Foulsel at the Moscow Detention Center was the last place an American businessman named Michael Calvey was expected to find himself after building a thriving venture capital firm in Russia for 25 years.
First, the Beef Agent of the Federal Security Service, FSB, plundered his apartment before dawn. A few hours later he was trapped in a holding cell with two other prisoners and a filthy hole in the toilet floor.
“Sel is suffocating and hot. The oppressive foul smell is hanging in the air. It details his extended ordeal through the Russian court system in a manufactured fraud case that began in 2019.
As President Trump praises the possibility of a “major economic development transaction” between the US and Russia as he calls for improved relations with Moscow, Calbee's fate stands as a cautionary note about important personal and professional risks, particularly given the voluntary nature of the court.
Perhaps no Western businessman has encouraged foreign investment in Russia over Calbee, 57, who helped build Internet Titan from high-tech startups like Yandex, a version of Google, Amazon and Uber. He bared Vostok Capital Partners, the company he founded, and won Colossal Returns.
Vostok then became engrossed in a troublesome commercial dispute with two suspicious Russian partners who had stripped their assets from the bank in the troubled merger. Once upon a time, Mr. Calbee's empty Moscow apartment was mysteriously set on fire for several hours before dinner accompanied by nervous negotiations.
After his company filed a lawsuit in the London Court of Arbitration, the partners were convinced that the US and several partners had perpetuated a massive fraud as part of a sleazy foreign conspiracy to undermine the Russian financial sector.
The agent attacked in February 2019, and although no evidence of fraud appeared in court, Calbee and some of his partners spent years in prison or house arrest.
“When the FSB gets involved in the case, they're like a car with six gears in the future and no other way around,” Calbee said in an interview in his home in Switzerland, where he was allowed to leave Russia in 2022. “They never back up or lose their face.”
His arrest surprised Western investors. “Everyone I knew was believed, angry and shocked,” said Bernie Cinde, an American banker with experience in Russia. “It was seen as a direct attack on the very idea of long-term investment in the Russian economy.”
Unusually, dozens of influential Russians defended Mr. Calbee. They include Kiril Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, and are now key negotiators to end the Ukrainian war. Greff of Germany is the CEO of Russia's largest bank. former Minister of Finance Alexei Kudrin; The US Embassy in Moscow also opposed his arrest.
Calbee thought that such interventions and a blow to investor confidence would remove the case. However, nothing surpassed the FSB.
President Vladimir V. Putin summoned top Kremlin officials and ordered American businessmen to be removed from prison, but he later said he learned that he ordered Calvey to find out what was illegal. During a period of tension in US-Russia relations, the Kremlin couldn't allow the arrest of prominent American businessmen to pretend to be false, he said.
Released from prison two months later, Calbee was locked up in his apartment, electronic surveillance devices tied to his ankles for two years, and spent a third under court order supervision at the 8pm curfew. When he developed a cancerous tumor on one leg, the court refused to allow him to remove the device, so the doctor underwent surgery without the benefit of an MRI.
The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment on Calbee's account. At the time of his conviction, President's spokesman Dmitry Peskov cited Putin as saying the government cannot interfere with the courts.
When he was first arrested, Mr. Calvey was jailed at Matroskayatisina prison near downtown Moscow. It is sometimes called “Kremlin Central” because so many inmates are accused of a famous corruption case pushed out by the Kremlin. No violent criminals were found, but no one was found guilty, Calbee wrote.
His cellmate greeted him with non-alcoholic toast: “Novosley” or welcome. One was former vice minister of culture. The other was an army general. The young man was a computer hacker, and the three were construction big names. No one trusted, and one of them confessed.
Their cell, 13 feet x 16 feet, was tidy and somewhat comfortable, with a TV and separate toilet. The men shared everything equally, from cleaning hypes to external food supplies. He dedicated his book to the Cell 604 men, shedding tears as he spoke about them. The book will be released in the UK on Thursday and in the US in early April.
During his detention, Mr. Calbee tried to avoid seeing him get in the way. His reading list included Kafka as an appropriate reflection of his destiny.
For example, when a prosecutor summed up the case, she admitted that no one testified about the crimes that are committed, adding, “It's just what the organized criminal group we deal with proves.” The whole court laughed out loud, Calbee said.
The trial highlighted the FSB's control over the court, and the closing statement repeated the opening charges almost accurately, Calbee said. Testimony from all witnesses may never have happened. “Of course, the Russian people are the main victims of the court,” he writes.
In August 2021, Calbee was convicted of misappropriation of funds and was sentenced to five years of suspension. The conviction for false accusations said it was dirty with all his work for Russia.
His Russian Saga began in 1991, just two years after the University of Oklahoma, and Calbee went to work at the former Wall Street boss of the European Bank for reconstruction and development. It was established by the former Soviet bloc to help it move into a market economy.
He worked to raise funds for the energy sector project. His first Moscow roommate, Charlie Ryan, tried to camouflage his age by adopting a serious attitude at work, being considered young by the size of the deal.
“The lives of foreigners in Moscow in the 1990s were the same parts as the strange and wonderful parts,” Calbee wrote. Pizza Hut was considered a high-end restaurant to impress the date. Cheap caviar kilo has proven to be an alternative to breakfast cereal.
Calbee has founded bare Bostok to build a business that caters to the new middle class. He married a Russian woman named Julia, who had two sons and a daughter. Now they are all young adults.
He existed within the elite business bubble and was surrounded by people keen to integrate Russia into the world economy. At the time of his trial, Baring Vostok said, overall, he had invested more than $2.8 billion in 80 companies across the region, and was such a Western player.
He learned Russians through countless hours spent with young, ambitious entrepreneurs. “It was difficult to spend time with them and I didn't feel like Russia was a much better place than when I was in my grandparents' generation,” he said.
When the prominent businessman was arrested, Calbee considered it to be interfering with politics. He considered the Russian companions to be overly pessimistic about the direction of their country.
He ignored that former KGB agent Putin had handed all the major institutions to Shirobiki, a Russian term that incorporates all security institutions. Even the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 did not stop Mr Calbee.
“What I was not truly grateful and I realized only through the arrest was the depth of control and influence of the Russian dominant caste, the FSB and the other Shirobikis,” he said.
Calbee's businesses flourished even while incarcerated, only pulling plugs after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The rushing investment cost billions of dollars for his company, he said.
He ended in Russia. Under Russian law, his conviction was invalidated after the end of his five-year probation period, which ended a year ago, but last week a Moscow court changed the probation sentence given to a French defendant in the suit to absentee sentence.
Calbee hopes that some American companies will return, but Russia believes it is too risky for long-term investment. However, the peace agreement may encourage him to invest in Ukraine. He has nurtured internet startups elsewhere and employs young technological talents that have escaped Russia.
Similar geological differences between Moscow and Washington mean that businessmen can become pawns on chessboards, he said.
