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

by Bill Browder

NBC was about to release a long and, I hoped, hard-hitting exposé on everything surrounding the Magnitsky case. I didn’t know when it would air, but I hoped it would at least come out before the Judiciary Committee hearing. About a month later, on July 7, as Elena and I were packing for Colorado, the story aired on MSNBC. The reporter, Richard Engel, didn’t just go into Sergei’s story and the $230 million fraud, but also talked about Vladimir Kara-Murza’s poisoning, Boris Nemtsov’s assassination, and Nikolai Gorokhov’s rooftop “accident.” It was fantastic.

During the gala dinner on the last night of the G20 Summit in Germany, Trump abandoned his assigned seat next to the wife of the Japanese prime minister to join his own wife, Melania, who happened to be seated next to Vladimir Putin. Trump, accompanied by no staff or translators, spoke to Putin for about an hour. When the Times asked what they discussed, Trump said, “Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.” Trump Jr. would make the exact same claim about his meeting with Veselnitskaya the next day. None of this was coincidental. At the end of July, it was reported that President Trump had dictated Trump Jr.’s initial statement to the press as the president flew home from Germany on Air Force One. Most people barely noticed this admission, but it was extraordinary. President Trump and his son both knew that “adoption” was an innocuous-sounding code for the Magnitsky Act, and now both men were trying very hard to make the Trump Tower meeting sound a lot less sinister than it had been. My upcoming testimony at the Senate Judiciary Committee would be my opportunity to tie everything together. It would show that the Magnitsky Act was not only the driving force behind Putin’s official policy toward the West, but was also behind his audacious intervention in the US political process. It truly would be the chance of a lifetime.

I stayed laser-focused on playing it straight down the middle. I couldn’t afford for this hearing to become partisan. I needed Republicans and Democrats to continue to work together to fight off Putin as he tried to derail the Magnitsky Act. Fortunately, as the hearing progressed, the partisanship fell away. There was genuine desire among all the senators to understand how Russia worked and why Putin behaved the way he did. For an hour and 45 minutes, I unpacked Putin’s motivations. I drew a line from the $230 million fraud to Putin’s proxy, the cellist Sergei Roldugin. I explained that this wasn’t a one-off, but one of thousands of crimes Putin had benefitted from, allowing him to accumulate an estimated $200 billion fortune. I pointed out that nearly all of this wealth was held at financial institutions in the West and at risk of being frozen under the Magnitsky Act. For these reasons, the law was an existential threat to him and his senior officials. Four of the nine senators were former prosecutors, and they brought all of their prosecutorial skills to bear with their questions. By the time I was done answering, an epiphany had emerged among the lawmakers in the room. For the first time, it all made sense: one of the main reasons Putin had interfered in the US election was because of the Magnitsky Act.

If one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans had heard of Sergei and the Magnitsky Act before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, by the time all the media died down, that number had grown exponentially. A good part of the American public—and surely, Vladimir Putin himself—had gotten the message. The Magnitsky Act was here to stay.

That was October 17, the same day the Canadian Senate passed the Magnitsky Act. This latest Interpol warrant was a direct retaliation. With this new information, I called Patrick Davis at Senator Grassley’s office to see if he could find out if my ESTA issue was somehow linked to this Interpol notice. He contacted DHS and reported back that, indeed, the ESTA system syncs with Interpol’s. Anyone who is wanted by Interpol automatically loses their ESTA. A human being hadn’t been behind me losing my ESTA. No one in the United States had intentionally targeted me. I felt foolish for thinking it was a conspiracy at all. Of course, the US president, no matter who that was, wouldn’t be coordinating with Putin.

The next morning, Senators McCain and Cardin issued a joint press release calling for my visa to be reinstated. “Mr. Browder’s work has helped to remove corrupt actors from our financial system.… It would be unfortunate if the U.S. decided to bar him based on a decision by those same Russian officials who have been targeted by [the Magnitsky Act].” Within two hours, the Department of Homeland Security had reinstated my ESTA. Two days later, Interpol deleted the arrest warrant from their system, and ordered all 192 member states to remove any mention of me from their national databases. This defeat was humiliating for Putin, but one thing he could control was his own country’s court system. On December 29, 2017, the Tverskoy District Court in Moscow found Ivan and me guilty of our latest “crimes.” Ivan was sentenced to eight years, and I was given another nine, both in absentia. I now faced 18 years in a Russian prison camp if I were ever extradited to Moscow.

Eva and Michael had written more than 70 articles on Danske Bank. These covered a range of suspicious payments across multiple schemes involving disparate characters like Azerbaijan’s most senior leaders, corrupt Western European politicians, a Russian arms dealer, sanctioned Iranian companies, and even a cousin of Putin’s, among others. Their reporting forced Danske Bank to act. In the fall of 2017, the bank’s CEO, Thomas Borgen, announced a top-to-bottom audit, to be conducted by external lawyers and accountants. The findings of this audit had still not been made public by the time we were going to meet with Eva and Michael. We wanted to see them because we’d made some dramatic discoveries of our own regarding Danske Bank. Using data from the French investigation, the Moldovan file, and other sources, Vadim had identified 43,112 transactions showing that $200 million connected to the $230 million had been laundered through 20 shell companies with accounts at Danske Bank’s lone Estonian branch, in Tallinn.

Michael messaged Vadim to inform him that their analysis confirmed the $200 million we’d identified, but that they’d also found an additional $8.3 billion of suspicious money flowing from Russia and other former Soviet states through these 20 companies between 2007 and 2015. This was far, far more than any of us had expected. By itself it represented Europe’s third largest money laundering scandal in history.

We eventually learned that, right around this time, the most senior Swiss federal police officer investigating money laundering connected to the Magnitsky case, a man named Vinzenz Schnell, was caught taking a secret, unauthorized trip to Moscow to meet with none other than Natalia Veselnitskaya. It was later discovered that while he was actively trying to sabotage the Swiss Magnitsky investigation, Schnell went on a lavish hunting trip in Russia that was paid for by a Russian oligarch. Schnell was eventually fired and convicted in a Swiss court.

Putin smiled and nodded confidently, looking like he’d spent the whole weekend preparing for this moment. “We can meet you halfway.… We can actually permit representatives of the United States, including this very commission headed by Mr. Mueller. We can let them into the country. They can be present at questioning. In this case there’s another condition. This kind of effort should be a mutual one. We would expect that the Americans would reciprocate.… For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case.” I had to watch it several times to make sure that I’d heard it correctly. Somehow, Putin, standing next to the President of the United States, was suggesting swapping 12 Russian GRU officers—for me! I waited for Trump’s reaction. Surely, he would reject this out of hand. But he didn’t. “I think that’s an incredible offer,” he said, suggesting he was ready to trade me.