Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money
Laundering, State-Sponsored Murder,and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
Bill
Browder
THE SUNDAY
TIMES NO 2 BESTSELLER ** THE NEW YORK TIMES NO 1 BESTSELLER '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 expose
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. The book has been read,
but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or
highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR012232041
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.
Freezing
Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, State-Sponsored Murder, and
Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath by Bill Browder is published by Simon &
Schuster
Red Notice: A True Story of Corruption, Murder
and how I became Putin's no. 1 enemy
By Bill Browder
The profoundly shocking story of the murder of lawyer
Sergei Magnitsky in Russian police custody fuels this powerful, page-turning
investigation into the lengths Putin will go to silence critics and exert total
state control.
'An unburdening, a witness statement and a thriller
all at the same time ... electrifying.' The Times
I have to assume that there is a very real chance that
Putin or members of his regime will have me killed some day. If I'm killed, you
will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you
know.
A Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. A
true-life thriller by one of Putin's Most Wanted.
In November 2009, the young lawyer Sergei Magnitsky
was beaten to death by eight police officers in a freezing cell in a Moscow
prison. His crime? Testifying against Russian officials who were involved in a
conspiracy to steal $230 million of taxes.
Red Notice is a searing expose of the whitewash of
this imprisonment and murder. The killing hasn't been investigated. It hasn't
been punished. Bill Browder is still campaigning for justice for his late
lawyer and friend. This is his explosive journey from the heady world of
finance in New York and London in the 1990s, through battles with ruthless
oligarchs in turbulent post-Soviet Union Moscow, to the shadowy heart of the
Kremlin.
With fraud, bribery, corruption and torture exposed at
every turn, Red Notice is a shocking political roller-coaster.
__________________
Reads like a classic thriller, with an everyman hero
alone and in danger in a hostile foreign city ... but it's all true, and it's a
story that needs to be told.' Lee Child
'A shocking true-life thriller.' Tom Stoppard
'A riveting account... it is a powerful story and
Browder tells it skilfully.' The Washington Post
MEDIA
REVIEWS
"Reads
like a classic thriller, with an everyman hero alone and in danger in a hostile
foreign city ... but it's all true, and it's a story that needs to be
told." Lee Child "The story of Sergei Magnitsky's life and death is a
shocking true-life thriller, and Bill Browder was the man to write it."
Tom Stoppard "A sizzling account of Mr Browder's rise, fall and
metamorphosis from bombastic financier to renowned human-rights activist ...
Reads more like a financial thriller than a real-life story." The
Economist "An unburdening, a witness statement and a thriller all at the
same time ... Electrifying ... One heck of a read." -- Giles Whittell The
Times "An expose of years of state-sponsored torture and murder ... this
story of courage combined with a dash of obsessiveness is about the real here
and now." -- Sonia Purnell The Independent
Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No 1 Enemy by
Bill Browder – review
A gripping account of murder, high finance and the
Russian president’s Achilles heel
‘There is no doubt that Browder has succeeded in
annoying President Putin in a way that few have.’
Luke
Harding
Thu 26 Mar
2015 10.30 GMT
In 2008 a
young Russian lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive tax fraud. He
found evidence that a group of well-connected Russian officials had stolen a
whopping $230m. The same officials had Magnitsky arrested; he was tossed into a
freezing cell and refused medical treatment. Magnitsky – who suffered from
pancreatitis and gall stones – spent months in pain. This state-sanctioned
torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. One day his
condition grew critical. Guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat
him to death.
Magnitsky’s
case was to become the most notorious and best-documented example of human
rights abuse in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That this happened was down to one
man: Bill Browder, a US-born financier and the CEO of a successful asset management
company. Once a Putin fan, Browder found himself in trouble in 2005 when he was
deported from Russia. He hired a team, including Magnitsky. When the Kremlin
got nasty, most of the lawyers fled. Magnitsky – a family man with two small
boys, who liked Beethoven – refused to leave. He believed the law would protect
him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic
misjudgment.
Red Notice
is a dramatic, moving and thriller-like account of how Magnitsky’s death
transformed Browder from hedge-fund manager to global human rights crusader.
Its title refers to the extradition request served by Russia on Interpol,
demanding Browder’s arrest. (A Russian court later jailed him in absentia for
nine years.) In truth, there are quite a few pretenders to the exalted post of
“Putin’s No 1 Enemy”, as he describes himself. They include Michael
Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch whom Putin (pictured) jailed and sent to
Siberia. There is the late Boris Berezovsky, another tycoon who fell out with
Russia’s grudge-bearer-in-chief and decamped to London, playing Trotsky to
Putin’s Stalin. Or Alexei Navalny, the Moscow opposition leader, currently
under house arrest. Or the murdered Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in a Mayfair
hotel with radioactive green tea.
Still,
there is no doubt that Browder has succeeded in annoying Putin in a way that
few have. In the wake of Magnitsky’s murder, he began a campaign to bring his
killers to justice. Since they occupied high positions in Russia’s interior
ministry and FSB spy agency there was little prospect of this happening.
Instead, Browder took advantage of an obscure law passed by president George W
Bush in 2004, which allows the US to impose visa sanctions on corrupt foreign
officials.
Browder took
his campaign to Washington, where the state department gave him short shrift.
The Obama administration had “reset” relations with Russia and didn’t want to
rock the boat. Indefatigable, bloody-minded, a sort of virtuous
pain-in-the-arse Ancient Mariner, Browder continued to lobby senators,
journalists and anybody who would listen to him. Against the odds, Congress
passed a landmark Magnitsky law in 2012, blocking 18 officials from entering
the US. Most importantly, the law denied them access to US banking.
Inadvertently,
Browder had found Putin and co’s Achilles heel, and a model that might be used
against other mid-ranking human rights abusers. In Soviet times, the politburo
lived quite a bit better than the average Soviet citizen. It had special shops
and holidays on the Black Sea. In Putin’s Russia, however, the difference was
vast: top bureaucrats were worth millions and enjoyed international lifestyles.
They owned property in London and Florida. They sent their kids to British
private schools. What was the point of stealing all that money if you could
only spend it in Sochi, with its scruffy, pebbly beach?
The
Magnitsky law drew an apoplectic, asymmetric response from Putin. He ended the
adoption of Russian babies by childless American couples. And, in a twist that
might have been written by Gogol, the Kremlin put Magnitsky on trial. That he
was already dead was apparently not a problem. In summer 2013 a judge convicted
him of tax evasion, announcing a surreal verdict to an empty barred cage.
All of this
is well told, in a memoir with many grotesque moments. Browder’s personal story
is interesting, too. He is the grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the
American Communist party. In the 1920s Earl visited Moscow and fell in love
with a Russian lawyer. They married and had three children. When Earl returned
to the US he ran for president on the Communist ticket, in 1936 and 1940,
winning 80,000 votes. As a teenager, the young Browder decided the only way to
rebel against his brainy leftwing family was to become a capitalist. Inevitably
he was drawn to eastern Europe and his timing was impeccable: he got his first
foot in the door, with the Boston Consulting Group, two months before the
Berlin wall fell down.
The early
chapters of Red Notice read like a mixture of Bildungsroman and a self-help
manual for aspiring carpetbaggers. Browder was sent to Poland to rescue a
crumbling bus factory. The trip wasn’t a success. Polish food didn’t agree with
him; he lost a stone; the firm’s employees felt betrayed when he reluctantly
concluded that most of them had to be sacked. While he was there Browder
subscribed to Poland’s first-ever privatisations; quicker than most investors,
he realised the demise of the communist bloc offered a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to get stupidly rich.
There were
false starts. Browder went to work for Robert Maxwell. Every day a whumping
from the heavens signified the great man’s arrival by helicopter. Maxwell’s
watery death left Browder unemployed. He soon bounced back and was off advising
a Russian trawler fleet north of the Arctic circle. What Browder really wanted
to do was to run his own investment fund. After some comic negotiations, with a
stuffy London bank and a pair of billionaires, he got the seed millions he
needed. He called his new firm Hermitage Capital and moved to Moscow.
The story
of Russia’s scandalous privatisation programme under Boris Yeltsin is familiar.
Facing defeat in the runup to the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin gave
state assets away cheap to the oligarchs. In return they got him re-elected.
Browder, meanwhile, piled into the Russian stock market. By 1997 Hermitage had
become the best performing investment fund in the world, and its CEO hailed as
a financial superman. But he failed to anticipate Russia’s 1998 crash; in its
aftermath, oligarchs screwed western investors like Browder by diluting their
shares in Russian companies. Browder fought back and when Putin became
president in 2000 hailed him as an ally in the fight against oligarchic
malfeasance. In reality, the new president wasn’t interested in cleaning up
Russia. His goal was simple: to redistribute the states’s abundant resources
among his KGB friends.
Red Notice
offers a scant and less than convincing account of these years when Browder
talked up Russia in western forums. He now admits he was “naive” to take Putin
at face value. And yet it’s impossible not to admire him for his subsequent
pertinacious campaign against the officials who caused his lawyer’s death.
The British
government wasn’t much help, we learn. (Browder, based in London, is a UK
citizen.) Two interior ministry officials – Artem Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov –
allegedly orchestrated the $230m fraud, stealing taxes paid by Hermitage to the
Russian state. Browder found out where the money went – on Range Rovers, Moscow
real estate and tacky properties in Dubai. A Russian living in the UK,
Alexander Perepilichnyy, offered further clues as to how the officials had
routed the “rebate” via a Moscow tax office.
In November
2012 – just as the Magnitsky act was passed – Perepilichnyy collapsed and died
while jogging outside his Surrey mansion. He was 44. His cause of death is
still a mystery.
Luke Harding’s Mafia State: How One Reporter
Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia is published by Guardian Faber
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