>There’s no question that London is the dirty money capital of the world.
>
>The UK didn’t just turn a blind eye to Russian money. We welcomed it. For many decades now London has been rolling out the red carpet to corrupt and criminal individuals from around the world. Britain is a very open financial hub. It’s really important that you have really clear well enforced rules. And that’s something Britain simply doesn’t have.
>
>There are key aspects of our legal and financial system that makes the city of London a great place to bring dirty money and launder wealth. We have now woken up. Dirty money is being seen for what it is, which is a poison to democracy. It’s taken the real slipping of Putin’s mask, an act of aggression so appalling.
>
>The UK appears to have completely lost its moral compass.
>
>This is really a tale of two empires, British Empire and the Soviet Empire. And the British Empire as it unravelled retained lots of outposts, British Virgin Islands, Channel Islands. They needed a new purpose. And the purpose they found was as providers of financial secrecy, and shell companies, corporate camouflage, ways for people to move through the globalising economy without leaving their fingerprints on anything. The engine of the multi-trillion dollar offshore industry rife with dirty money.
>
>This is how corruption went global. While the British Empire was doing that, the Soviet Empire was collapsing too. The greatest act of corruption the world has probably ever seen, the scramble in a few years in the ’90s to grab the wealth of the entire Soviet Empire, create this oligarchy that went then surging out into the world. And where this all meets is London, the place where dirty money comes to party.
>
>The origins came with the big bang under Margaret Thatcher when she started liberalising the financial services sector. And then that carried on under the labour government with a commission on deregulation. Over the past two decades, the UK has really welcomed in Russian money of all kinds, law firms, real estate agents, the government.
>
>There are statements on the record from Boris Johnson, our prime minister, from when he was the mayor of London, saying that he wanted to make London a hub for Russian money.
>
>If you’re a senior civil servant what you need to demonstrate to ministers is that you won’t cause trouble for business. We see it all the time in things like failures of financial regulation before the financial crisis, the failures of building regulation that have been exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire, the golden visa schemes which are introduced in 2008.
>
>The golden visas were introduced by the Labour government to attract wealth and capital into London. In theory, there were checks on this. But in practise, they didn’t work. It was abused by oligarchs and kleptocrats who wanted to bring their dirty money into London and use the scheme to establish legitimacy and credibility.
>
>It’s possible to spend gigantic amounts of money in the UK economy with a mascot. You’re supposed to tell the Companies House registry who the real owners, the beneficial owners, of the companies are. But in practise, it’s really easy to evade those rules. And fundamentally, no one goes after companies that just lie.
>
>It’s essentially a Wild West of information, which is unverified, and in some cases ludicrous. You can put forward any name, hide your identity. There are Adolf Hitlers, and Donald Ducks, and Mickey Mouses. It is so easy to register a company on Companies House, costs £12, you can do it in minutes. And crucially, no one checks the information.
>
>Usually, the applications are approved within 24 hours. They don’t actually have the statutory power to check the information, to investigate false information, or remove it from the register. This is one of those reforms that’s been talked about for years and nothing has been done.
>
>The next stage you want to layer to move this money around in a series of complicated financial transactions that will distance you from the money and from your source of wealth. That’s where the UK banks come in. Some 86 banks have been involved in obtaining, moving corrupt wealth around the world.
>
>The cash by the time it has got to London has probably already gone through a couple of British overseas territories like the British Virgin Islands.
>
>Step three is you want to integrate your wealth into the UK system. You want to buy assets, including UK property. Lawyers, real estate agents are on hand to help you do that.
>
>Once you’ve got the cash into London you can then basically use it like it’s clean. People aren’t bringing this money onshore to put it into drug gangs. They’re putting it on the shore to buy houses in Kensington.
>
>You can own UK property through a shell company, even an offshore shell company. And if you do own it through an offshore shell company, you don’t have to say who really owns that property . . . Roughly 84,000 homes here in the UK are owned anonymously. We have identified £6.7bn of UK property that has been bought with suspicious wealth.
>
>Finally, you want to defend your wealth and your reputation. Our libel laws, which are very claimant friendly, make the high court a perfect place. When questions are asked about oligarchs by investigative journalists, including those at the Financial Times, the lawyers try to shut them up.
>
>There’s an entire industry based in London, the big heavy duty reputation management law firms. They harangue the press and broadcasters. So even when we try to expose the wrongdoing, the kleptocrats use their resources to close down the conversation. And the lawyers make a lot of money but support the oligarchs.
>
>Look at the House of Lords and the number of fortunes made in the Soviet Union either by nationals from the former Soviet Union or peers who rent out their legitimacy to highly questionable oligarchs to sit on the boards of their companies. Look at the political donors who buy access to our most senior elected officials from the prime minister down.
>
>Does it matter that Tory donors have roots in the Russian kleptocracy? People will of course insist that they are just legitimate business people. But the source of their wealth is an ultra-corrupt system.
>
>They are connected at every level. We have City grandees, lords, former ministers sitting on their boards. The integration of Russian business with London’s political and business elite is complete.
>
>There have been huge questions asked for years about the UK’s record on enforcement. Often, UK law enforcement agencies are simply outgunned by the big lawyers that worked for corrupt and criminal individuals.
>
>The Serious Fraud Office for example, has a budget of £50mn a year. Any self-respecting oligarch makes that amount of money in less than a week.
This 👏👏👏👏👏
Try to explain that to a day to day jonny and you get downvoted.
It wasnt just the russian s oligarch s money profit from Syria or the dirty money that they did laundry through our banks to finance the now war in Ukraine.
It is dirty money from everywhere.
But if I am not wrong that was the aim of Brexit too, Theresa May stated in her speeches a few times that the idea was to negotiate with the world and turn the UK into a Tax Heaven Island, to compete with the Swiss Banks in europe.
Obviouslt Bojo who doesnt know much about the financial market but a lot about helping his mates, pissed on this idea.
The sad part is that Auntie Margie, back in the 80s would have been for this idea of auntie May, she did turn the Uk back then into a financial center as a way to make up the profit that we lost within the closure of the mines in the north and the already decaying british steel industry.
>We have now woken up. Dirty money is being seen for what it is, which is a poison to democracy. It’s taken the real slipping of Putin’s mask, an act of aggression so appalling.
This is pretty ridiculous. Everybody knew this was the case, but people with power and connections were getting very rich so that’s all the mattered, and they certainly don’t care about democracy. And although there’s now a focus on illegitimate Russian money, illegitimate money from the likes of OPEC and China are coming in as normal.
Became that when the first slave colonies were established.
4 comments
>There’s no question that London is the dirty money capital of the world.
>
>The UK didn’t just turn a blind eye to Russian money. We welcomed it. For many decades now London has been rolling out the red carpet to corrupt and criminal individuals from around the world. Britain is a very open financial hub. It’s really important that you have really clear well enforced rules. And that’s something Britain simply doesn’t have.
>
>There are key aspects of our legal and financial system that makes the city of London a great place to bring dirty money and launder wealth. We have now woken up. Dirty money is being seen for what it is, which is a poison to democracy. It’s taken the real slipping of Putin’s mask, an act of aggression so appalling.
>
>The UK appears to have completely lost its moral compass.
>
>This is really a tale of two empires, British Empire and the Soviet Empire. And the British Empire as it unravelled retained lots of outposts, British Virgin Islands, Channel Islands. They needed a new purpose. And the purpose they found was as providers of financial secrecy, and shell companies, corporate camouflage, ways for people to move through the globalising economy without leaving their fingerprints on anything. The engine of the multi-trillion dollar offshore industry rife with dirty money.
>
>This is how corruption went global. While the British Empire was doing that, the Soviet Empire was collapsing too. The greatest act of corruption the world has probably ever seen, the scramble in a few years in the ’90s to grab the wealth of the entire Soviet Empire, create this oligarchy that went then surging out into the world. And where this all meets is London, the place where dirty money comes to party.
>
>The origins came with the big bang under Margaret Thatcher when she started liberalising the financial services sector. And then that carried on under the labour government with a commission on deregulation. Over the past two decades, the UK has really welcomed in Russian money of all kinds, law firms, real estate agents, the government.
>
>There are statements on the record from Boris Johnson, our prime minister, from when he was the mayor of London, saying that he wanted to make London a hub for Russian money.
>
>If you’re a senior civil servant what you need to demonstrate to ministers is that you won’t cause trouble for business. We see it all the time in things like failures of financial regulation before the financial crisis, the failures of building regulation that have been exposed by the Grenfell Tower fire, the golden visa schemes which are introduced in 2008.
>
>The golden visas were introduced by the Labour government to attract wealth and capital into London. In theory, there were checks on this. But in practise, they didn’t work. It was abused by oligarchs and kleptocrats who wanted to bring their dirty money into London and use the scheme to establish legitimacy and credibility.
>
>It’s possible to spend gigantic amounts of money in the UK economy with a mascot. You’re supposed to tell the Companies House registry who the real owners, the beneficial owners, of the companies are. But in practise, it’s really easy to evade those rules. And fundamentally, no one goes after companies that just lie.
>
>It’s essentially a Wild West of information, which is unverified, and in some cases ludicrous. You can put forward any name, hide your identity. There are Adolf Hitlers, and Donald Ducks, and Mickey Mouses. It is so easy to register a company on Companies House, costs £12, you can do it in minutes. And crucially, no one checks the information.
>
>Usually, the applications are approved within 24 hours. They don’t actually have the statutory power to check the information, to investigate false information, or remove it from the register. This is one of those reforms that’s been talked about for years and nothing has been done.
>
>The next stage you want to layer to move this money around in a series of complicated financial transactions that will distance you from the money and from your source of wealth. That’s where the UK banks come in. Some 86 banks have been involved in obtaining, moving corrupt wealth around the world.
>
>The cash by the time it has got to London has probably already gone through a couple of British overseas territories like the British Virgin Islands.
>
>Step three is you want to integrate your wealth into the UK system. You want to buy assets, including UK property. Lawyers, real estate agents are on hand to help you do that.
>
>Once you’ve got the cash into London you can then basically use it like it’s clean. People aren’t bringing this money onshore to put it into drug gangs. They’re putting it on the shore to buy houses in Kensington.
>
>You can own UK property through a shell company, even an offshore shell company. And if you do own it through an offshore shell company, you don’t have to say who really owns that property . . . Roughly 84,000 homes here in the UK are owned anonymously. We have identified £6.7bn of UK property that has been bought with suspicious wealth.
>
>Finally, you want to defend your wealth and your reputation. Our libel laws, which are very claimant friendly, make the high court a perfect place. When questions are asked about oligarchs by investigative journalists, including those at the Financial Times, the lawyers try to shut them up.
>
>There’s an entire industry based in London, the big heavy duty reputation management law firms. They harangue the press and broadcasters. So even when we try to expose the wrongdoing, the kleptocrats use their resources to close down the conversation. And the lawyers make a lot of money but support the oligarchs.
>
>Look at the House of Lords and the number of fortunes made in the Soviet Union either by nationals from the former Soviet Union or peers who rent out their legitimacy to highly questionable oligarchs to sit on the boards of their companies. Look at the political donors who buy access to our most senior elected officials from the prime minister down.
>
>Does it matter that Tory donors have roots in the Russian kleptocracy? People will of course insist that they are just legitimate business people. But the source of their wealth is an ultra-corrupt system.
>
>They are connected at every level. We have City grandees, lords, former ministers sitting on their boards. The integration of Russian business with London’s political and business elite is complete.
>
>There have been huge questions asked for years about the UK’s record on enforcement. Often, UK law enforcement agencies are simply outgunned by the big lawyers that worked for corrupt and criminal individuals.
>
>The Serious Fraud Office for example, has a budget of £50mn a year. Any self-respecting oligarch makes that amount of money in less than a week.
This 👏👏👏👏👏
Try to explain that to a day to day jonny and you get downvoted.
It wasnt just the russian s oligarch s money profit from Syria or the dirty money that they did laundry through our banks to finance the now war in Ukraine.
It is dirty money from everywhere.
But if I am not wrong that was the aim of Brexit too, Theresa May stated in her speeches a few times that the idea was to negotiate with the world and turn the UK into a Tax Heaven Island, to compete with the Swiss Banks in europe.
Obviouslt Bojo who doesnt know much about the financial market but a lot about helping his mates, pissed on this idea.
The sad part is that Auntie Margie, back in the 80s would have been for this idea of auntie May, she did turn the Uk back then into a financial center as a way to make up the profit that we lost within the closure of the mines in the north and the already decaying british steel industry.
>We have now woken up. Dirty money is being seen for what it is, which is a poison to democracy. It’s taken the real slipping of Putin’s mask, an act of aggression so appalling.
This is pretty ridiculous. Everybody knew this was the case, but people with power and connections were getting very rich so that’s all the mattered, and they certainly don’t care about democracy. And although there’s now a focus on illegitimate Russian money, illegitimate money from the likes of OPEC and China are coming in as normal.
Became that when the first slave colonies were established.