The Russian Banker, Part 3: Asylum

This is an audio transcript of the Behind the Money podcast episode: ‘The Russian Banker, Part 3: Asylum’

Stefania Palma
It’s 2015. Sergei Leontiev has just fled Russia after paramilitary troops stormed his bank. He first lands in London, where he lawyers up and he quickly learns his problems have followed him there. He’s being pursued by a former client named Alexander Varshavsky, and Varshavsky is on his way to meet him.

Courtney Weaver
You can think of Sergei’s post-Moscow battles as a series of escalating risks, and Alexander Varshavsky was level one. Varshavsky is the big client that Sergei argued with the night before he fled. He owns one of the biggest car dealerships in Moscow.

Stefania Palma
According to Sergei and other people at Probusinessbank, Varshavsky seemed to be very connected. So he’s trying to get money back for himself, but also for his contacts. According to Sergei and others, these are very powerful people.

Courtney Weaver
Sergei and Varshavsky — they don’t really know each other. Varshavsky is good friends with Sergei’s best childhood friend, the one he started the bank with. But they’re basically strangers. Sergei doesn’t want to meet with Varshavsky, but eventually he relents. And they agree to meet in London, in Mayfair, in a posh hotel lobby.

Sergei Leontiev
The lawyers suggested that I recorded it. Just to record everything, that they don’t use it against you.

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It was a room in the restaurant in the lobby, and there were a lot of people there Varshavsky brought with himself. So I was kind of alone against all these people trying to get something out of me. 

Courtney Weaver
Varshavsky says he needs his money back — $100mn dollars. Varshavsky says he can’t go back to Moscow and face the others without some kind of a guarantee that he’ll get that money.

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Stefania Palma
They go back and forth for two hours. The conversation just keeps going around in circles.

Sergei Leontiev
I was trying to get rid of him.

Courtney Weaver
But Varshavsky persists, and he says if Sergei doesn’t pay up, things are going to get scary for both of them.

Sergei Leontiev
Of course, he was threatening the situation could come to the point where is no way out anymore for us and meaning that they can just hire $4,000 somebody some kind of killer to kill you in every country of the world.

Courtney Weaver
Sergei refuses to make a deal on the spot. And Varshavsky is really mad because now he’s going back to Moscow completely empty-handed. Sergei gets up to leave.

Sergei Leontiev
I was kind of running out of the hotel. He was running after me.

Stefania Palma
Varshavsky confirmed he met Sergei after the bank raid. He also confirmed that Sergei had promised to fulfil all obligations, but never did. Varshavsky denied any ties to Russian high-ranking officials. But Sergei would soon face a series of even bigger challenges from Varshavsky and Russian authorities more broadly. Critics argue Russia has a playbook for people who become its targets. Sergei saw his fights with Putin as a full-blown war in which seeking US asylum would become just another battle.

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Courtney Weaver
From the Financial Times, This is The Russian Banker. I’m Courtney Weaver.

Stefania Palma
And I’m Stefania Palma.

Courtney Weaver
Now, our final episode — Part 3: Russia’s Dirty Work.

Stefania Palma
Sergei didn’t stay in London too long. He decides to go to the US. And then his asylum application, he argues that he believed the country’s rule of law could protect him from what he described as a political persecution from Russia. So he boards a plane for New York, where he’s seeking safety but also trying to set up a new company. But his troubles chased him there.

Sergei Leontiev
We had cars following us all the time, waiting for us in front of the building, the same type of cars for several weeks.

Courtney Weaver
Are you worried for your personal safety at all?

Sergei Leontiev
Yes. I’m worried very much.

Courtney Weaver
One weekend in New York, Sergei’s office is broken into and he doesn’t know who did it. At the same time, his business partner starts getting harassed as well. Back in Moscow, someone leaves photographs of young family members on his partner’s brother’s grave. The implication being that anyone could be next. Sergei increases security — risk management, he calls it.

Stefania Palma
And then Russian authorities used another weapon from their arsenal. They put out an Interpol red notice against Sergei, which essentially put him on an international wanted poster, giving any law enforcement agency across the world a free pass to arrest him. That meant that in practice, he was stuck in the US. He couldn’t even travel to Vienna to see his parents.

Sergei Leontiev
I couldn’t meet my mother, but she still was alive. And she was kind of hoping for us to meet one day. So that didn’t happen.

Stefania Palma
Russia’s a well known user, many would say abuser, of
Interpol Red Notices. Forty percent of the Interpol red notices that
are made public stem from Russia. We ask Kyle Parker about this. He’s
the congressional staffer that Sergey met with before he got his
asylum. Kyle said Russia has a history of abusing legal systems
internationally to harass its enemies.

Kyle Parker
Russia can trigger Interpol red notices or things like that to complicate your life, you know, even so that you’re not safe abroad, in a sense. To rope rule of law-based systems like the United States unwittingly to become the long arm of what is essentially a Russian vendetta.

Courtney Weaver
Sergei’s legal team says there’s another sign of this vendetta. Russia’s Deposit Insurance Agency hired a notorious Russian lawyer named Andrei Pavlov to handle a Probusinessbank’s case. He became one of the architects of the legal pursuit against Sergei. The asylum application, says Pavlov, even hauled Sergei’s parents into an Austrian police station for questioning.

Kyle Parker
There is no chance that if Andrei Pavlov was involved and the Deposit Insurance Agency was involved, that it was a legitimate legal attack.

Courtney Weaver
Bill Browder was the most prominent foreign investor in Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union. That is, until Pavlov allegedly took part in a scheme to steal Browder’s business as part of an elaborate tax fraud. Pavlov was among many Russians sanctioned by the US government for their role in the attack on Browder’s firm, which ultimately led to the wrongful imprisonment and death of Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky.

Kyle Parker
It has been impossible to get any justice in Russia because the authorities circle the wagons. And one of the people who tried to create the counter-narrative about this whole case was this Russian lawyer named Andrei Pavlov.

Courtney Weaver
For Sergei, Pavlov is just one piece of a much bigger effort to freeze his assets and ultimately extradite him back to Russia.

Sergei Leontiev
They were, like, using all the new possible tools how to attack me everywhere. They will attack me personally in the US. They will attack me with Varshavsky in the US. They will attack me with a lot of investigations in several jurisdictions.

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Stefania Palma
Sergei’s legal team argues that this is part of the broader strategy from countries like Russia that try to cast as wide a net as possible with legal challenges across multiple jurisdictions brought either by the Russian authorities or proxies, which in Sergei’s view, could allegedly include people like Varshavsky.

Sergei Leontiev
There were a lot of threats coming from him.

Stefania Palma
Varshavsky’s car dealership sued Sergei for approximately $60mn in New York state’s Supreme Court, accusing him of transferring the money that he had lent Sergei’s businesses to an offshore trust. But Sergei suspects that Varshavsky is, in reality, acting with higher powers behind him. People from the Russian states. Other cases against Sergei were filed by the Russian Federation itself, but the majority were brought by Russia’s Deposit Insurance Agency in places like Cyprus, Liechtenstein, even Austria.

Sergei Leontiev
Sometimes I started counting all these trials. It’s like about 40 already.

Courtney Weaver
There’s an ostensible reason for these cases. Probusinessbank depositors lost a lot of money, and these cases seek to make depositors whole. But this is Russia. And there are other possible reasons. Officials might be trying to line their own pockets. Or if Sergei is right, it’s political retribution. Filing so many cases at once is meant to be mentally and financially draining for someone like Sergei. It’s expensive. He needs a legal team big enough to fight multiple complicated cases around the world.

Sergei Leontiev
They were making the process longer and they understood that I was paying lawyers, that it’s not cheap and to exhaust me.

Stefania Palma
Sergei’s legal team says in many cases Russia exploits foreign courts, often using the discovery process to get eyes on a target’s finances. Sometimes discovery is more important than the verdict. Sergei’s lawyer says the cases have the primary goal of freezing his assets. He says that is to prevent him from funding Russia’s opposition.

Courtney Weaver
But despite all these arguments from Sergei’s legal team, some of his critics think he should face justice in Russia. This is Teresa, the western investor we spoke with who had raised concerns about the bank early on. She notes Sergei fled while many of his staffers face stiff consequences back in Russia.

Teresa, via an actor
He left all his guys there. You know, the number of people that got arrested and put in jail, they were basically just fulfilling his command.

Courtney Weaver
There are a lot of questions about the fairness of Russia’s judicial system. Nearly all defendants are found guilty, and it’s frequently used to wrongfully detain political targets and journalists. But despite that, Peter the whistleblower and Ivan the central banker, they still believe Sergei and his co-founder should return to Russia and face trial, even if that means their fate is sealed. This is Ivan.

Ivan, via an actor
You asked me what will happen if they come back to Russia. They will be sued and they will be in prison. And that’s it.

Courtney Weaver
But then we asked if his life would be at risk if he were to return to Russia.

Ivan, via an actor
Oof. That, honestly, I don’t know.

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Courtney Weaver
I don’t think anyone can look at the past few years in Russia and not say that Sergei would face an incredibly tough time were he to return. Sergei was fighting back against the Russian government at a time when people in the west were more sympathetic to hearing the cases of Russia’s enemies. And Sergei knew that narrative and played into it. At the same time, there’s so much about his case that just doesn’t really add up. And his asylum application, he puts so much focus on his connections with Alexei Navalny, who currently is in Russian jail. And it just seems the more and more that we look into the case, the more that Sergei really, if not, fabricated this and just really emphasised it in a way to get sympathy for his case with the judge.

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Stefania Palma
We don’t know how much of all this the New York judge knew or considered when she made her decision to grant Sergei asylum last year. The Department of Justice, on behalf of Judge Alice Segal, declined to comment. The US government, as it typically does, argued against Sergei’s case. Representing the government in courts, the Department of Homeland Security highlighted the fact that Sergei had been accused of embezzlement in Russia. But Judge Segal decided the department did not meet its burden in the case. For all Russia has thrown at Sergei, Peter the whistleblower at Sergei’s bank is not convinced.

Peter, via an actor
I don’t mind, first of all, that he has asylum in America. I’m sure that the judge has done that in good conscience, in good faith. You wouldn’t ask from a judge from New York deciding on asylum, from a person who says, “I’m a political refugee,” to check the accounts. It’s . . . She has not the competence, she has not the means, and she has no access to the information. Now, if she had, I’m pretty sure that she would have changed her mind.

Stefania Palma
Asylum experts we talked to say it’s not up to US immigration courts to investigate every claim an applicant makes. Steve Yale-Loehr is a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School and he also directs the Cornell asylum appeals clinic.

Steve Yale-Loehr
The government is overworked and overburdened, and the government often doesn’t do its own homework of determining what happened in the country and whether the person did or did not meet with so and so to be able to prove or disprove their political opposition to the government.

Stefania Palma
And Professor Yale-Loehr says even if the whistle-blower’s accusations are true, it still might not preclude someone like Sergei from getting asylum.

Steve Yale-Loehr
It may be that he did multiple things, some of which were bad, but he still may have a well-founded fear of persecution because he did associate with the opposition leader in Russia. Leontiev was lucky. He spoke English. He had an attorney to represent him. And he had a lot of evidence and the circumstances of where he came from and the timing probably all helped to allow him to win asylum.

Courtney Weaver
Around the time Sergei received asylum, it also happened to be a pivotal moment in the war in Ukraine. Putin’s invasion had caught so many people in the west off-guard and naturally horrified them. Any opponent of Putin was someone to be listened to, elevated. Getting asylum is a huge deal in the US. So you would think that Sergei would have been ecstatic after the ruling. But he says he wasn’t surprised. His lawyers had a feeling the judge would side with his case and he’d pretty much, if you will, priced it in.

Sergei Leontiev
When you know that you’ll have an additional salary and you expected, and your boss told it already. Of course, you can show a little bit of surprise just to please your boss, but really, you’ve just already put it in your budget.

Courtney Weaver
That might sound really dismissive, but think of it this way: Sergei is in the middle of a huge fight. To him, asylum is just one small victory.

Sergei Leontiev
So it’s like a big war, you know, second world war — you don’t celebrate when you win a battle during the war. So I will really celebrate when I have the 9th of May.

Courtney Weaver
He’s referring to Russia’s victory day at the end of world war 2. But Sergei’s victory day hasn’t come yet. He’s had some wins, though. The Interpol red notice against him was withdrawn. He’s won some of his lawsuits, and other suits have been dropped. But his real day of victory, that won’t come, he says, until all the suits are gone, his assets are unfrozen and he can run his investment firm in the US in peace.

Stefania Palma
At the end of our final interview with Sergei Leontiev, we asked him what he’d say to a critic who thinks he didn’t deserve asylum in the US.

Sergei Leontiev
I will say he’s wrong, because just to say something like that, just similar, would I say, “You don’t deserve to be on this planet.” Our whole story and the whole case and all the details and what kind of additional proof you will need maybe then, just to say that Navalny doesn’t deserve to have an asylum case. Stupid idea.

Stefania Palma
I think it’s undeniable that Sergei was obviously facing very serious threats, that he had to leave Moscow behind as quickly as possible and that this ultimately resulted in his escape from Russia. So in that sense, on paper, he appears to be a classic asylum applicant.

Courtney Weaver
I think at the same time, there is a distinction to be made. Is Sergei a political dissident or is he a Russian businessman? For a lot of Russian businessmen in the ’90s and the 2000s, they were basically taking their life in their hand when they decided to do business there. And you compare that to some of the people in the Russian opposition right now who are sitting in jail, who have been killed and, you know, who will either never see their children again or not see them for years. It’s just a totally different situation and it feels a bit uncomfortable putting Sergei in that category.

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I’m Courtney Weaver.

Stefania Palma
And I’m Stefania Palma.

Courtney Weaver
We reported this series and it was produced by the Financial Times and Rhyme Media. At Rhyme Media, the producers are Lydia McMullen-Laird and Jennifer Sigl. Dan Bobkoff is the executive producer.

Stefania Palma
At the Financial Times, the executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Topher Forhecz. Sound mixing by Breen Turner. Special thanks to Peter Spiegel, Marc Filippino, Alastair Mackie, Persis Love, Josh Gabert-Doyon and Tania Cherkas.