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

by Bill Browder

The meeting was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. the following morning, which in Spain counts as an early meeting.

As soon as the car’s sirens started blaring, I was struck by a terrifying thought. What if these people weren’t police officers? What if they’d somehow obtained uniforms and a police car and were impersonating police officers? What if, instead of driving me to the police station, they drove me to an airstrip, put

me on a private plane, and whisked me off to Moscow?

didn’t have to put a complete stop to the stealing, I just needed to create enough pressure for marginal change.

This naming-and-shaming approach turned out to be remarkably profitable, and the Hermitage Fund became one of the best performing funds in the world. At the height of my career, I was responsible for $4.5 billion invested in Russian equities. But, of course, exposing corrupt oligarchs didn’t make me very popular in Russia.

John Moscow had served at the New York District Attorney’s Office for 33 years and was one of their most aggressive prosecutors, having led fights against domestic corruption and international financial crime.

“Good. The key to any successful prosecution is the quality of the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses.”

they moved him from a pretrial detention center with a medical wing to a maximum-security jail called Butyrka—a hellhole

considered to be one of the worst in Russia.

This idea slowly evolved into a legislative proposal called the Magnitsky Act, which would ban visas and freeze assets of Russian human rights violators, including those who had tortured and killed Sergei.

Europe is an intensely egalitarian place where success in business is often frowned upon.

The official motto of the World Economic Forum is “Committed to Improving the State of the World,” but in reality, many attendees are billionaires, dictators, and Fortune 500 executives who have little interest in improving the state of the world. A few are interested in exactly the opposite.

To justify their noble mission, the World Economic Forum regularly invites a handful of people who do take their motto to heart.

Prince Albert, Monaco’s head of state, was notoriously chummy with Vladimir Putin. He was the only foreigner on the 2007 Siberian hunting trip that produced the infamous

picture of a shirtless Putin on horseback. Because of their friendship, Prince Albert enthusiastically supported the Russian president and occasionally did his bidding. I’d heard stories about Putin’s enemies checking into Monaco hotels, presenting their passports, and finding themselves arrested within minutes by the local police.

Vadim used the Moldovan file to follow the money from Moldova to places like Cyprus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Unfortunately, neither we nor the OCCRP had police files for these countries, and as EU member states, they all had good data protection, meaning we couldn’t just purchase the information we needed like we had done in Russia.

The Moldovan file contained references to dozens and dozens of shell companies with meaningless names like Dexterson LLP, Green Pot Industrial Corporation, Prevezon Holdings, and Malton International. Bill decided to run these names through every New York property database he could get his hands on, operating on the idea that one or more of the thieves might have bought Manhattan real estate using some of the $230 million.

“One of these companies hit,” he told me on the phone that morning. “Prevezon. Whoever it belongs to has been grabbing New York property like candy.” “I can’t believe it.”

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.

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.

Apparently, Barron’s in-house counsel didn’t want to risk a lawsuit even if the story was iron-clad.

In theory, SARs absolve banks of responsibility if their clients later turn out to be criminals. Globally, thousands of SARs are filed every day, and nearly all of them are ignored.

This weaponization of Interpol, which is notoriously lax in vetting arrest warrants issued by authoritarian states, was harrowing. After that, every time I crossed an international border, there would be a very real risk of being arrested and extradited to Russia. With these developments, I needed the United States on my side more than ever.

previously worked for us in tracking down who had received that money. Now they were representing one of those recipients! This was a clear conflict of interest, making their client, in legal terms, “adverse” to us. We also pointed out that when we’d worked together we’d given them confidential information. The Bar Association explicitly forbade this type of disloyalty, and we requested that BakerHostetler recuse themselves and John Moscow without delay.I

For many, the words “lawyer” and “ethics” are mutually exclusive. As we all know, lawyers have become the brunt of countless jokes. (What’s the difference between a lawyer and a jellyfish? One is a spineless, poisonous blob. The other is a form of sea life. Why won’t sharks attack lawyers? Professional courtesy.) But I thought this disrespect was mostly reserved for ambulance chasers with one-room offices in strip malls, not Ivy League attorneys in glass towers in midtown Manhattan. I was surprised that BakerHostetler, a firm that had been around since 1916, with clients like Ford and Microsoft, would conform to this lowest stereotype.

It was one thing for them to try to snow-job us with legalese, but another for them to be scrutinized by the Grievance Committee and risk punishment, up to and including disbarment. It would be much easier for them just to walk away from Prevezon.

We knew from working with John Moscow that one of his specialties was using subpoenas as weapons unto themselves. When he first pitched us, he boasted that he liked to identify his opponents’ sensitivities and then demand everything they were uncomfortable handing over. Now, he was turning this on us. Except that he didn’t need to identify our sensitivities—he already knew them from the time we had worked together.

I made a list of 10 of the most powerful law firms in New York and contacted each. Six immediately said they weren’t interested. None explained why, but I knew the reason. Russians were throwing around legal fees like confetti in New York. They were suing each other, getting divorces, buying luxury properties, applying for visas, and setting up bank accounts. And their US lawyers were loving it. Why would any of these firms jeopardize this gravy train by working with someone as toxic to the Russians as me?

The British government, however, did take Russians for granted. I was almost certain that after Britain received the US government’s warning they would do nothing. And worse, if I was actually kidnapped by the Russians, there would be no real consequences.

This lax attitude had given Putin the impression that he could operate with impunity in the UK.

At the end of the day, the biggest market for bodyguards in London is Russians (who are afraid of other Russians).

I were trying to kidnap me, what would I do? Planning such an operation would involve surveillance, monitoring my habits, and looking for any exploitable pattern.

The Russians had been in the news a lot. They’d invaded Ukraine, shot down a passenger plane, and cheated in the Olympics—and it seemed like the hosts wholeheartedly agreed that Putin was a malign influence on the world. I told Sergei’s story just as I had many times before, but now I was able to back it up with a hardcover book that sat on the coffee table in front of us. The interview was over in less than five minutes, but it couldn’t have gone better.

It hadn’t been much of a stretch to convince an Anglo-American audience that Putin wasn’t a good guy, but in Europe it was a different story. Despite our consistent efforts, there was no Magnitsky Act anywhere in the European Union. And on the law enforcement side, while several money laundering cases had been opened—including a prominent one in France—their pace was glacial and a few were even stalled altogether.

Our main difficulty was that, in contrast to the United States, Europe had a smattering of political factions that were nakedly pro-Putin, and they had infected the mainstream debate. In France, for example, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front party, openly took millions of euros from a Kremlin-connected bank to fund her political party. In return, it appeared that she supported most of Putin’s anti-Western policies. In Germany, former chancellor Gerhard Schröder had taken a lucrative position at a subsidiary of Gazprom, the Russian gas behemoth, almost the moment he left office. Even though he was a longtime Social Democrat, a party committed to freedom and social justice, Schröder became one of Putin’s most vocal supporters in Europe. In Hungary, the autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, regularly intervened on Putin’s behalf in the EU, making no attempt to hide his sympathies. There was, however, at least one EU country that was clear-eyed about Russia at that moment—the Netherlands.

the thing that most upset Putin about Boris was his work on the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s mind, this was an unforgivable betrayal.

I had to hand it to the Russians. They’d failed to get me into their own court system for years, but now they were using a US court proceeding, in which they were the target, to do the exact equivalent.

“You have to think about it like you have an arrow in your neck,” he said. “It has to come out one way or another. It’s not going to be pleasant. If we pull it too suddenly, it may hit an artery and you’ll die. So we need to ease it out slowly and gingerly.”

There are no human beings in the room, just mannequins.

It was perfect legal jiujitsu. He’d used our opponents’ own weight to knock them over.

He carefully listed Boris’s best qualities—how he never betrayed his friends or principles, how he never put his personal interests above those of his country, and above all, how Boris had been thoroughly incorruptible. In a country whose foundation is corruption, this was his ultimate sin.

The Global Response Centre is a division of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office responsible for helping British nationals in trouble abroad.

We’re all led to believe that if you’re a citizen of a powerful country like the United States or Great Britain, and something bad happens to you abroad, your government will bring its full weight and force to protect you. But that wasn’t happening here.

He cited the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, explaining that he was forbidden from using the diplomatic pouch for anything other than official communications. To show that he cared, however, he offered to have an embassy official escort our courier to the airport and accompany them up to border control. Unfortunately, that was as far as he could go.

The Russians didn’t give a damn about the Vienna Convention. They used their diplomatic pouches to move drugs, poisons, and cash around the world. Why couldn’t the British bend the rules to use theirs to save one of their own citizens?

Finally, at the end of the day, I was referred to a concierge doctor who catered to hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and other wealthy Londoners. He didn’t come cheap, but I was ready to pay anything. This doctor was connected to a private lab on Harley Street, an area in central London with a concentration of high-end doctors and medical experts. He assured me that they had all the necessary contacts to get the samples tested at any UK government lab. He said it would take a day, two at the most, but that we would have some answers imminently.

“Volodya,” the Russian diminutive for Vladimir.

In Russia, private individuals regularly conspire with their government, so it made perfect sense that they would project this behavior onto me and the US justice system.

In all Russian money laundering cases, the money starts in Russia; then goes through a handful of transit countries like Moldova, Cyprus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; before landing in destination countries like France, Switzerland, and the United States. When it reaches this final stage, the money is

accumulated in banks or kept in real estate, or used to make extravagant purchases like yacht and private jet charters, jewelry, or fine art.