Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

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I would like to write more books one day but, at the moment, I’m concentrating on my day job as Caucasus Editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. I also write freelance articles and worry about the Welsh rugby team. It’s money that supports and enables organised crime. And, so long as it brings money into the country, the British financial and legal systems are happy to hide and launder it, and frustrate attempts to find out where it came from. Their perennial justification is: if we don’t do it, they’ll just take their business elsewhere. An urgent account of Britain's history of welcoming corrupt capital...Mr. Bullough argues compellingly that though more anti-corruption funds and tougher enforcement are welcome, what is really needed is a change of philosophy: for principles to take precedence over the profits of a few.” — The Economist Royal historian Tessa Dunlop’s incisive, crisply written book, subtitled “A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy”, uses oral history techniques to help give the familiar tale of the relationship between the youthful Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip context and texture. By contrasting verbatim testimonies of ordinary people with the rarefied life of the royal couple, Dunlop gives the narrative greater immediacy and relevance than it might otherwise have possessed, while elegantly conveying a kaleidoscopic vision of 40s Britain on the verge of change. Now She Is Witch Nixon, Simon. "Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough review — how Britain became a dirty paradise for kleptocrats". thetimes.co.uk . Retrieved 20 March 2022.

In one galling story, an accountant from Azerbaijan was ripped off by a Russian con artist in England. It was a phony bank branch in a gleaming office tower in Hong Kong, as elaborate as anything in the film The Sting. He got some degree of justice, but the courts were astonishingly more worried about reputational damage to the profession than meting out justice. As Bullough tells it: The connections between Britain and America are profound—in foreign policy, in investment, in literature, in pop music, in the sharing of each other’s celebrities. Sometimes, the closeness leads the two countries into terrible mistakes, as with the Iraq War; sometimes, as with defeating the Nazis or filming This Is Spinal Tap, the exchange leads to something magnificent. The term Special Relationship—which was popularized, if not invented, by Churchill—has become a cliché, invoked increasingly dutifully by American politicians and increasingly needi-fully by British ones, but it still reflects a deep and enduring connection that goes far beyond what the two countries have with anyone else. The lessons were learned in the British Virgin Islands, where it dawned on some lawyers that they could make a decent living setting up shell companies for the rich overseas. It festooned to its logical conclusion in the Cayman Islands, which has been built entirely on shell companies to hide the fortunes of the corrupt elected, dictators, rich executives and of course every kind of criminal imaginable. An American financial lawyer found the BVI law firm (before the internet, when research was nearly impossible and telephoning was absurdly expensive) and told them what he wanted to set up. So they did. He even wrote the laws for island governments to adopt. Much has changed since Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed on their own vision in 1941, but one thing clearly remained constant: the strength of the bond between the two English-speaking nations.a b c d e "Oliver Bullough". Hay Festival. Archived from the original on 23 June 2017 . Retrieved 20 March 2022.

In sum, “Britain has essentially outsourced responsibility for stopping money laundering to the money launderers, and is failing to stop dirty money as a result. Much of the time the same bodies tasked with regulating professionals’ financial transactions are also charged with lobbying government on their behalf, while also relying on those same professionals’ membership fees to keep solvent.” It is business as usual in the UK. What first drew my attention to this book was its beginning with descriptions of Britain's acquisition of the Suez Canal and post-WWII period as its Empire collapsed, which are both historical periods I have studied so it was interesting to have another in-depth look at them in this book.

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Another example comes from today’s news, where Russian troops invading Ukraine find themselves poorly armed and without food, so that they have to scavenge. The reason? The huge buildup in the military budget went into shell companies for top generals and politicians, who all seem to have gigantic yachts in Cypress (another British colony that learned well), while draftees sent to Ukraine have to deal with food rations that expired (stale-dated) in 2015. Vladimir Putin’s skimming is estimated to be as high as a hundred billion US dollars. One of his accounts was discovered in the Panama Papers, where a modest cellist from St. Petersburg was the named owner of a shell company with a billion US dollars in it. Turns out he was a neighbor and friend of Putin’s when they were both just starting out. All this money is simply not going to what it was collected for. This is why Bullough can say countries like the Caymans, the BVI and most of all the UK are busy exporting poverty and suffering, by importing and investing the ill-gotten gains of criminals. In his forceful follow-up to Moneyland , Oliver Bullough unravels the dark secret of how Britain placed itself at the center of the global offshore economy and at the service of the worst people in the world. We met at a café on the first floor of a bookshop in a rather grand building on Trafalgar Square—a building that, funnily enough, considering the topic we had met to discuss, Ukrainian oligarchs had swapped between them in 2016 to settle an argument in the way that my son might give a small gift to a friend after they’ve fallen out on the playground.