More explosive, compulsive and gasp-inducingly,
spine-tinglingly, mouth-dryingly, heart-poundingly thrilling than any fiction I
have read for years, but it is all true’ Stephen Fry
‘Mind-blowing...Browder's battle for justice is at
times terrifying, at times deeply touching’ Catherine Belton
‘A jaw-dropping exposé by Putin’s anti-corruption
nemesis’ Daily Telegraph
Following
his explosive international bestseller Red Notice, Bill Browder returns with
another gripping thriller chronicling how he became Vladimir Putin’s number one
enemy by exposing Putin’s campaign to steal and launder hundreds of billions of
dollars and kill anyone who stands in his way.
When Bill
Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a
Moscow jail, Browder made it his life’s mission to go after his killers and
make sure they faced justice. The first step of that mission was to uncover who
was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over.
As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through
the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were
shocked to discovered that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the
crime.
As law
enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his
cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through
cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top
lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down. Putin will stop at
nothing to protect his money. As Freezing Order reveals, it was Browder’s
campaign to expose Putin’s corruption that prompted Russia’s intervention in
the 2016 US presidential election.
At once a
financial caper, an international adventure and a passionate plea for justice,
Freezing Order is a timely and stirring morality tale about how one man can
take on one of the most ruthless villains in the world.
Freezing Order by Bill Browder review – life as a
target of Putin
This incredible account of being framed by the Russian
authorities – and the deadly fallout from fighting back – reads like a thriller
Andrew
Anthony
Andrew
Anthony
Sun 17 Apr
2022 08.00 BST
In terms of
western relations with Vladimir Putin, Bill Browder has performed the role of
the canary in the coalmine – or perhaps goldmine would be more fitting. A
graduate of Stanford Business School, he arrived in Moscow in the late 1990s,
via a stint in London, determined to make his fortune.
As his
previous book, Red Notice, detailed, that’s exactly what he did. He set up
Hermitage Capital Management, with the help of the Monaco-based billionaire
Edmond Safra (later to die in a fire started by one of his servants).
It was a
time of wild profiteering, as post-Soviet state assets were sold off on the
cheap, and a venal oligarchy was created. Business feuds were regularly settled
by bullets, and the life expectancy of bankers was radically shortened. When
Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999, promising to stamp out corruption,
Browder was a relieved man.
And he
remained pro-Putin for the next three years, as the new Russian leader imposed
state order on capitalist anarchy. In these years, Browder made a fortune,
turning Hermitage into the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. His
big innovation was shareholder activism, in which he targeted corrupt practices
in some of the biggest companies, such as Gazprom, and by doing so raised their
share price.
There’s something deeply offending to our sense of
justice about an innocent man framed by powerful forces
Then in
2003 Putin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time the richest oligarch in
Russia, and instead of opposing corruption, began putting the squeeze on the
duly intimidated oligarchy. That meant putting a stop to Browder’s busy-bodying
by deporting him from Russia in 2005.
Eighteen
months later, Hermitage’s offices were raided by the Russian authorities and
its paperwork removed. Those documents were then used by officers from the
interior ministry to stage a $230m (£175m) tax rebate scam. They then blamed
the scam on Browder, and when his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, exposed the
officers responsible for the fraud, those same officers had Magnitsky arrested.
Held for
almost a year without charge, Magnitsky died a few days before he was due to be
released – murdered, says Browder, and a number of independent investigators,
by prison guards who beat him to death. Thereafter Browder, a naturalised
Briton based in London, dedicated himself to gaining justice for his friend,
primarily by lobbying for the Magnitsky Act – a bill that authorised the US
government to sanction human rights offenders and freeze their assets. A smilar
law has been enacted in 33 other countries, including the UK and EU.
Once
adopted, however, the Magnitsky law remained mostly unused in the US, and
particularly in the UK. It was only after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that
the UK authorities belatedly noticed the preponderance of corrupt Russian
billionaires laundering their money in London. As Browder informs us at the end
of the book, most of the $230m from the tax scam found its way to these shores.
Characteristically, the British authorities did nothing about it.
But the
Russian authorities did. They targeted Browder. He found himself embroiled in a
US case against a Russian shell company that had used part of the stolen $230m
to buy property in New York. The Russians hired a lawyer who had previously
worked for Browder, a conflict of interest that eventually had the lawyer
barred, but not before Browder feared his personal information had been passed
on to the people who were out to get him.
He was also
subject to a series of Interpol warrants, and at one stage in the book he is
arrested in Madrid under a Russian-requested order. At first he’s not sure if
the Spanish police are in fact Russian agents in disguise, and then he’s not
sure if he will be held and extradited to Moscow – where he would likely have
met the same end as his lawyer.
Witnesses
to Russian corruption die in bizarre circumstances, falling off roofs or from
sudden heart attacks
As
terrifying as this incident must have been, in a way it pales by comparison
with another moment in the book in which Browder recalls the 2018 Helsinki
summit between Putin and Donald Trump. Out of the blue, Putin offered to swap
some Russian intelligence agents for Browder, and in a joint press conference
Trump said that he thought it was “an incredible offer”.
Browder was
on holiday at his home in Colorado at the time, and imagined that blacked-out
secret service land cruisers would arrive and he’d be rendered away to Moscow
to face a rigged showtrial and a mysterious death behind bars.
It’s an
incredible story, told with pace and panache, that reads like a thriller.
There’s something deeply offending to our sense of justice about an innocent
man framed by powerful forces. It’s a fear that Alexandre Dumas and Alfred
Hitchcock tapped into to dramatic effect, but what is most troubling here is
how acquiescent the western establishment has been to Russian crimes and lies.
Lawyers,
politicians and the usual useful idiots have all been successfully recruited to
the Russian cause, either through financial inducement, bribery, bovine anti-west
sentiments, or perhaps worst of all, complacency. Representatives of each of
these groups feature in this book, in which witnesses to Russian corruption die
in bizarre circumstances, falling off roofs or from sudden heart attacks. There
are also poisonings, threats, intimidation and the whole gamut of dirty tricks.
Throughout
it all, Browder remains impressively upbeat and resolute. Perhaps the story of
one very wealthy man going up against the Russian state seems indulgent against
the backdrop of the nightmare unfolding in Ukraine. But they are related
events, and as this book makes all too clear, we’ve taken far too long to
recognise the true nature of the regime that connects them.
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