Excerpt from Red Notice by Bill Browder, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

With our people and money safe, we had eliminated the main levers that the Russian government could use to harm us. Whatever their next move might be, it couldn't be that daunting.

I felt better after achieving this, but dealing with the loss of confidence from my clients was a different matter. Most had invested in Hermitage because I was on the ground in Moscow. When I was there, I could identify profitable investments and protect their capital if something went wrong. Now, all of a sudden, I could do neither.

The first person to point this out was Jean Karoubi, the man I'd first approached as an investor back in 1996. Jean had become one of my closest confidants over the years and always had his finger on the pulse of the markets. When Reuters broke my visa story on March 17, Jean called me almost immediately and said in an uncharacteristically serious tone, "Bill, we've done great together. But I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason why I should keep my money in the fund when you've fallen out with the Russian government."

Hearing this from one of my earliest and most enthusiastic supporters was a bit of a shock, but he was right. The last thing I wanted to do was try to convince him to keep his money in the fund only to have things go further off the rails with the Russians. The only logical thing for him to do was take his winnings off the table.

In the following days I had similar conversations with many other clients who'd come to the same conclusion.

I knew what was coming: redemption orders, and lots of them. The next available date that investors could withdraw money from the fund was May 26, and they had to submit their redemption requests eight weeks before that. So on March 31 I would get my first look at how bad the situation was.

At 5:20 p.m. that day, I received the redemption spreadsheet from HSBC, the fund's administrator. Normally, the subscriptions and redemptions were listed on a single page. In a busy quarter it might be two or three pages. But this spreadsheet was ten pages long with 240 line items of people requesting their money back. I quickly flipped to the end and added it all up. More than 20 percent of the fund was redeeming!

That was a huge number by any measure, and I knew it was just the beginning. I was standing on the precipice. Everything I'd worked for was starting to fall apart. The only thing that might possibly change the situation was getting my Russian visa reinstated. But I had given up on that.

Surprisingly, the British government hadn't. In mid-June 2006, I got a call from Simon Smith, head of the Russia desk at the Foreign Office: "We're working an interesting angle for sorting out your visa problem, Bill. But we wanted to make sure you're still interested in returning to Russia before we move forward."

"Of course I'm interested, Simon!" I said enthusiastically. "But I thought you wouldn't do anything more after the media circus."

"The press didn't help, that's for sure. But we haven't given up," Smith said reassuringly.

"What do you have in mind?"

"As you probably know, Russia is hosting the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg on the fifteenth of July. We were thinking of putting your case on the prime minister's agenda to discuss directly with Putin."

"Really. . . . That would be amazing, Simon."

"Don't get your hopes up too much. It's not a done deal, Bill, but we are working on it."

We hung up and I stared out the window. How could I not get my hopes up? Just as easily as my visa refusal had ruined my business, a visa reinstatement could restore it.

As the G8 drew nearer, I was a bundle of nerves. A positive outcome from Prime Minister Tony Blair's intervention would be life-changing. However, as the days and weeks passed, I began to have my doubts. I hadn't been able to get in touch with Smith. I tried to keep a cool head, but I couldn't figure out why he had been so encouraging before and then suddenly gone quiet.

Excerpted from Red Notice by Bill Browder. Copyright © 2015 by Bill Browder. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.