In this extremely timely book, Oliver reveals how the UK became a hospitable location for oligarchs and kleptocrats from all over the world,
a place where they can hide their money, build respectable reputations on the back of philanthropy and party donations,
and influence those in power from professional facilitators to politicians.
Oliver's book asks searing questions about today's political and economic life in the United Kingdom.
He is particularly interested in what he calls buttering, which Oliver will no doubt explain to us in greater detail.
Oliver is an award winning author and journalist who specialises in financial crime and in the former Soviet Union.
Though the canvas on which this particular book is written is really, really global.
And he's also the author of the acclaimed Money Land, the book he published in 2019 on themes that are somewhat similar.
But the two books are complementary. And I have to say, having finished many length of sorry but a Letter to the World just recently,
it's a absolutely compelling read that should really have implications, certainly for for anyone interested in research in this field.
It's it's a very, very important and revealing book, but it also contains an agenda for civic action.
And I think that that aspect I find particularly inspirational.
So without further ado, I'm going to give the word to Oliver, who's going to in 15 minutes present some of the key themes in the book.
Then I'll move back here to ask some questions to discuss a little bit with Oliver,
and then sooner rather than later, we're going to open up the discussion to the audience.
We also have a very large online audience.
I think we have about 330 people registered for this event.
So and we'll be able to get comments and questions from from from you and the online audience.
I would only repeat this point just before we start our conversation for those asking questions
to be as concise as possible so that we can deal with as many questions as we possibly can.
Oliver, thank you.
Thank you, everyone, for being here.
I feel it's one of those evenings when perhaps it's everyone's instincts is to sit outside the Kings arms with a very cold pint of something.
So I'm grateful that you've chosen to come inside. I must say, I was in this room before it was fashionable.
This used to be the history library. And I studied. I studied here back in the late 1990, shortly before I moved to Russia.
I always had a slight obsession with Russia, and during the period when I was a student, I sort of felt that.
All I really wanted to do was go and live in Eastern Europe.
It was at the time in the 1990s when there was this period of transformation after the end of communism, when it felt like.
Sort of once in a I'd like to say once in a lifetime,
it's sort of more once in forever chance of witnessing the transformation of a of a of a whole half of the continent,
which had always been totalitarian or dictatorial or autocratic into democracies.
Rather naively, I felt that if I moved to Russia, I would be able to witness this, this transformation.
So I moved to Russia in 1999. As it turned out, three or four weeks before I arrived in St Petersburg, Vladimir Putin became prime minister.
So instead of witnessing the transformation of Russia into a democracy,
I instead witnessed the extinction of the various flickering signs of democracy that had developed in the 1990s.
He gradually as first prime minister and then President, then Prime Minister again, then president again, still president.
Time of speaking extinguished free political parties, free free businesses, free media is sort of extension of state control went surprisingly far.
He extinguished free football hooligans. Free organised crime.
He created what the Kremlin refers to as an. Vertical of power.
I mean, this idea that everything is subordinate to the Kremlin and it was a profoundly depressing experience,
really very few things about reporting on politics in Russia during the years that I was there were optimistic.
And, you know, naturally many. Western countries were quite critical of the tendencies that were happening in Russia at the time.
American politicians would fly in and lecture the Russians on the development,
on what they needed to do and so on, which was which we dutifully reported, of course, as Western journalists.
But there was always this strange. Sort of.
Back bit to the journalistic news cycle at the time, which was that every now and then, I mean,
it wasn't, you know, every month, but it might be every couple of months or every three months.
We'd get a call from editors in London who would say, some Russian guy has just bought a mansion in north London.
Biggest house after Buckingham Palace. Who is this guy?
Or some Russian guys just bought a football club.
Can you do a quick 800 words of who is this guy?
You know, some Russian guy is just given a large amount of money to, I don't know, some particularly notable cause somewhere.
Who is this guy? Can you just do a quick article on who he is, where his money came from?
And it felt very weird, really, that these people who were the very close circle around Vladimir Putin,
this very small number of very wealthy Russians, had done very well after Russia's transformation.
And they are a very small number in Russia remains probably more unequal than any large country.
This very small number of people who were in Russia called the oligarchs. They were considered to be the problem.
They were the problem. They were what was undermining democratic transformation.
All they had to do, it seemed, was get on a plane and fly to Heathrow.
And they were transformed instantly into entrepreneurs or or occasionally philanthropists.
I don't think they were called wealth creators,
but you very much felt that that was in the post and it was really annoying and sort of hypocritical really.
And a number of us, you know, sort of risk files or actual Russians.
So we found this very frustrating,
this hypocrisy whereby Russians were treated very differently if they were in Russia or if they were just dispensing largesse in London.
And so that's why we created what we called the kleptocracy.
Toure's kleptocracy, too, is a very simple idea.
I wish it were my idea, but actually it was my friend Roman Abramovich who who came up with it.
And the model was the Hollywood turds that you can do in California.
You go in a bus and drive around Hollywood. And the guide points out, you know, the house that used to belong to Charlie Chaplin or an American.
Pick your film star. They all live there, obviously, and it's all very exciting.
And everyone feels a frisson of nearness to the to the stars of the silver screen.
We did a similar thing, except instead of highlighting the houses that belonged to the stars of the silver screen,
we pointed out houses that belonged to Russian government ministers, oligarchs and so on.
And as and as we developed the tours and we did more and more of them,
we sort of expanded our focus because, of course, London hasn't been providing this kind of.
Wealth management services for questionable fortunes only for Russians.
You know, we had those areas and Kazakhs in Kyrgyzstan, you know, Azeris, Georgians, Nigerians, Angolans.
It's a target rich area, west London and north London.
I mean, essentially, the area we could cover on our bus was limited only by the attention span of the people on the bus or the traffic on the day.
Sometimes with particularly light traffic,
we would go up to Highgate and try and see if we could get a glimpse of that particularly large building which in Hurst,
which belongs to a Russian fertiliser tycoon. We haven't really tested people's patience by going into their home counties, but had we done,
there's obviously a lot of opportunities for gawping at luxury properties there as well.
And because of my role as a sort of guide on the Kleptocracy tours,
I gained a degree of notoriety among people who were interested in kleptocracy in other countries.
And when they came to London, they would often ask me out for a coffee to ask my opinion about what they should be doing,
which is why I ended up with this is a bit of a shaggy dog story,
but there was a point, which is why I ended up chatting to an American academic called Andrew, who was looking into Chinese money laundering.
Chinese money laundering is quite different to Russian money laundering because of the
different specifics of the Chinese and Russian sort of political and economic setups,
but, you know, has the commonality that the money tends to end up or if it ends up, it moves through London.
And Andrew was here in the UK to find out how that worked.
And he and the way he was doing this, it rapidly became clear was he was using me as a springboard to try and find access to people who
would know details of investigations into Chinese money laundering that were happening in the UK.
So he kept asking me who were the equivalent of people in America who were doing important work?
You know, who's the equivalent of the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York?
And I have to say, we don't. We don't we don't have anyone like that here.
You know, he's the equivalent of, I don't know, the Department of Justice's kleptocracy unit.
I'd say, well, we don't we don't have anyone like that either.
You know, his homeland security investigations, he's bringing those kind of cases against, you know, wealthy criminal immigrants.
You know, again, we don't we don't have that.
And it became it became embarrassing after a while because it felt a little bit like I recently read my children the the the Thousand and one Nights.
And there's that story of Alibaba and the 40 thieves when his brother was trying to get into the magic cave.
And he knows that the password is a foodstuff, but he doesn't know it's open sesame.
So we keep saying so open lentil, open chickpea and things and it keeps not opening.
And it felt a bit like Andrew was just naming American institutions until eventually the magic of my
contact book would open and I would reveal all these people tackling money laundering in Britain.
And eventually I have to say, look, I'm sorry that we don't have any of those people, that it's just a sector of society that exists.
Not, you know, and I was trying to come up with try to explain why this wasn't happening.
I said, because in America you do this, you are like the policeman to the world.
You enforce your law on the rest of the world. But in Britain, we don't we don't feel the need to do that.
We're not the policeman to the world. But what are we if we're not the policeman to the world?
What's Britain? And the image that came to mind was it was a conciliatory in a mafia movie.
I'm the kind of person who sits next to the doorman in the back room of an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn in a white vest eating spaghetti.
But that's obviously not a British thing and not a British stereotype.
So know so I put that aside. What is it was I always thought that you know, it's about that somebody stands there immaculately dressed,
you know, proffering advice when it's asked for getting people out of scrapes.
I did, actually, after I had this idea, Andrew left in a degree of disappointment, I think, to what I was prepared to provide.
But I sat there thinking about this and thought,
this is really quite interesting because it's not just a metaphorical butler of Britain's actually big in the literal business.
We are the leading provider of butlers to oligarchs around the world.
And I thought, Well, maybe I'll go and join an actual Butler class that training schools all over the place.
And so I did for a morning. I was a trainee butler only lasted a morning.
I think they realised quite quickly that I wasn't actually there to learn how to be a butler, but rather to try and reveal the whole butler industry.
So I wasn't invited back. But. But while I was there, I was talking to a very nice Canadian trainee butler,
and I asked her why while we were flower arranging why I was actually quite good.
It was like a basket. Anyway, they forgot afterwards.
It didn't stick. But. But, but why is this butler demand was Butler's.
And she said, Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Everyone wants their own Jeeves, but ha.
And of course that's it.
Everyone wants a Jeeves and James because and I did I did actually read all of the Jeeves and Wooster Brooks high volumes of them.
You haven't read them, but I presume most people here know it's such an educated crowd.
You will notice Mr. James is a is a is the fictional valet of a fictional posh Bullingdon trapped called Bertie Wooster.
And and Bertie West is always getting into scrapes caused by his own idiocy or the idiocy of his friends or relatives.
And Jeeves is always extricating him by the use of his enormous brain.
Jeeves is essentially, you know, endlessly competent and could be anything,
but instead chooses to earn money by helping Bertie with to get out of scrapes.
And some of the scrapes and some of the tricks he has to use to get Bertie was sort of scrapes are genuinely savage like is it perverts the
course of justice impersonates police officers he bribes police officers he assaults a police officer at one point and in his own words,
it felt the best course of action.
So to avoid any unpleasantness, which is the usual thing to say, certainly wasn't unpleasant for the police officer.
But but anyway, so Jeeves, this is what this is what we have become.
And it became, I suppose, because I'm a, you know, a Russian ist, my initial my instinct was this is a post-Soviet story.
This is a post-Soviet transformation. Right.
But but actually, if you look at just just the most obvious Russian scams, which have involved British involvement, you know,
there was a particularly notable one that Vladimir Putin was involved and he kind of came to
public attention by shutting down an investigation in the late 1990s before he was prime minister,
even when he was still head of the FSB, the main internal security service that predated the end of the Soviet Union,
that were Soviet, Soviet dirty money, was moving through London and the British offshore territories before 1991.
And if that was moving through here, then clearly this is a this isn't a post-Soviet problem.
This is something that long predates it. And that I mean, that's obvious with a moment's thought.
If you lift the perspective up from the former Soviet Union to other places, you know,
Nigerian kleptocratic money has obviously been coming through London or flowing through Britain or British office or territory since the 1960s.
I mean, really picked up in the 1970s. Money from the Gulf, money from South America, money from from the Far East, from Malaysia,
Indonesia and so on, has been coming here in huge quantities since way before 1991.
The pace may have picked up with liberalisation in Russia in the. China.
But clearly the problem predates the end of the Soviet Union by a long time.
And. The longer I looked into this, the more it occurred to me that this is essentially a post imperial story.
That I'm becoming a butler by becoming a sort of servant to the world's oligarchs is essentially what Britain became,
what it sees to be the world's oligarch on its own account.
A sort of bankrupt Britain after the Second World War could no longer afford to impose its will on
foreign countries in the manner that Vladimir Putin is currently imposing his will on Ukraine.
But we still knew how to do it. We just couldn't afford to do it anymore. So we started advising foreign oligarchs and how to be.
You know. Fevers. So is our word of other people's property rather than doing it on our own accounts.
If you are an aristocrat and you've lost your big house, but you still know how to behave like an aristocrat,
there's a lot of money to be made in being a butler for other people. And there is this key moment,
which I think is crucial to understand the transformation of Britain into a place that sells services to the wealthy of other countries,
no matter where their money comes from. And that was in 1955.
It was at a time when the world worked in a very different way to how it works now.
The post-war system, the Bretton Woods system, which I'm sure many of you are aware of, severely limited how money could move between countries.
The the the allies at the end of the Second World War felt that the unrestrained capital flows of the interwar period had been
a key contributing factor in the instability that led to the rise of fascism throughout continental Europe and elsewhere.
And in order to try and allow democracy to cement itself in the post-war period,
they needed to really restrict these capital flows to allow countries a degree
of stability and to get a chance to build democracy in the in the post-war,
particularly post-war Europe. And this was very successful, unrestricted economic growth all across the Western world throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
But it was very annoying if you were very wealthy because taxes were extremely high.
The it was a deliberate policy of this policy was to have punitive taxation rates on the very wealthy.
You know, it's kind of amazing to think about it. But, you know, marginal tax rates of 95, 97% were not that unusual in Western countries at the time.
And it was also very unusual, a very annoying system for the city of London.
The City of London had been the economic motor of the British Empire.
But as the British Empire drifted away. More and more countries became independent.
More and more countries turned to using the US dollar as their main currency of transactions rather than sterling.
And in the City of London, it became sort of moribund.
Actually quite amazing to read oral histories of the City of London from the 1950s, because it's so utterly different to what the city is like now.
As is one of my favourite anecdotes from one of these oral histories is a guy who used to work in a bank and on his lunch break came in.
A friend used to get on a boat to go to Greenwich. It wasn't like these fast catamarans that go up and down the Thames.
Now this was a real tramp steamer and they would go down to chug down to Greenwich,
drinking beer the whole way and eating sandwiches and chug all their backing.
And the whole round trip would take two or three and a half hours. By the time they got back, it'd be barely able to stop and then be so drunk.
And no one in the office of the evening would have noticed that gone because there was just absolutely nothing going on.
But there were still entrepreneurial people in the city who were keen to change this very sort of moribund status quo.
And importantly, for our purposes and for the purpose of this of this story,
there were two banks who really felt very much chafing at the restrictions imposed by the Bretton Woods system.
One was the Midland Bank, a high street bank in the UK, but a small one,
one that really struggling to break into the big time because of the restrictions imposed on on lending rates that it could charge.
And the other was a massive scale.
Not only bank, a Soviet owned institution that was based in London and which was banking the Soviet Union's dollars,
because the Soviet Union felt that keeping its dollars in New York was unwise because they could be frozen at a time of geopolitical tension.
And the Midland Bank wanted to raise capital so it could fund more lending.
And Damascus, in their old new bank, wanted to do something with these dollars it was keeping in London.
And they realised that if the West Coast can lend his dollars to the Midland Bank,
that it was beneficial for both of them because the Midland would have money it could essentially use to fund lending and the West Coast controlled
the bank could earn an interest rate that was illegal in the US where there were strict limits on the lending rate that could be charged by banks.
So they sort of did this little trade between themselves and that wouldn't really amounted to very much had the later they'd been the Suez crisis.
And because of the Suez crisis and the humiliation that followed,
when that when when the US really put very strong pressure on the UK to pull out of Egypt,
sterling froze essentially as an international currency that was this real massive sterling crisis and
the banks in London were desperately looking around for a new way of funding the trade that they funded.
And they picked up on this idea that the Midland Damascus came out of the bank of done and they started using dollars to lend up to.
And when they did that, they made an amazing discovery. I mean, a world changing discovery.
I mean, possibly one of the most important discoveries of the second half of the 20th century,
which was that if you use dollars in the city of London, British rules didn't apply because the British rules apply only to sterling.
And American rules don't apply either because American was only applied in the United States.
So these very strict limitations on the movement of money around the world which applied universally and really
restricted the interest rates that can be charged and how money could be moved around just didn't apply.
They had invented an entirely rules free space just by using dollars in London and all of the networks of the British Empire,
which had previously moved Sterling around the world, were repurposed to move dollars,
and these dollars were could move freely and moving money freely, without limits,
without having to do any compliance, any of the things banks have to do is a very profitable thing to do.
Basically, that's how, you know, the City of London is reborn as a banking centre by moving dollars,
and they needed a term for this legal space that created because they had to keep two sets of books,
one, the boring of sterling denominated transactions to these exciting buccaneering rules, free transactions, what you call a space with no rules.
Well, there is a legal concept which existed at the time.
That's what happens if you get in a boat and you voyage out to sea, away from the territorial jurisdiction of any government that's called offshore.
And this is where offshore comes from. This is the invention of offshore.
And if you look at what they were doing, they were allowing the owners of money, any money,
the Soviet Union or geopolitical foe, to evade the restrictions placed on them by other governments.
In that case, the United States, our closest ally.
We were making money earning fees from allowing the Soviet Union to dodge restrictions placed on its activities by the United States.
And this market grew enormously from about $4 billion a year in the beginning of the 1960s to 40 billion by the end of the 1960s.
The offshore dollar market in London is now worth about $3 trillion a year. It's by far the biggest market in the world.
But really, all dollars are now offshore.
It became so big that the onshore restrictions collapsed under the weight of this capital flows because all the banks moved to London,
because what was the point of banking anywhere else would you had to go somewhere else? You had restrictions in Germany or France or Japan or the US.
So they came here. So all the other countries reduced their restrictions too, and money was able to move freely.
The post-war Bretton Woods system, designed to limit the movements of money, to create stability,
to allow governments to build democracy safe from the sort of speculative fervour of the owners of wealth that collapsed too.
And we ended up with the world that we don't have that we have now.
And this is the story of the growth of kleptocracy, really, of kleptocracy not just in Russia and Ukraine and Azerbaijan,
but in many of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, in many of the countries of the Far East of South Asia and so on,
in the all of the elites of these countries have been able to move money through and spend money in London unchecked and unregulated,
because this is how London now makes its money with astonishing and huge impact on our country and how our country has changed.
And also, above all, in the rest of the world. So that's what I mean by being Butler to the world.
But suffering is these services whereby we earn fees by helping anyone who
can afford to pay them to evade the restrictions imposed by other countries.
You know, what is Butler the is about far more than just moving money unhindered.
It's about investing that money. It's about hiding the origins of that money.
It's about using defamation proceedings to attack journalists who might reveal the origins of that money.
It's about being able to sue the owners of that money in British courts.
It's about my favourite example. It's one that was exposed after the book came out by the researchers Alexei Navalny,
a Russian anti-corruption activist who revealed that the Qataris are the biggest actually talking about the Arabian Nights,
the Qataris and the that the biggest the time super yacht of unclear ownership anywhere in the world.
He revealed that it probably belonged to Vladimir Putin and he had a crew manifest every
single member of the crew of the Qataris and worked for the Kremlin's guard service,
the sort of Secret Service that protects the president of the Russian Federation, except for one, the captain.
And he was, of course, British, because they always are. I mean, thank you.
Thank you, Oliver. Let me start with a question about one of the things that is most striking about
your book is the speed with which some of your lead characters in the book,
some of these Russian Ukrainian oligarchs get to the very heart of the British establishment.
They do so in real time. They're still disreputable.
Back in the former Soviet space, they may be even undergoing investigations in the United States as one of the main characters in your book.
In the U.K., they will be seeing royalty. They will be donors to political parties.
They will be using blue chip facilitators, the leading law firms, the leading banks.
They will become important donors to the leading cultural institutions, think tanks.
The question is, how could this happen? Yeah, it's it's true.
There's a sort of it's like being in an airport where you have one of these fast track immigration lines, which you had to pay for it.
There's a sort of fast track immigration line that most people,
if they have to get a visa and then live here for a generation or two before anyone is prepared to accept that they're actually British.
If you if you can pay money, then it just takes you to three years.
Really?
I mean, the example I write about in the book is a gentleman called Dmitri Firtash, a Ukrainian gas tycoon who made a fortune by working with Gazprom,
the Vladimir Putin's gas company, to sell gas to Ukraine as a tool of Russian foreign policy.
He made a very large fortune doing this far more money than he could spend in Ukraine.
So he brought the money here, and that was in 2007.
And within four years, thanks to the generous donations he'd given to another of the university, I believe it's somewhere in the fence.
He was welcome to the Guild of Benefactors of Cambridge University.
He had been introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh as this astonishing photo of him shaking behind him.
Awareness. Long red robes. He'd been given a special medal for his outstanding philanthropy.
He bought himself a mansion in central London. It's one of those iceberg mansions that has as much under the surface as it does above the surface.
If you look on the on the plans, on the on the planning portal, which you can look up,
you can see it has a swimming pool about ten metres underground. It's extraordinary.
He he got to open trading on the London Stock Exchange.
He he was welcomed into the House of Commons to be the Speaker of Parliament.
All of these things, because it sets up the British Ukrainian Society with several members of the House of Lords in the House of Commons
associated with him on the board or helping him with essentially to it to ease his passage into the British establishment.
So, I mean, it's amazing that when when his big business coup happened in 2006,
when when Russia cut off the gas supply to Ukraine because Ukraine's objecting to the very high prices that it
wanted to charge when the Ukrainian government backed down and he said Mr. Tusk made his his first big fortune.
No one knew what he looked like. No one knew who he was.
A global witness, a campaigning investigative organisation, wrote a report about the gas trade,
and all they had was the shape of a person with a question mark instead of a photo because no one knew what he looked like.
But within four years, he's hanging out with the Duke of Edinburgh.
Another two years he's in Parliament, opening an opening trading London Stock Exchange.
And then and this is sort of the most amazing two facts that when crisis broke out in Ukraine, again, as it did in the winter of 2013 to 14,
the huge protests that became with the Euromaidan revolution, the president of Ukraine flees and Vladimir Putin annexes Crimea.
The government here is so keen to know what to do that they ask Mr. Fitzgerald to give him advice.
I'm afraid that his advice is that this is all the Americans fault and that they shouldn't impose any sanctions on Russia.
And then we sold him a tube station, which is amazing.
I think he's the only private owner of a tube station, certainly in London, possibly in the world.
And I mean, it was a disused tube station.
It was used by the Ministry of Defence as an office, but it's still got all the platforms, the shops, everything.
I mean, it's kind of amazing. I haven't been in it myself, but my friends have been down to the platform level.
This is just extraordinary. It still looks like a tube station.
So that kind of weird, you know, shiny tile, purple tiles that you got in front of old tube stations.
And it is an amazing demonstration of our willingness to bottler for anyone who can afford our services,
that we integrated him into our establishment so fast and provided him with all the all the
sort of reputation management services that he needed and the contrast with us in the Americas.
As I was saying, the Americans are the policeman of the world.
Is that while this was happening this whole time the FBI was investigating him and the trades he'd been involved in and two weeks after.
We saw it in the tube station. The Americans indicted him on corruption charges and he's been stuck in Vienna backing extradition ever since.
So he's never got to enjoy his tube station. It's just sitting there unused.
We used to feature him on the photography tours. He was all he was.
It was my favourite because I used to cry and he was always my favourite character.
His house was my favourite because every time we turned up he'd call the police or whoever was in that.
He wasn't in there, he was in Vienna.
Whoever was in there would call the police and say, Yeah, because the problem is if you're supposed to, it's just a house, right?
I mean, your is on Belgrave Square along with Europe, but it's still just a house like any other house above ground square.
So this was this is more fun because you tied up and sat outside and then the police would come and them and then we'd have to explain who we were.
And that was more fun. So we liked him for that.
Oliver In the book, you serve a British regulatory capacity, guys in the financial sector and also law enforcement capacity.
And the picture you paint is absolutely appalling and I work on these things.
But even reading the way you pin this out, I have one one example here that really struck me.
The command and control centre of the National Crime Agency,
which is one of the crucial entities this regard, loses its entire workforce every three years.
Yeah, I mean, that's the turnover. The salaries are bad, people are demoralised.
And law enforcement and financial experts in the U.K. are completely outgunned,
especially in terms of the high quality legal services that these these all the guards are able to bring in to any minor confrontation.
Yeah. Tell us a bit about it. So all our law enforcement and regulatory bodies are both badly designed and underfunded.
Faces a spectacular double whammy of failure. Know the National Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office, the Metropolitan Police,
City Police, who are the sort of lead agencies for tackling financial crime,
I mean, almost hilariously underfunded compared to the resources that are put in place by the the oligarchs to defend their wealth and.
I mean, even small things that can be done in the Companies House Corporate Registry, which is, you know, registered thousands of companies every day.
And it is it is has been for a long time the leading provider of the shell companies
that are loaning money out of the former Soviet Union in huge quantities.
The really big money laundering scandals like Danske Bank and Swedbank and so on have all been hidden behind British shell companies.
That is Europe. But you can you could go in like, well, I'm talking create a company in 50 minutes.
It goes to £12, you know, checks the information you provide.
It is it is a dreadful system. And the is about lack of resourcing.
You know, it is technically a criminal offence to create a company and lie on the on the documents.
But but it's incredibly unusual for anyone to be prosecuted. The only prosecution that I know of is a man called Kevin Brewer,
who created companies in politicians names to show them how easy it was to create fake companies.
And he was then prosecuted for creating fake companies, which is genuinely insane.
I mean, it's alarming. I mean, but then there's also that the the power structure of the system.
You know, we do have anti-money laundering regulators who are supposed to check our enabling industries,
you know, the lawyers, the accountants and so on. But we have 26 of them.
Those countries have three of most. We have 26 is fragmented just for accountants.
There are eight different anti-money laundering regulators and they can pick and choose between them at will if you're being regulated.
But when you don't like it, you can just move to another one, which is a little bit like playing football.
And if you don't like the referee's decision, you can just go move to a different pitch and and in that case the referee wouldn't the salary.
So obviously the referee isn't going to be too strict in imposing the offside rule.
I'm my favourite favourite, if that's the word of the anti-money laundering regulators, is the faculty office of the Archbishop of Canterbury,
which has been regulating notaries public,
who would rather with it branch the legal profession since the 16th century as a result of the divorce deal cooked up for Henry V.
If the facts of a part of our anti-money laundering regulatory system exist because of Thomas Caldwell's divorce deal with the Irish,
we know that this is not a system that was designed.
It's just something that, like so many things in the British Constitution, we just sort of stumbled into being a kind of will this do sort of way.
And as a result, money laundering isn't stopped, according to the estimates of the National Crime Agency.
And it's very much a finger in the air estimates £100 billion to be is laundered through the city of London every year.
I mean, maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe it's smaller. We don't know. That's just a one with eight zeroes after it.
But it's an incredible amount of money and every single one of those patterns has
been stolen from countries that desperately need to be moved through a country that,
frankly, doesn't. And that is it's a national scandal.
And I really don't understand why it doesn't get more attention all.
Oliver, tell us a little bit about the difficulties of doing work in this field and in particular
the legal the role of lawyers in limiting scrutiny of oligarchs and their facilitators.
We've seen in the media a number of journalists, Catherine Belton, Tom Burgess, yourself that have undergone lawsuits.
Could you tell us a bit about the legal profession in the UK and the role it plays in this?
Yeah, I mean, we have very strict rules around defamation in this country,
also very strict rules about data protection, which are in some ways even worse.
And they do make it very hard to write about oligarchs and rights, about the very wealthy.
It's interesting talking to American journalists about the stories that they have not been able to publish.
And they'll say, oh, I had this, you know, this tip off, but I have managed to stand it up.
You know, I never managed to publish because I couldn't nail down the facts. Whereas in Britain, a regulated yes, it's now all I could do.
I'd never had a whistleblower. I had all the documents, all the information, but I couldn't publish it because of the risk of being sued.
And and it isn't saying it's just the fault of the lawyers is understating how pernicious the system is because it makes it sound like that.
I have somewhere a drawer of stories that are ready to go that I've written and prepared and they're all ready.
And if they just change the law,
I'd be able to sort of send them all out on Twitter and everything would be great because it isn't just the lawyers that stop you.
That's there's a because the first step is, I think, well, will I be ever be able to get this published?
And if the answer is no, I'm not even going to bother starting the research into an article.
If I, if I, if I do, you know, think I might be able to get it published, I'll take it to an editor.
And I say, when you commissioned this, the editor, he might think or she might think,
I'm never going to get this published, never going to get this through the lawyers so they won't commission it.
And then the lawyers, if if I manage to think it's a good idea and the editor agrees, then I write it.
The editor approves it, we take it to the lawyer, and then the lawyer will say, No, there's no point because we might get sued.
Then it only then if it goes through those three stages, might it be published, at which point we might actually get sued.
So. And the extent to which this self. Censoring happens and it is censoring.
You know, I was talking to a friend who works for one of our national broadcasters that recently
did a film on one of the big oligarchs that had that film on file for three years.
And they only ran it because of the sanctions that have been put in.
They've been sitting there for ages that they haven't had any legal letters about it.
They were just worried that they might get suits. They never published it. You know, this said self-censorship reaches almost absurd levels sometimes.
I am I have a friend who wrote a book about a giant financial fraud, the Malaysian one IMDB scam, and he wrote a book about $1,000,000,000.
Well, it's a very good book. And he couldn't get it published in this country because the main protagonist in
The Fraud had hired a British law firm to basically threaten British publishers,
British distributors and so on with legal action if the book ever was published.
The book finally was published after about a year, the very brave small publishing house took on the risk of publishing it here.
And unfortunately, nothing, nothing came of it. It was it was absolutely fine.
And I wrote an article about the fact that it had been finally published and the law firm
acting on behalf of the this the protagonist of the book was able to threaten that publication.
And the article about the book being published was never published.
Even though I wasn't writing about the original crime, I hadn't said almost anything at all.
I was just writing the process of how difficult it is to publish a book in the face of legal pressure.
But it didn't matter. The editor was so risk averse that the article was never, never happens.
And that's case. It's almost a matter. Censorship. It was a censorship of an article about censorship.
And that's the difficulties. I don't overstate how it's annoying, but I mean,
it's not like it's not like journalists in Azerbaijan are put in prison or journalists in Russia who are killed.
It's not it's not that bad, but it does mean it does limit the amount of information that is out there.
And this has a sort of vicious circle effect because, you know, in other countries,
when journalists are able to publish articles about corruption and financial crime,
that can then provoke police investigations or law enforcement investigations, which will then in turn inform other journalistic investigations.
And you end up with this cycle whereby more and more information gets out there.
But the fact that there's this constant sand in the wheel of publications means that the police don't have the raw material
they need or due diligence information's working when the financial services industry don't have the information they need.
So essentially more and more people are able to get away with financial crime. You wouldn't be able to otherwise.
And it is a it is a bonkers situation and very annoying.
So Oliver, you've written many land your book.
This book is impeccable timing, but until February the people in the UK who are interested in this sort of
cluster of issues yourself a couple of campaigning investigative organisations.
Three weeks ago we had Margaret Hodge MP, Andrew Mitchell MP who've been championing this agenda.
But with the Russia Ukraine invasion of Ukraine, this really has come into into the mainstream.
But there's a curiously focussed character to the British debate.
It's, it's about Russian kleptocrats and, and the laundering of Russian money.
It seems to me I come at this, as you know, from a more African perspective, that we're not really having a systemic conversation.
There's no Nigeria, there's no Angola. There's certainly no Persian Gulf in this conversation.
And yet the mechanisms, there's no Chinese money laundering conversation,
but the mechanisms that elites from the world over use to launder their money and their reputations in the UK are they're not similar,
they're exactly the same. And the service providers are the ones you describe, say exactly the same individuals.
What do you make of that? For the chances of real structural reform in the UK is the response to the Ukraine crisis and the invasion of Ukraine.
I think it has revealed two very interesting phenomena in Britain, one of which is this it's very reactive.
You ended up with a crisis and an all of the oligarchs assets were frozen, but those assets were the same assets four or five months ago,
earned in the same way, moved here in the same way, spent on the same things.
They're the same people. What changed was there was a geopolitical crisis.
So that so that was not a law enforcement decision.
There was no law enforcement decision that this is a political decision made in response to a political crisis.
And that is what we see again and again and again. There's no proactive law enforcement response to financial crime.
We're not saying we're not we're not freezing. You know, for example, the case in in America to meet your firtash test,
they investigated him because they felt he had broken the law and they got an indictment in the grand jury in Chicago,
and they unsealed the indictment and they're trying to extradite him in this country.
It is entirely a response to have got to be a Putin did. So this is a foreign policy decision.
It's been presented as a law enforcement decision. But but there's no law enforcement aspect to it.
And we don't really know what the sanctions are intended to achieve.
It's never really been explained to they exist purely to deny these assets to Vladimir Putin.
Government or are they supposed to be? We keep hearing these ludicrous gimmicks being thrown out by the government like them.
I mean, Michael Gove came up with this idea that that we could repurpose these these oligarch's properties to house Ukrainian refugees.
You know, that was that was 1 to 2 months ago. And mysteriously, nothing more has been heard of that.
And it's so there's this sort of kind of. Timeless.
Clueless government response to a crisis.
But there have been specific actions taken and specific actions promised, which I think elucidate a second point,
which is equally important, which is that the government did pass a set back in January.
A government minister resigned at the dispatch box in the House of Lords because of the lack of action on economic and financial crime.
Lord Agnew I'm so disgusted he resigned in response.
After the Ukraine crisis, however, we got very quickly an economic crime act intending to impose transparency on shell companies that own
property in the UK and do a couple of other technical changes to unexplained wealth orders and other things.
And now we promised a new economic crime bill which would supposedly clean up companies house.
So yes, the government is doing something great and the government is able to stand up and say,
look at all these world leading activities that we've undertaken.
I'm. But there's no extra resources to impose to enforce these rules.
There's no extra money for the National Crime Agency. They've announced the creation of K Cell, the Kleptocracy Unit within the National Crime Agency.
But there already was an international corruption unit. It's just a rebranding of the same thing.
There's no new people. There's no new money. There's no new political cover for this.
Instead, you have a new law has been passed and that's the sum total of everything.
I mean, we had, you know, Margaret Hodge and Andrew Mitchell managed to force through during the Theresa may premiership,
managed to force through an amendment that imposed transparency on all tax havens,
the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and so on, which is important and valuable.
But there's no new resources being made available to these places to allow them to implement the law.
The law was passed and that's the problem solved from the government's perspective, and this is a sort of almost performative method of government.
So I keep trying to think of a mechanism for metaphor to describe what this is.
You see, it's an environmental regulation as well.
You know, last year an environment act is passed, but there's no resourcing of obligations to allow to enforce it.
You see it in all sorts of different cities and it feels a little bit like, you know, I don't know whether any of you when you were kids,
you had one of these steering wheels that you could stick to the back of you,
the driver's seat when you were a child and you could, you know, steer and DB and not drop as if you were driving the car.
And it was a bit like this is what the government's doing and Boris Johnson as a DB, but they're not attached to the wheels,
it's not actually changing the direction of the car or making it go fast or slow or doing anything at all.
It just looks like he's trying to go in for a work services. Another.
It just occurred to me where I was watching a making of a documentary of the last Bond film.
I'm not the last one from the last but one Miss Moneypenny driving and drove around
the streets of Istanbul and like a bike ride because erm and it was you know,
incredibly dramatic but on the roof that was the guy who played The Stig from Top Gear who had his own steering wheel.
He was actually driving the car and it feels a bit like that. But we've got, you know, this trust, this money being served.
This is whatever is as much as off the wheel. The car would still go wherever it's going.
And it feels a bit like that really, that they passed these laws,
but they don't because they don't provide any extra resources for the for the for the agencies tasked with enforcing these laws.
Nothing actually changes. But they get the headlines in the newspapers. And then next month we'll forget about Ukraine.
We'll be talking about something else. I think that's probably what I comes know,
that's a powerful corrective because there's a there's some optimism in certain
quarters that we've turned the corner and that things will have to change.
Quite optimistic, actually. A couple of months ago, I did feel like, wow, they've got it.
Isn't that amazing? You know, but but then they're actually cut the funding for the international corruption unit from 5.3 to £5 billion just now.
So, yeah, just, just recently it's a story I had a I did a talk at the Wimbledon book festival last night.
And in the afterwards, after it came out, a woman came up who works for one of the enforcement agencies.
I wouldn't say which one, but but and she and she said, you know, thanks very much for what you're saying.
Everything you're saying is is completely fits with my own experience of working in this area.
And I was saying, well, is there anything is there anything that you think I should be writing about?
You know, not individual stories, obviously, but but themes. Things I'm not talking about, things I should cover.
And she said, just just keep talking about how we we're just so few of us.
That's what we just so few of us. We're trying so hard and there are so few of us.
And there's this astonishing quote in the report by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee into Russian interference in the UK,
which was published in 2020. Boris Johnson tried to prevent it being published, in fact did succeed in having it.
It suppressed its law for the general election in 2019, but eventually it was published.
And there's this amazing quote from the director of the National Crime Agency.
For the record, the woman I was talking to yesterday was not direct to extract from national government just now, but she did then.
She then ran it and in which she was asked in the report, why don't you do more to tackle oligarchs?
And she said, I am she said, quote, I am bluntly concerned about the impact on our budget.
You can't tackle oligarchs like that. These are rich,
resourceful people who will defend their property with everything they've got and
the sorry tale of the unexplained wealth orders as a mechanism that look promising.
But yeah, I mean, it's another, you know, optimistic route, you know, after the they were proposed before the Salisbury poisoning,
if I passed the law passed before the Salisbury poisoning,
but they were always associated with it because they they came into force around the same time.
And there was an attempt to force around the time that Mcmafia was on the television.
So they were called the Mcmafia laws.
And they were going to be they were they were talked up by government ministers and they were going to finally drive the oligarchs out of the country.
And they are an important mechanism to create a mechanism in the if if if a judge imposes an unexplained wealth order on your property,
that instead of the law enforcement agencies having to prove that it's criminal, you have to prove that it's not.
So it is. You know, it's a it's a pretty good thing for cutting through the sort of offshore obfuscation to show companies and so on.
The oligarchs are good at hiding line, but. Because they never provided enough resources to the national community to use them
the first time that they were used really properly in anger against a sort of,
you know, a proper, you know, politically connected person from above.
You know, that's obviously the daughter of the former president of Kazakhstan to reorganise by the next case just totally fell apart humiliated.
Her lawyers the a very powerful law firm, you know, very, very resourceful and very good at their job.
And they just ripped the National Crime Agency case apart and it fell apart.
And they haven't used one since that was done. You know, the you know, the hole in their budget that they left would cost £112 billion.
And the budget was so huge that, you know, that that was it. But but what's awful is that this doesn't appear to have been anticipated.
If you read the you know, the impact assessments have and it's been well thought is published by the Home Office.
Before this happened, they anticipated that the cost of using that over a decade would be one and a half million pounds.
And yet they lost that much money in the costs of the other side in a single case that's not take which they lost,
which they lost, it's not taking into account their own costs.
So they haven't used them since on, on a, on a Christie's post person, they used them on organised criminals.
Oliver We'll have about 25 minutes of, of questions with the audience.
I just wanted to ask you very briefly a final question before we open the floor.
You mentioned the Firtash case in Cambridge, and I think it's obvious from your book,
although this is not the focus of your book, but it's obvious that literature,
the search for respectability through philanthropy to cultural institutions, sports clubs,
but also think tanks in universities, plays an important role in these elite trajectories.
Yeah, we are here in a university setting.
What can you tell us? Well, I mean, what's your message here? You know, let's not pretend this is new.
I mean, Mr. Mr. Rhodes still is just up the road, but the you know, it's.
I think there were many things that makes Britain very attractive as a place to put your money.
You know, we have this unrivalled cluster of corruption services available in the City of London that know what I mean?
There's this argument that if we didn't do it, somebody else will. But that's not true because there is nowhere else to do it.
The only country that can rival what Britain provide is the United States.
And the United States has the FBI. So we can't do what we can do, just bits and bobs of what we can do.
There are good private schools in Switzerland and there's places to hide your money in Switzerland,
but they don't have the wealth management services,
the defamation laws and the useful and biddable legal system that the international language in Britain has it all,
the whole sort of panoply of services. But I think one thing that we also have to answer your question is this very long tradition in, you know,
in our institutions and this sort of very long this is long and well-established good cultural capital of the aristocracy,
which, you know, and the fact that you can read about it and you see it in Downton Abbey, you can read about it in Jane Austen.
And what we're selling is essentially membership of the aristocracy.
That's it. You are we are transforming oligarchs into aristocrats.
And this, again, this isn't a new thing, but the present Duke of Westminster's father,
who I believe was also what a life called the Duke of Westminster, which is uncanny.
But he he used to when he failed in those, you know, origin of wealth,
things he used to write because he was very witty and very smart, knowing origin of wealth,
courage, because because it was, you know, his family came over here with the Duke,
with the Duke of Normandy in 1066, killed all the locals and stole everything.
But that was a thousand years ago. And that's fine now, you know? But but but what?
In the old days, it used to take a while, you know, to go to respectability, you know?
I mean, you could go to go to India. I mean, this is essentially what the oligarchs are doing is what princes do in India.
Right? You steal everything from India, come back here, build a big house.
And then in a generation or two, you are the Lord of something or other. But what people want is just that process.
But just in five years, we want we want integration into the Downton Abbey class within five years.
So you come over here, you buy your house, meeting square, you buy a mansion in the home counties, you buy your superyacht.
And I mean, look, we have the son of a Russian oligarch in the House of Lords.
I mean, look, this is literal, literal integration to the aristocracy.
It's kind of amazing and it doesn't really get as much attention as I think it deserves.
Thank you, Oliver. And we're going to open the floor. A couple of things we're going to have.
You can buy the book outside. There's also drinks at 615.
So keep that in mind. When you're when you're asking your question, I'd ask you to introduce yourself and to keep it brief,
because we want as many of you to be able to to to share views unless you're really interesting inexact science,
in which case you can go under pressure. So I'm going to ask this gentleman here.
Okay. So my name's John Barrows.
I think your book is absolutely fantastic. And to what extent do you think that the lack of will to investigate the role of Russian
oligarchs was linked with the contributions to over many years to the Conservative Party?
And also in relation to Abramovich, most of the things that we now know were known at the time of the litigation against Berezovsky.
Could you just explain why it was absolutely zero seemed to have happened between then and then.
Boris, thank you. So with regards to the first question about funding of the Conservative Party, I don't.
I'm not really a believer in conspiracies, to be honest.
And, you know, there's sort of always this dichotomy, dichotomy between, you know, couple conspiracy.
I always think that we need a third option because what you end up with is something which is accidentally discovered,
which is so beneficial to enough people that no one has any incentive to change it.
We don't have a word for whatever that is, that concept. But I think that that explains far more than either cock up or conspiracy.
I don't think that the Conservative Party is doing what it or it's doing or with so such a sluggish
about acting in regard to Russian money because of Russian donations to the Conservative Party.
Because to be honest, the Labour government was just as bad as they know as people many of them will now admit,
and the Tory government before them were just as bad as well.
This has been a long term thing that long predates the gifts of these wealthy Russian origin people to the Tory party.
I don't think that we have a Russian money problem. I think we have a money problem for which goes far deeper than a Russian money problem.
And I think a lot of it goes back to the origins of offshore finance in the 1950s and sixties, which is, you know,
what was London offering and what was London's unique selling point as a rival to Wall Street,
which is where the business had been, what London was was less regulated.
That was it was the only thing we had to offer was the fact that we could do what they could do cheaper because we didn't have any rules.
And I think there has been this this long term reluctance to impose rules on money in Britain
because out of fear that it will just go back to America and then we will end up with nothing.
And there is a story I tell in the book, which which if you read it, you know,
which is about the the Scottish Liberty Partnership, this very niche legal structure.
It's not a shell companies. It's a limited partnership, but it works in the same way.
And it was used to launder money out of the Soviet Union by the by the tens of billions, if not the hundreds of billions.
And this was revealed by some very good journalists and campaigned on by some very good,
tenacious Scottish politicians who really wanted this to be a real stain on Scotland's reputation because they needed to change the law.
And Westminster and the Treasury didn't change the law out of concern that it
would drive the private fund industry elsewhere to Luxembourg or Delaware,
because it wasn't only criminals who were using these structures, it was also the private fund industry.
And that and that that example is, I think, a very telling one about the the nervousness of politicians to to to to try and restrain the golden goose,
which is wearing all these lovely golden eggs. Thank you, Charles.
Thank you very much, Charles Godfrey from the Oxford Martin School.
The Suez Crisis brutally showed just how policy UK was compared with the states mid-fifties.
Why didn't the American authorities insist that the British authorities cut down the embryonic euro, a euro Eurodollar market?
And if I can slip in a second question in the book, leave Dmitri Firtash fighting extradition in Vienna.
And from what you've just said, he's still there. Is that changing, especially with Austria's changing attitude to Russia?
Thank you. With regards to the first question in the Eurodollar market, it took quite a long time for the Americans to notice it was happening.
It took a long time for the British government. They said something. The Bank of England kept it very much themselves for quite a long time.
If you spend time at the Bank of England archives, you can see these letters in which they're saying,
you know, they're not, in so many words, don't tell the Treasury. But there's very much the implication.
But what's interesting is talking to people who were in the Treasury at the time, they were very, very different places.
The Bank of England, even though had been nationalised, it was it was culturally substantially the same as it had been pre-war and going back.
It was it was public school, very suspicious of university educated people, dominated by people who had worked for the merchant banks,
particularly that class of the city, not the city more broadly, not the clearing banks, specifically the merchant banks, very public school.
You can see this. You see in the message they all call each other by their first names.
So the outgroup are all called by their by their surnames.
There's this guy, Geoffrey Bell, who was who became the first person to genuinely research the Eurodollar market.
And he was from had been educated at a grammar school in Lincolnshire and been educated in DRC.
So he was Bell. It was bell. So it's a bell. And he would find his lessons heroically.
Jeffrey would try to. Charles And then always what did Bell and so say why did and so the British government and realise for a
long time this is happening and the US Government didn't realise and I think why they then tolerated it.
So when they first got in the early sixties was because this is a period of
sort of growing globalisation and it was kind of annoying for multinational
companies to have these restrictions on moving money because it meant that
they really struggle to move money between different divisions of themselves.
So say Shell Oil, for example, was really struggling to move dollars between its own divisions.
It would have to fund its divisions in a country where the revenue in that country, which was quite hard.
So initially I think they quite liked the fact that there was this loophole in the regulations that allowed
their multinationals to move money through London because it kind of took the pressure off the US economy.
It was only by the end of the of the sixties when because there's this I've been going briefly, very nerdy in sort of international money flows.
You have this trilemma of the three options, you can either have governmental autonomy, fixed exchange rates or free capital flows.
You can only have two of them.
And if you have fixed exchange rates, which they wanted, all fixed against the dollar and the dollar fixed against gold,
and governments will tell me you couldn't have free capital flows because that would destroy fixed estrangement.
So what? Nothing came. It gave the world free capital flows.
So? So one or the other two you had to give. Which is why by the end of the sixties you get this very high inflation in the US.
And so the dollar has to come off gold in 1971. So this this very high inflation is essentially the blowback effect of the creation
of the offshore dollar market because it meant the money could move freely. And you ended up with this explosive growth in the money supply.
And so by the end of the sixties, the US government, Hastings,
anywhere in the Fed is talking about trying to impose its own rules on the Eurodollar markets,
which the Eurodollar market was the trials, you know, because they tried to offset that.
They tried to open an Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in London, and the Brits will be doing like open an office in Vienna.
So so essentially the genie was out the bottle by the time the Americans realised how damaging it was going to be.
Initially they thought it was quite convenient. We have a question in the back.
It's a lasting issue there. I don't know why it hasn't got more attention because it's such a mess.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, he's still there.
I don't think I mean, it's become one of these extradition trials, like your sandwich case, which just goes on and on and on and on.
And essentially, it's like almost everyone is terrified of making a decision.
I mean, but what's weird is I have a source, a source, an American source that I quote in the book.
He was telling me about why they chose to unseal the indictment when he was in Vienna because the only countries he went to were Ukraine with him.
There was no extradition treaty. Britain, France and Austria.
And because of the Assange case and there was one of the 911 connected cases which had
gone on for so long yesterday because they didn't want to see that when he was in the UK,
France is even less likely to extradite people to the US, to Britain. So the only other choice they had was Austria.
They didn't particularly want it to be Austria, which was the least bad option.
So they were hoping that Austria would be less bad for the UK or France, which probably is to be found in Britain.
But it's still not great from the perspective of trying to get a quick decision on extradition case when all the documents always can take a long.
Thanks. I'm Bridget from the business school there. Hello there.
Going back to the topic of the butlers themselves,
there was a very funny moment in March when some lawyers from Michigan of the law firm that you mentioned were
called by name on the floor of parliament as a sort of who's who of who is enabling these Russian fortunes to.
To be used in problematic ways in the context of Ukraine. At the same time, Iskandariyah was also a registered corporation.
That has since been rescinded.
But it was a B Corp is a legal status after rigorous application, and it's scrutiny where you're meant to have a benefit to society.
So it's often consumer goods like for those who have kids, those foods,
those little squeezy pouches, B Corp, I think, you know, a lot of alternatives to dairy products.
Those are B Corp. So, you know, these kind of hippie products.
I think that and Jerry's is a B Corp, right. But so is mitochondria.
So my question, although that since been rescinded but my question is clearly the right hand is not quite speaking to the left
hand in terms of forms of social praise or forms of scrutiny that are applied to the butlers themselves.
What's a way to to address that? Is it about naming and shaming?
Is that impeded on the floor? Is it simply about having more regular news stories?
I'm wondering if the approach to the butlers themselves needs to be different than the approach to the oligarchs?
Yeah, it's a really interesting point. I mean, the cool thing we need to do is prosecute people who enable financial crime.
It doesn't happen. You know, the if at the moment, even if there is a case brought against a big company for paying bribes,
invariably the company settles for the deferred prosecution agreement or occasionally an actual conviction.
But individual directors or executives are never found guilty.
That is a real problem and a problem in our law, but also the problem with the ambition of law enforcement agencies.
But more broadly, I mean I mean, I'm full of admiration in this country where they are very, very good at what they do.
You know, they are interestingly, quite even going to go into that because they might see me,
but they they are a very, very good law firm, as are Castle Rock.
So all of these firms are very, very good at what they do.
I had a fascinating I've had a fascinating couple of conversations recently with a lawyer who works for a different law firm.
And that law firm was retained by a Ukrainian oligarch to prevent a film I made about corruption in Ukraine from being shown in 2015.
And it was very difficult at the time for me and the people who I work with making this film.
We'd really gone to town in Ukraine and we're really proud of what we've done.
But this British law firm was retained by a Ukrainian oligarch to prevent us from showing the
film and successfully in no one would touch it after after the letters started going out.
And I don't know if you're a Game of Thrones fan. I Rostock, whenever she goes to bed, has a list of people she recites who she's going to kill.
And, you know, and if I'd had an hour to start this, the particular lawyers who'd killed this film would have been very near the top of it,
because I was so angry and humiliated by what they've done.
It was awful because, you know, all these people in Ukraine and really risk that, you know, that risked a lot to talk to us and we didn't.
There was nothing to show for it. I feel never a result.
Anyway, three months ago, after the the sanctions were imposed on the first Russian oligarchs,
I got an email saying, would you, you know, take part in a webinar on the world webinar?
Would you take part in a webinar about sanctions? And it was from this law firm, I was like, What on earth you think you know?
And I replied, I said, You know, you don't remember.
I mean, listen, I'll take part in your webinar, but I promise you I'm going to talk at some length about what you did to my film.
And the guy was like and the guy was like, What are you talking about?
What, what, what film, what, what? You know?
And I was like and so I supported him, forwarded him the first letter we received with the private and co-production and all this spiel,
this nonsense about all the various, you know, articles of the European Convention on Human Rights are violated or whatever anyway.
And, and he was like, That's interesting.
Yeah, I didn't I joined the firm after that happened, but I'll put you in touch with the person who wrote that letter and maybe,
you know, maybe you could you could come to some kind of arrangement about this.
Very unlikely. But all right.
And them and I went out for a cup of coffee with the with the with the lawyer had written this letter, and it was fascinating.
I mean, she's lovely. I'm really nice. And in fact quite similar backgrounds me also a Russell File also lives in Russia for
a bit and spoke Russian and all that but I had just gone on a very different path.
And what was interesting about it was I think we have this vision of the enablers as being like Scrooge McDuck cackling in a room somewhere and,
you know, diving into that vault full of gold coins. But she she saw that she was doing the right thing.
She didn't see the she wasn't. Yeah. You know, your work is oligarch to suppress the freedom of speech of this journalist that she was representing
her client who was being unfairly traduced by an irresponsible journalist and you know,
and use the tools available to her to do the right thing.
And it was amazing and a fascinating discussion.
And so, you know, I think it really opened my eyes to what the enabling culture is.
It's not. And culture of of ha ha ha, you know, it's people doing the right thing.
And, and it's actually I it, you know, I've actually met up with her another time and it was great.
I really enjoyed talking to her in a sort of wow way and.
Mhm. And it really, it, I have this,
I have this one thing I try and remember all the time is that there are very few actual villains in the world that there are psychopaths.
But leaving them aside, the vast majority of people think that the heroes.
And the vast majority people think they're doing the right thing. And and.
By their own rights. Maybe they are. Maybe they're protecting their family. Or they're protecting their clients.
They're protecting you other. And it doesn't really help to think this is a villain,
because then you just misunderstanding how someone sees themselves and then you're never going to get inside their head and change their behaviour.
So I mean the question I suppose for me, and it's also one of those very self-serving arguments,
more journalism, I'm a journalist is, you know, we need more.
Revealing of what the victim's stories are. So you can understand that if someone has been a natural resources minister and
inexplicably simultaneously built up a very successful natural resources company,
that's not a risk free and a cost free process. Someone paid for that, and that person is the victim.
And that's the stories that we need to tell. Thank you. And there's a question from the online audience, Claire.
So Paul Online asks, What is the likelihood of the money that has been sanctioned from the oligarchs to be used to help Ukraine in the future?
I mean, the future is a long time hold. I would say that the likelihood is the proven issue is not zero, but it's very near trends to zero.
There have been very few successful confiscations of assets which have been stolen by kleptocrats oligarchs in the past.
There've been some in relation to some about trade in Nigeria,
but they have to do some pretty complicated deals with his family to get those even they have to have been some in relation to Kazakhstan.
But but even that was a, you know, a bit of an exception.
I think a far more telling example is the case of Papua Lutsenko, former prime minister of Ukraine, who who,
after he fell out with the government, made the mistake of flying to America, where he was immediately arrested.
And the and and they prosecuted and put him in jail for corruption.
He was in jail for, I think it is. And they confiscated his his fortune or they tried to complicate his fortune.
But as far as I know, they still haven't managed to get hold of it. That was in I think he was arrested in 2000 to 2001.
And they've been trying to confiscate his fortune for two decades. And this type of managed it.
It is so well protected by offshore offshore structures and lawyers that they haven't managed to get out of this.
And so these caucuses become a kind of job. As far as job is, they you know,
they just end up being job creation schemes for lawyers and no no money ever actually ends up being returned very, very rarely.
And then you have the issue of if the money is returned, as it has been in in examples in Nigeria,
how do you know that the money isn't just going to be stolen by someone else? You know, it's a real challenge.
And, you know, I mean,
there's some farcical example with Equatorial Guinea where the the Obiang family that the younger Obiang junior had had a yacht,
a mansion in California. He had a very large and exciting collection of Michael Jackson memorabilia, series of supercars and various other things.
And then, you know, the American government brought a case against this is the proceeds of crime confiscation.
And then what do you do with it?
Because if you return it to Equatorial Guinea, it's just going to go straight back to the guy you just confiscated it from Americans, everything.
So so it's a real challenge. We only have 5 minutes left and I see seven or eight questions in the audience.
We won't be able to take all of them. I suggest that we take three questions, which we'll roll up in one go.
And Oliver, you get the final, final say. I see a hand over there and then another hand there and one here in the front.
And I suggest those of you who still have questions that you can ask them directly to Oliver in in the drinks next door.
Hi. Thanks very much. My name is Rachel Marra. I'm doing my doctorate in international development.
And as a South African, I'm very conscious of the suffering that happens when corrupt politicians can shift their money overseas.
My question is, I think you mentioned that there's a chapter in the book about what civilians can do and what we can do.
And I'd be interested to hear that, but also what the international community can do.
I mean, is there a space for United Nations or I mean, Biden's been doing the sort of 15% minimum tax.
Is there some kind of equivalent GS 20 something that can happen?
Is there some international context in which this can really be tackled?
Yeah. Thank you.
I'm bit of a miniature Oxford for Europe and we use the hashtag Russia.
But with Brexit, which you might might not want to comment on. But our question really was to do with the the case of Anne Banks versus Gulliver.
And I know it's a sensitive area, and I'm sure you'd be very careful about what you can say,
but do you have any comments and any lessons to be learned from it?
Thank you. And finally here. Recipient of Williams College.
We're sitting in Oxford. So very briefly.
Oxford University gets the largest of all the donations of all university of all universities in Britain.
Largest in two or three in the world. If you wouldn't recognise them, look up and down.
They have tall buildings and fences. And then you call it.
I identify, six of whom three made their fortunes in wretched aluminium mining.
What are they giving all this money for? The naming price in Oxford is 80 million, not these billions.
The highest give hundred and 75 million.
So what are they giving all this money away for? Where they get out of it?
And it doesn't matter anyway. I guess I'm over it.
If you just want to deal with these questions within 3 minutes. I know it's the only one.
Can governments do or can they? Is there a role for the UN?
I spoke to the guy who penned the UN Convention Against Corruption in the 1970s and he rather naively wrote a very concise,
well-thought-out convention on corruption. And then it was submitted to the governments and all [INAUDIBLE] broke loose.
You know, the the Communist bloc wanted to define corruption as capitalism.
The Arab bloc wants to combine corruption, Zionism.
And so it went on is sort of rather concise document sprawled to hundreds of pages and then never really came to anything at all.
Nobody knows what corruption is, right? I mean, it's just it isn't a defined word.
So one of the issues is the one thing I would love to see from academics, what we hear is,
you know, proper work to look at corruption, to define it to how it works.
It's typography is what the bits in Britain, the laundering of the money is.
That's still corruption or should we call that something else? At the moment, it's like we have we have cancer specialists.
We don't need the word cancer to describe all different kinds of cancer.
We need to separate out and, you know, dissect out all the different bits to find out how it works.
Because at the moment, the word is so vague, it's very difficult to know what it means.
As for Carol, Carol, this case is a disgrace. I mean, the fact that she was left alone and not backed up by the observer is a disgrace.
The fact that the court system subjected anyone to that is a disgrace.
It's great that she won. I'm delighted. But it is a demonstration of how our court system benefits people who are able to afford to use it.
And it isn't an instrument for justice. It's an instrument of vengeance.
It's I'm delighted that she won, but it should never happen in the first place.
It's what I think about that. As for what's the money for?
Well, like I was saying that, you know, they want to be aristocrats. Right. And as I was saying, they don't think of themselves as bad people.
They're entrepreneurs. They want entrepreneurs to with their money, you know, they spend it on this.
And also and this is not a flippant response. If you've got $8 billion, it's actually quite hard to spend it.
It's a lot of money. And and it keeps building up backs up all the time.
The interest on the interest, you know, it's just getting it out the door is a challenge.
I mean, not everyone can be Mackenzie Scott and she checks out, by the way, the 500 billion, 500 billion, you know, if you're just, you know,
and you want to have a bit of money for the super yachts and stuff, but you'd still be backing up,
you know, giving up, buying a big house, doing something, big houses.
You can have one, two or four or five. You're going to struggle to visit them every year.
I mean, you could buy an island, but again, the same. So, yeah, a big donation to a university.
It's it's immortality, you know, what's it this this like, you know, we die.
We die three times, you know, once,
once when we die once when the last person who knew us died and once when our name is said for the last time, you know,
if you're Cecil Rhodes and you've got your statue up there that people are going to keep talking about you,
you know, what was it you said after when he was dying that they don't change the name of countries, do they?
You know, I mean, they do tend to put it to good.
But, you know, if you've got a school of governance named after, you know,
implication against the person who that's named after them, you know, then he's this whole emotional thing.
Over. This has been fascinating, eye opening and very disquieting.
Thank you very much for joining us here today.