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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Morphy, Jim (24 March 2014). "The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough". Wales Arts Review . Retrieved 20 March 2022. Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

Oliver Bullough unsparingly reveals the devastating facts behind Britain's dirty financial secrets and moral guilt while directly challenging the UK to clean up its act. This book is a must-read for those who care about our reputation in the world today.” —Andrew Mitchell, MP and former British international development minister He identifies the start of this as the Suez Crisis in the 1950s which was, he argues, a sign of Britain’s waning influence in the world. Added to this was the loss of income following the independence of its former colonies. As he observes, ‘The banker to the world transformed into a pauper; the global currency limping from one crisis to the next’. It was necessary to replace the lost revenues and a small circle of people within the City of London’s financial instititions came up with ways to do it that took advantage of a regulatory regime which pretty much relied on ‘chaps doing the right thing’. Except it turns out they didn’t. Instead they looked for any way they could to keep money from around the world flowing into their coffers and stop anyone else finding out about it, especially the taxman, their defence being ‘If we don’t do it, someone else will’. It’s the same instinct that still drives those on the political right to call for less deregulation not more.In Britain,” Bullough argues, “butlering is almost invariably regarded as a source of jobs and wealth because it is seen from the butler’s perspective rather than that of their clients’ or their victims’… It makes a good comedy when Jeeves outsmarts the village bobby or Bertie Wooster gets away with a scam because his chum is the local magistrate, but this is not the way to run a financial system.” 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 Subsequent chapters examine how an obscure financial device called the Scottish Limited Partnership, often exposed by The Herald, became criminals’ preferred method of hiding money and how Dmitry Firtash (“Putin’s man in Ukraine”, topically enough) integrated himself into British society by adopting the role of a generous philanthropist. That provoked me into writing my second book, The Last Man in Russia, which describes the struggle of a Russian to live in freedom and the efforts of Soviet officials to stop him. The life story of Father Dmitry, the Orthodox priest I chose as my central figure, seems to me to mirror the life of his whole nation, which is beset by depression and alcoholism. 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.’

Tak, ta książka otwiera oczy! To była dla mnie o tyle interesująca lektura, że od kilkunastu lat związana jestem z Wielką Brytanią. 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. To say this unmissable, deeply depressing book – about exactly how Britain pimps itself to the world’s dirtiest money – is timely is to miss author Oliver Bullough’s point. The fact is the stories that he tells, sordid tales of a nation flogging its real estate and its services and its football clubs and its good name to the shadiest and highest bidder, no questions asked, have been hiding in plain sight for decades. It has just seemed in no government’s interest to notice them. 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.The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain’s twentieth-century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat. In the immortal words of former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, ‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.’ But the funny thing was, Britain had already found a role. It even had the costume. The leaders of the world just hadn’t noticed it yet. His work has appeared at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, [13] and in GQ, [14] Granta, [15] and The Guardian. [16] [17] [18] Bibliography [ edit ] A couple of years ago, Andrew, an American academic, asked me to meet for a coffee. 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. 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 are 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 they’re 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 my sons loose in a Lego shop. Couldn’t be timelier... A stinging case for developing a regulatory regime to force the U.K. 'to seek a different way to earn a living.’” — Kirkus

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 it’s been getting there, or indeed how much of it there is. 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. Oliver Bullough’s illuminating study of the dirty money coursing through Britain has the slogan “the book the billionaires don’t want you to read”. Bullough’s angry, fascinating study of corruption and power in modern-day geopolitics has the pace of an airport thriller and the righteous zeal of a prosecuting barrister. Not that most of the malefactors featured will ever see the inside of a court; the complicity of a system that has made them wealthy means that prosecution, while deserved, is out of the question. Eventually, in response to his interlocutor’s bafflement, he blurted: “We’re not a policeman, like you guys, we’re a butler, the butler to the world… If someone is rich, whether they are Chinese or Russian or whatever, and they need something done, or something hidden, or something bought, then Britain sorts that out for them… – that’s what a butler does.” The American asked him another question: “How long has this been going on?” and Bullough again found himself answering without hesitation: “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.”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. A scathing portrait of the U.K. as a kind of ATM, maintained by servile bankers, for the use of nefarious characters around the world. Anyone who cares about the future of this country should read this sizzlingly written and incendiary story…This book blows apart Britain's image of gentlemanly respectability and lays bare the real picture: ruthless greed disguised by hypocrisy, and tolerated because of willful ignorance.” —Edward Lucas, author of The New Cold War Happy Christmas, David,” he said, before getting down to business. “We feel a bit under threat here, so I’ve told my liaison to your office that should there be catastrophic loss at Fort Meade, we are turning the functioning of the American SIGINT system over to GCHQ … it’s just a precaution, but if we go down, you run the show.” There was then, according to an account he later gave in a book promotional event, “a long pause.” When I left Russia in 2006, I was exhausted by it, however. I had seen too much misery and never wanted to write about Chechnya again. But I had promised to give a talk to a society in London. After the talk, I was asked if I would ever write a book about what I had seen. I wrote down a few thoughts, took them to a friend who knew about books, and she introduced me to a publisher.

At every stage, he records how easy criminals found it to do business with the UK, a country willing to let virtually anyone avail themselves of its financial and legal services and loath to pass any legislation that would impede them, so long as the cash kept flowing. 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: Urgent and essential reading…Bullough has drilled down to the root of the malaise that's rotting the UK system. Beautifully written with quiet despairing humor, this is the defining story of our times.” —Catherine Belton, author of Putin’s People From accepting multi-million pound tips from Russian oligarchs, to the offshore tax havens, meet Butler Britain... Exploring the way in which Britain services oligarchs, builds tax havens and launders money, Oliver Bullough presents a startling, if sometimes overdramatic, picture of current policy on economic crime.I moved to Russia in 1999, after growing up in mid-Wales and studying at Oxford University. I had no particular plan, beyond a desire to learn Russian, but got a job at a local magazine and realised I liked finding things out and writing about them. From accepting multi-million pound tips from Russian oligarchs, to enabling Gibraltar to become an offshore gambling haven, meet Butler Britain... The Biden administration is putting corruption at the heart of its foreign policy, and that means it needs to confront Britain's role as the foremost enabler of financial crime and ill behavior. This audiobook lays bare how London has deliberately undercut U.S. regulations for decades, and calls into question the extent to which Britain can be considered a reliable ally. Mr. Bullough, a lively and clever writer, has alighted on a lively and clever metaphor around which he builds Butler to the World. Riveting it is to read.” — Wall Street Journal He traces the origins of the “butler” mentality to the humiliation of Suez and the end of Empire. With the US now the dominant global force, Britain had to find a new role for itself. An inkling of what that would be came with the Eurodollar, the first in a stream of financial innovations that shook up the stale monoculture of British banking and ultimately deprived governments of autonomy by connecting up national money markets and allowing for unimpeded global trade.