Петр Померанцев - Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible - The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

Browder takes out some files: lists of UK companies that helped launder bits of the Magnitsky money. (We do several takes to get a nice shot. Browder and the MP are used to it.)

“I’ve filed complaints with the authorities, but there’s no response. Could you see what’s happening?”

The MP says he will try. The English financial authorities are notoriously slow at clamping down on money laundered through the country. London is the perfect home for money launderers: terrific lawyers to defend your stolen assets; great bankers to move it; weak cops who don’t ask where they came from.

A little later I’m invited back to Parliament for a presentation, “Why Europe Needs a Magnitsky Act.” The US version of the act is Browder’s great achievement, banning Russian human rights abusers and corrupt officials from entry into, investments in, and owning property in the United States. The White House and the business community all initially opposed the bill: human rights and finance, they argued, shouldn’t mix. Browder pushed it through even though most said it would be impossible. But now no government in Europe is prepared to touch the act: it might stop the money coming in. Browder hopes to provoke a referendum.

There are only a couple of dozen people at the presentation, in a small room at the end of a long corridor in a quiet corner of Parliament. I see a couple of backbench MPs, a leftie journalist, a neo-con magazine editor. No one from government. Jamison Firestone is there, too; he looks to be in his mid-thirties though he is actually pushing fifty and just has that everlasting boyish thing. Firestone was the American lawyer for whom Sergey Magnitsky worked at Firestone and Duncan, the Moscow law firm Browder hired. Browder never really knew Magnitsky, had rarely seen him. It’s all very different for Firestone. He seems to twist in pain every time he talks about his dead colleague. I see him regularly, pacing through every party and every conference and business meeting and lecture about Russia, calling out on the money launderers and murderers and repeating the name “Magnitsky! Magnitsky!” until it burns in everybody’s ears. A canary in the mine of Mayfair calling that this is all wrong.

We meet a little later in a café in Maida Vale. As we speak Firestone’s voice sometimes rises, and people look around at us, startled. When I glance up again later I spot them quietly listening in. There’s a downpour outside with reports of flooding further down the Thames estuary. Firestone calls Magnitsky by his first name, Sergey.

“Sergey was the best lawyer I ever knew. I never saw him lose a case, never. We would have clients charged for taxes they didn’t owe, and every time he would challenge the courts and win. He was an optimist. He only ever got emotional about classical music. Even when he was arrested. He called me from the car on the way to the police station and he was calm: he was sure it would all clear up.”

After Sergey was arrested the police came for Firestone’s other lawyers. He had to take one colleague down the fire escape of her home with the police at the front door, and then they took a night train across the Russian-Ukrainian border. Another flew straight to London.

“I had spent eighteen years in Russia but for my colleagues it was their whole life. We rented a three-bedroom apartment together. My colleagues would sit in their rooms crying. Their relatives were ill or suffering, but they couldn’t go back to see them. But none of us could really say anything, since what was happening to Sergey was so much worse.”

When Sergey had been in prison for nine months, nine months in which no one was allowed to visit him, his wife managed to get hold of his prison diary.

“I received it by e-mail,” continues Firestone. “Just page after page of stoical, detailed description. Like a lawyer, just cataloguing everything calmly. How the sewage would flood the cell and they would live with it for days; how he would have to stand to write because there was no room there were so many prisoners; how each cell got worse because he wouldn’t confess and incriminate others; how there was no glass in the windows in the cell in winter and it was freezing. In the summer overcrowded cells and prisoner transport trucks were like filthy never ending saunas; how he would not get treatment when the pain in his stomach was becoming unbearable…. What made it worse was the calm way he was cataloguing it all. I could hear his voice. Same as always.”

Firestone’s own voice is rising again. He never thought he would end up taking on the Kremlin.

“I had a wonderful life, my colleagues had wonderful lives. And to hold onto it, all we had to do was shut up and let this pass. But somebody was killed.”

He tells me he still yearns to go back to Russia. He had Russian residency and was about to apply for a passport for a second citizenship, planned to spend his life there. He had first moved to Moscow in 1991, straight after he graduated from college. It was his father who had advised him he should learn Russian in high school; back in the 1980s he had already told Jamison the USSR would collapse one day and Russia was where the money would be. Firestone’s father was a serial entrepreneur who had made and lost a fortune in California real estate, created the only Internet porn site to lose money, and then made $12 million by creating another site that helps kids with their homework. At the time Firestone went to Russia his father was in jail for selling fraudulent tax shelters.

“My dad liked to hang out with gangsters the way Frank Sinatra would like to hang out with gangsters. When he was released he came over to Russia and tried to get a protection racket involved in my first business: importing cars to Russia. He said everyone in Russia needs protection, but I didn’t want the mafia in my business and he took a hit out to break the legs of my friend and law partner: ‘If I have your legs broken you’ll ignore it because you’re strong. If you see your friend with broken legs you’ll understand the cost of opposing me,’ my dad told me. I resigned and then the protection racket my dad hired stole our cars and that was the end of his foray into Russia. My dad was always my moral compass: whatever he suggested I did the opposite.”

Firestone had many moments in Russia when he had to think about his dad: all the times he was asked to “move some money”; the partner in his audit company who told him they should cheat on their firm’s taxes. (Firestone had him thrown out of the building by guards with AK-47s and reported him to the police.) Then there was the time the Russian minister for development (the same one Benedict had worked for) asked Firestone what he thought needed to change in Russia to protect private property. The minister expected a polite answer, but Firestone told him publicly that while ministers and oligarchs were above the law, the country was fucked. Firestone was a board member and head of the small business committee of the American Chamber of Commerce at the time. One of his fellow board members from a Fortune 100 company told him off for being outspoken: “We like what you’re saying Jamison—but could you say it quieter?”

“We were all making a lot of money,” says Firestone, “but I could tell things were getting scummier.”

But I can also hear the thrill in his voice when he talks about his Moscow adventures.

“I’ll wear the lawyer’s hat,” says Firestone, “but I was a really good street fighter. I fired mafias twice on behalf of my clients. Mafia, like police, can only react to two responses: ‘yes sir’ or ‘no sir’ (which gets you killed). One time a client was raided and had his business database stolen by the mafia group that was meant to be protecting him: they’d crossed over to a rival. So we went to meet these guys in a hotel on Petrovka and I told them in Russian and in my nicest corporate voice: