He stepped aside when the doors opened, making room for me to exit first, but once we were in the hall he shuffled past me, stopping in front of a white door. 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. They then blamed the scam on Browder, and when his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, exposed the officers responsible for the fraud, those same officers had Magnitsky arrested. Although the book does touch on politics, the author remains objective and doesn't discuss political views.

When Bill Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life’s mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. It's led to many acts of cybercrime and harassment (see review linked) against those trying to stop the actual stealing and killing. Browder – with incredible courage, resilience and grace, and always at great risk to his personal safety and freedom – continues to chase after Putin and his henchmen. This brilliant attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, believed that “Russia was changing for the better and that the rule of law would ultimately protect him.This exploration of the dark heart of corruption asks the question of what one person can do in the face of such insidious corruption, and makes us ask what we can find in ourselves to stand up and resist those forces that would steal, decieve and murder for their own gain.

Finally, the war in Ukraine has woken most people up to what a monster Putin is, but the only way to make him and his cronies suffer for their crimes is to make them as poor as possible by shutting them out of Western financial systems, seizing their assets, and stopping them from using the West as their playground. Why at the 2018 Helsinki summit with Trump would Bill Browder be the one person Putin named he wanted to interrogate in trade for the 12 GRU officers Mueller had indicted? Representatives of each of these groups feature in this book, in which witnesses to Russian corruption die in bizarre circumstances, falling off roofs or from sudden heart attacks. The Act is named after Sergei Magnitsky, Browder's former Russian Attorney who was imprisoned and beaten to death by the Russians for being an honest man. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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.