Oliver Bullough - Butler to the World

BUTLER TO THE WORLD

Also by Oliver Bullough

Moneyland

The Last Man in Russia

Let Our Fame Be Great

BUTLER TO THE WORLD

How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

OLIVER BULLOUGH

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Profile Books Ltd

29 Cloth Fair

London

EC1A JQ

www.profilebooks.com

Copyright Oliver Bullough, 2022

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Typeset in Sabon by MacGuru Ltd

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78816 587 7

eISBN 978 1 78283 739 8

Audio ISBN 978 1 78283 994 1

Contents

THE BUTLER BUSINESS

A couple of years ago, an American academic asked me to meet for a coffee. His name was Andrew. He was researching Chinese money and he wanted to hear about Chinese-owned assets in London and what the British government was doing to ensure their owners had earned their wealth legally. I get these requests every now and then, thanks to my role as a guide on the London Kleptocracy Tours, which show off oligarch-owned properties in the pricier parts of Knightsbridge and Belgravia, and I like to help if I can.

We met at a caf 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 rare football card to a friend after theyve fallen out in the playground.

Andrew had come well prepared for the meeting and had a checklist to work through, which was clearly designed to generate a list of names for other people he could speak to. Which law enforcement agency was doing the most to tackle the threat of Chinese money laundering? Who was the best person to talk to at that agency? Which prosecutors had brought the best cases? Who had done the most robust research on the volume of Chinese-owned money in the UK, and what assets did that money tend to buy? Which politicians were most alert to the question, and how did they organise themselves?

Because of the shared language, Americans and Brits often think their countries are more similar than they actually are, which is something I am as guilty of as anyone. When I do research in the United States, I am consistently amazed by the willingness of officials to sit down with me and talk through their work. I call them without an introduction, and yet time and again they trust me to keep specific details of our discussions off the record. Court documents are easy to obtain, and prosecutors willing to talk about them. Politicians meanwhile seem to have a genuine belief in the importance of communicating their work to a wider public, which means theyre happy to talk to writers like me. American journalists complain about their working conditions, just like everyone does everywhere, but for a European doing research into financial crime in the US is as heady an experience as letting a child loose in a Lego shop.

Andrew, however, was discovering that the pleasant surprise sadly does not work in the opposite direction. I think he had been hoping that I would share a few contacts, for British equivalents of the kind of people I have always found without too much trouble when Ive visited Miami, Washington, San Francisco or New York. Its possible that he had been concerned I would refuse to open my address book to him, but it seemed not to have occurred to him that I would have no address book to open; that essentially the people he was looking for would not exist.

There was no concerted law enforcement effort against Chinese money laundering, I told him, so there was no investigator who could talk to him about it. There have been essentially no prosecutions so none for him to look into, and there is almost no research into where the money has been going, how its been getting there, or indeed how much of it there is.

He kept coming at the questions from different angles, almost as if he thought that he just needed to find the right password to unlock the door hiding Britains enforcement mechanism. Where was the equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations International Corruption Squad? Who was doing the work of the Kleptocracy Team at the Department of Justice? What about Homeland Security Investigations; did Britain have something like them? Were prosecutors building cases, in a British version of the Southern District of New York? Was bringing down a big Chinese money-laundering ring the kind of case that would make someones career? Which parliamentary commissions were probing this? Surely, someone was? As he talked, I began to see the situation through his eyes, which gave me a perspective Id never had before.

The problem was that he could keep trying different passwords until the rocks rotted away, but it wouldnt help: there was no cave of treasures for him to open. If he wanted to find out how much Chinese money was entering the UK, who was moving it and what it was buying, he was going to have to start from scratch and do all the work himself. Andrew had come to London to discover how Britain was fighting illicit finance, but he was discovering that this was not happening at all. Quite the reverse, in fact.

It is of course not just Britain which helps Chinese kleptocrats and criminals to launder money. The shadow financial system used by Chinese criminals is transnational by its nature. It transcends any one jurisdiction, and derives its power and resilience from the fact it does not rely on any one place: if one jurisdiction becomes hostile, money effortlessly relocates to somewhere that isnt. And the system grows all the time, as lawyers, accountants and others persuade politicians to give them access to the kind of fees they can generate by moving money around. You can find it as much in Dubai, Sydney, Lichtenstein and Curaao, as you can in Switzerland or New York. But you find it most of all in London.

And what I began to realise when talking to Andrew is how Britain is so much more invested in this business than all those other places. Financial skulduggery isnt just something that happens in the UK; there has been a concerted and decades-long effort to encourage it to do so. This is hard to comprehend, because it is so at variance with Britains public image: as the country of Harry Potter, Queen Elizabeth II and Downton Abbey; a place defined by irony, tradition and substantial breakfasts. Mob bankers are vulgar, and if theres one thing we know about Britain, its that its not vulgar. But the facts are the facts. However bad other countries are, Britain has for decades been worse. It operates as a gigantic loophole, undercutting other countries rules, massaging down tax rates, neutering regulations, laundering foreign criminals money.

Its not just that Britain isnt investigating the crooks, its helping them too. Moving and investing their money is of course central to what the UK does, but thats only the start: its also educating their children, solving their legal disputes, easing their passage into global high society, hiding their crimes and generally letting them dodge the consequences of their actions. I had known this before, but I had never thought of it as a single phenomenon. It was Andrews questions that crystallised the matter in my mind.