An American investor helped build the economy of Russia. He was imprisoned for false accusations.

A foul-smelling cell in a Moscow detention center was almost the last place than an American businessman named Michael Calvey had to meet after having spent 25 years building a flourishing venture capital company in Russia which transformed certain technological startups into world brands.

First, Costauds of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, ransacked his apartment before dawn. A few hours later, it was confined to a support cell with two other prisoners and a dirty hole in the ground for toilets.

The cell is stifling and hot, an oppressive stench suspended in the air as if decades of accumulated human sweat mixed with indescribable horrors emanating from the toilet disorder area, wrote Mr. Calvey in a new book this week entitled Odyssey Moscow. He details his prolonged test in the Russian judicial system in a fabricated fraud case launched in 2019: in a few surreal and terrifying hours, I transformed myself from one of the most successful Western businessmen in Russia into a prisoner of the state.

President Trump rents the possibility of main economic development transactions between the United States and Russia, because he is looking for improved relationships with Moscow, the fate of Mr. Calveys is an edifying story on important personal and professional risks involved in cases in Russia, in particular given the arbitrary nature of his courts.

Perhaps no Western businessman has favored foreign investments in Russia more than Mr. Calvey, 57, who helped forge internet titans from technological startups like Yandex a version of Google, Amazon and Uber have gathered in one or TINKOFF credit systems, one of the largest world digital banks. The company he founded originated from Vostok Capital Partners, obtained colossal yields.

Then, Baring Vostok was mired in an unpleasant commercial dispute with two doubtful Russian partners who stripped the assets of a bank in a merger in difficulty. Once, Mr. Calveys empties the apartment in Moscow mysteriously took hours of fire before a dinner involving tense negotiations.

After his cabinet filed a case with an arbitration court in London, the partners convinced Department K of the FSB, head of internal financial crimes, that the American and several partners had perpetuated massive fraud in the context of an vile foreign conspiracy to undermine the financial sector of Russia.

The agents jumped in February 2019, and although no evidence of reprehensible acts appeared in court, Mr. Calvey and several partners spent years in prison or under house arrest.

Once the FSB is involved in a case, they are like a car with six speeds in the future and none upside down, said Calvey in an interview in Switzerland, his house since he was finally allowed to leave Russia in 2022. Lanky and Trim, he retains a childish air despite his gray hair. They will never back down and will never lose face.

His arrest amazed Western investors. Everyone I knew was incredulous, angry and shocked, said Bernie Super, an American banker with prolonged experience in Russia. It was considered a direct assault on the very idea of ​​long -term investment in the Russian economy.

Exceptionally, dozens of influential Russians defended Mr. Calvey. They understood Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia Sovereign Wealth Fund and now a key negotiator to end the Ukraine War; German GREF, director general of the largest Russian bank; And Alexei Kudrin, a previous Minister of Finance. The United States Embassy in Moscow has also opposed its arrest.

Calvey thought that such interventions, combined at the time of investors, would drop the case. But nothing was prevailing on the FSB

President Vladimir V. Putin summoned senior Kremlin officials, ordering them to take out the American businessman from prison, but also to find something illegal that Calvey had done, he said later. At a tense time in American-Russian relations, the Kremlin could not admit having arrested an eminent American businessman on false pretexts, he said.

Released from prison after two months, Calvey was confined to his apartment with an electronic surveillance system attached around his ankle for two years, and spent a third under the surveillance ordered by the court with a 8 p.m. curfew. When he developed a cancer tumor in one leg, the court refused to allow him to withdraw the aircraft, the doctors therefore operated without benefiting from an MRI

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comments on the account of Mr. Calveys. At the time of his conviction, Dmitry Peskov, the presidential spokesman, quoted Mr. Putin saying that the government could not intervene in court.

During the arrest for the first time, Mr. Calvey was imprisoned in the prison of Matrosskaya Tishina, near the city center of Moscow. It is sometimes called the central Kremlin because so many prisoners are faced with loads in cases of high level corruption pushed by the Kremlin. There were no violent criminals, but no one is never acquitted either, wrote Mr. Calvey.

His cell comrades welcomed him with a non -alcoholic toast: Novoselye, or Bienvenue. One was a former vice-minister of culture. Another was an army general. A youngest was a computer hacker and three were construction magnates. Trust anyone, one of them confided.

Their cell, 13 feet by 16 feet, was tidy and somewhat comfortable, with a television and separate toilets. Men also share, from cleaning tasks to food supplies from the outside. He devoted his book to men from cell 604 and tears up when he talks about it. The book will be released in Great Britain and early April in the United States on Thursday.

Throughout his detention, Mr. Calvey tried to prevent his jailers from seeing him disturbed. His reading list included Kafka as an appropriate reflection of his fate.

When a prosecutor summed up the case, for example, she admitted that no witness testified to a crime committed, then added, it simply proves a well -organized criminal group with which we are dealing. The whole courtroom laughed aloud, said Calvey.

The trial underlined control of the FSB on the courts, the closing declarations repeating almost exactly the charges of opening, said Calvey. All the witnesses of the witnesses might never have taken place. The Russians are of course the main victims of his courts, he wrote.

In August 2021, Calvey was found guilty of the abandonment of funds and a five -year suspended sentence. The conviction for false accusations was grated, he said, a stain on all his work for Russia.

His saga of Russia began in 1991, when only two years from Oklahoma University, Calvey went to work for his former Wall Street boss at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It was established to help the old Soviet block in transition to a market economy.

He worked on the financing of projects in the energy sector. Considered for the scale of the agreements, he tried to camouflage his age by adopting serious behavior at work, said Charlie Ryan, his first roommate in Moscow.

Life for an expatriate in the 1990s, Moscow was equally bizarre and wonderful, wrote Mr. Calvey. Pizza Hut was considered a high -end restaurant to impress a date. The cheap caviar kilos have proven to be a substitute for breakfast cereals.

Mr. Calvey has established Baring Vostok to create companies that are aimed at the new middle class. He married a Russian woman named Julia, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, now all the young adults.

It existed in an elite business bubble, surrounded by people wishing to integrate Russia into the world economy. At the time of his trial, Baring Vostok said that on the whole, he had invested more than $ 2.8 billion in 80 companies in the region, making it the largest Western actor of this type.

He learned Russian for countless hours he spent with young ambitious entrepreneurs. It was difficult to spend time with them and not having the impression that Russia was a good place, much better than at the time of their generation of grandparents, he said.

When eminent businessmen were arrested, Calvey attributed it to their interference in politics. He considered his Russian associates that are too dark about the management of their country.

He ignored the repeated red flags that Mr. Putin, a former KGB agent, had given control of each great institution to the Siloviki, a Russian term incorporating all the security agencies. Even the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 did not dissuade Mr. Calvey.

What I did not really appreciate and only realizes with my arrest is the depth of the control and the influence of the leading caste of Russia, which is FSB and the other Siloviki, he said.

Mr. Calveys' companies prospered when he was imprisoned, and he only pulled the plug after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The rushed divestment cost his business billions of dollars, he said.

He finished with Russia. Although by the Russian law, his conviction was canceled after the end of his five -year probation period last week, a Moscow court changed the probationary sentence granted to a French accused in the case to a prison sentence.

Calvey expects some American companies to return, although he considers Russia that is too risky for long -term investments. A peace agreement could however encourage him to invest in Ukraine. It promotes internet startups elsewhere, using young technological talents that fled Russia.

The simmering geopolitical differences between Moscow and Washington mean that any businessman can become a chess pawn, he said, adding: you can hope that you will not be on your head, but ultimately, it could happen at any time.

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