Yep, Bill Browder is basically the most effective person to ever lobby multiple world powers into creating legislation to blacklist people by name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act#Individuals_affe...) from Russia or any country for that matter. TLDR; is that Browder was making some sweet money in Russia after the USSR collapsed and eventually enough powerful people in Russia didn't want him there, so he had to leave, but one of his lawyers was arrested and mysteriously died in prison.
There is a great podcast floating out there from NPR where they talk about the seemingly real possibility that Russia had a vested interest in getting a president in office just to repeal the Magnitsky Act because it hurt that much.
Worth noting though that the majority of powerful people in Russia have primary assets, investments, family and property in the West. This makes the legislation very effective. It is hard to tell how much that would apply to Iran's mullahs.
The western banking system is much more porous than one would think. Sanctions against individuals could be a very fine grained stopgap solution.
The below is mostly writing off the recent shock of having been centimeters away from buying real estate off one of the most important known straw men laundering shady Russian and other former USSR money. I discovered his identity just in time...
A lot of this shady money was laundered through Baltic banks. Just one straw man, Staņislavs Gorins (Stanislav Gorin), was a director in name in many hundreds of companies in Latvia and offshore that laundered enormous amounts and moved it west.
He claims his identity was stolen, but that's very unlikely, given actions like him personally going to foreign embassies to help setup foreign shell companies. And given he's actively scheming with OneCoin, a shady Bulgarian crypto coin.
I went looking down the rabbit hole a bit further. It looks like Latvia has somewhat learned its lesson, but especially in the UK, relevant legislation is like Swiss cheese: one giant loophole. Just search for "companies house loopholes".
There is a great podcast floating out there from NPR where they talk about the seemingly real possibility that Russia had a vested interest in getting a president in office just to repeal the Magnitsky Act because it hurt that much.