He expertly walks us through the ins and outs of various legal strategies and developments that include enough high drama, plot twists and colourful characters for a movie. An eye-opening exposé of the lengths Putin’s cronies will go to hide their crimes and punish their accusers.

It’s a fear that Alexandre Dumas and Alfred Hitchcock tapped into to dramatic effect, but what is most troubling here is how acquiescent the western establishment has been to Russian crimes and lies. If something like this ever happens again,” she said, “and you can’t reach anyone, post it on Twitter. Lawyers, politicians and the usual useful idiots have all been successfully recruited to the Russian cause, either through financial inducement, bribery, bovine anti-west sentiments, or perhaps worst of all, complacency. Bill Browder takes us down the rabbit hole of Kremlin lawfare where down is up and wrong is right, and powerful Russian interests are trying to upend our legal and political systems.An essential work by someone who understood long before the rest of the world did just how far corrupt Russian officials and businesspeople will go to defend their ill-gotten wealth, and how foreign lawyers, lobbyists and public relations firms enable them. If nothing else, I would be afforded due process before any possibility of being extradited to Moscow. I noticed there was a light out at the far end of the hall, and that there was a small stain on the manager’s lapel. Then in 2003 Putin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time the richest oligarch in Russia, and instead of opposing corruption, began putting the squeeze on the duly intimidated oligarchy. More explosive, compulsive and gasp-inducingly, spine-tingingly, mouth-dryingly, heart-poundingly thrilling than any fiction I have read for years.

Thereafter Browder, a naturalised Briton based in London, dedicated himself to gaining justice for his friend, primarily by lobbying for the Magnitsky Act – a bill that authorised the US government to sanction human rights offenders and freeze their assets.Amid the horrors being reported every day from Ukraine, it also provides a highly readable insight into the true nature of the regime that is responsible for them.

He scanned my passport and fed the credit card—a Black American Express Card to which I’d recently been upgraded—into a chip reader. This personal account of Browder's battle for justice is at times terrifying, at times deeply touching - and leads inexorably to a vast money-laundering scheme the Kremlin will seemingly stop at nothing to cover up. but what is most troubling here is how acquiescent the western establishment has been to Russian crimes and lies. I’d started using Twitter a couple of years earlier, and now had some 135,000 followers, many of them journalists, government officials, and politicians from around the world.It would be entertaining fiction, but it is a true story that serves as a roadmap for fighting back against the crime and corruption from Putin’s Russia. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of America’s top lawyers and politicians to bring him down. In terms of western relations with Vladimir Putin, Bill Browder has performed the role of the canary in the coalmine – or perhaps goldmine would be more fitting.

Bill Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005.Fast paced and engaging, Browder’s book reads like a spy novel, but it also makes a powerful and remarkably prescient case for the need to use all the legal and financial tools available to separate Putin’s financiers from their foreign-held bank accounts and luxury yachts. I would encourage anyone interested in what goes on in high places to read this book and be educated in such matters. With the inevitable delays, I was looking at a minimum of six months of sitting in a sweltering Spanish jail before I was either released or sent to Russia.