Bear hug – Russian finance in the UK

“You have to understand that Russia is an absolute kleptocracy,” anti-corruption campaigner Roman Borisovich told the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in March [2018], his quote repeated in its recently published forthright analysis of how funds flowing from that country into London are not necessarily free of Kremlin influence. In the report, entitled ‘Moscow’s gold: Russian Corruption in the UK’ [1], journalist Oliver Bullough explains how the oligarchs “hold property at the pleasure of Mr Putin… They get to own it and enjoy it in return for the fact that he gets whatever he wants whenever he wants.” The interplay of business and state in Russia doesn’t seem to have bothered the UK that much in the past – City professionals have certainly felt comfortable handling the oligarchs’ funds and structuring their deals. As Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Financial Crime & Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute told the committee, “we have had the welcome mat out for the money – it has been financial investment as opposed to industrial investment over the past twenty years”.