This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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How the UK helps the world’s kleptocrats and crooks – deliberately

By:   []

Date: 2022-03 

But where was the equivalent of the FBI’s 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 someone’s 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 I’d never had before. The problem was that he could keep trying different passwords until the rocks rotted away, but it wouldn’t 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 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 isn’t. 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 Curaçao, as you can in Switzerland or New York. But you find it most of all in London.

Britain is so much more invested in this business than all those other places. Financial skulduggery isn’t 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 Britain’s 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 there’s one thing we know about Britain, it’s that it’s not vulgar. 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.

It’s not just that Britain isn’t investigating the crooks, it’s helping them too. Moving and investing their money is of course central to what the UK does, but that’s only the start: it’s 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.

‘Britain is like a butler,’ I said at last, as I tried to explain to both of us what was going on. ‘If someone’s rich, whether they’re Chinese or Russian or whatever, and they need something

done, or something hidden, or something bought, then Britain sorts that out for them. We’re not a policeman, like America, we’re a butler, the butler to the world. That’s why we don’t investigate the issues that you’re talking about – that’s not what a butler does.’

He looked at me for a few beats, perhaps trying to work out if I was being serious.

‘How long has this been going on?’ he asked at last, and the answer came to me without me having to think about it. It was suddenly obvious.

‘It started in the 1950s. We needed a new business model after America took over as the world’s superpower, and this is what we found.’
[END]

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