his light-bulb moment. “I now knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life,” he writes.

The first third of “Red Notice” recounts the engrossing tale of Browder’s rise to the top of the financial world. Descriptions of his early jobs working for the disgraced financier Robert Maxwell and the highflying bank Salomon Brothers are among the book’s most entertaining sections. Browder is a keen observer of Wall Street culture with a gift for making complex financial investments understandable. You find yourself cheering along as he earns a fortune investing in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, even as he beats his chest after each winning bet. “In a short time, our $25 million portfolio was transformed into $125 million,” he writes. “We had made $100 million!”

Browder soon begins to bump up against rapacious oligarchs and crooked management. But rather than exit the country, like many disillusioned American investors, Browder wages a campaign to clean up Russian capitalism and expose its underbelly. In 2005, the Kremlin bars him from Russia, his assets are misappropriated and one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, is imprisoned and dies after being beaten by eight riot guards.

Unbowed, Browder punches back. He persuades Congress to pass a law in 2012 imposing sanctions against Russian officials said to be responsible for Magnitsky’s death. His actions drive the Kremlin berserk, and Putin retaliates by signing into law a ban on Americans’ adopting Russian orphans. There is a warrant out for Browder’s arrest in Russia, and he believes there is a real chance that Putin will have him killed.

No doubt, last month’s murder of the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has surely heightened that fear. Nemtsov had championed Browder’s crusade, traveling to Washington to call on the American government to establish sanctions.

“Previously, the Putin regime relied primarily on imprisonment and exile to silence opposition politicians,” Browder said in a statement issued after Nemtsov’s death. “Now, they have started murdering them. I’m sure this won’t be the last.”

The narrative in “Red Notice” moves along briskly, and Browder’s prose is clean. But as he morphs from iconoclastic investor to political crusader, Browder becomes less likable. At times, he is not his own best protagonist and too frequently lapses into off-putting self-aggrandizement when discussing his accomplishments.

He describes his testimony before a United States House committee. “As I spoke, I noticed that the fresh-faced staffers had stopped tapping away at their BlackBerrys,” he writes, and after he finished “several people in the room had tears in their eyes.” He recalls a human rights panel discussion with Tom Stoppard and Bianca Jagger. “I’d planned to say more, but was cut off by an outburst of applause,” he writes. “One by one, people rose from their seats, and before I knew it, everyone was standing.”

“Red Notice” isn’t the first time Browder has told his tale. He was featured on “60 Minutes” last year, and this newspaper and numerous others have profiled him. Browder acknowledges using the media to help both his investments and his quest for justice, but he also appears to relish the attention, even while it comes at great personal risk. Though he has dedicated his life’s work and this compelling book to his deceased lawyer, make no mistake: Bill Browder is the hero of his own story.

Review by Peter Lattman for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, 18th March 2015

http://www.billbrowder.com/reviews