Ties that threaten: why Browder won’t visit SA

Acclaimed American-born British author, financier and activist Bill Browder has a house in Cape Town that he hasn’t seen in more than a decade. It sits waiting for him, a place he used to visit often, but he cannot go back.

The reason is that Browder lives with arrest warrants, threats, and warnings about the danger he would face in South Africa and other countries. 

Browder was the primary driving force behind the implementation of the Magnitsky Act in 2012, a United States law that authorises the US president to impose economic sanctions and travel bans on foreign individuals and entities who are involved in human rights violations or significant corruption. 

The original Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 was passed to impose sanctions on Russian officials responsible for the detention, abuse, and death of Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Browder’s lawyer, in a Moscow prison in 2009. The Magnitsky Act has since inspired similar legislation in countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union to hold perpetrators of abuse and corruption accountable. 

The Act infuriated Russian President Vladimir Putin, hence the arrest warrants. 

“I haven’t been to South Africa since 2012,” Browder says. “After the Magnitsky Act was passed, which enraged Putin, and he started chasing me all over the world with arrest warrants, I was advised by individuals high in the South African government that my safety couldn’t be guaranteed.” For security reasons, he won’t disclose the location of his home. 

The separation is painful not only because he owns property here but because the country is threaded through friendships and community ties. “I have many friends in the Jewish community in Cape Town who I would love to spend time with,” he says. “But I cannot go because it’s too dangerous.” 

His connection to South Africa has always been personal. In the years before the Magnitsky Act, he travelled here freely and often. After Russia convicted him twice in absentia and sentenced him to a combined 18 years in prison, most countries became unsafe for him. 

“Most countries would honour that warrant,” he says. “I can travel only to the most robust rule-of-law countries that understand human rights obligations and wouldn’t send me back to Russia. There’s probably only a dozen countries that I feel safe travelling to in the world.” South Africa isn’t one of them. 

His distance from Cape Town and its Jewish community sits uneasily beside his own sense of identity. Browder describes himself as “100% Jewish”, though he grew up in “an atheist household because of communism”. His mother was a Holocaust refugee from Vienna, a history that marked him long before he became a human rights campaigner. On one of his earliest trips to Eastern Europe in 1990, he visited Auschwitz and Birkenau. Seeing the camps with his own eyes left a lasting imprint. “It was profoundly life changing. The power, the capacity for people to do terrible things is never very far away,” he says. 

That understanding shaped how he responded to Magnitsky’s murder in 2009. His lawyer had uncovered a massive fraud involving Russian officials. He was arrested, tortured, and killed at the age of 37. “I have pretty much given up my life as a businessman to focus all my time, energy, and resources in getting justice for him,” Browder says. 

He grew up steeped in political history. “My grandfather, Earl Browder, was the General Secretary of the American Communist Party. He ran for president twice as a communist, and lived in Russia. My grandmother is from Russia. My father was born in Russia.” Looking for a way to rebel as a teenager, he chose capitalism. “I came up with a good idea, which was put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist.” 

After graduating from Stanford Business School in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, he had what he calls an epiphany. “If my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the Berlin Wall has just come down, I’m going to try to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe.” He did, becoming the largest foreign investor in Russia. “But as you know, that led to all sorts of other terrible things.” 

Years later, after Magnitsky’s murder, Browder wrote the book Red Notice so that he didn’t have to retell the story endlessly to governments and regulators. “One of the most unexpected things was that it became an international bestseller,” he says. But turning it into a film has proved nearly impossible. “I have run into roadblock upon roadblock because everybody is so scared of doing something considered hostile to Putin.” 

The loss of Magnitsky remains raw. “They say that time heals all wounds. This isn’t as fresh a wound, but it hasn’t healed this wound,” he says. What happened to Magnitsky “is just the tip of a huge iceberg”, harming many Russians and now Ukrainians who are “subject to the same type of horror”. 

Browder’s campaign has widened into sanctions policy, political prisoner advocacy, and efforts to cut off Russian revenue. “My motivation to get justice for Sergei has morphed into a motivation to get justice for other victims of the regime,” he says. 

His view of Putin is absolute. “Putin is truly a monster, and he’s very good at being a monster,” Browder says. His power comes from indifference to human life. “He doesn’t care about his losses. He doesn’t care about people dying. Russia has lost vast numbers of soldiers in Ukraine. It doesn’t bother him.” Western democracies couldn’t react that way, and “that’s what makes him so scary”. 

Reform inside Russia is, in Browder’s view, impossible without “a massive, unexpected revolution, a complete destruction of the existing system” because it’s “so pernicious, well organised, and well financed”. 

Sanctions have been far stronger than he expected, yet he says the omission of oil has allowed Putin to keep funding the war. Only eight refineries in the world buy Russian crude. If governments told them they couldn’t do business with the West and buy Russian oil at the same time, he believes “in six months’ time, Putin would be begging for a ceasefire”. For him, a realistic Ukrainian victory requires two steps: “the West gives the Ukrainians weapons; and the West sanctions the oil”. 

He is equally troubled by what he calls a rise in kleptocracy in the US, saying, “I’m watching the American system becoming kleptocratic on an exponential basis right now with horror.” Those who benefit from corruption “are going to want to keep it in place”, he says, pointing out, “Of course you might know all about that in South Africa.” 

Living under threat has become routine. “Like any other terrible thing that can happen to a person, you learn to live with it,” Browder says. His survival rests on vigilance. “I’m 16 years into this, and I’m still alive, which is pretty amazing.” 

He has never once considered stopping. “There has never been a single minute where I have considered stopping my work,” he says, because what drives him is “absolute moral outrage at what these people did to Sergei Magnitsky” and “a total commitment not to let them get away with it”. 

Asked what leaders of democratic countries need to understand about Russia, he says, “Putin is a menace on the same level as Stalin, Hitler, and Kim Jong Un” and dealing with him requires “full and absolute containment, using all the resources collectively”. 

For now, his home in Cape Town remains empty, and his friends in the local Jewish community remain out of reach. His ties to the country are strong, but the danger is stronger. Browder hopes that one day, he will be able to return. Until then, his fight continues, shaped by history, justice, and the promise he made to Magnitsky.