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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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. 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. 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. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. In the chapter ‘Giving Evidence’, the author describes the UK’s woeful record on tackling money laundering, leaving him to conclude that what measures are in place are designed to give the impression of extreme activity while actually doing nothing.

But overall, this book was an incredibly strong (albeit depressing) introduction to Britain's role in global money laundering, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in financial crime, offshore tax havens, or Britain's modern economic history. There's a certain amount of 'gotcha' journalism, but it's never quite as cringe inducing as it can be. Much of the time the same bodies tasked with regulating professionals’ financial transactions are also charged with lobbying government on their behalf, while also relying on those same professionals’ membership fees to keep solvent.New role for Britain since losing its empire officially (Suez crisis) is providing financial / offshore services to anyone who will pay them for it. 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.

Travelling to meet the people I wanted to talk to and to see the places I wanted to describe took me to the far north of Russia, to rotting gulag towns; to the west of Russia, to half-abandoned villages; and to the Ural Mountains, where the communists locked up their doughtiest opponents; and to Moscow itself, that great fat spider in the centre of its web. I thought the author's decision to approach the very complex and wide-reaching issue of money laundering and financial crime by zooming in on specific events/territories/individuals (delete as appropriate), was a good one as it allowed for more precision and it stopped his information from being too vague, jumbled and incomprehensible.More needs to be done and in particular Britain needs to stop British Overseas Territories from creating the kinds of financial regimes and loopholes which allow this shadowy financial world to flourish. Gibraltar, BVI, Scottish Limited Partnerships, Isle of Man, Eurodollars (created by the City to avoid USD regulation), and so on. A similar thing happened in the 2000's with Climate Change literature and hopefully this will spark wider discussions on Britain's abhorrent record of servicing financial crime. But behind the scenes, there is an entirely different country, one which—in a career of writing about corruption, money laundering, and financial crime—I have gradually come to glimpse, understand, and grow alarmed by. Today, numerous firms continue to pop up in Scotland, using the same short list of addresses - private homes where the occupants set up these companies all day long.

Prawda jest taka, że grupka uprzywilejowanych Anglików ma nas w garści, a organy ścigania zwalczające korupcję mają niedostatek zasobów - to walka z wiatrakami. This isn't just about Russian oligarchs in London-though they certainly feature-but legal, financial and cultural changes stretching back to the 1950s. Alongside his 2018 book Moneyland – a quest into that Narnia of libel laws and tax havens and old-school-tie discretion that makes London so attractive to extortionists – he organised “kleptocrat tours” of the capital, his equivalent of Hollywood Hills rubber-necking, bus trips around Knightsbridge and Mayfair pointing out the mansions where the cronies of the world’s worst dictators and biggest tax dodgers hide their billions. Book pretty much just walks people through the development of the process of sheltering dirty money in the west throughout chapters on Suez, British Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, Scotland etc, all through the colourful but still detail oriented anecdotes from people who helped or fought the entrenchment of dirty money in Britain.Meanwhile the Chancellor of the Exchequer has moved out of his Downing Street flat after it was discovered his wife considers herself non-domiciled in Britain so that she pays no taxes on the IT fortune she inherited in her native India. Eurodollar trading allows vast pools of money to transit all over the world, instantly, and the taxman can’t touch them, no matter where they land – or they just change labels and move on again. Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals is a 2022 book written by Oliver Bullough in which he argues the United Kingdom found a new role for itself following the 1956 Suez Crisis as agent and facilitator to the powerful and wealthy globally. In this context, and in the context of many other stories that Bullough tells, Boris Johnson’s determination to delay the report of the intelligence and security committee into compromising Russian activity in the UK, and then dismiss it as the work of “ Islington Remainers”, looks ever more alarming.

Jego usługi są atrakcyjne dla uchylających się od płacenia podatków, ukrywających swoje miliardy, dla kumpli najgorszych dyktatorów świata, oligarchów, kleptokratów i kombinatorów.The unmatched financial and legal infrastructure that had allowed the UK to conquer a quarter of the world was quietly repurposed to do the bidding of individuals from dubious regimes that it had sometimes fostered, and others who had seized control of their nation’s resources and needed a place to hide what they creamed off. I found the book focused more on how terrible the result of helping is, or how bad the respective choices or policies the UK made are. Here's how summarizes what I just explained: "It operates as a gigantic loophole, undercutting other countries’ rules, massaging down tax rates, neutering regulations, laundering foreign criminals’ money. 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. 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.