Today, regulators that have had their budgets continually slashed are swamped with reports from banks about suspicious accounts and transactions, but they don’t even have the staff to read them all. It’s 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. From grasping bankers to opportunistic lawyers and feckless MPs, unable and unwilling to withstand the schemes of the global rich, Oliver Bullough has drilled down to the root of the malaise that's rotting the UK system. The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain’s twentieth century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat.

To była dla mnie o tyle interesująca lektura, że od kilkunastu lat związana jestem z Wielką Brytanią. They used crafty expertise to create the small print of shell companies and financial instruments that allowed multimillionaires and global corporations to avoid doing the thing they liked least – pay taxes. It starts hundreds of years ago, when Scotland allowed the formation of limited partnerships, feudal firms that never had to reveal ownership, activities or pay taxes. From the murky origins of tax havens and gambling centres in the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar to the influence of oligarchs in the British establishment, Butler to the World is the story of how we became a nation of Jeeveses – and how it doesn’t have to be this way. Unfortunately the final few chapters, with the exception of the one on money laundering, do feel a little slow.It is the City of London together with the legal and accountancy professions using their skills to help the super-rich hide their wealth offshore, evade tax and avoid having to account to anyone except themselves. It took comfort from the fact that ‘no client had suffered loss as a result’ of Sharif’s conduct, which is particularly perverse because the whole point of filing a suspicious activity report is to allow the authorities to confiscate criminal wealth.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. As he observes, ‘The banker to the world transformed into a pauper; the global currency limping from one crisis to the next’. The UK virtually invented shadow banking with some almost unnoticed dodgy financial innovations in the 1950s, and even up to present day the government has ignored the problem and defanged its own regulators and justice system to better appeal to "clients". The term 'timely' is used all too often in the media, but there really isn't a more timely book than Oliver Bullough's Butler to the World . From accepting multi-million pound tips from Russian oligarchs, to the offshore tax havens, meet Butler Britain.It took even Bullough a while, though, to nail the exact bent-double relationship that many among the elite of this country’s lawmakers and bankers and lawyers and accountants have adopted toward this global kleptocracy.