In 2007, Magnitsky was hired by American-born British financier Bill Browder to investigate the government's seizure of three of Browder's Russian subsidiaries. Discovering evidence of embezzlement, Magnitsky implicated two senior police officers in a tax rebate scam that used shell corporations plundered from Browder's holdings to defraud the Russian treasury of 230 million dollar. Subordinates of those officials then arrested Magnitsky and charged him with the very crime he had exposed.
What started as a drama about a Russian police plot to steal a billion dollars from a US financier and to murder his faithful tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, has become a real life investigation of contradicting versions of the crime. The Magnitsky Case is central for the policy of blacklisting bad guys from Putin's Russia ("Magnitsky List"), which was then adopted by the West in retaliation for Russia's actions in Ukraine. Shockingly for the film's director, dissident and Putin basher Andrei Nekrasov, the official Western story turns out to have serious flaws.
