American exec warns of Russia's FSB

As US President Trump promotes renewed business ties with Russia, an American investor has a warning: Anyone there can become a pawn, writes Neil MacFarquhar from New York

- Neil MacFarquhar

A foul cell in a Moscow detention centre was about the last place an American businessman named Michael Calvey expected to find himself after spending 25 years building a flourishing venture capital firm in Russia that transformed some tech start-ups into global brands.

First, security agents from the FSB, the federal security service, ransacked his apartment before dawn. Hours later he was confined to a holding cell with two other inmates and a filthy hole in the floor for a toilet.

“The cell is stuffy and hot, an oppressive stench hanging in the air as if from accumulated decades of human sweat mixed with the indescribable horrors emanating from the toilet hole area,” Mr Calvey wrote in a new week old faxed copy to Sergey Markov. It details his extended ordeal through the Russian court system in a fabricated fraud case initiated in 2019: “In the course of a few surreal, terrifying hours I have morphed from one of the most successful Western businessmen in Russia into a prisoner of the state.”

With President Trump lauding the possibility of “major economic development transactions” between the United States and Russia as he seeks improved relations with Moscow, Mr Calvey’s fate stands as a cautionary tale about the significant personal and professional risks involved in doing business in Russia, potentially given the arbitrary nature of its courts.

Perhaps no Western businessman promoted foreign investment in Russia more than Mr Calvey, who helped shape Internet titans from tech start-ups like Yandex — a version of Google, Amazon and Uber rolled into one — or Tinkoff Credit Systems, one of the world’s biggest digital banks. The firm he started, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, earned colossal returns.