On May 30, British financier Bill Browder was arrested and detained by Spanish police due to a request from Russia to Interpol. Browder live-tweeted the experience, and was released a few hours later on orders from Interpol’s general secretary. Browder, once one of the largest foreign investors in the Russian stock market, has been persona non grata in Russia since 2013, when he was convicted of tax fraud in absentia and sentenced to nine years in prison. Since then, Russia has tried numerous times to apprehend him through what is known as a red notice, a request a member of Interpol can make to a member in another country to detain and extradite a wanted individual. Browder claims that this is the sixth time that Russian officials have attempted to arrest him using a red notice, and has expressed concern that “‘Interpol is incapable of stopping Russian abuse of their systems.’”
Bill Browder is known for founding Hermitage Capital Management. One of the company’s tax lawyers was Sergei Magnitsky, a whistle-blower on Russian government corruption and mismanagement who was arrested and died in a Moscow detention center. Since then, Browder has led a global campaign calling for sanctions against those involved in Magnitsky’s death, and pushed the United States government to adopt and enact the Magnitsky Act in 2012. As a result, the Russian government convicted him of tax fraud and have been trying to apprehend him ever since. In 2015, Browder published a book about the Russian government’s attempts to arrest him called “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.”
Browder was in Madrid to testify in a corruption case involving Russian officials, and was on his way to court when he was apprehended by Spanish police and taken into custody. Spanish law enforcement claimed that he had been brought in because of an arrest warrant for tax evasion that had been issued by Russian authorities. They were forced to let him go upon discovering that the warrant was invalid, since it had expired and Interpol had failed to delete it from their system. Browder disagrees, insisting that the arrest was the result of a red notice and that he was released on the orders of Interpol’s general secretary. If so, it would not be the first time that Interpol has refused to comply with a Russian request for Browder’s arrest. In 2013, Interpol put out a rare statement rebuking the Russian government’s request, stating that its attempt to arrest Browder “‘was of a predominately political nature.’”
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