In 1991, Michael Calvey – a newly-graduated aspiring Wall Street hotshot – made a short trip from his native America to the recently-collapsed USSR to look at oil and gas projects. Sensing a huge opportunity, he soon based himself in Moscow, living through the “Wild East” years and going on to build Baring Vostok, Russia’s largest private equity firm
Living in Moscow for twenty five years, Calvey learnt the language, married a Russian woman, raised a family and forged an unmatched network of personal and business contacts. His investment funds earned enormous returns for blue-chip Western investors as the Former Soviet Union opened up to international business. Bloomberg described Calvey as “a legend in the Russian market - with a reputed aversion to any kind of foul play”.
But in 2019, after a dramatic dawn raid, Mike Calvey was thrown into Moscow’s notorious Mattrosskaya Tishina prison – famous for holding Soviet-era coup-plotters – on charges trumped up by local business rivals.
As the White House and Kremlin argued about his incarceration, he was caught for months in a Kafkaesque trap, denied access to evidence proving his innocence. And yet, bleak though his prison experience was, he found spiritual enrichment, forging unlikely friendships with his five cellmates – some also victims of Russia’s cynical justice system.
Fully exonerated of all wrong-doing, Calvey is currently Chairman of Baring Ventures, which sold all its Russian assets after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and now focuses on other international markets.
His newly-published book – Odyssey Moscow: One American's Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State – is dedicated to the cellmates who helped him through his nightmare prison experience.
It is the story not just of one man – but of an era of Russian hope and aspiration derailed.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Odyssey-Moscow-Westerners-Encounter-Russian/dp/1803997303
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