Days after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, the British Parliament fast-tracked reforms on economic crime. According to Bullough, this was an attempted rebranding of the international corruption unit within the National Crime Agency — with no new money or people to enforce the rules.
"There's this almost clueless response to the crisis," Bullough said, describing the move as an "almost performative method of government." Bullough recently published his latest book, "Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals."
In January, Theodore Agnew resigned as minister of state at the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury "because of the lack of action on financial crime," Bullough said. "But after the Ukraine crisis, we got, very quickly, an Economic Crime Act intending to impose transparency on shell companies that own property in the U.K.," as well as "technical changes to unexplained wealth," he said.
On March 7, members of Parliament voted unanimously for the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill, which lawmakers fast-tracked through the House of Commons in a single day following a seven-hour debate.
However, Bullough said, the government didn't provide any new funding to enforce the rules, intended to capture oligarchs' assets, and, in fact, recently cut funding for the anti-corruption unit from £5.3 million ($6.45 million) to £5 million. Not only does the U.K. government lack financial law enforcement capacities comparable to those of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bullough said, but while the American authorities investigate oligarchs, metaphorical butlers in City of London and British government have been "transforming oligarchs into aristocrats."
Dmytro Firtash, "a Ukrainian gas tycoon who made a fortune by working with Gazprom," is one such example and a main character in Bullough's book, he said.
In 2011, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko launched a class action against Firtash in New York federal court alleging political and human rights violations, saying that while Firtash owned RosUkrEnergo AG and Russian energy giant Gazprom OAO, he ran a racketeering enterprise to deprive the Ukrainian people of natural gas reserves.
Bullough described Gazprom as "Vladimir Putin's gas company" and "a tool of Russian foreign policy" that the Kremlin used to sell gas to Ukraine.
In April 2014, the Justice Department announced an indictment against Firtash related to his control of Group DF, "an international conglomerate of companies … directly and indirectly owned by Group DF Ltd., a British Virgin Islands company," according to a news release.
Two months earlier, the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence had sold Firtash the disused Brompton Road tube station for £53 million, according to a news report by the BBC.
"I think he's the only private owner of a tube station — not just in London, but anywhere in the world," Bullough said.
Since posting €125 million ($130.5 million) in bail for release from custody in Vienna in March 2014, Firtash has successfully fought extradition to the U.S., Bullough said.
In September 2020, Firtash was tied to Lev Parnas' family in statements made before U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken during the New York government's probe into alleged unlawful political donations by allies of Rudy Giuliani into a political action committee supporting then-President Donald Trump.
Bullough said he chose the word "butler" to describe bankers, lawyers and government officials in his book while pondering the character Jeeves from the novels of 20th century humor author P.G. Wodehouse.
"Jeeves is essentially endlessly competent and could be anything, but instead chooses to earn his money by helping [his employer] get out of scrapes," Bullough said. "Jeeves: This is what we've become."
After the U.S. pressured the U.K. to pull out of Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, "the sterling froze, essentially, as an international currency," Bullough said. Bankers in the City of London, desperate to continue funding trade, began lending in dollars, which led to a "world-changing discovery" — namely, that "British rules didn't apply, because the British rules applied only to sterling." American rules also didn't apply, according to the author, because they only applied in the U.S.
"They had invented an entirely rules-free space," Bullough said, describing the process as an accidental discovery.
The British Empire then began moving dollars, rather than sterling, around the world, thereby evading British laws. These "exciting, buccaneering, rules-free transactions" were later described as "offshore," the origin of a term still used today to describe tax havens.
After World War II, the Allies "felt that the unrestrained capital flows of the interwar period had been a key contributing factor in the instability that led to the rise of fascism throughout continental Europe and elsewhere," and so they created institutions to restrict capital flows. The idea was to give countries "a chance to build democracy in the post-war period, particularly in post-war Europe," he said.
"London gave the world free capital flows," Bullough said. "Essentially, the genie was out of the bottle by the time the Americans realized how damaging it was going to be."
Firtash did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Kremlin's press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The press office of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Parnas' representative in the case mentioned, Joseph A. Bondy of the Law Offices of Joseph A. Bondy, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
--Additional reporting by Richard Crump, Joanne Faulkner, Najiyya Budaly, Hailey Konnath, Allison Grande, Lucia Osborne-Crowley and Matt Thompson. Editing by Khalid Adad.
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