How London became the dirty money capital of the world | FT Film

There is no doubt that London is the

dirty

money

capital

of the

world

. The UK did not turn a blind eye to Russian

money

. We welcomed it for many decades. Now London has been rolling out the red carpet to corrupt individuals and criminals from around the

world

. Britain is a very open financial centre. It is very important that there are very clear and well-applied rules. That's something Britain simply doesn't have. There are key aspects of our legal and financial system that make the City of London a great place to bring in

dirty

money. and launder wealth the russians have accounted for around a billion pounds worth of residential property in

london

now we have woken up dirty money is being seen for what it is, which is a poison to democracy the real slipping of putin's mask has been an act of aggression so appalling the uk seems to have completely lost its moral compass this is really a tale of two empires the british empire and the soviet empire and the british empire as it fell apart it retained many virgin island outposts British Channel Islands needed a new purpose and the purpose they found was as providers of shell company financial secrecy, corporate camouflage, ways for people to move through the globalized economy without leaving their fingerprints on anything, the engine of the multi-billion dollar offshore industry riddled with dirty money, this is how corruption went global while the the british empire was doing that the soviet empire was collapsing too much the biggest act of corruption the world has probably ever seen the fight in a few years in The 90s to seize the wealth of the entire Soviet empire created this oligarchy that later emerged in the world and where all this comes together is London, the place where dirty money comes to party.

The origins came with the big bang under Margaret Thatcher when started to liberalize the financial services sector you brand customer i will sell you half a million in 673 and then that continued under the labor government with a mission of deregulation david cameron i think you got it thank you very much after he left office people have simply refused to take on the challenge of rooting out dirty money from

london

over the last two decades the uk has really welcomed russian money of all kinds law firms estate agents the government there are recorded statements by boris johnson our prime minister from when he was mayor of London saying he wanted to make London a center for Russian money the stock exchange welcomed many Russian companies He wanted them to make the UK and London their European base.

One of the reasons Britain has gotten itself into this hole is that Britain's ruling elites believe in getting out of business's way at all costs, so if you're a senior civil servant what you need to prove to ministers is that they won't cause problems for companies, we see it all the time in things like failures in financial regulation before the financial crisis. The visa schemes were introduced in 2008. Golden visas were introduced by the Labor government to attract wealth and

capital

to London. If you had enough money, you could buy citizenship. In theory there were controls on this, but in practice they didn't work, of course they did.

Abused by oligarchs and kleptocrats who wanted to bring their dirty money to London and use the scheme to establish legitimacy and credibility in what was considered a trusted jurisdiction. The idea that citizenship is for sale is quite remarkable. It's a scandal that I. I have been pursuing it for many years and am delighted that the government has finally abolished the scheme. The scheme peaked around 2012, when I think around 1200 golden visas were issued that year, 60 actually went to Russians or Chinese if power was taken in Kazakhstan, Moscow. venezuela, wherever it is, you are getting rich off the fat of the land, you put it in london and what comes with it in london in this complete set of services to put on a legitimate face, let's say you want to bring dirty money to the city of london and integrate it into the system, there are basically four key stages: placement, layering, integration and defense, so let's start by bringing your money from, say, a Latvian bank account, a Cayman Islands bank account that you want and then transfer it to a UK shell company, it is possible.

To spend gigantic amounts of money in the UK economy with a mascot, you are supposed to tell the company register who the real owners, the beneficial owners of the companies, are, but in practice it is very easy to get around those rules and Fundamentally, no one goes after companies. that is essentially a wild west of information that is unverified and in some cases ridiculous, you can submit any name, hide your identity, there is adolf hitler, donald ducks and mickey mouse, it is very easy to register a company in the company house It costs 12 pounds. You can do it in minutes and, most importantly, no one verifies the information.

Requests are typically approved within 24 hours. In reality, they do not have the legal power to verify the information, investigate false information or remove it from the registry. Now there are some directions inside. the UK that has thousands of registered companies and if you go and knock on the door you will not find any staff, they are literally being created as a front to hide the true ownership of who really controls and benefits from the money that flows. that company, this is a crucial area that the government says it wants to strengthen, but this is one of those reforms that has been talked about for years and nothing has been done.

The next stage you want to layer to move this money into a series of complicated financial transactions that will take you away from the money and your source of wealth. That's where the UK banks come from. Some 86 banks have been involved in obtaining the movement of corrupt wealth around the world. The cash by the time we get to London will probably be It has already passed through a couple of British overseas territories, such as the British Virgin Islands. The third step is whether you want to integrate your estate into the UK system. He wants to buy assets, including UK-owned solicitors.

Real estate agents are available to help you do it once you do. If you have the money in London, you can basically use it as if it were clean. People don't bring this money to the coast to use for drug gangs. They are putting him on the coast to buy houses in Kensington. The purchase really began with Mr. Abramovic was showing him several properties they finally bought one in Kensington for over 90 million his fortunes were enormous they were a target for state agents in London do you have a Russian type conversation? The agency would be looking for the typical Russian buyer.

A major house, larger than most grade one and two listed locations, would be Belgravia Mayfair Knightsbridge, there wasn't that much stock, but when something becomes available your thoughts will immediately find one of these oligarchs who wanted to buy a property at through which you can own property in the United Kingdom. a shell company, even an offshore shell company, and if you own it through an offshore shell company, you do not have to say who really owns that property and lawyers are available to advise you on these complicated transactions, which which creates an opaque ownership structure of some of our most valuable homes in the UK, approximately 84,000 homes here in the UK are anonymously owned.

We have identified £6.7bn of UK property that has been purchased with suspicious wealth. 1.5 billion of that, around 150 property titles, have been bought by Russian individuals who Whether accused of corruption or with close links to the Kremlin, we find British property worth £830 million owned by Russian individuals through companies phantom based in our Crown Dependencies and overseas territories, and between 10 and 20 major houses have been sold to oligarchs who normally owned them. a third party, could have been a lawyer, could have been an intermediary, didn't really have much dialogue with the director and a fleet of cars arrived and all the windows were blacked out.

Later he realized that very unpleasant situations were occurring with people. being murdered and falling out of windows, recent events in Ukraine have shown that all previous thoughts and suspicions are as bad as they could be. If those buyers invested money here to wash it, then you wish you had nothing to do. With it you ultimately want to defend your wealth and your reputation and the city of London is the perfect place to come if you want to do that. Our very plaintiff-friendly defamation laws make the High Court a perfect place to bring your successful defamation claims.

The City of London is home to some of the world's leading law firms who can help you bring them to you when questions about Polygox are asked. find investigative journalists, including those in financial times, lawyers try to silence them. I've had a little. of experience in high court battles with powerful figures from the former Soviet Union there is an entire industry based in London big heavyweight reputation management law firms appeal to the press and broadcasters newspapers are often vastly outnumbered There are vexatious cases that come in just racking up bills, delaying things, causing problems, making editors think, oh God, do we have to do this?

Even when we try to expose wrongdoing, kleptocrats use their resources to shut down the conversation and lawyers make a lot of money. but we supported the oligarchs, we were involved in a case, they owed us money and we wanted to reach an agreement, but they said no, we are not going to pay them, so we had to go to court. One day a very large individual came to our door and made it clear to us that we should drop the case. One man had quite a few gold teeth and was built like a gorilla. He was a threat.

One of the attractions of being in London is the network of lawyers, accountants, oligarchs, kleptocrats who do business with English law. provides a seal of legitimacy: we have identified 81 law firms, 86 UK banks and, astonishingly, 177 UK educational institutions that have accepted or moved dirty money from around the world. The Russians own our newspapers. Their children are in elite public schools. Their properties are in Mayfair. having one or two properties where people are now on the sanctions list makes you think I'm doing the right thing, look at the house of lords and the number of fortunes made in the soviet union, whether by nationals of the former soviet union or peers who rent their legitimacy to highly questionable oligarchs to sit on the boards of their companies look at the political donors who buy access to our highest-ranking elected officials, from the prime minister on down.

I am often asked to address Commonwealth political representatives on how to ensure proper accountability now I do so with shame. I feel disingenuous not only because of the way we have allowed dirty money into the country, but because that dirty money has infected the public domain and then infected our politics. about the way we responded to the kovid pandemic, we talk about a chamocracy, meity contracts, look let's say lord lebedev, does it matter that he is the son of a former kgb officer? Does it matter that his fortune was earned in a place governed by kleptocratic rules?

Importantly, conservative donors have roots in the Russian kleptocracy who will, of course, insist that they are simply legitimate businessmen, but the source of their wealth is not an ultra-corrupt system. They are connected at all levels. We have big cities, gentlemen, former ministers sitting in their positions. together the integration of Russian companies with London's political and business elite is complete, you can buy a bit of university and name a wing of an art gallery after yourself and suddenly you are a businessman or a statesman instead of being a thief or a despot Britain has a very open financial heart but it is always vulnerable to dirty money coming into the country and it is very important in that situation that you have very clear and well-enforced rules and that is something that Britain simply does not have .

Big questions have been asked. For years on the UK's law enforcement record, UK law enforcement agencies are often simply outmatched by big-time lawyers who worked for corrupt and criminal individuals. The four serious offices, for example, have a budget of 50 million pounds a year, any oligarch worth his salt earns that amount. of money in less than a week I really hope the UK government ensures the national crime agency, serious fraud office and others haveteeth that can bite, we had to have a war to bring all this to a head and it is a shame that so many people have died as a result the crisis in Ukraine has marked a real turning point that we are now waking up to because a kleptocrat has sent troops to a neighboring democracy to the fact that this dirty money is a weapon with kleptocrats they are at war with democracy there are a number of legislative changes that have been talked about for a long time and the government has delayed and failed to implement those things over a really long period and that's how we got to where we are now, David Cameron promised.

He told me in 2015-2016 that he would introduce a bill that would allow us to have a public registry of the beneficial owners of properties that had been acquired through foreign entities. The Economic Crime Belt that the government recently passed is landmark legislation that brings forward the long-promised and delayed property registration Foreign companies buying property in the UK have to tell the land registry who actually owns and controls those companies. It is hoped that this will be the beginning of the end of the people hiding behind offshore vehicles and for whom everyone will be held accountable. the beneficial owner of anything, be it a plane, a yacht or a house, the economic crimes bill makes it easier to impose sanctions.

Unexplained wealth orders are easier to pursue. Unexplained wealth orders were a new investigative tool. Granted to law enforcement in 2018, it is a type of court order that forces someone with assets of more than £50,000 to explain how they could afford it if it doesn't seem to make sense until they have There have been four cases where they have been used successfully and the amount seized is a small part of the problem are the costs of not being successful and introducing them to the new Economic Crimes Bill basically limits the amount of liability police forces can have. if they are ordered to pay the costs that we will have. a draft law on economic crimes 2.0 within a few months.

I really hope that the next Economic Crimes Bill will really address some of the loopholes that still remain. Kleptocracy spreads like a virus and begins to change the way people deal with power with all this dirty money. that has come to the UK with all these fortunes made in kleptocracies, one must start to wonder if our political system is becoming more corrupt as a result to put an end to London graduates, London could become much less open, we can take serious action to limit. the ability of some types of people to come here, the political consensus is there, if you like the second option, which is to keep London a very open rules-based place, but trying to introduce new rules into the system to make it more difficult for people. who are really bad actors to disguise their money the government's approach to sanctions has been too little too late it is a knee-jerk response to a horrendous act of kleptocratic aggression by one of history's great kleptocrats we have shown astonishing tolerance until This moment I point out people who we believe are so connected to the Putin regime that if we confiscate some of their wealth that will cause this man to change course.

I first raised the issue of abramovic more than a year ago, when the opposition leader in Russian Navalny was imprisoned by Vladimir Putin Navalny said there that if the West really wanted to support democracy we should take action by sanctioning Putin's cronies at his around at the time when the government did not take action. It is important to remember that this is a much bigger problem, it may be called London Graduate, but in reality this is not just about Russia and our response seems to be that we want to try to pressure a kleptocrat. We need to dismantle our complicity with kleptocracy, wherever it comes from.

Take massive clampdowns on secrecy in the economy and the provision of secrecy by the big guys. In parts of the former British Empire, the UK is in an exceptionally strong position to crack down on kleptocrats due to our position as the so-called money laundering capital. The flattery service of this dirty money over all these years has now, ironically, put us in the position To strike the biggest blow, the measures the UK has taken will have clear costs. Exodus of companies from Russia. We have also seen announcements from professional services and UK-based law firms that they will decline to take the biggest hit. doing more work for Russian clients there will be a financial cost because dirty money has benefited certain sectors in the UK.

There are professionals who have benefited in monetary terms from the dirty money that flows through the UK from the services we offer, but there are many. people in the UK who have not become economically rich, what kind of society do we want? I think it's the end of the London graduate when I see it there is a huge gulf between talking tough about things like sanctions, dirty money and economic crime and doing something about it the UK is guilty of laundering the world's dirty money we help facilitate global corruption we in the West decided we would march into Russia bankers consultants businessmen lawyers and remake this collapsing communist empire in our own image we were not remaking the former soviet union in our image the new kleptocratic order was remaking us in its image this dirty money is poisoning our democratic institutions by bribing politicians to serve the interests of this small international oligarchy is undermining the free press these are the only things that separate us from these authoritarian regimes these institutions and this dirty money is corroding you.