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

by Bill Browder

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. Most of this data ends up at the physical epicenter of Russia’s information market, a low-end shopping mall just west of the Moskva River called Gorbushka. Inside is a chaotic hodgepodge of kiosks selling everything from pirated Fast and Furious DVDs to Star Wars figures to Chinese cell phones. But if you go into the back of some of these stalls, you’ll find disks of government databases for sale. They contain things like salary information, cell phone registries, and travel records, and the most you have to pay for any of these is a few dollars. Gorbushka Market, Moscow. (© HERMITAGE) At the higher end of the information market were specialized brokers who had nothing to do with Gorbushka. They sold more sophisticated databases like those belonging to the Russian Central Bank or the State Customs Committee. Back when I was running the Hermitage Fund, Vadim and I used these sources to ferret out multibillion-dollar scams at the companies we invested in. Now that we were conducting a money laundering investigation, these resources became invaluable in a completely different way.