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

Product Information

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 shows how, time and again, wealthy individuals arriving in the UK rely on the same army of professional advisers who help them buy up prime real estate, with the properties registered using a web of offshore shell companies. Generous public donations to universities, arts foundations and political parties bestow a certain kind of British respectability, and grease the way for introductions to members of the royal family and ministers. Unbeknownst to Mullin and indeed to pretty much everyone else, the Treasury and the private equity industry were actually seeking to loosen those same regulations, so limited partnerships would have to report even less information to the authorities than they already did. They had no interest in whether Eastern European money launderers could or could not do business, but they did want investments to be even more profitable than they already were. Remember how the Bank of England doomed controls on international money flows in the 1950s? The Treasury was doing exactly the same thing now. From accepting multi-million pound tips from Russian oligarchs, to enabling Gibraltar to become an offshore gambling haven, meet Butler Britain... The money their customers stole has simply gone missing from the country of origin, denying everyone there all kinds of services. Bullough uses the example of dirt poor Moldova, where a billion dollars disappeared into shell companies in Scotland. For the less than a million poor Moldovans, a billion dollars is gigantic, and will not be made up any time soon. The result is decaying infrastructure and little or no services. Moldova, like so many other countries, was not poor; it was ripped off. Worldwide, estimates for money stashed in shell companies is between 12 and 20 trillion dollars.

To be fair, British politicians have had their moments in the fight against dirty money. One came when, as prime minister, David Cameron hosted a global anti-corruption summit in 2016. He also pushed through reforms including a public register of company owners, the first in a G20 economy. But momentum stalled with the distractions of Brexit and covid-19. Closing the laundry What first drew my attention to this book was its beginning with descriptions of Britain's acquisition of the Suez Canal and post-WWII period as its Empire collapsed, which are both historical periods I have studied so it was interesting to have another in-depth look at them in this book. 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. Daniloff, Nicholas. (2012). Review of the book Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the Defiant People of the Caucasus. Journal of Cold War Studies 14(3), 220-222.Financial skulduggery isn’t something that just happens in the UK,” Bullough writes, “there has been a concerted and decades-long effort to encourage it to do so.” From accepting multi-million pound tips from Russian oligarchs, to enabling Gibraltar to become an offshore gambling haven, meet Butler Britain… 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.

Impressively detailed…Lucid explanations of complex financial matters and a simmering sense of outrage distinguish this timely investigation into how Britain sacrificed its principles for pounds.” — Publishers Weekly a b c d e "Oliver Bullough". Hay Festival. Archived from the original on 23 June 2017 . Retrieved 20 March 2022.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: 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. 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.’ After History Finals at Oxford, Bullough acted in a friend's Edinburgh Fringe play. [5] In 1999, he bought the Lonely Planet Guide to Russia, took a Russian language course, and got hired by a Saint Petersburg English language magazine. [1] [5] After a year, Bullough was employed by The Times of Central Asia, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. [5]

Butler to the World reveals how the UK took up its position at the elbow of the worst people on Earth: the oligarchs, kleptocrats and gangsters. We pride ourselves on values of fair play and the rule of law, but few countries do more to frustrate global anti-corruption efforts. We are now a nation of Jeeveses, snobbish enablers for rich halfwits of considerably less charm than Bertie Wooster. It doesn’t have to be that way. This is an absolute must-read for everyone who wants to understand Britain's crucial role in the global dirty money crisis…Bullough lifts the lid and explains in a very clear and intelligible way why and how Britain is facilitating illicit finance across the world. The narrative is gripping, the analysis original and powerful and the detailed examples terrifying. This book will provide a powerful contribution to the important debate on the UK and dirty money.” —Margaret Hodge, MP and chair of the Public Accounts Committee A stinging case for developing a regulatory regime to force the U.K. “to seek a different way to earn a living.” 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.Bullough identifies the critical moment in this sad trajectory as the 1956 Suez crisis. In the ensuing financial crash the banking elite that ran the City borrowed barrel loads of dollars to prop up sterling and, by so doing, accidentally invented “one of the most consequential financial tools of the 20th century” – the eurodollar. The banks used the eurodollar to carry on pumping liquidity into the City “without limits or restrictions”, while offering their wealthy clients the choice of having their assets counted in Britain, the US or both – whichever was the most profitable and tax efficient. Bullough shows how this led to the creation of an array of complex financial products, all served from a silver platter of jurisdictions, permitting the super-rich to shelter their fortunes from the prying eyes of governments and regulators. Morphy, Jim (24 March 2014). "The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough". Wales Arts Review . Retrieved 20 March 2022.