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

by Bill Browder

When Vadim got to the office that morning, he soon found Prevezon Holdings in our copy of the Moldovan file. Two Moldovan shell companies had sent $857,764 from the stolen $230 million to Prevezon, which was registered in Cyprus. This was a lucky break. Unlike places such as the British Virgin Islands or Panama, where beneficial ownership of shell companies is secret, Cyprus has an open registry. All you have to do is go online, punch in a company’s name, and you’ll find out who it belongs to. When Vadim did this, he learned that Prevezon Holdings was owned by a Russian man named Denis Katsyv. In a typical money laundering scheme, ownership is like a Russian Matryoshka doll. You open one shell company to find another, and that leads to another and another and so on. Whenever you do land on an actual name, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it belongs to an unemployed alcoholic or a peripatetic yoga instructor or some other random person willing to hand over their passport in exchange for a few hundred dollars. Little do they know, they then become nominal owners of shell companies that can launder millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars.