Russian agents have threatened me via email, voice mail and text messages with death, kidnapping and extradition.”īritish Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson tweeted Wednesday that he was “very glad” Browder had been released.

But Putin doesn’t just use Interpol to express his anger. “Each request has been summarily rejected, including the most recent. “Thankfully, Interpol has seen these as blatant, politically motivated attempts to silence me,” he wrote for CNN last year. This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case /ZonzXizvIJ- Bill Browder May 30, 2018īrowder has previously claimed that Putin has tried multiple times to use Interpol, the multinational police organization, to target him abroad. Spanish National Police just released me after Interpol General Secretary in Lyon advised them not to honor the new Russian Interpol Red Notice. This is the 6th time that Russia has abused Interpol in my case.” Shortly after leaving the police station, Browder tweeted a curbside photo and wrote: “Good news. The Magnitsky Act, passed in 2012, provides US lawmakers with sweeping powers to freeze assets and place travel restrictions on foreign government officials involved in human-rights abuses. He has been one of the main proponents of the Russia sanctions law in the US known as the Magnitsky Act – named for his former lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in suspicious circumstances in 2009. In the years since, Browder has become a UK citizen and a fierce critic of corruption. But that all changed in 2005 when he was expelled from the country after being deemed a threat to national security.īrowder claims his expulsion was because of his criticism of Russian corporate governance. He was once the largest investor in Russia’s stock market and a supporter of the Russian President. “When he was at the police station we realized the arrest warrant wasn’t valid, so he was released.”Ĭhicago-born Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, an international investment fund.

“Browder had an international arrest warrant issued by Russia against him and that was the reason he was arrested,” a Spanish National Police spokesperson told CNN. Spanish authorities confirmed that the anti-corruption activist was arrested in Madrid, but had since been released. This is the arrest warrant /Cr1Sf4vS4a- Bill Browder May 30, 2018 He later tweeted out what he said was an image of the warrant. “Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant,” Browder tweeted early Wednesday. Bill Browder, a prominent financial manager and vocal Vladimir Putin critic, was briefly arrested in Spain on a Russian arrest warrant Wednesday.

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