Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder

Author:Bill Browder [Browder, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, True Crime, Business, History, Politics, Russia
ISBN: 9781982153335
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

– 25 – The Seagull

FALL–WINTER 2015

It took a while for my nerves to settle after Vladimir’s poisoning. Thankfully, during the summer, the Russians left me alone. But on October 5, about a month before the Magnitsky Awards, Michael Kim, whom I hadn’t heard from in a while, called from New York.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Bill,” he said, “but BakerHostetler is at it again.” He’d just received notice that John Moscow and Mark Cymrot were going back to court to force me to sit for a second deposition. Apparently, this time they’d learned from their mistakes. Instead of overbroad questions and document requests, they’d narrowed the scope in such a way that Judge Griesa would probably accept what they were asking for. In Michael’s view, there was no way out of it.

He was right. On November 9, Judge Griesa accepted their request without any fuss, and instructed us to agree on a deposition date before the trial began. The trial date was still in flux, but it was due to start around the New Year.

I couldn’t understand why the Russians were doing this. The first deposition had been a total bust, and they’d failed to get the sensitive information they were so eager to get their hands on. It had also cost them a small fortune.

But then, their reasons became clear.

On November 17, one day after the Magnitsky Awards in London, Mark Cymrot filed a document with the court formally accusing me and Sergei of stealing the $230 million. He based this filing on an official document the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office had recently sent to the US Department of Justice that made the same allegations.

The Russians had been developing this fiction domestically for years, but now they were formally exporting it to the West.

It was a crazy defense strategy. Prevezon had the dirty money in their accounts in New York, not me, and they were the ones who had to explain why it was there, not me. They were on trial—not me. Lobbing conspiracy theories at the court wasn’t going to get them acquitted.

As crude as this strategy was, at least our opponents had put their cards on the table. This accusation showed that the second deposition wasn’t about defending Prevezon, and now it wasn’t even about them trying to get our confidential information. It was about making false accusations against me in an official court-like setting. The Russians could then release my second deposition on the Internet (as they had done with the first one) as part of their campaign to convince the world that Sergei and I were somehow the villains, not them.

The deposition was going to happen, but negotiating the date wasn’t straightforward. Everyone had scheduling conflicts in the month of December. I would have to fly in from London; the US government would have to be there too, and their calendar was full; the holidays were coming up; and, as a kicker, Mark Cymrot’s daughter was getting married right after Christmas, putting a handful of days off-limits.

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