Probably almost everyone has seen this video by now. If you haven’t, I recommend watching it.
I know Jamison Firestone, who heads the law firm Firestone Dunkan mentioned in the video. He was the first person I heard this whole story from. Jamison is what you’d call a born-and-bred New Yorker, and on my first trip to the city — still my only one so far — he gave me an informal tour. We were walking through Central Park, and I was entertaining him with various stories from the lives of our homegrown crooks. “And there was this case too,” “and what do you make of this one?” And then he said to me: now let me tell you one of my own stories about your Russian crooks. You won’t believe it. And it really is hard to believe at first. Several companies were effectively stolen from Browder and the Hermitage fund, and then it was somehow proven with lightning speed that those companies had overpaid their taxes to the state. In just two days (!), the state refunded 5.4 billion rubles (about 54 million USD at the time) (!) — and the money vanished. Amazing. I should add that I don’t exactly see Browder himself as some innocent choirboy. He’s quite a piece of work too. A few years earlier, he had been lavishly praising Putin and insisting that the criticism of him was unfair. But then he found himself 5.4 billion rubles in the red — and changed his mind.