After years of prevarication and delay, the government must deal with Russian dirty money in the capital
Describing the manner in which Britain has been cravenly complicit in the laundering of Russian oligarchs’ wealth, one expert witness told the foreign affairs select committee in 2018: “We have had a welcome mat out to money – it has been financial investment as opposed to industrial investment over the past 20 years. We have had a regulatory stance that welcomed that money.”
After accumulating a huge body of similar evidence, the MPs produced a report entitled “Moscow’s Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK”. Published in the wake of the novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, it starkly concluded that President Vladimir Putin and his allies hid and laundered corrupt assets in London, drawing upon them when required. Nothing of any substance was done. A subsequent “Russia Report” of 2020, published by the intelligence and security committee, judged that oligarchs had become a corrupting force in British public life, using their money to make connections and exert undue influence. Again, the government response has been to delay and prevaricate.
