Bill Browder, a Putin Critic, Live-Tweets His Arrest in Spain

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/world/europe/bill-browder-arrest-russia-twitter.html

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Bill Browder, a London-based investor who has styled himself as a nemesis of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, documented the latest episode in his 13-year game of cat and mouse with the Russian government, live-tweeting his brief arrest by the Spanish police on Wednesday.

Russia has repeatedly requested Mr. Browder’s arrest through Interpol — this was the sixth such attempt, he said — but its requests have been refused repeatedly. In 2013, in a rare and sharp rebuke, Interpol said Russia’s request to arrest Mr. Browder “was of a predominately political nature.”

A spokesman for the Spanish national police said that Mr. Browder had been detained in error, and that police in Madrid realized the international warrant was no longer valid only after he had been taken into custody.

“There is not, and never has been, a Red Notice for Mr. Bill Browder,” the Interpol media office said in an emailed statement. “Mr. Browder is not wanted via Interpol channels.”

Mr. Browder said he had been arrested while en route to testify to Spanish prosecutors about a corruption case involving Russian officials, and that he was released after the Interpol general secretary in Lyon, France, intervened on his behalf.

Interpol, an organization of 190 countries is forbidden by its constitution from any action of a “political character.” This can make it difficult to obtain red notices, which amount to international arrest warrants.

Russia has succeeded, however, in obtaining arrests through less formal “diffusions,” which allow member countries to feed requests into Interpol’s computer system without real vetting. In some cases, Russia has timed diffusions for the precise moment when a target enters a certain country.

Mr. Browder reflected in a 2016 interview that the Russian authorities were undeterred by failure. “The Russians try stuff a hundred times, and sometimes it works,” he said. “They can fail 99 times, but the 100th time it could work. For them, that makes it all worthwhile.”

Mr. Browder, who was once the largest foreign investor in the Russian stock market, ran afoul of Mr. Putin in 2005 and was kicked out of Russia. He was convicted of tax fraud by a Russian court in absentia and sentenced to nine years in prison. He documented Russia’s efforts to arrest him in a 2015 book, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.”

Mr. Browder’s lobbying took on moral force in 2009, when Sergei L. Magnitsky, a tax lawyer for his company, Hermitage Capital, died of toxic shock and heart failure in a Moscow detention center, where he had been held for more than a year. While in detention, Mr. Magnitsky had meticulously documented his requests for medical care for pancreatitis and gall bladder disease, which were denied. The Russian authorities said he had never complained of health problems.

Mr. Browder turned the lawyer’s death into an international cause and succeeded in persuading Congress to pass a 2012 law, the Magnitsky Act, that barred Russian officials linked with his death from entering the United States or using its banking system. The European Parliament later passed its own version of the act, in a hearing that ended with a standing ovation for Mr. Browder.

Mr. Browder was born in the United States but later renounced his American citizenship and became a citizen of Britain. His grandfather Earl Browder was the head of the American Communist Party. His father became a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, and his brother, Thomas, is an eminent particle physicist.