Red notice

23. Department K

Ivan and I took the 3:00 p.m. Eurostar back to London. We needed to talk out of earshot, and the only place available was between cars, where we sat uncomfortably on fold-down jump seats. Northern France churned by just outside the door, a blur of green and gray. We tried to call Moscow and London, but the connection kept dropping out as the train zipped in and out of tunnels, so we gave up and went back to our seats, where we sat in silence for the rest of the journey. Although I’d known Russia was a violent place, since the day that I’d set foot on Russian soil in 1992 it had never touched me, or anyone close to me. Now, all of a sudden, it was all too real.

My first concern was Maxim. As soon as I got home, I called Jamie and asked for an update. After Maxim had been beaten, the police had arrested and fined him, even before he was taken to the hospital. Thankfully, his injuries were not life-threatening. I implored Jamie to file a complaint, but he resisted. «Maxim’s scared, Bill. The officers who beat him said that they’d accuse him of pulling a knife on them, rearrest him, and put him in jail if he says anything».

How could I argue with that? At least he was going to be all right.

I arrived at the office early the next morning. Ivan was already there, inspecting a handwritten copy of the search warrant that Emma had faxed over. Her handwriting was obsessively clear and still had the bubbly letters of a schoolgirl’s, but the content of the warrant was anything but innocent. It said that the tax crimes department of the Moscow Interior Ministry had opened a criminal case against Ivan, accusing him of underpaying $44 million in dividend withholding taxes for Kameya. They came up with an arbitrary tax claim for the company, and because Ivan administered the entity for our client, the police blamed Ivan.

No matter how illegitimate the Russian criminal justice system may seem from the outside, Russia is still a sovereign state that most Western governments cooperate with on extradition requests, Interpol Red Notices, and international asset freezes. Even though we were in London, ignoring a criminal case like this could lead to all sorts of terrible things for Ivan.

The warrant was baseless — Kameya had paid the same rate of tax as everyone else — and accusing Ivan of any crime was plainly unjust. If there was ever a person who lived by the rules, it was Ivan Cherkasov. He was a good husband, father, friend, and colleague. His suits were always pressed, his hair was always trimmed, and he was always on time. Watching him pace the office because of this trumped-up charge was infuriating, and I promised I would do whatever I could to help him sort out this mess.

The first thing I did was to retain the best tax lawyer I knew in Moscow, a thirty-five-year-old attorney named Sergei Magnitsky. Sergei was the head of the tax practice at Firestone Duncan, and his knowledge of Russian tax law was encyclopedic. Since he’d begun working there, he was rumored never to have lost a case.

Once Sergei was on board, we asked him to analyze whether we’d done anything wrong. Ivan had always been vigilant, and I assumed that our taxes were correctly paid, but since the Interior Ministry was making such grave allegations, we needed to be absolutely sure.

Sergei requested all of Kameya’s tax filings and supporting documents. He stayed up late into the night and called the next morning with his analysis: «Guys, I’ve looked at every aspect of Kameya’s tax situation. Ivan’s done nothing wrong».

While Sergei could help us understand tax law, Ivan also needed a criminal lawyer to deal with the police. We then hired Eduard Khayretdinov, a former police investigator and judge who’d been a defense attorney since 1992. He was forty-eight years old, six feet two, with gray hair, a thick mustache, and big hands. He reminded me of a Russian version of the Marlboro Man. He was the type of man you wanted to have on your side in Russia if things ever went horribly wrong. He’d defended and won some of Russia’s most high profile and seemingly hopeless criminal cases — in a country whose conviction rate is over 99 percent, that was a true miracle.

Eduard volunteered to go to the police station to find out what the cops were up to. When he arrived, he was directed to the lead investigator on the case, a thirty-year-old major named Pavel Karpov. Eduard asked Karpov for a copy of some of the case files, which under Russian law the defense attorney is entitled to see. Karpov refused. This was very unusual. In Eduard’s fifteen years as a defense lawyer, it had never before happened.

Eduard was frustrated by Karpov’s stonewalling, but I actually saw it as a positive sign. I thought that if Karpov was afraid to show us the case files, it must mean that he simply had no case.

Unfortunately, my optimistic theory started to unravel almost immediately. On June 14 I got a call from Catherine Belton, the reporter from the 2006 G8 summit who’d asked Putin why I was kicked out of the country. She was now working for the Financial Times and wanted to know if I had any comment on the raids by the Interior Ministry. I gave her my response and hoped the article would accurately reflect our side of the story.

The next morning I went to the front door to pick up the papers and was greeted by a headline on the front page of the FT that read, «Russia probes Browder firm over taxes». I sat on the bench in my hallway and read the article three times. It was full of Interior Ministry fabrications and innuendo, but the one thing that jumped out at me was a single sentence in the middle of the story: «Investigators are targeting Mr. Browder as being behind the scheme».

These guys weren’t backing off at all. They had much bigger plans. Clearly, whatever was happening with Ivan and Kameya was just a prelude to a much bigger plan to go after me.

This was disturbing, and we were at a complete disadvantage. We arguably had the best lawyers in Russia, but that didn’t matter because our opponents were law enforcement officials working outside the law. What we needed more than anything was intelligence, the kind of intelligence that the FSB would have. What we needed was Vadim’s source Aslan, the man who’d warned Vadim to leave Russia back in 2006, after things got hot following my expulsion from the country.

We had no idea whether the internal governmental conflict that had motivated Aslan to come to Vadim in the first place was still going on or if he would be willing to help us again, but it was worth a try.

Vadim sent him a simple message asking to talk.

Thirty minutes later we had a response: «What do you want to know?»

«I’m hoping you could tell me who’s behind last week’s raids, and if you might know what they’re planning next?» Vadim wrote.

A few minutes later another message arrived: «Yes, I know. Department K of the FSB is behind everything. They want to take Browder down and seize all of his assets. This case is only the beginning. Many other criminal cases will follow».

When Vadim translated this message for me, my leg started to twitch uncontrollably. Aslan’s message was unequivocal and chilling, and I desperately hoped he was wrong.

I had a million questions, starting with, What was Department K?

I asked Vadim, but he didn’t know. We walked to his desk on the off chance we could find some reference on the Internet. Remarkably, after clicking several links, we were staring at an official organizational chart on the FSB website. Department K was the FSB’s economic counterespionage unit.

I stumbled back to my desk and fell into my chair. I told my secretary to hold all calls. I needed to process this. The thought of being pursued by Department K was almost too much to take in.

As I sat there, I thought, I am being pursued by the Russian secret police, and there is nothing I can do about it. I can’t file a complaint with them and I can’t request my case files. They are the secret police. Worse, they have access to every tool imaginable, both legitimate and illegitimate. The FSB doesn’t just issue arrest warrants and extradition requests — it dispatches assassins.