Dirty Russian Money in the UK — Part One
If you have been feeling, like myself, what the hell can I do about what’s going on in Ukraine, and how the hell can I rectify how the world has allowed Russia/Putin to get to this point, and, like myself, you believe charity is all well and good but not the remedy for root cause, and that walking party lines pointing fingers at Boris is stupid, then maybe you will appreciate this discussion: Welcome to Londongrad: why does London still attract so much dirty money?
In this ThinkIn put on by Tortoise and led by Giles Whittell, Bill Browder (CEO Hermitage Capital; Head of Global Magnitsky Justice campaign; Author, ‘Red Notice and Freezing Order’ (June 2022) and Michael O’Kane (Head of Business Crime, Peters & Peters), with well-intending but deplorable Dame Margaret Hodge MP (MP for Barking; Co-chair, APPG on Anti-Corruption & Responsible Tax) have given me a direction in how to politicise myself when it comes to disabling Putin, which I knew was about money (because everything is always about money), but the workings of which I had only vague knowledge. In this talk, Bill Browder has evidenced the existence of corruption, and Michael O’Kane has attested to their reasons in the UK. (Dame Margaret Hodge MP speaks a lot of nonsense typical to irrational leftist vanguard that pushes me away from Labour, but that’s for another time.)
I painstakingly quote the following excerpts for the benefit of public politicisation, which I am usually averse to unless I feel very strongly I must act. A war of this kind, linked to the money system of our kind — it warrants doing something and saying something about. I am a week late (Welcome to Londongrad: why does London still attract so much dirty money? was published on 4th March), but I am glad I am no later.
Excerpts only and edited for ease of reading:
Giles Whittell: […] Why does London still attract so much dirty money […] what is the practical case for going after [oligarchs] right now and who is close enough to Putin that that it might make a difference?
Bill Browder: […] Let’s first talk about why oligarchs, why do we care about oligarchs, why does Putin care about oligarchs. And I think it’s important for people to understand that oligarchs are are not independently wealthy they’re dependently wealthy. They became wealthy from the goodwill of Vladimir Putin and their wealth is not all their own. That in most cases they hold significant amounts of money for Vladimir Putin […]. So we then come to this war […] and we’re trying to figure out […] what can we do, and the ideal thing is to try to make it costly for him personally. […] And so […] we go after the people who hold his money who are […] the oligarchs.
Where do they like to hold the money? A lot of them like to hold the money here. Because this is a great country, we have a rule of law and property rights which they don’t have in Russia. And if there’s another reason why they like to have their money here [is] because they can be almost 100 percent sure that they’ll never be investigated or prosecuted for any type of financial crime. […]
And i can say that not as some kind of speculative observer but I can say that as a an active person trying to create consequences for Russians involved in money laundering and bringing that money to this country because my lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in 2009 for uncovering a 230 million dollar Russian government corruption scheme and we’ve spent the time trying to find out where that money came. And we discovered that it went all over the world to about 24 different countries. We filed criminal complaints with every different law enforcement agency where the money hit.
16 countries opened investigations. Some countries froze money, some seized money, but the largest amount of money from the entire Magnitsky investigation came to the United Kingdom. And this is one country which absolutely refused to open any type of criminal investigation.
And I had an interesting experience which is I got a rejection letter from the National Crime Agency. And the person who wrote the rejection letter left the National Crime Agency after he wrote the letter and retired, and he invited me to lunch. And he told me that he actually wanted to conduct an investigation but he was ordered by one of the most senior people in the National Crime Agency under no circumstances to launch the investigation.
And so what I can say is that oligarchs like coming here because their money is safe. It’s safe from being stolen by other Russians and it’s safe from being investigated by the authorities. And so as a result, the title Londongrad is perfectly fitting. […]
G: The oligarchs who have been targeted since this invasion by the UK government […]— notionally bag carriers for Putin, Gennady Timchenko and two Rotenbergs […] — did they get the right people?
B: Well Imean these are like, you know, really nasty characters that should be sanctioned but they were already sanctioned by the United States four years ago by the US Treasury. […] So that was good, but what do you do if you’re a Gennady Timchenko or Arkady Rotenberg and you’ve been sanctioned in the United States and you haven’t been sanctioned in the UK or or the EU? Well you probably figure your time is going to come eventually and so anything you have that are in other countries, you move into the names of of family members or trustees or nominees or whatever. So by the time we sanction them four years later… I mean that’s about as tepid as you can get. That’s like saying look how tough we are but actually…
And here’s where the story really gets ugly. There were seven people on the list. You know who else was on the list? Oleg Deripaska. Why didn’t we say — so if we’re gonna copy the US list — why are we not sanctioning Oleg Deripaska? Another person on the US list was Suleyman Kerimov — he’s got all sorts of stuff here, why are we not sanctioning him? And so when they announced that, I was really disappointed. I thought that was just like almost an insult to anybody who had any sort of, was a connoisseur of sanctions.
Michael O’Kane: […] The two main financial centers in the world are London and New York. New York is not full of oligarchs. There’s a few but there aren’t the same number as there are in London so why is that? Now I think it’s often very tempting to try and come up with simplistic answers […] but […] the big difference for me [is] if you’re in New York and you commit financial crime, the chances of you being prosecuted and convicted are really high, really quite high. And why is that? Because the United States government — it’s still not as high as it should be but — the United States government properly resources law enforcement and it properly gives messages that law enforcement is important, they won’t put up with corruption or dirty money. […]
Here, time and time again, the Serious Fraud Office is told it doesn’t have a future. Why would a talented lawyer going to want to go and work in the Serious Fraud Office? The National Crime Agency brings a case under Unexplained Wealth Orders, loses the case, has to pay a one and a half million pound cost order — that’s a huge percentage of their budget. If you’re working there and if that happens to you, you’re thinking to yourself, […] who was it that said that ‘Laws are cobwebs that catch the small flies but the hornets and wasps fly through’? We have to strengthen the cobwebs.
And it’s not any particular political party’s fault, it’s not Boris Johnson, this goes back 25 or 30 years. When I was prosecuting in the 1990s, the Crown Prosecution Service then, you know, we complained but it was nothing like it is now. It’s lost 33 of its budget in the last decade, the Serious Fraud Office brings hardly any cases now. When we represented the Maxwell case back in the 1990s, the Guardian front page on the 4th of November 1991 said 350 million pounds missing from Maxwell Group pension fund […]. City of London Police and the SFO raided Maxwell house the following morning. That is so unlikely to happen now it’s not even worth mentioning. In fact the SFO introduced statistics last year they did no raids last year!
I mean it’s not politically popular to pay lawyers. Whether they are prosecutors or whether they are defenders. There are barristers doing criminal defense work out there preparing for cases tomorrow who will be being paid the same for the case they’re doing tomorrow as they would have been paid 25 years ago. What other profession in this country is earning the same for the same work they’re doing as they would have earned 25 years ago? Repeated governments have essentially tried to limit and reduce the amount of money that’s put into law enforcement in this country on both sides. Not just prosecutors, you have to have proper defenders, too.
So there’s any wonder that the people come here and they think okay, well, as Bill says, the chances of us getting caught are minimal, and it’s true. And it’s true but nobody wants to do anything about it […]
If anything comes from what we’re all talking about tonight, if it means finally […] people are going to take this seriously and corruption is actually going to start to be weeded out, not just in relation to oligarchs but everywhere, then it’ll be a good thing for the British judicial system, which is still the most respected judicial system in the world, but if we keep doing what we’re doing, that is not going to last long.
To be continued in Part Two.
