A friend in London provides services to the super-rich, some of them Russian. He wears lovely suits, works from a patrician address and can play up his private-school accent to impress clients. Though always law-abiding himself, he’d never be so vulgar as to ask clients if they had ever stolen, say, Russian mineral wealth. I suspect he’s now going through his client list in a panic.
Who are London’s enablers, and how do they justify themselves? In 1992, a Russian named Alex walked into a Hamptons estate agents in Kensington and bought flats in cash, for between ￡200,000 and ￡320,000 each. This was probably “the first sale of London property to private buyers from the ex-USSR in modern British history”, writes Oliver Bullough in Moneyland. Then Londongrad mushroomed.
French economist Gabriel Zucman estimated in 2014 that 52 per cent of Russian wealth was held offshore — surely the largest-ever exportation of elite money. By 2020, a British parliamentary report admitted, “Russian influence in the UK” was “the new normal”, while “a lot of Russians with very close links to Putin” were “well integrated into the UK business and social scene”.