Free Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice by Bill Browder Page A

interesting. Nobody was doing anything in Russia, meaning there was no one to fight me over it. I decided to take a chance. I declared myself the investment banker in charge of Russia, held my breath, and waited to see if anyone would object. Nobody did.
    From that moment on, Russia was my territory.
    But there was a good reason why no one cared about Russia: there was no paid investment-banking work to do there. While Russia may have been politically free, it was still Soviet in every respect, including their use of investment bankers. I stubbornly ignored this fact and set out to find whatever business I could. I tirelessly went to conferences, meetings, luncheons, and networking events all around London, hoping some business would fall into my lap.
    Three months in, I still hadn’t made a single penny for Salomon and my prospects were not looking good. But then, a lawyer whomI’d met at a networking event told me about an advisory assignment for the Murmansk Trawler Fleet, a Russian fishing operation two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. The fleet had put out a tender for a privatization adviser. I didn’t know the first thing about fishing, but I’d learned how to make an excellent proposal at BCG, and I set to work.
    I searched Salomon’s deal database, looking for anything to do with trawlers or fishing. Remarkably, fifteen years earlier the Tokyo office had been involved in several transactions involving Japanese fishing companies. Fifteen years seemed like a long time, and these were debt deals, not privatizations, but what the hell? I stuck all the Japanese experience in the proposal, tidied it up, and sent it off to Murmansk.
    A few weeks later, the phone rang. A woman named Irina was calling on behalf of the Murmansk Trawler Fleet’s president.
    “Mr. Browder,” she said in a thick Russian accent, “we would like to inform you that we have accepted your proposal.” I briefly wondered if they had even received any others. “When can you come to Murmansk to begin the assignment?” she asked awkwardly. It sounded as if this was the first time she had ever spoken to a Western investment banker.
    I was elated—I had brought in my first piece of real business—but the tender didn’t say how much they would pay. Since I hadn’t made any progress toward the goal of making five times my salary, I was hoping for something significant. In a deliberate and formal voice that I thought would make me sound older and more credible, I said, “I’m very honored you’ve chosen our firm. Could I inquire how much you intend to pay for this assignment?”
    Irina spoke in Russian with someone in the background, then said, “Mr. Browder, we have budget of fifty thousand dollars for two months for this assignment. This is acceptable for you?”
    My heart sank. It’s hard to describe how small $50,000 is to an investment banker. Linda Evangelista, a supermodel from the 1980s and 1990s, once famously declared, “I don’t get out of bed for lessthan ten thousand dollars a day.” For an investment banker, that number is more like $1 million. But here I was having earned nothing for Salomon, and $50,000 was that much more than zero, so I agreed.
    A week later, I set off for Murmansk. The first leg of the trip was a 9:30 a.m. British Airways flight to Saint Petersburg. It took four and a half hours, and with the three-hour time difference, I arrived in the late afternoon at Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport. I stared out of my window as the plane taxied to the terminal and was astonished to see the burned-out carcass of an Aeroflot passenger plane lying on the side of the runway. I had no idea how it had gotten there. Apparently it was too much of a bother for the airport authorities to have it moved.
    Welcome to Russia.
    Since Aeroflot scheduled lots of its regional flights in the middle of the night, I had to sit in the airport for another ten hours until 3:30 a.m. to make the connection to Murmansk. Waiting