Svetlana was stunning. When she bumped against Bill Browder, 10 years ago in the queue for a conference buffet, he remembered that she smelt like sandalwood, that she had full red lips and was wearing a black cocktail dress. Most of all, he remembered that she was very interested in him.
They started talking and, as they parted, she placed a finger lightly on his arm and asked for his card. That night she sent him emails. When the second one came, Browder, an unimposing and bespectacled middle-aged man, was at last sure of what he had suspected from the start: Svetlana was a honey trap.
"It was kind of ridiculous, to be honest," he says. "It was a very clumsy effort. I'd known this woman for 10 minutes. But that's how they do things. They're almost Keystone Cop in the way they conduct these operations."
"They" in this case, and throughout our conversation, means "the Russians".
He still does not know what Svetlana was looking to do. "Poison me? Put something on my computer? Alert the bad guys I was there? Get pictures for blackmail?"
He is certain, though, that she didn't want to start a relationship.
Things like this happen to Browder. Sometimes when he crosses borders he learns he is on an Interpol red list and gets arrested. Sometimes Russians on salaries of a few hundred dollars a month find the resources to hire top QCs to sue him in the London courts. Sometimes his associates accidentally fall off the tops of buildings.
Once, while on holiday in the US, he woke up to learn, completely unexpectedly and not a little bracingly, that Donald Trump had casually declared his openness to the idea of swapping Browder, a British citizen, for some Russian intelligence agents. It was, said Trump at a joint press conference, an "incredible offer".
"I could just picture a bunch of black Suburbans [US Secret Service cars] showing up, and then finding myself in a US Air Force jet being carted off to Russia."
This didn't happen. But, put it this way, he was pleased to leave the country – and if Trump was still in power, he wouldn't be going back.
There aren't many people that Vladimir Putin openly states are his enemy. There are even fewer who are still at liberty. But – so far – Browder, a 57-year-old one-time London investment banker and founder of the Russian investment company Hermitage Capital Management, is at large and polonium-free.
For something that would get so big, that would take in presidents and prime ministers, Russian FSB agents and US Senate hearings, that would ultimately be key to understanding the West's response to the Ukraine invasion, the story of the great second act of Bill Browder's career begins so small.
It opens 12 years ago in a sparse, cold room in a prison on the outskirts of Moscow. On the floor lay Sergei Magnitsky, a 37-year-old tax adviser. He was dead.
If you believe Browder – as do the legislatures of 34 countries and counting – Magnitsky had been bludgeoned to death by eight guards in full riot gear for the crime of uncovering a government fraud. If you believe the Russians, as well as their Western lawyers, Magnitsky himself committed the fraud and – sadly, they lament – died of natural causes.
Or, confusingly, according to later Russian accusations – on which Browder is currently being tried in absentia – Magnitsky was actually poisoned. The poisoner? Browder, the shadowy head of a transnational criminal organisation. Either way, Browder is, Russia maintains, the real criminal.
Everything that has happened since to Browder can be traced to that day. "His murder changed my life completely," he says.
That was when Browder became, in his words, a "full-time Putin troublemaker". Although he didn't start with that objective. "It all started as my way of trying to address the unbelievable guilt that I had. He wouldn't be dead if he hadn't been working for me. That has been the thing sitting on top of my shoulders every day for the past 12 years.
"But it also metastasised into something so dramatically big – bigger than just his tragedy."
To explain what had happened to Magnitsky – assuming, that is, you accept the Russians are lying – you could do worse than listen to the 2017 US Senate hearing when Browder was called to discuss Russian influence in the US political process. He was introduced by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.
"In 2007, Russian Government officials and members of organised crime… stole the corporate identity of three Hermitage companies and used them fraudulently, obtaining $230 million," Grassley said.
"Hermitage filed criminal complaints with law enforcement agencies in Russia. In response, the Russian Government assigned the case to the very officials involved in the crime." The criminals became their own investigators and turned out not to be terribly impartial. "Mr Magnitsky, Mr Browder's lawyer and the one who uncovered the fraud, was eventually jailed and died under highly suspicious circumstances."
Despite this, Browder had faith that the Russian legal system would avenge Magnitsky's death. Through months of torture, Magnitsky had meticulously recorded his treatment.
"There was so much documentary evidence of all the terrible things they did to him," he says. "It just seemed inconceivable to me that the Russian Government wouldn't then act in some way to cauterise the wounds. If I'd been on their side, I'd have been whispering into their ears, 'Take five or 10 of these guys, stick them in jail, dust off your hands and declare the case closed.' That's exactly what the Saudis did after killing Jamal Khashoggi."
Why didn't they do this? The more he prodded, the more he poked, the more he looked at where the US$230m went, it was clear that this isolated and – in the scheme of things – small fraud was not isolated at all.
The $230m was sliced and diced, used to buy silence and influence and sloshed into a great river of corrupt cash – hundreds of billions – flowing from the turbulence and treacherous rapids of Russia for the placid and predictable property rights of the West. This money represents the safety and security of Russia's millionaires but is so much more than that. It is Putin's tool of patronage and power. A lot of it is Putin's himself, held by proxies. It is, Browder maintains, the cement of the Russian state.
This was, he says, the problem facing Putin. He could not make an example of a few prison guards. The river of money ran too deep and, in any case, "He was a beneficiary of the crime."
"The Magnitsky case was the piece of string that if you pulled on it could unravel the whole system."
If following the money was key to understanding the crime it was also, Browder realised, key to avenging it. He might not be able to punish those involved in Magnitsky's death in Russia itself, but if their reward was an apartment in Kensington or a yacht in Biarritz, well, that he could get.
This was the idea behind what is now known as the Magnitsky Act, a law that, thanks to Browder's lobbying, has been enacted in one form or another in 34 countries, including the UK and US, and the EU. Those linked to corruption or human rights abuses in Russia can have their assets outside Russia seized.
It is also the principle that is currently being applied in new sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine. It is why Chelsea Football Club is for sale. It is why the ownership of a yacht called Scheherazade, on which the toilet roll holders are made of gold, is of such interest to Gibraltar's authorities.
But – a question that is even more pertinent today – does this approach really work?
A grim answer, of sorts, comes in the fates of those who helped Browder.
Browder has written a book, Freezing Order, about his fight for the Magnitsky Act. Reading it, I come to anticipate certain sections. He will describe in unusual detail the day of someone with whom he has been working. Where they were, who they met, what they did. Then he might, say, mention something they ate. By this time I know what's coming – and generally, it is the sort of thing that involves a sudden and unexpected fault in all the local CCTV cameras.
If the Magnitsky Act weren't effective, it's hard to see why so much effort is being spent on stopping it.
All of which means that when people meet Browder, they tend to ask him why he is alive. It is a reasonable question. The obvious first answer is that he isn't Russian – he can't be killed without consequence.
"The reason I survived the past 10 years is Putin has had one foot in the civilised world and one foot in the criminal world. He could go to the G20, he could get all these Western apologists to continue apologising for him." During those years, Browder's main worry was what would happen to him crossing borders. On occasions, he found himself wanted by Interpol and detained as part of Russia's attempt to get him into the country. He took to travelling only to countries he was sure would throw the case out.
Now, though? "Putin's put both feet into the criminal world and all bets are off. I would say that my level of risk has probably skyrocketed."
We meet in a studio in central London. I had expected a security detail, but his only entourage consists of a publicist from his book publisher, who looks as if she might be scary if you break a non-disclosure agreement, but not if you are trying to put polonium in his tea.
This is deliberate. "One thing I don't do is go around with five heavily armed bodyguards," says Browder. "Those bodyguards are effectively mercenaries. I can hire them today; somebody else could hire them tomorrow to find out where I am. The whole security industry is one big mercenary thing."
If now is his moment of greatest danger, the same is true of his adversary. For 12 years he was Cassandra, warning about Putin, but "everybody pushed me aside… I was screaming as loud as I could."
Browder's experiences should, he says, be a warning of what comes next. "Vladimir Putin is a criminal personally. He participates financially in crimes; he orders murders; he lies to governments and creates false narratives. And everything that happened to me and to Sergei and to all the people around us is an absolute carbon copy of what's happening on a much larger basis.
"Ten years ago, when the Magnitsky Act was passed, he already knew that he was going to do something horrific and that everyone was going to start hunting for a policy. And he knew the Magnitsky Act was going to become the template for going after his money. And that's why he hated it so much."
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Bill Browder did not start his life as a selfless crusader for justice.
Between the wars, his grandfather, Earl Browder, was general secretary of the Communist Party of the USA. His father was a mathematician, his brother became an academic. Browder rebelled, in his telling, by becoming a capitalist.
And in the 90s, the most exciting place to become a capitalist was Russia.
After a series of grotesquely botched privatisations, the country's crown jewels were being sold for a song. "I returned to London a man possessed," he writes with Tiggerish excitement in his first book, Red Notice. "They were giving away money for free in Russia."
The book, which became an international bestseller, is a rollicking but curious read.
During the course of it, he gains a new country, becoming a British citizen, gets divorced and acquires a new wife, Elena, a Russian national. He also gains a lot of money.
The first half felt, when I first read it, oddly unself-aware. Normally in biographies, people put the best spin they can on themselves. To me, and some reviewers, his account felt like a frank tale of shameless exploitation.
Time and again, a chapter would begin with him discovering a once nationalised Russian company was grossly undervalued, then conclude with him finding out how to buy a large chunk of it and seeing vast profits.
I ask him about this. Browder doesn't see why this is a problem. "If you're buying Apple shares before they went up 1000 times, is that a sin? Why is it more sinful to buy a Russian share trading at a low valuation than an Apple share trading at a low valuation?"
But that's not quite my point. If in 2022 you spot that Apple is a good bet, it is because you have seen something in the market or technology that other investors have not.
If in 1992 you spot that a former Soviet mineral company has been massively undervalued, it's because after 70 years of communism a babushka in Siberia, say, doesn't necessarily understand the value of the shares given to her by her government.
In Russia, the bitterness people feel towards oligarchs isn't only because of the corruption and illegality. In the 90s, the country's vast wealth was carved out between a few people canny or brutal enough to get it for a song. The fact that Browder was, in his telling, in the canny category does not completely change the fact that he did the 20th-century equivalent of buying Manhattan from Native Americans for a few beads.
The second half is where the book gets its heart and where – in my reading, but clearly not Browder's – he earns his redemption.
It is about his fight against corruption in the companies he invested in, a fight in which Putin was, initially, an ally. Then it is about his own failed fight to save Sergei Magnitsky.
This is the point where his latest book picks up – and where any similarity to the oligarchs of the 90s disappears. Whereas their wealth is now invested in gaudy yachts with their own mini-subs, he argues his is, in an odd sense, invested back in the country.
Occasionally, Browder talks in near-messianic terms about his quest. "I have been handed a righteous mission, which is to fight for justice… Fighting for justice is infinitely more satisfying than fighting for money."
How do Elena and his four children feel about him risking his life – he said recently that Putin "chased me around the world with death threats" – to avenge a man whose killers will most likely never find justice?
"My wife is more outraged with the crimes of the Putin regime than I am. If I'm ever getting tired, she pushes me forward."
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Normally when someone is interviewed for a magazine profile, they get dressed up for a shoot in designer clothes. The fashion house loans the outfit and in return gets to see their latest designs in a national paper. For Browder's shoot, very unusually, this doesn't happen.
No one, it seems, is willing to associate their expensive clothes with the man whose mission is to sanction a good chunk of the world's most reliable consumers of luxury goods.
He gives a wry but unsurprised smile when I tell him this. "Russians commit the crimes mostly for money. And then they need to put that money somewhere: they have to export their corruption. And we've been one of the biggest importers of that corruption in the world." The result, he says, is that it corrupts us too. We make money based on their money, and the filth seeps into us all.
So Browder poses instead in his own suit. By an odd coincidence, the shelves behind are stocked with Russian literature. There are the classics: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. There is also a lesser-known book called The Moscow Trial, by A.J. Cummings. It is an account of what became known as the Metro-Vickers affair.
In 1933, six Britons working in Moscow for the company Metropolitan-Vickers were arrested and put on trial, charged with sabotage and espionage. Their case became an international incident and also, in the West, an exemplar of the Soviet misuse and abuse of the legal process, as one of a series of show trials.
These days, increasingly, there is a consensus that it is not their own system the Russians misuse, but ours. Earlier this year David Davis, the Tory MP, argued in Parliament that oligarchs with "exceptionally deep pockets and exceptionally questionable ethics" were using such "lawfare" to "threaten, intimidate and put the fear of God into British journalists, citizens, officials and media organisations".
If Putin is the evil villain of Browder's book, it is Western lawyers who are his menacing sidekicks. Repeatedly, Browder has found himself pursued by Russians with inexplicably endless resources, prepared to spend money on teams of Western experts to lobby politicians and throw legal landmines in his path. Sometimes he has found himself quite literally pursued – through the streets of New York when a law firm tried to subpoena him.
It incenses him. "The courts become an outpost for the Russian Government to go after its victims. It's a system where you have a bunch of mercenary lawyers working for the Russian state to terrorise, attack and burn the resources of their victims."
What is particularly galling, he says, is when the Russian ostensibly hiring the lawyers so patently cannot afford it but no one asks what is really going on. "You've got these judges that are just sort of sitting there ignoring the context of this stuff.
"There's a common mantra among the legal community that everyone is entitled to defence. But is everyone entitled to an attack on behalf of a dictator? Is that an entitlement?"
In his book, one name, in particular, comes up again and again: John Moscow. Initially, Browder hired Moscow, a US expert on money laundering, to help him. But Moscow, who worked at the time for the US firm BakerHostetler, started working for a Russian shell company – employed, says Browder, to make the case that it was in fact Browder who had stolen the money.
He demanded documents from Browder that, Browder feared, the Russian state could then somehow have obtained from his clients.
"If we handed all of this over to BakerHostetler, our Russian adversaries were sure to get hold of it, enabling them to plan any number of sinister moves against us," Browder claims in one dramatic passage. "With all the dead bodies racking up, this was genuinely terrifying."
Moscow's name comes up often enough in the book that it feels very much like it's personal. Browder's last book sold more than one million copies. I very much get the impression that he wants everybody who buys this one – a readership that will ideally include Moscow's friends – to come away loathing Moscow as much as Browder does.
When I ask him if the book constitutes revenge, he says that Moscow is merely the epitome of "the enablers" – a cipher to stand in for so many of the battles he has had.
"I think that all these people are going to find life a lot harder in the future. I think that there's a whole movement to make life difficult for them. I think we're gonna see tougher laws. And I think it's going to create an environment where fewer people want to do that."
For now, though, lawfare is real – and a powerful tool. Given the contents of his book and how blunt his accusations are, I ask him if he is worried about libel.
"Well, I'll tell you a funny story. My libel lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC, looked at the whole book. And he said, 'The book is fine. The only thing I have to say is, maybe Svetlana was for real? Maybe she's going to sue you for saying she didn't really love you.' "
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The Magnitsky Act was about one man seeking justice for one specific crime. Its power, says Browder, lies in that, by chance, it targeted the great weakness of the Russian state: Putin's money.
"The oligarchs are not like rich people that I've met anywhere else," says Browder. "When you meet a person who's a billionaire they're usually very relaxed, very happy. They are coming up with ideas of how to spend their money. But in Russia, you can't be an oligarch unless Putin decides that you're entitled to be an oligarch. If he doesn't want you to be an oligarch, he'll take your money away and throw you in jail or kill you.
"Their main function is to act as fronts for him, to hold his money. And that's the reason why sanctioning them is so important, because if you want to go after Vladimir Putin's money, you've got to find out where it is. Where is it? It's with the oligarchs."
So $230m is nothing, not compared with all the money extracted from Russia since the fall of communism. Sergei Magnitsky is nothing. One man, one case, one injustice. But that case was the thread that Browder pulled. From it emerged nested Russian dolls of shell companies. And at the centre of it all, always, one 37-year-old man, dead in a frozen prison cell.
What does it all mean? Why, if Browder's thesis is right, does Putin need all this money?
"We don't understand the medieval nature of Russia because we can't put ourselves into their system. You can't be the most powerful person in Russia and not be the most brutal person in Russia and not be the richest person in Russia. To be the tsar you cannot be subordinate to anyone.
"You're either the f***er or the f***ee in Russia, and Putin has to be the f***er of everybody."
Written by: Tom Whipple
© The Times of London
