Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

by Bill Browder

He explained that we could trace these dollars by using something called a 1782 subpoena. I’d never heard of it, but it sounded promising. His idea was to take advantage of a little-known feature of the international banking system: whenever money is transferred in dollars—even between two banks in Russia—it touches a US clearing bank for a fraction of a second, leaving a permanent record. Those clearing banks are headquartered in Manhattan and under the jurisdiction of US courts. If we subpoenaed those banks and got their records, we could use that information to begin to reconstruct the money trail.

Every time someone does something in Russia, that information gets filed in quadruplicate with four different ministries. The people working at those ministries make only a few hundred dollars a month. As a result, nearly everything is for sale.

The official motto of the World Economic Forum is “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” but in reality, many attendees are billionaires, dictators, and Fortune 500 executives who have little interest in improving the state of the world. A few are interested in exactly the opposite.

To truly appreciate where Putin is coming from, you have to be a criminologist, not a political scientist. Putin constantly lies. Proclamations about his fears of NATO enlargement or any grand Russian vision are smokescreens. This war isn’t about any of these things, it’s about a scared little man who’s stolen too much money and is terrified of facing the consequences. What he wants—what he needs—is to stay in power at all costs.