Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Russian oligarchs, banks and businesses could have sanctions against them lifted if Russia's President Vladimir Putin ends his invasion of Ukraine and commits to "no further aggression", UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has said. You see in principle ‘we’ don’t really have a problem with the oligarchs. 

“Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf countries and some Latin American economies. We use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries, which account for close to half of world GDP. Because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top, accounting for it increases the top 0.01% wealth share substantially in Europe, even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively. It has considerable effects in Russia, where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore. These results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world.” Macro

“Here’s an irony of history: at the 1945 Yalta Conference (in Crimea, of all places) Russia argued that Ukraine was an independent country and worthy of its own vote at the United Nations, while the United States and Britain argued that it was a region within Russia. I guess history isn’t what it used it be.” –Matthew Stevenson, Counterpunch.org, 23 February 2022 After 40 years of allowing Russian oligarchs to hide their money and and wealth in Western banks and assets, granting them citizenship status and letting them finance political parties in the West, the EU leader Von der Leyen announced after the beginning of the Russian invasion that “ we will work to prohibit Russian oligarchs from using their financial assets on our markets.”

Boris, the Russian oligarchs and Page 3 model

UK’s [the West’s] dance with the Kremlin comes home to roost