After the main course was cleared, Medvedev rose and took the microphone at the front of the room. He spoke for several minutes in Russian (I listened to the translation on an earpiece), and his speech was even more tedious and devoid of substance than the others. I couldn’t wait for it all to be over.
As soon as Medvedev finished, waiters glided across the room delivering plates of carrot cake and cups of coffee and tea. As I drank my tea and picked the icing off the cake, Elena tugged my jacket and whispered, «Bill, I’ve just had a great idea. Why don’t you ask Medvedev to help with your visa?»
I gave her a sideways glance. «Don’t be ridiculous». I’d exhausted every possibility of getting my visa back, right up to Putin. After the G8, I considered that chapter in my life to be well and truly over. Moreover, I couldn’t imagine anything more humiliating than walking up to Medvedev to beg for my visa.
I tried to tell Elena this but she wouldn’t listen. She was insistent. «Seriously, look. No one’s talking to him. Let’s just do it».
She stood and stared at me intently. Defying Elena was more frightening than having an unpleasant encounter with Medvedev, so I stood too. I reluctantly followed her across the room, and when we reached Medvedev, I stuck out my hand and said, «Hello, Mr. Deputy Prime Minister. I’m Bill Browder. Maybe you remember me?»
Elena translated. Medvedev stood and shook my hand. There was a general bustle as other people in the room took notice. If I could talk to Medvedev, then they could too. People started to stand and move in our direction.
«Yes, of course I remember you. How are you, Mr. Browder?»
«I’m fine, but as you probably know, I haven’t been allowed into Russia for more than a year. I was wondering if you could help me get my visa back?»
As I said this, a group of people, including a reporter from Bloomberg and another from the New York Times, pressed in on us. If Davos was Medvedev’s international debut, then this conversation was going to be one of the most interesting moments of the whole conference.
Medvedev glanced at the people gathering around him and had to make a snap decision. He could reject my request, which would be interesting and newsworthy, or he could be helpful, which would be less so. He paused for a moment before saying, «Gladly, Mr. Browder. If you give me a copy of your visa application, then I’ll submit it to the Federal Border Service with my recommendation to approve it».
That was it. The reporters pressed in on Medvedev, and as Elena and I slid away from the crowd, she squeezed my hand. «You see? I was right».
We went straight back to the hotel and got on the phone to London. Normally it takes three or four days to gather all the documents needed for a Russian visa application, but the team stayed up all night working on it, and by 8:00 a.m. the fax machine at the hotel spewed out the paperwork.
I had back-to-back meetings with investors that morning, so Elena went to a room at the conference center where Medvedev was due to give a speech and stood near the podium. With all the security, it was unlikely that she would be able to make direct contact with Medvedev, but she spotted Arkady Dvorkovich, Putin’s adviser who had tried to help me before. She asked if he would deliver the application. Dvorkovich took it and promised he would.
The forum ended the next day, and Elena and I returned to London, proud of our fortuitous high-level intervention.
The results took a few weeks, but on February 19 I received a message from Moscow about my visa. Only it wasn’t from the Federal Border Service. It was from a Lieutenant Colonel Artem Kuznetsov at the Moscow branch of the Interior Ministry. This was odd. The Interior Ministry dealt with criminal investigations, not visas. Since I didn’t speak Russian, I asked Vadim to return Kuznetsov’s call.
After Vadim explained that he worked for me, Kuznetsov said, «O'kay. I’ll explain to you what the situation is».
«Great».
«As far as I understand, Mr. Browder sent in an application requesting permission to enter the territory of the Russian Federation».
«Yes, yes, we sent those documents».
«I just wanted to drop by and discuss it, if that’s possible», Kuznetsov said casually.
«You see, the thing is, I’m not in Moscow right now», Vadim responded. «So if you could send me the questions, then we could try to answer them for you».
«I can’t just send them over, I’d prefer to discuss them in person», Kuznetsov said testily.
This wasn’t a normal inquiry. In a legitimate investigation, Russian officials always sent their questions in writing. What had become apparent to me from my decade in Russia was that when an official asks to meet informally, it means only one thing: they want a bribe. In the many instances where officials had tried to shake me down, I’d uniformly ignored them and they always went away.
Kuznetsov finished the conversation by saying, «The sooner you answer these questions, the sooner your problems will disappear».
As with similar requests in the past, I decided to ignore it.
This phone call might have upset me more if the launch of Hermitage Global wasn’t going so well, and I quickly forgot about it. One by one, my old clients and a number of new ones started subscribing to the fund. By the end of April 2007 I had raised $625 million. This didn’t replace the amount of money withdrawn from the Russian fund, but it meant that I had stopped the bleeding and that my company would stay in business.
On June 4, 2007, I was scheduled to present the results of the launch of Hermitage Global to our board of directors at the Westin Hotel in Paris. After all the bad news in the previous two years, it was the first time since I had been expelled from Russia that I had some good news to share with the board.
Ivan and I arrived on the evening of the third to get prepared. I got up at six the next morning, went to the gym, showered, and ate a light breakfast. By 8:00 a.m. I was on the phone arguing with my trader over a Dubai stock he was supposed to have sold several days earlier. There’d been a technical problem at the Dubai exchange that had held up the sale. Now the share price was plummeting, and I was furious that he hadn’t been able to sell it before we started losing money. He was making excuses and I was growing more and more agitated.
As he and I argued, my call waiting beeped. I looked at the caller ID only because I was worried that it might be Elena, who was due to give birth to our second child later in the month. It wasn’t Elena, though — it was Emma, the Hermitage Fund secretary in Moscow. Emma was a pleasant twenty-one-year-old Russian girl from the provinces who looked several years younger. She was honest and hardworking and managed the office vigilantly. She rarely called me directly, so I told the trader to hold on and clicked over. «Emma, can this wait?»
«No, it can’t, Bill», she said in perfect English. «There are twenty-five plainclothes police officers raiding our office!»
«What?»
She repeated what she’d just said.
«Shit. Hold on». I clicked back to the trader, told him I had to call back, and returned to Emma. «What are they after?»
«I don’t know but there’s a guy — Artem Kuznetsov — who’s in charge and—"
«Did you say Kuznetsov?»
«Yes».
This had to be the same Artem Kuznetsov who’d tried to shake us down us a few months earlier! «Does he have a search warrant?»