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  • What have we got inside here?

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

  • £11.95 million for the freehold.

  • Shall we take a look inside?

  • Absolutely. Please come through.

  • This is beautiful.

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

  • I've just spotted the floor!

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

  • And you can see your workout underneath.

  • Everything in the kitchen is of a high specification.

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

  • We've got two parking spaces.

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

  • fancy like a Porsche 911 above.

  • Sounds about right.

  • 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.

  • It doesn't get more central than this.

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

  • Some of the world's top restaurants.

  • Everything here is on your doorstep.

  • 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

  • as a store for dirty money.

  • 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.

  • But will it be successful?

  • 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

  • long before the war.

  • 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 likehigh-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

  • was soon reached.

  • 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

  • originally came from.

  • 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

  • sector, the Big Bang.

  • 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.

  • We call this a blind faith period.

  • The gates were wide open.

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

  • the U.K.'s links to Russia.

  • 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

  • property market.

  • 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

  • close ties to the Kremlin.

  • 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

  • by a company that they then own.

  • But that's quite rare.

  • 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

  • offshore jurisdictions.

  • 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

  • to sanctioned oligarchs.

  • That includes metals magnate Alisher Usmanov, industrialist Oleg Deripaska

  • and Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich.

  • We've been able to identify so far around $9 billion worth of assets owned by Abramovich.

  • A big chunk of that's in the U.K. and especially here in London.

  • A lot of it's in real estate, key commercial investments like Chelsea.

  • But, also, townhouses, mansions.

  • It also includes superyachts, jets, helicopters and other flashy assets.

  • In March 2022, the U.K. government introduced into law a long-awaited Economic Crime Act

  • intended to crack down on corruption.

  • Included in it is a Register of Overseas Entities, requiring those behind foreign companies

  • with U.K. property holdings to reveal their identities.

  • A spokesperson from the government was not available for interview, but they said in a statement:

  • We continue to lead the way in our fight against corruption, working closely with the private

  • sector, international partners and the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories to ensure

  • there are no safe havens for criminals to hide their dirty money.

  • But some opponents claim it doesn't go far enough.

  • Sadly, the legislation is flawed, and I think when we come to the second Economic Crime Bill,

  • we will already have to amend that.

  • And it's flawed in two ways.

  • An oligarch who buys a property through a foreign registered company, let's say in

  • the BVI [British Virgin Islands], we'll have to know who that beneficial owner is.

  • But that oligarch could pass it to his children, and then we would no longer be able to know.

  • Or the oligarch could pass it through a trust, and once you've got it in a trust, again,

  • the identity of the real beneficial owner of the property, and therefore the owner of

  • the wealth, will be unknown.

  • We're going to have to amend that bill when the ink has hardly dried on the paper.

  • Already, the government has said it is drafting a second Economic Crime Bill to be passed later in 2022.

  • The follow-on legislation is set to give the government new powers to seize crypto assets

  • from criminals and make it harder for shell companies to find loopholes.

  • Still, tackling illicit wealth is an issue that extends well beyond Britain.

  • The U.K.'s Parliament is now working with its counterparts in the U.S. Congress and

  • European Parliament to ensure that as London weans itself off Russian riches,

  • dirty money doesn't find new places to hide.

  • This international action is equally important, because you want to drive it out of the U.K.,

  • but you don't want it then to land in another jurisdiction.

  • The wealth that's put into London comes from not just Russia but from Nigeria,

  • from Azerbaijan, from Brazil, from other countries.

  • So, really, tackling oligarchy has to be a global project.

  • So we shouldn't just have a tunnel vision on Russian wealth in London

  • but also kleptocratic wealth from all over the world.

What have we got inside here?

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

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    Summer に公開 2022 年 04 月 28 日
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