One of our top priorities starting in the fall of 2010 was to be certain that Perepilichnyy wasn’t scamming us.
We began by verifying the property outside Moscow and quickly found that the sixty-four-thousand-square-foot lot that their suburban mansion was built on belonged to Vladlen Stepanov’s eighty-five-year-old pensioner mother. She had an income of $3,500 per year, but was somehow sitting on this plot of land with a market value of $12 million, and that was before anything had even been built on it.
But the Stepanovs had built something on it. They’d hired one of Moscow’s leading architects to design two hard-angled, modernist buildings totaling twelve thousand square feet. These were made of German granite, structural glass, and polished metal. When I saw the pictures of the houses, I thought they looked more like they belonged to a top hedge fund manager than a midlevel Russian tax collector and her husband.
Next, we turned to Dubai. Using an online property database, we confirmed that the villa there, which was bought for $767,123, was indeed registered to Vladlen Stepanov. Unfortunately, the other two condominiums, which together were worth more than $6 million, were still under construction and hadn’t been registered. We knew about them only because of some wire transfers from the Stepanovs’ Swiss accounts.
The Swiss accounts were the strings that tied everything together. Not only had they been used for these lavish purchases, but they also held more than $10 million in cash that, according to Perepilichnyy, was wired in after the tax-rebate fraud occurred. If we could confirm that these accounts were real, then we could make a Russian Untouchables video about Olga Stepanova and her husband that would light up the Moscow sky.
Everything now hinged on the authenticity of the Swiss accounts.
In an ideal world I could just have gone to Credit Suisse and asked if the statements were genuine, but Swiss bankers are so secretive that they would have told me nothing.
I could also have approached acquaintances at Credit Suisse, but they wouldn’t have helped. Divulging confidential client information was a fireable offense, and I didn’t know anybody well enough that he or she would take that risk for me.
Our only remaining option was to file a complaint with the Swiss authorities and see where that led. My London lawyer drafted the complaint, and when it was ready to go, I asked how long he thought it would take to hear back.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Anywhere from three months to a year.”
“Three months to a year? That’s way too long. Is there some way to make them go faster?”
“No. In my experience the Swiss authorities can take a long time. They’ll get to it when they get to it.”
January and February passed with no news, and March did too. By mid-March 2011, the Stepanova video was finished and was better than anything we’d done before. I wanted to move ahead, but the Swiss authorities were holding me back.
Then, in late March, we learned of an entirely new twist to the Russian cover-up. The Russian authorities convicted an ex-felon, a man named Vyacheslav Khlebnikov, for his role in the tax-rebate fraud. They could have put a hundred ex-cons in jail as fall guys for the crime and it wouldn’t have mattered to me, but what did matter was what was written in the official sentencing documents. The documents stated that the tax officials were completely innocent and had been “tricked” and “misled” into granting the single largest tax refund in Russian history in one day on Christmas Eve 2007.
Tax officials such as Olga Stepanova.
I decided, Enough is enough. They can’t continue lying like this. Perepilichnyy’s information is good. I know it, the Swiss know it, and soon the world will know it too.
The video went live on April 20, 2011. The reaction was immediate and huge—bigger than anything we’d done before. By the end of the first day, it had over 200,000 views. By the end of the week it had nearly 360,000. And by the end of the month, more than 500,000 people had watched it. Olga Stepanova became known around the world as the Tax Princess, and reporters from every corner of Russia harangued her and her husband. NTV, one of the state-controlled television stations, even staked out Vladlen Stepanov’s eighty-five-year-old mother, who lived in a one-room hovel in a Soviet apartment complex. When asked about the lavish property she nominally owned, she answered that she agreed to put it in her name in exchange for a cleaning lady to help her tidy up her apartment once a week. Her millionaire son wouldn’t even take care of his elderly mother properly.
Best of all, three days after we launched the video, the Swiss attorney general announced that he’d frozen the Stepanovs’ accounts at Credit Suisse. Unbeknownst to us, the Swiss authorities had opened a full criminal money-laundering case soon after they received our complaint.
I felt completely vindicated. Perepilichnyy’s information had been genuine and the money had been frozen. We’d hit the criminals in the place they cared about most—their bank accounts.