who got a copy of an Interpol all-points bulletin in order to arrest you! The document is attached. Please call the office ASAP!”At the end of January 2013 I found myself back in Davos at the World Economic Forum. On my second day there, as I was trudging through the snow outside the conference center, I heard a chirpy female voice call out, “Bill! Bill!”
I turned and saw a short woman with a big furry hat walking briskly toward me. As she got closer, I recognized her. It was Chrystia Freeland, the reporter who’d broken the Sidanco story so many years ago in Moscow. She was now an editor-at-large for Reuters.
She stopped in front of me, her cheeks flushed by the cold.
“Hey, Chrystia!”
“I’m glad I spotted you,” she said urgently. Normally, she and I would have kissed on both cheeks and caught up, but she apparently had something important to tell me.
“What’s going on?”
“Bill, I just came from an off-the-record briefing with Medvedev, and your name came up.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. I’m not too popular with the Russians these days.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I need to tell you what he said—hold on.” She dug a reporter’s notepad out of her pocket, flipped through the pages, and stopped. “Here it is. Someone asked about the Magnitsky case, and Medvedev said, quote, Yes, it’s a shame that Sergei Magnitsky died, and Bill Browder is running free and alive.” She looked up at me. “That’s what he said.”
“That’s how it seemed to me.”
Panic pooled in my stomach. I thanked Chrystia for telling me and made my way into the conference center with this ominous information hanging over my head. I continued with my meetings, and throughout the day four other journalists who’d been at the same briefing pulled me aside and repeated Chrystia’s story.
I’d been threatened many times by people from Russia, but never by the prime minister.1 I knew my life was in danger, but this ratcheted the danger to a new level. As soon as I returned to London, I called Steven Beck, our security expert, and substantially increased my personal protection.
The threat also indicated the mind-set of Putin and his men. I took it as a signal that they didn’t want to harm me just physically, but in any way they could.
The first bit of this nastiness came when the Russian authorities announced the date that they were going to begin my trial for tax evasion in absentia. They’d been using the threat of this fabricated case for years to try to intimidate me and get me to back down, but the passage of the Magnitsky Act had pushed them over the edge.
Putting me on trial when I wasn’t in Russia was highly unusual. It would be only the second time in post-Soviet history that Russia would try a Westerner in absentia. But that wasn’t the worst part. Their truly unbelievable move was to also try Sergei Magnitsky.
That’s right. They were going to put the man they had killed on trial. Even Joseph Stalin, one of the most zealous mass murderers of all time, a man responsible for the deaths of at least 20 million Russians, never stooped to putting a dead man on trial.
But in March 2013, that is exactly what Vladimir Putin did.
Putin was creating legal history. The last time a dead person had been prosecuted in Europe was in 897 CE, when the Catholic Church convicted Pope Formosus posthumously, cut off his papal fingers, and threw his body into the Tiber River.
The nastiness didn’t stop there, though. Days before the trial was set to begin, NTV, the state-controlled television station, began aggressively advertising a one-hour, prime-time “documentary” about me called The Browder List.
I didn’t even bother to watch it when it aired, but Vladimir called to give me a summary: “It is pure paranoid fantasy, Bill.” He told me that by the time it was over, not only were Sergei and I accused of tax evasion, but I was also responsible for the devaluation of the ruble in 1998; I was guilty of stealing the $4.8 billion loan that the IMF had made to Russia; I had killed my business partner Edmond Safra; I was a British MI6 agent; and I had murdered Sergei Magnitsky myself.
I might have been upset by this, but their fabrications were so amateurish that no person watching this show could possibly believe a word of it. However, it wasn’t clear that credibility even mattered to the Russian authorities. Everything they did came from a well-worn playbook. The same NTV crew made a similar “documentary” trying to tarnish the protest movement after Putin’s reelection in 2012. They made another one about the famous anti-Putin punk band, Pussy Riot. After both films, their subjects were arrested and imprisoned.
Our trial began on March 11 at the Tverskoi District Court with Judge Igor Alisov presiding. Neither the Magnitsky family nor I would have anything to do with it, so the court appointed a pair of public defenders against our wishes. Both tried to withdraw when they realized they weren’t wanted, but both were threatened with disbarment if they didn’t carry on.
Every Western government, parliament, media outlet, and human rights organization viewed this as an appalling miscarriage of justice. We all stared in awe as the trial began and the prosecutor droned on for hours in front of an empty cage.
Everyone wondered why Putin was doing this. The cost to Russia’s international reputation was enormous, and the upside to him seemed limited. There was practically no chance that I would end up in a Russian prison, and Sergei was already dead.
But this had a twisted logic. In Putin’s mind, if he had a court judgment against Sergei and me, his officials could then visit all the European governments that were considering their own version of the Magnitsky Act and say, “How can you put a piece of legislation in place that is named after a criminal convicted in our court? And how can you listen to his advocate, who has been convicted of the same crime?” Pesky details such as the fact that Sergei had been dead for three years and killed in police custody after exposing a massive government corruption scheme never entered into Putin’s equation.
Midway through, the trial ground to a halt because the two public defenders stopped showing up to court.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Since the outcome of this trial was predetermined and controlled by Putin, I couldn’t imagine that these defenders were acting of their own volition. I started to think that this was Putin’s elegant way of getting out of this humiliating spectacle he’d created for himself.
But instead of folding, Putin doubled down. On April 22, the Russian authorities issued an arrest warrant for me as well as new criminal charges.
While this might sound dramatic, it didn’t upset me the way the Russians intended. There was no chance I was going to be arrested in the United Kingdom. The British government had already recognized the process as “abusive” and had rejected all Russian requests to hand me over. I couldn’t imagine any other civilized country handing me over either. So in spite of the aggressive noises from the Russian government, I carried on with my advocacy work.
In mid-May, I was invited to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Davos of the human rights world. On the day of the event, just before I was supposed to take the stage in front of three hundred people, I checked my BlackBerry and saw an urgent message from my secretary with “Interpol” in the subject line.
I opened it and read, “Bill, we’ve just been contacted by who got a copy of an Interpol all-points bulletin in order to arrest you! The document is attached. Please call the office ASAP!”
I quickly opened the PDF, and sure enough the Russians had finally gone to Interpol.
Seconds after reading this, I was called to the stage to give my speech. I forced a smile, walked under the lights, and spent the next ten minutes telling the story I’d told so many times before about me, Russia, and Sergei. I managed to put the Interpol message out of my mind long enough so that I could get through my talk. After the applause, I hurried out to the lobby and immediately phoned my lawyer in London. She explained that the Interpol notice meant that any time I crossed an international border, I could be arrested. It was up to whatever country I was visiting to act on the warrant.
I was in Norway, and the situation there was potentially tricky. While the country had a stellar human rights record, it shared a border and a long history with Russia, and there was no telling what the Norwegians would do in this situation. I called Elena, told her what was going on, and asked her to prepare for the worst.
I booked an earlier flight home, grabbed my bags, and made my way to Oslo Airport. I arrived an hour and a half early and checked in at the Scandinavian Airlines desk. When I couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer, I slowly made my way down the long corridor to Norwegian passport control.
Like Eduard and Vladimir before me, I was a bundle of nerves as I prepared to cross the border as a wanted man. I started to imagine the moment I presented my passport, and the look on the officer’s face when he saw that I had an Interpol arrest warrant in my name. I imagined being put into a Norwegian detention center. I could see the months that I would spend in a spartan cell, and the drawn-out court proceedings as I fought my extradition. I could see the Norwegians buckling under Russian pressure and me losing this fight. I could see the Aeroflot plane that I would be thrown onto, bound for Moscow. I didn’t even want to think about the horrors I would be subjected to after that.
No other passengers were at passport control. I had to choose between two equally bored-looking, young Nordic men in uniform. I decided to take the one on the left for no particular reason. I handed him my passport, interrupting a conversation he was having with the other officer.
He took it absently, opened it to my picture, and glanced at it. He then glanced at me, closed the passport, and handed it back. Thankfully, he didn’t scan it through his machine, so the Interpol notice was never even flagged.
That was it. I grabbed my passport and made my way to the plane.
When I arrived in Britain, it was different. The Border Force scans every passport, and mine was no exception. But the British government had already decided not to act on any Russian requests in my case. It took the immigration officer a few extra minutes to process my entry, but when he was finished, he handed me my passport and let me go.
Even though I was safe in Britain, the Russians had me where they wanted me. By putting out a Red Notice, they could effectively prevent me from traveling, and by not traveling, they were betting that they could stop Magnitsky sanctions from spreading to Europe.
I had no choice: I had to deal with Interpol head-on. The day I got back from Norway, I issued a press release announcing the warrant, and it was picked up immediately. Journalists and politicians started calling Interpol to ask if they would side with the Russians or with me. Normally Interpol isn’t accountable to anybody, but because of all the attention they were getting on my case, they decided to have a special meeting to determine my fate the following week.
I wasn’t optimistic. Interpol has a reputation for cooperating with authoritarian regimes to chase down political enemies. In many cases Interpol had done the wrong thing. The most egregious example of this was in the lead-up to World War II, when Interpol helped the Nazis pursue prominent Jews who’d fled the Reich. There have been many shocking examples since.
The day before Interpol’s meeting, London’s Daily Telegraph weighed in on my behalf with an article entitled “Is Interpol Fighting for Truth and Justice, or Helping the Villains?” The columnist, Peter Oborne, deftly used my case to illustrate that Interpol had a pattern of being abused by rogue nations such as Russia. “It is entirely likely that Interpol will find with the FSB and against Bill Browder,” he wrote. “But in the court of international opinion it’s not Mr. Browder who’s on trial: it’s Interpol itself, for its collaboration with some of the nastiest regimes in the world.”
Two days later, on May 24, 2013, I was at my desk writing this book when I got a call from my lawyer. She had just received an email from Interpol rejecting the Russians’ application for my Red Notice.
An hour later, Interpol published its rejection of Russia’s request on its website. It announced, “The Interpol General Secretariat has deleted all information in relation to William Browder following a recommendation by the independent Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files.” This was categorical and almost completely unprecedented. Interpol rarely rejected notices, and if they did, they never publicly announced them.
This repudiation must have made Putin even more furious. Once again, when it came to anything to do with me or Sergei Magnitsky, he was being publicly humiliated. If there was any chance that Putin was going to back out of the posthumous trial in the aftermath of the Interpol embarrassment, that possibility had vanished.
Judge Alisov resumed the case, and the trial finally concluded on July 11, 2013. That morning, the judge took his place in the small, hot courtroom and prepared to read his statement. The two court-appointed defense lawyers were there, along with two prosecutors. There were six guards in berets and black uniforms, but since they had no one to guard or cart away afterward they were an unnecessary formality.
Rarely speaking above a whisper, Judge Alisov read the decision. He hardly ever looked up from his papers. It took him well over an hour to describe all of Putin’s fantasies about what Sergei and I had done wrong. When the judge was finished, Sergei and I had been found guilty of large-scale tax evasion, and I’d been sentenced to nine years in prison.
It was all a show, a Potemkin court. This is Russia today. A stuffy room presided over by a corrupt judge, policed by unthinking guards, with lawyers who are there just to give the appearance of a real trial, and with no defendant in the cage. A place where lies reign supreme. A place where two and two is still five, white is still black, and up is still down. A place where convictions are certain, and guilt a given. Where a foreigner can be convicted in absentia of crimes he did not commit.
A place where an innocent man who was murdered by the state, a man whose only crime was loving his country too much, can be made to suffer from beyond the grave.
This is Russia today.
1 After serving as president, Medvedev returned to the office of prime minister in May 2012.