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

by Bill Browder

The Department of Justice was asking the court to issue a worldwide freezing order over Prevezon’s assets. This order included approximately $20 million of real estate and cash in New York, along with €3 million (approximately $3.5 million) of assets held in the Netherlands. The total was more than 27 times the $857,764 we’d originally traced from the stolen $230 million going to New York. The US authorities were going after everything they could find, with the intention of seizing all of the $230 million, provided they could locate it. The SDNY’s filing was a complete and independent vindication of everything we’d been saying since 2008. The Department of Justice had laid out the facts in black-and-white and was now ready to stand by them in a US federal court. The next day, the court approved the government’s application. This was the fourth freezing order in the Magnitsky case.