As I rushed to pack, I remembered something Elena had said to me after I’d been detained at Geneva Airport that February. If something like this ever happens again,” she said, “and you can’t reach anyone, post it on Twitter.

When Bill Browder's young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life's mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. What concerned him was that his presidential suite would be unavailable so long as it contained my belongings.

A few minutes later, the senior officer who’d presented the charge sheet re-entered the room, translator in tow, both with heads bowed. They expected some kind of reaction, but the Russians had been accusing me of much more serious crimes for such a long time that the sole accusation of “fraud” had almost no impact. A graduate of Stanford Business School, he arrived in Moscow in the late 1990s, via a stint in London, determined to make his fortune. I had been subjected to dozens of death threats, and had even been warned several years earlier by a US government official that an extrajudicial rendition was being planned for me. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down.

When I arrived at my hotel that evening, the manager scurried over to the check-in desk and ushered the clerk aside. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Then in 2003 Putin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time the richest oligarch in Russia, and instead of opposing corruption, began putting the squeeze on the duly intimidated oligarchy.

He set up Hermitage Capital Management, with the help of the Monaco-based billionaire Edmond Safra (later to die in a fire started by one of his servants). Lawyers, politicians and the usual useful idiots have all been successfully recruited to the Russian cause, either through financial inducement, bribery, bovine anti-west sentiments, or perhaps worst of all, complacency. Held for almost a year without charge, Magnitsky died a few days before he was due to be released – murdered, says Browder, and a number of independent investigators, by prison guards who beat him to death. By the glint in Prosecutor Grinda’s eye, I could see that he would take what I was telling him seriously. The officer and translator who were with me looked at each other and then disappeared, leaving me alone again.

If its subject matter weren’t so grave, the book could be said to have all the elements of a high-octane drama. We were soon stuck in traffic again, this time in front of the Royal Palace, among a throng of tour buses and schoolchildren.Bill Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management and was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discover that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime. When Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999, promising to stamp out corruption, Browder was a relieved man. Bill Browder, founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. Fast paced and engaging, Browder’s book reads like a spy novel, but it also makes a powerful and remarkably prescient case for the need to use all the legal and financial tools available to separate Putin’s financiers from their foreign-held bank accounts and luxury yachts.

But they are related events, and as this book makes all too clear, we’ve taken far too long to recognise the true nature of the regime that connects them.He’d dealt with all my Russian troubles so well, but I was sure he was following this ordeal on Twitter, overcome with worry. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.