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Londongrad

Vladimir Putin’s savage attack on Ukraine has brutally brought to the fore the phenomenon known as “Londongrad”.


Much excellent reporting in the past decade has revealed how corrupt elites from around the world launder looted money in the west.


In Butler to the World, [Oliver] Bullough takes the UK to task. 


Butlering goes far beyond accepting deposits from the world’s corrupt: it extends to procuring (palatial) housing for them, educating their children, honouring them in every way from naming rights at Britain’s world-class universities to royal patronage, as well as catering to all the minor needs the super-rich might need.


Bullough describes a postwar City of London determined to insulate itself from government regulation, ready to embrace innovations that would mean good business for financiers. He also highlights how in a world of hard currency shortage — withholding dollars was the means by which Washington made London give up Suez — there was a lot to like in allowing cross-border money flows that escaped national regulation.


American Kleptocracy, by corruption researcher Casey Michel, gives the US the same treatment as Bullough gives the UK.


These two books will leave no reader in any doubt that the US and the UK have a large class of “enablers”, or service providers such as bankers, lawyers, real estate agents, accountants and PR advisers needed to give dirty money a good home. 


The US enabling class may be the most dangerous, given its influence in the politics of a more powerful country.


Bullough makes a good case that there is something particularly conducive to “butlering” in Britain’s peculiar set-up. The country’s unwritten social codes; its upper class’s exclusive solidarity and unspoken obsession with money; the common law tradition and resistance to codified rules — all conspire to frustrate crackdowns or even the willingness to crack down.


In Britain’s financial elite, “chaps don’t tell other chaps how to behave,” writes the author. And so old peculiarities of British law, from Scottish limited partnerships to private criminal prosecutions, became perfect instruments for crooks to hide their money and silence their critics.


London and the US as safe havens for dirty money


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