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for his longtime friend Vladimir Putin.
As anyone who follows Russia knows,
Putin loves money. But because he’s
President, he can only earn his offi-
cial salary (which is around $300,000
a year), and he can’t hold any assets
beyond those he accumulated before
he was in government. If he did, any-
one who got hold of a copy of a bank
statement or a property registry with
his name on it could use it as leverage
to blackmail him. Putin is well aware
of this, because he’s used this tactic on
many occasions against his own enemies.
Therefore, Putin needed others to
hold his money so that no paper trail led
back to him. For this, he needed people
he could trust. In any mafia-like organiza-
tion, these people are rare birds. There is
no commodity more valuable than trust.
Roldugin was one such person for
Putin. From the moment the two had
met on the streets of Leningrad in their
20s, they were like brothers. Roldugin
introduced Putin to his wife; he was the
godfather to Putin’s firstborn daughter;
and through the decades they had re-
mained the closest of friends.
For us, this news was potentially
even more dramatic. If we could some-
how link any of the $230 million tax re-
fund that Sergei Magnitsky had been
killed over to Putin through Roldugin,
it would be a game changer.
Two days later, an obscure Lithua-
nian website reported that one of the
companies linked to Roldugin had re-
ceived $800,000 from an account at
a Lithuanian bank. This account be-
longed to a shell company called Delco
Networks.
We searched our money-laundering
database and found that this $800,000
was connected to the $230 million tax
refund. After leaving Russia, the money
had passed through a series of banks
in Moldova, Estonia, and, ultimately,
Lithuania.
We could now link the crime that
Sergei Magnitsky had exposed and been
killed over to Roldugin. And from Rol-
dugin, we could link it to Russian presi-
dent Vladimir Putin.
This explained everything.
When Sergei was killed, Putin could
have had the perpetrators of the tax re-
bate fraud prosecuted, but he didn’t.
When the international community de-
manded justice for Sergei, Putin exoner-
ated everyone involved. When the Mag-
nitsky Act passed in the U.S., freezing
all assets of those implicated in Sergei’s
murder, Putin retaliated by banning the
adoption of Russian orphans by Amer-
ican families. Before the law passed,
Putin’s government had even arranged
for Dmitry Klyuev, a convicted mobster,
along with his consigliere, Andrei Pav-
lov, both private citizens, to attend the
OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Mo-
naco to lobby against the Magnitsky
Act, as if they were some sort of special
government envoys.
Why had Putin gone to such lengths
to protect a group of crooked officials
and organized criminals?
Because, quite simply, he was
△
The headstone for lawyer Sergei
Magnitsky, for whom the Magnitsky
Act is named, on Dec. 7, 2012
ANDREY SMIRNOV—AFP/GETTY IMAGES; PREVIOUS PAGES: GETTY IMAGES
