Name: How Russia's war exposed the dark side of luxury London
Uploaded: 2022-04-28T02:45:41.000Z
Duration: 9 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

So we have got a four-bedroom, just under 4,000 square-foot Mews house.

This is what you expect of a £12 million house.

It's a great way to incorporate the natural light.

Everything in the kitchen is of a high specification.

So, as you would imagine, Miele appliances, you've got wine coolers.

I would imagine you could probably get a Range Rover in down here, and then maybe something

London. With its prime real estate market, luxury shopping locations and access to high-flying

social circles, the city's status as a hub for the world's uber-wealthy is well established.

We are literally a stone's throw away from Hyde Park, we've got Grosvenor Square.

But following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and resultant sanctions on President Putin's

oligarch elite, a spotlight has been firmly cast on the British capital and its complicity

If you're looking for somewhere safe to stash the proceeds of your nefarious activities,

London's a very attractive place to do it.

It's hard to come up with something more symbolic of the extent of Russian influence in the U.K.

We've got a flat owned by the deputy prime minister of Russia, overlooking the

Ministry of Defense, which he bought from the Queen.

Yep, right across the road from Downing Street.

Now, the British government is seeking to salvage its reputation with a clampdown on corruption.

And just how will London fare without its fix of forbidden finance?

If people can't trust Britain, if we lose our status as trusted jurisdiction, that in

the longer term is much more damaging to the U.K. economy.

When Russia mounted its war in Ukraine in February 2022, Britain was one of the first

Western allies to impose sanctions on the country.

As of May, those sanctions have reached over a thousand individuals and businesses seen

to be fueling President Putin's war chest with ill-gotten wealth.

That includes banks with total global assets of £500 billion and oligarchs and their families

with a combined net worth of £150 billion.

But behind London's ban lies a shady relationship with Russian wealth that is anything but secret:

A reputation for which it earned the nicknames Londongrad, the laundromat and Moscow-on-Thames

A December 2020 Home Office report found a “significant volume of Russian, or Russian-linked

illicit finance channeled through the UK economy,” including on things like “high-end UK real estate,

private school fees, luxury vehicles, and sometimes as donations to cultural institutions.”

To understand how we got here, we have to go back to the fall of the British Empire.

As former British colonies gained independence, the U.K. was left with a handful of outposts,

which were awarded special tax-exempt status to reduce their economic dependence.

The Suez Crisi of 1956 and subsequent financial pressures on the pound sterling led

the Bank of England to impose a temporary ban on lending to non-British borrowers.

This threatened a lucrative lifeline of commercial banks in London, and an informal compromise

Commercial banks in London could still conduct transactions on the condition that it was

between non-British residents and conducted in a foreign currency.

This led to the unintended growth of offshore financial centers in the last remnants of

the former British Empire, and London played a key role in facilitating the unregulated industry.

Those offshore hubs made it easier for non-Britons to discretely move their money to the U.K.

through complex structures such as shell companies, a type of business which operates in name only.

Britain's offshore network of financial centers, places like the British Virgin Islands,

provide an opportunity to create complex networks of what we call shell companies, layered one

over the other, to put distance between you as the owner of an asset and where the money

The rise of Britain's offshore financial network was kept afloat in the 1980s during

a period of increasing financial deregulation.

We have to go back to Margaret Thatcher's time, when she liberalized the financial services

Then under both Blair and Brown, the Labour government, we had a continuing deregulation

of the financial services sector, so that created an environment in which it was easy

to use corporate structures for nefarious purposes.

Then, in 2008, Britain's position as a hub for international wealth was cemented with

the introduction of a new controversial investor visa.

Dubbed the 'golden visa,' it granted residency and an eventual path to citizenship to anyone

who invested £2 million or more in the U.K.

Banks took this golden visa as a sign that the government thought you were legit, and

the government hadn't done any anti-money laundering checks.

The program was scrapped in February 2022, just ahead of the war, amid pressure over

Still, more than 12,000 golden visas were issued in its lifetime, of which 2,581 were

to Russian citizens, including at least eight sanctioned oligarchs.

Much of that investment over the years has found its way here, into London's luxury

And while many such investments have been legitimate, around $9 billion of questionable

funds have been parked in British properties since 2016.

£1.5 billion of that we have connected to Russians either accused of corruption or with

Tom Stocks is a senior investigator at The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Some of these assets are owned directly, in name, by officials or oligarchs, or perhaps

Most of the time we're talking about assets that are owned by very complex offshore ownership

structures; through companies in British Virgin Islands, or Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, other

Using a combination of public records and major data leaks such as the Panama and Pandora Papers,

OCCPR's Russian Asset Tracker has so far identified $17 billion of assets belonging

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Russia's war exposed the dark side of luxury London

compromise

period

tackle

reputation