Nordea: Vi är medvetna om anklagelserna från Browder

William Felix Browder (born 23 April 1964) is an American-born British financier, economist and human rights defender. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, an investment fund that at one time was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. He gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998 to avoid paying taxes related to foreign investment. After having business in Russia for ten years, Browder was refused entry to Russia in 2005 as a threat to national security; he has said it was because he exposed corruption. After the death in prison in 2009 of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer and auditor who had represented his company and conducted an investigation into massive tax fraud related to it, Browder lobbied for Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, a law to punish Russian human rights violators, which was signed into law in 2012 by President Barack Obama. In 2013, Browder was tried in absentia in Russia for tax fraud, jointly in a posthumous prosecution of Magnitsky. He was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison. Interpol rejected Russian requests to arrest Browder, saying the case was political. In 2014, the European Parliament voted for sanctions against 30 Russians believed complicit in the Magnitsky case; this was the first time it had taken such action. In July 2017, Browder testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through use of persons in Washington, D.C. On October 19, 2017, Canada enacted its own Magnitsky Act, which allows for the freezing of assets and visa bans on officials from Russia and other nations considered to be guilty of human rights violations, and prohibits Canadian firms from dealing with foreign nationals who have grossly violated human rights. Other countries including Estonia, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom, have also enacted their own version of the Magnitsky Act. On October 21, 2017, as part of a criminal conviction for tax evasion, the Russian government attempted to place Browder on Interpol's arrest list. After a protest by U.S. Congressional leaders, his visa was restored the following day. Russia's arrest-warrant request was rejected by Interpol on October 26, 2017. While visiting Spain in May 2018, Browder was arrested on 30 May 2018 by Spanish authorities on a new Russian Interpol warrant and transferred to an undisclosed Spanish police station, yet he was released two hours later, after Interpol confirmed that this was a political case.

Hermitage Capital Management is an investment fund and asset management company specializing in Russian markets founded by Bill Browder and Edmond Safra. Chief Operating Officer is Ivan Cherkasov. Hermitage Capital Management headquarters are in Guernsey, it also maintains offices in the Cayman Islands, London and Moscow, Russia.Its main investment fund, the Hermitage Fund created in 1996, was rated as extremely successful after earning 2,697% between 1996 and December 2007. It was ranked the World’s Best Performing Emerging Markets Fund over the 1996-2001 five-year period by Nelsons.Hermitage describe themselves as an activist fund. Its main tactics include the exposure of corporate corruption in the companies it is holding, in the hope of improving managerial behaviour and lessen the significant discount that corruption has on share prices. Most famously, Hermitage has helped to expose several high-profile cases of corruption in Russia's largest company Gazprom between 1998 and 2000. In October 2000, Hermitage reported that "investors are valuing this company as if 99 percent of its assets have been stolen. The real figure is around 10 percent so that's good news."In April 2007, the firm launched Hermitage Global, an activist fund focused on global emerging markets. Since 2015, Hermitage has operated as a family office hedge fund based in London, having returned outside capital to investors. The focus of the fund is still in emerging markets.