Welcome back to the podcast, Bride, Swindle, or Steel.

We are recording this on the fifth anniversary of the podcast, which is a nice milestone for all of us at Trace and also for Brad, our fantastic editor for all five years.

My guest today is Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital,

who will be known to all of you as the force of nature behind the Magnitsky Act, or now I guess

it's the Axe, plural. This is Bill's third time on the podcast, and he's joining me today

to talk about his new book, Freezing Order. Freezing Order released just a couple of

weeks ago, follows on nicely from his first book, a New York Times bestseller, Red Notice. Bill,

thank you for joining me again. Delighted to be here. Freezing Order is a fantastic book. I really,

really enjoyed it. It's difficult, as many people have pointed out, to remember that it's

nonfiction. I won't offer my own review here because Stephen Fry and Tom Stoppert have already

reviewed it. Stofford says it was compulsory reading, and Fry calls it explosive, compulsive,

and a cracking good read. But books with this level of research and detail and probably risk of libel are so much work.

Can you tell me your goal in writing freezing order after the success of Red Notice?

Red Notice, my first book, finished around 2012 when the Magnitsky Act was passed. That was the legislation which

freezes assets and bans visas of human rights violators and kleptocrats. And it's got a very

grand ending and it's all very satisfying. But since the Magnitsky Act was passed, there have been

so many things that we've done and the Russians have done in our ongoing campaign to bring to justice, the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer, that I felt it was really important for everyone to hear the continuation of the story.

In a certain way, freezing order is more shocking the red notice in terms of what we've discovered in all the corruption of the Putin regime.

And even more upsetting and shocking is how the Russians and how Vladimir Putin himself has reacted to what we found.

That's an interesting point. The whole Magnitsky story in the hands of the Russians gets increasingly

strange. First, he wasn't murdered, but later

he was murdered and you were the one who murdered him and then he was put on trial posthumously.

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