Out in the cold in Putin's Russia

Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin

Author: Bill Browder

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 799

As a hedge fund manager Bill Browder knows all about timing. But even he could not have anticipated the exquisite timeliness of Freezing Order, a sequel to his 2016 page-turner Red Notice, an expose of the massive financial fraud at the centre of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous oligarchic regime. Freezing Order was released on April 12, a little over a month after Russia launched a “special operation” in Ukraine causing the US to tighten sanctions on Russia and Mr Putin’s cronies. This book chronicles Mr Browder’s attempts to achieve a similar outcome since 2009.

His campaign was launched to avenge the murder in a Russian prison of Sergei Magnitsky, chief accountant in

Mr Browder’s Hermitage Capital, and publicise Mr Putin’s criminal-corporate complex. Red Notice was Mr Browder’s account of how he lobbied the US Congress to sanction Russian officials involved in the shenanigans that led to Magnitsky’s killing.  The result was the Magnitsky Act, passed in 2012 in a rare show of bipartisanship (the late John McCain was a sponsor), which was later expanded to become a wider human rights accountability law. Freezing Order takes the story forward with Mr Browder’s attempts to lobby other western nations to pass similar Magnitsky laws.

Both books could be mistaken for airport thrillers, not least because of their dramatic subtitles. Red Notice went with “A True Story of Corruption, Murder and How I Became Putin’s no. 1 enemy”.  Freezing Order proclaims that it is a “True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath”. But even the most jaded reader will admit that neither descriptor is exaggerated.

Like its prequel, this book is not a bald account of the intricacies of high finance and arcane law-making only. If anything, Mr Browder’s life since 2009 appears to have been an astonishing saga of escaping assassination attempts, Interpol arrests (the notorious red notice), honey traps and all manner of intimidation by the long arm of Mr Putin’s kleptocratic empire.   

Garry Kasparov, the former chess grandmaster and now chair of the Human Rights Foundation, described Freezing Order as a “warning against the waves of crime and corruption emanating from Putin’s Russia”.  This may suggest that

Mr Browder, the grandson of the famous leader of the Communist Party of the United States Earl Browder, is a hair-shirt human rights activist. In fact, he is a hard-nosed hedge fund manager and an unabashed capitalist. He’s unmistakably part of the “one per cent”, swanning around with the champagne-and-caviar Davos crowd, holidaying in resorts most of us only get to see in Conde Nast but also using his wealth to jet around lobbying politicians in the US, Europe and Canada to proscribe Russian lawmakers and oligarchs. 

Red Notice describes his early days as a brash rookie with some venerable Wall Street names such as Bain and BCG, the latter taking him to London. That was where he watched the Iron Curtain fall and made a fateful decision. “My grandfather had been the biggest communist in America, and as I watched these events I decided I wanted to become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe,” he wrote. He was among the small cohort of western investment analysts who spotted early the hugely under-priced privatisation of natural resources conglomerates in former Soviet satellites and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia.

After some spectacular success,

Mr Browder found himself on the wrong side of a bet on Russian bonds when the economy went into a tailspin, unleashing an untrammelled orgy of stealing, asset stripping, preferential share dilutions, transfer pricing and embezzlement of oligarch-owned conglomerates in which he’d invested. Mr Browder was naïve enough to publicly call out these serial misdeeds, including of Gazprom, publicising what he called his “stealing analysis” through the press, and tracing the gravy train to Vladimir Putin. Then came the intimidation, death threats, and exorbitant tax notices that encouraged

Mr Browder to wind up his Russian operations and relocate himself and his staff to London. Only Sergei Magnitsky refused to leave and paid a terrible price.

Mr Browder has flair for the sort of prose Martin Cruz Smith wouldn’t sniff at.  Freezing Order opens with his arrest in Madrid on a Russian arrest warrant put out by Interpol. This is one attempt to silence him as western law enforcement agencies start freezing Russian assets and put the squeeze on Mr Putin’s empire. Freezing Order takes you on a roller coaster ride as Russian goons pursue him around the globe and even set a laughably ham-fisted honey trap.  In his attempt to stall the Magnitsky Act, Mr Putin moves to suborn leading politicians. Nadia Veselnitskaya was a name with which he was familiar long before Donald Trump Jr’s infamous Trump Tower meeting.

Both Mr Browder’s books offer authentic insights into the inner workings of high finance and high politics. Unlike many of the world’s wealthiest, he doesn’t drone on about “compassionate capitalism”. Yet he’s managed to achieve as much as the most assiduous investor in “good causes” and probably with more lasting impact.