Financier and fierce Kremlin critic Bill Browder was arrested in Spain on Wednesday, he said on Twitter, "on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant," a copy of which he posted as well. The detention did not last long.
Browder, once a major foreign investor in Russia through his Hermitage Capital Management firm, has led a push to get Western countries to enact Magnitsky Act laws sanctioning Russian officials accused of human rights abuses and corruption, including freezing their assets and denying visas. The laws, enacted in the U.S. in 2012 and just recently in Britain, are named after Sergei Magnitsky, Browder's former lawyer, who died in Russian prison in 2009 after uncovering alleged massive tax fraud in Moscow.
Russia, which accused Browder and Magnitsky of perpetrating the fraud and convicted them in absentia in 2013, has sought to use Interpol to get Browder arrested and extradited to Russia. Browder, a U.S.-born British citizen, plausibly calls the charges politically motivated. He recently testified before the U.S. human rights Helsinki Commission about a family of four Russian exiles, the Bitkovs, arrested in Guatemala at Moscow's request and sentenced to at least 14 years in prison for passport violations. "It's the most remarkable story of evil coming out of Russia that I've seen in a long time," Browder told NPR's Scott Simon in April.
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