>>51
London property is always an option for such investments. After King Constantine II was ousted in the wake of a military coup in Greece, in 1967, he moved into a mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath; ever since, global plutocrats have sought safe harbor in the city’s leafy precincts. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian buyers raced into London’s housing market. One real-estate agent described his Russian clients “gleefully plonking saddlebags of cash on the desk.” According to new figures from Transparency International, Russians who have been accused of corruption or of having links to the Kremlin have bought at least 1.5 billion pounds’ worth of property in Great Britain. The real number is no doubt higher, but it is virtually impossible to ascertain, because so many of these transactions are obscured by layers of secrecy. The Economist describes London as “a slop-bucket for dodgy Russian wealth.”
Bullough has made a careful study of this process. In an earlier book, “Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back” (2018), he explained that, for moneyed arrivistes in the U.K., a glamorous new home is the first step on a well-established pathway for laundering reputations. Next up: hire a P.R. firm. “The PR agency puts them in touch with biddable members of parliament,” Bullough says, “who are prepared to put their names to the billionaire’s charitable foundation. The foundation then launches itself at a fashionable London event space—a gallery is ideal.” Ultimately, the smart billionaire will “get his name on an institution, or become so closely associated with one that it may as well be.” Major gifts to universities are popular. So are football clubs.
What’s most apt about Bullough’s butler analogy is the appearance of gray-flannel propriety, which can impart an aura of respectability to even the most disreputable fortune. The mercenary grubbiness of Britain’s role might be “hard to comprehend,” Bullough suggests, “because it is so at variance with Britain’s public image.” Yet Belton and Bullough are joined in their dispiriting diagnosis by Tom Burgis, the author of the excellent book “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World” (2020). And by Britain’s National Crime Agency, which found that “many hundreds of billions of pounds of international criminal money” is laundered through U.K. banks and subsidiaries every year. And by Parliament’s own intelligence committee, which has described London as a “laundromat” for illicit Russian cash. And by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, which declared in 2018 that the ease with which Russia’s President and his allies hide their wealth in London has helped Putin pursue his agenda in Moscow.
Each time Putin has taken a provocative step in recent years—including the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in Mayfair, in 2006; Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in 2014; and the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, in 2018—British politicians and commentators have acknowledged London’s complicity with his regime and vowed to take steps to address it. But this has largely amounted to lip service. The English political establishment, like everything else in London, appears to be for sale. Boris Johnson, in his tenure as London’s mayor, was a pitchman to foreign buyers, boasting that property in the city had grown so desirable it was “treated effectively as another asset class.” Russian oligarchs have donated millions of pounds to the Conservative Party, and have enlisted British lords to sit on the boards of their companies.
At a fund-raising auction at the Tory summer ball in 2014, a woman named Lubov Chernukhin—who was then married to Vladimir Chernukhin, one of Putin’s former deputy finance ministers—paid a hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the top prize: a tennis match with Johnson and David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time. Johnson defended the match, decrying “a miasma of suspicion” toward “all rich Russians in London.” A Russian magnate told Catherine Belton, “In London, money rules everyone. Anyone and anything can be bought.” The Russians came to London, the source said, “to corrupt the U.K. political elite.”
Another reason that London’s oligarchs have been able to forestall a day of reckoning is their tendency to pursue punishing legal action against people who challenge them, exploiting a legal system that is notably friendly toward libel plaintiffs. In January, 2021, the Russian dissident and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny, who had recently survived an assassination attempt, released a video, titled “Putin’s Palace,” in which he accused the Russian President of being “obsessed with wealth and luxury,” and presented information about a billion-dollar compound that Putin had reportedly built for himself on the Black Sea. “Russia sells oil, gas, metals, fertilizer, and timber in huge quantities—but people’s incomes keep falling,” Navalny said. The oligarchs “influence political decisions from the shadows.” At one point, he held up a copy of Catherine Belton’s book.
Not long afterward, Roman Abramovich sued Belton and HarperCollins in London. “Putin’s People” had been on shelves for nearly a year, leading Belton to suspect that Navalny’s endorsement had likely prompted the suit. (Navalny has described Abramovich as “one of the key enablers and beneficiaries of Russian kleptocracy.”) Within days, three other Russian billionaires filed lawsuits against the book, as did Rosneft, the national oil company. To Belton, it felt like “a concerted attack.”