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.
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.
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 (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
