Bill Browder - Red notice

When Vladimir told me this, it made sense, and I was finally ready to go ahead and use his information to make a video.

But just as we started to get comfortable with Perepilichnyy, we received a new message from our source Aslan: «Department K furious about Kuznetsov and Karpov videos. Large new operation being planned against Hermitage and Browder».

We asked for clarification, but Aslan didn’t have any more details. My fears that Perepilichnyy was part of an FSB plot came roaring back. Maybe everything was going according to plan. It didn’t matter how compelling his information was. Before going forward I had to be doubly sure that we weren’t falling headfirst into an FSB trap.

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.

Our YouTube videos caught these corrupt Russian officials completely off guard, but the real coup de grâce that would destroy the equilibrium of the Russian authorities would be passing sanctions legislation in the United States.

In the fall of 2010, just as we were establishing contact with Perepilichnyy, Kyle Parker finished drafting the Magnitsky Act. On September 29, Senators Ben Cardin, John McCain, Roger Wicker, and Joe Lieberman introduced the bill in the Senate. The language was simple and direct — anyone involved in the false arrest, torture, or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or the crimes he uncovered, would be publicly named, banned from entering the United States, and have their US assets frozen.

When the bill’s introduction was made public, the Russian authorities were furious and had to devise some way to counter what was happening in Washington.

They found their first opportunity on November 10, less than a week before the first anniversary of Sergei’s death. That date was National Police Day in Russia, and the Interior Ministry held an annual awards ceremony for their most outstanding officers. Of the thirty-five awards given, five went to key figures in the Magnitsky case. These included Best Investigator awards for Pavel Karpov and Oleg Silchenko, the officer who organized Sergei’s torture in prison, and a Special Award of Gratitude for Irina Dudukina, the Interior Ministry spokeswoman who’d loyally spouted all the lies about Sergei just after he’d died.

Then, to really push their point, five days later the Interior Ministry held a press conference to «reveal new details about the Magnitsky case». Dudukina presided. Her bleached hair was a little longer and more teased out than it had been the year before, but she was still plump and tired-looking and still had a lower jaw that appeared to belong to a ventriloquist’s dummy. She unfolded a makeshift poster of twenty sheets of taped-together A4 paper and stuck it to a dry-erase board. Despite its being a jumbled mash of numbers and words, most of them too small even to be legible, this poster «proved» that Sergei had committed the fraud and received the $230 million tax rebate. When journalists started asking the most basic questions about her display, she had no credible responses and it was clear to everyone present that it was a fabrication.