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

by Bill Browder

Nikolai Gorokhov. Nikolai had been working for the Magnitskys in Russia since 2011. He was a former prosecutor and acutely aware of the danger this placed him in, but Nikolai was cut from the same cloth as Sergei. He felt it was his duty to hold Sergei’s murderers to account. To fully appreciate how dangerous the world had just become, we have to go back to 2015, when Nikolai became a key witness for the US government in the case against Prevezon. At that time, the SDNY had a significant obstacle in the case. To win, they needed hard evidence proving the stolen money had moved from Russia, through a network of international banks, and into New York. We’d supplied them with reams of Russian bank records from our money laundering database, but Paul Monteleoni and his team considered this to be intelligence, not evidence, and it wouldn’t be admissible in court. Normally, US prosecutors use mutual legal assistance requests (MLAs) to obtain this kind of evidence from their counterparts in other countries. And that’s exactly what happened here. The SDNY had formally asked half a dozen countries, including Estonia, Latvia, and Cyprus, to share their banking information, and they’d all cooperated. There was only one exception: Russia.