How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
For example, when I was home in London a few years ago we had dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant in Mayfair. My wife and I were chatting with the Maître D' for a bit, and he told us that they scheduled their host staff such that at least one person was present at all times who could converse fluently in Russian, in order to cater to their big spenders.
I know this is only an anecdote but I do think it is uniquely specific to Russian oligarchs. Aside from Harrods, which have specific staff to converse with the wealthy from China, the ME, etc. I didn't encounter a similar form of catering/pandering to the wealthy Chinese, Middle Easterners, etc. elsewhere.
Not just limited to London. Vancouver is a prime example of that thanks to an out of control immigration policy coupled with almost no enforcement for financial crimes [0].
Anyone with money who can't pass the stricter bar for US immigration and investment tries to hide it there.
I believe a few years ago Canada eliminated the immigration category that lets you move there just based on wealth.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
Check Punta del Este.
This may even play a bigger part than any regulatory environment, especially in a world where English is the lingua franca.
This seems like a critical component. In the US or Canada, there is no "old money" in the European-magnitude sense.
In the UK, on the other hand, there are a lot of structures that seem to straddle oligarchy and democracy (see: accuser burden of proof libel laws mentioned in article). There are not just different options for ultra wealthy, but experienced options, staffed by people who have been doing this for decades, at firms who have been doing this for centuries.
Opaque South Dakota trusts look quaint against that depth of historically-earned competency.
Cities in the US or Canada that offer comparable accommodation, eating and shopping opportunities are pretty miserable places to live in. Central London is beautiful, green and wonderful to walk around. It takes a very specific kind of person to enjoy walking around Manhattan on a regular basis.
London is also conveniently located wrt. top holiday destinations like the Alps and south of France.
London offers so much more to the oligarchy than just banks and lawyers.
Fuck, what other cities reliably offer Uber Lux? And I don’t mean the watered down American version with Suburbans and the likes.
The oligarchs will still remain in London even if draconian KYC laws might force them to rent instead of own, there aren’t any realistic alternatives.
Of course the “normies” will never understand this, they can’t even imagine the lifestyle. They have no idea what other great cities lack, because they’d never even dream of needing such services.
So it was the case that London was the city of the world during the empire which made it the candidate for running the Eurodollar system to rebuild Europe which cemented its place as the financial capital of the world up until America financialized their economy in the late 70s, its colonies allowed for unique tax systems which made it even more popular.
I got most of this from the book entitled Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson, and the documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8 that was inspired by it.
I’m super unconvinced this is true. I know many “oligarchs” living in London, most of them do not keep their money in the UK.
I think the people writing about London from a tax haven/money laundering perspective tend to have rather little insight into the quality of life aspect. It’s easy for them to mistakenly assume that the system is the main draw, but the reality on the ground seems rather different.
For very rich people that want to live in a city, London is absolutely the #1 destination.
I can tell you from experience that Vienna is a shithole compared to London if you have a 100k+/mo budget.
How many people choose to take a pay cut to work for as socially responsible company as they can? How many forgo the convenience and time savings of Amazon and shop at places that are more expensive because they are local small businesses or businesses that pay and treat their workers better? How many spend less on gadgets and luxuries and redirect those funds to making the world better, or to enable them to take the aforementioned socially responsible pay cut? How many advantaged people forgo using that advantage to gentrify neighborhoods and displace the disadvantaged to less desirable places? How many advantaged people forgo hoarding education resources for their children at the expense of children for whom society is already rigged against (e.g. liberal NYC has the most segregated schools in the country)?
EDIT: After fully reading the article, I realized that the author of the article deals with this issue: U.K.'s libel laws make it dangerous for media watchdogs to call out oligarchs explicitly.
There's also this photo of a pit within one of the stores being filled with cement just before being shutting down: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/tebfqa/almost_all_o...
I've been trying to find out more about what was going on other than money laundering but haven't been able to find much
From memory, the owner set up multiple other business used to secure COVID loans from UK Gov and also had the candy store business buy those business from him. The business was/is a front for these other activities.
If you are interested then I can maybe scan the article.
It may be known as such among a tiny minority who have multiple citizenships and most likely do not reside in Russia. Where investing in stock market/index funds is quite uncommon for an ordinary person, what a handful of the top .0001% do to their finances is even further out there. I know a few somewhat well-off by Russian standards people and no one has been to GB much less use it for some shady financial schemes.
There should be prisoners dilemma and therefore some country should emerge to fill this "market need"
Here is a good article from The Economist on the situation. I apologise for the low quality of photo of the page.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/02/26/...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220303055330/https://www.econo...
> ...the rule of the law does not apply...
All of these should be red flags - even if you yourself are shady, you want strong property rights and rule of law, not whatever the local despot feels like doing that day.
The checklist fir being an attractive investment target is large country, stable government (check, check), strong property rights and fair treatment of foreigners (don't know, don't know). If Americans start confiscating assets, then the Asians have an opportunity to absorb a lot of money if their governments can be held in check.
Cases take years to be concluded. Sometimes, even decades. The backlog is huge and the relatively very low cost of suing creates a lot of civil suits. In the US, losing a case means paying the costs of the winning side usually - In India the costs are calculated at a ridiculously low rate, that does not deter frivolous cases at all.
Also, the Indian Govt is known for its over zealous taxation of foreign entities - termed tax terrorism. Hardly a tax haven.
How are a bunch of dumb 2nd generation oil pumper warlords going to protect your money longterm?
I’m guessing the money is made, moved to Dubai then on to the UK, Canada, USA, etc for it to be parked.
Rule of law very much exists in the UAE. So much so that they have carved out a distinct common law system (so called DIFC courts) which effectively provide English language common law as a service. This was explicitly done to make investment and commercial activity in the country attractive, and within DIFC boundaries (and IIRC at this point nation-wide) supersedes the authority of Dubai's own courts on a whole range of matters.
Those 'financial free zones' basically function like charter cities so international investors do not have to deal with the domestic Shariah law system.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50205956
DIFC harly has a reputable track record. While on a paper it might sound independent, in reality is it just another extension to Sheik’s tentacles. Any compliance is just lip services.
There's less appeal if you're an American since the USG taxes you anywhere in the world, but if you're Canadian there's a lot of appeal to live there for a few years as a resident.
The people I've known in this category do something like this:
- Canadian Citizen
- Move to Dubai
- Trade crypto, make eight digit returns, liquidate funds
- Move back to Canada eventually without having had to pay tax on those funds
You can't do this as a US citizen without renouncing citizenship, but you can do this for most countries in the world (at least that's what people doing this have told me, I haven't looked into it that deeply myself).
This use to be popular with working at sea for 6 months to avoid taxes until it changed. You could be sailing around the world for the next two years any income you make would be taxable even if you renounce your citizenship (unless you take another citizenship or become a resident in a physical location)
So you could do this but for the effort you would be better off trading cryto from Canada avoiding popular exchanges and not reporting
My understanding was you could legally move to the UAE for a time as a Canadian citizen and do what I described.
It seems easy enough to not have day to day operations in Canada during that time. This seems like a way better option than tax evasion and prison imo.
I left feeling different about the place.
isn't that a tautology?
Democracies are preventing businesses from operating in russia. What exactly makes democracies so special that it isn't beyond corruption or evil? People have said democracies don't commit genocide, democracies don't invade and steal territory, democracies don't enslave, etc. When the truth is that democracies have committed the greatest genocides, stolen the most land, committed the worst evils. I've yet to get a satisfactory response. Russia is a democracy and the current bogeyman was elected. It's like people are so brainwashed by propaganda that they can't see the truth.
Yeah... re-read history without the biases, and you'll see that that is absolutely false.
> Russia is a democracy and the current bogeyman was elected.
Well, Russia has elections. It also jails those who are trying to run against Putin, and Putin controls the media. So you wind up with the trappings of democracy without the reality. (At least today. I think the original election that he won may have been fair.)
Walking around the residential areas of Chelsea or Knightsbridge I found it to be some of the most boring places in London. Beautiful houses and no one on the streets, pedestrian hostile roads, generally boring perfection.
I think optimising the city for the wealthy when these wealthy are not invested in the community kills the spirit of the city. London doesn't have particularly beautiful nature or weather, so if you make it about perfect streets and expensive buildings you can build something much better somewhere else. What London actually offers that is extremely valuable is a great culture and institutions and all these rich people who occupy a place in London without being in London are undermining it.
London has much more to offer than hiding the elites money, just as the Switzerland. These are advanced communities that has a lot of more going on for them beside accommodating the rich people of the world. The accumulated wealth in these places is not like the wealth in Silicon Valley, it is stale.
IMHO the dilution of the artificial wealth saturation will result in talented people having their impact amplified.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/russian-money-f...
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-02/russian-o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Protasevich
(Russia's puppet BTW)
And speaking of forcing a plane going between two countries to land try to make a political arrest, who did it first?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
To restate your idea: You want to invade a country at peace, kill its citizens and overthrow its government just to inconvenience some rich thugs.
an event or a group of events occurring as part of a sequence; an incident or period considered in isolation.
Is there something in the above definition that preculudes it from being used to refer to a genocide? And a more pertinent question: Was there a point to you comment apart from the feigned indignation?
I agree.
i might be able to afford a house there
The sooner we get to a point where tyranny overtly seeks tyranny, for all to see, the better.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/03/18/news/canada-prim...
Excellent starting point, I wonder what other rights should we dispense with.
Johnson and his government are doing with the Ukraine/Russia issue what they have done on virtually every other topic: talk loudly and carry a very small stick. They have made some grand statements about punishing these oligarchs, while moving at a glacial pace, so as to allow these oligarchs to liquidate as much as possible and flee.
I think, once the war in Ukraine is over (please God that's soon), the next Tory government (it's always the Tories!) will simply revert to type, take money from the Russian oligarchs who still want access for their kids to schools such as Eton, Harrow, etc. and allow the laundering to continue.
As long as the Murdoch press continues to misinform the British public on these issues, Johnson and his Tory ilk will have enough air cover to continue allowing these oligarchs to finance their party (political), their parties (social), and further corrupt the entire political system (see "Lord Lebedev").
How is it bad? If the Russian elite would be at least partly be indoctrinated in the western values it could only do good.
It was the case in the Soviet Union too that even though the West was the enemy, the status symbols were still all Western. In a weird way the elites aspired and lusted over the produce of Western consumerism.
Nobody outside is going to want to secure their wealth there. If kleptocratic Russians wanted that sort of arrangement, they could just keep it in Russia.
I don't understand how this is possible. Is it legal in Britain for foreigners to finance political parties?
The point is these guys have visas, residency etc., they aren't a criminal class, in the UK.
It's funny how until the Ukraine crisis, every time I mentioned how serious a problem this was, people told me I was exaggerating. Even in the first week of the war, that happened here on HN.
The London Laundromat is a significant corrosive influence.
Doesn't take a genius to see the potential long-term negative implications this creates. It's clearly not going to liberalize China or Chinese diaspora temporarily living abroad at large, let's not make that catastrophic error again. It was just a couple days ago that a Chinese student in the US stabbed a Tiananmen activist Chinese defector to death, in public. Thanks Henry Kissinger.
It's kind of time to take this stuff seriously before it catches us by surprise more than it already has.
It worked for Western Germany, not for Eastern Germany. The West was rebuilt by an Allied council and the East by a Soviet Bloc. After the economic collapse of the USSR and reunification of Germany, Western Germany extensively prepared for the transition process. Another example of this is North and South Korea, prior to Korean War North Korea was the dominant economy. North has not collapse due to Chinese support.
Japan was also rebuilt with the US's help under the condition of democratic reforms. Japan saw immense economic growth afterward under that system.
The Middle East is difficult due to a lack of cohesive national identities in the countries stemming from longstanding tribalistic tendencies, without proximally supporting liberal institutions. Well, except Israel, but that's an obvious conflict of interest. Autocrats and monarchies overcome culture barriers with force and threat of force.
As for China, they were handed a MASSIVE economic opportunity for reestablishing diplomatic relations--lopsided exchange in China's favor IMO. This is also why the US has the "Rust Belt" and other economic dead zones throughout middle America that were once manufacturing towns. It may even help explain, the roaring-80s. The US did not anticipate an economic transfer as fast as it occurred. Different topic... Rapid Chinese economic growth empowered the CCP to maintain its status as a champion of the people for improving the quality of life across the nation as a product of the CCPs policies, which occurred at the rate and ease that it did largely thanks to Kissinger coaxing Nixon to made a "great deal" with Mao. And, this isn't meant to dismiss the Chinese population's agency fostering the growth, only that it wouldn't have happened anywhere near as fast as it did without the US trade deal.
As for much, not all, of Eastern Europe, and, including Russia. Soviet corruption remained and didn't see enough economic growth to justify embracing liberal democracy. Many people think or are lead to believe that life was better under Soviet rule, even though the mechanism of economic growth it implemented was doomed to fail in the long-run.
Those nations were conquered!
An individual who is not a citizen of the United States or a national of the United States and has not been lawfully admitted to the U.S. for permanent residence, as defined in 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(20); or ...
Suggesting that you can also donate if you have permanent resident status (aka 'green card holder'), regardless of citizenship.
[0] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...
Our citizenship systems are similar but not completely identical.
Well, they _are_ a criminal class here. It's just they've been getting away with it for some time because they're under the protection of another criminal class - our leaders. With any luck the ramifications of this Russia/Ukraine business will cause the unravelling of much more than that little squirt Putin.
It depends how you see it, I suppose.
What I mean is this:
Basically all of these oligarchs come here to do legitimate business, just with unexplained wealth. And that's the loophole; unexplained wealth. You have to spend it in a way that brings you attention, before anyone even asks.
So here they are not acting criminally; their wealth is only criminal if someone can prove it was illegally obtained in Russia, and that is quite a high bar, considering the source of the wealth and the system in which it was created.
It's not just for Russian oligarchs, either; unexplained wealth is at least as big a problem from the middle east.
And as you likely know, campaigners even tried to get Donald Trump to explain how he bought a golf course with cash using an unexplained wealth order. I do wonder if that will get revisited, since it was almost certainly cash of dubious, and quite likely Russian, origin.
As I see it, It's not "unexplained wealth" per se that's at issue. I find that concept (the assumption that having money you can't account for is _alone_ automatic grounds for suspicion) quite despotic and authoritarian. In the US it's become a means by which police can just "legally" confiscate someone's savings. That can only go to dark places for ordinary people who have some luck with their speculations.
It's not the money, it's what they do with it and the sort of behaviour they "buy". There's a litany of serious crime (SOCA) and actions by NCA or local police that mysteriously dead-end. Intimidation of judges, police and journalists, bribery, legal threats designed to silence investigations (SLAPP) has multiplied within Britain thanks to "oligarchs".
For years our own leaders have allowed this to fester, turned a blind eye, or been involved more closely - a connection between Peter Mandelson and Oleg Deripaska is just one of the few exposed. Earlier economic crime bills have stalled, and existing "investigatory powers" legislation has rarely, if ever, been used successfully against these people.
This has led to new intelligence groups, think-tanks and university research departments set up around countering "Lawfare". Corruption is global, as you say. But let's be honest here; just because someone is not a _technically_ convicted criminal it doesn't mean they not de-facto criminals to a standard most ordinary people would accept. The problem is getting anything through a courts system so underfunded, amidst a society so corrupted by money.
What I said is that I hope this Russo-Ukraine war has side effects (far beyond ousting Putin) that blow-back on our own corrupt officials.
I'm unconcerned about this with respect to UWOs. They don't seem to be too difficult to fight off with documentation, for one thing.
> Intimidation of judges, police and journalists, bribery, legal threats designed to silence investigations (SLAPP) has multiplied within Britain thanks to "oligarchs".
This is true, but it's far from uniquely the work of the wealthier end of the Russian diaspora. There are other examples wherein all the money has been made in the UK.
The difference with the oligarch money is that everyone knows it is stolen wealth and pretends not to see it. You can take a donation from some hedge fund viper and hold your head up that it's just business. When you accept donations without due diligence that you know would fail due diligence, you've been suborned. It's a double victory: the oligarch both pays for the legislation (or non-legislation) he wants, and also envelops the politician in the stink that he himself is used to.
But the true corrupting power gained from getting someone to turn a blind eye is in getting them to do it more than once, because then they are compromised without deniability; that's why you make the big donations, over a long period of time.
This is why the "Citizens United" decision was so horrible and should be reversed.
This is what Citizens United wanted, but it's not the outcome of the Supreme Court case.
The outcome of the case was the gutting of BCRA 2002[1], which previously prevented unlimited corporate and union spending in political campaigns. The rest (anonymized funding, "super" PACs) are logical consequences of the overturning of that law and American corporate structure.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartisan_Campaign_Reform_Act
>" This would be legal in the United States as well. They would just first form a corporation and then donate it from there."
These statements were factually incorrect. You are making different claims.
But it's easier to create a super pac, accept unlimited money, and then pay out in whatever way is effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc
Capitalism and Free Speech
Corporations can't donate money to campaigns, either. (They can spend money on them, or donate funds to non-campaign groups that spend money independently of campaigns, but not donate to politicians.)
But donating millions like it's commonplace in the US I find pretty questionable. And it leads to corruption like the "pay to play" lists.
I get the instinctive hatred for extremely rich people and their wealth. But the one thing I've come to realize as I myself become richer, every new thing I buy atomically means I get less time to enjoy my previous possessions. We all just have 24 hours in a day. So practically all those possession of the ultra rich are often just paper deeds. There is on sum, a much greater benefit of something like a Mega Yacht to all the people that work there, worked to build it, work to maintain in, crew it, dock it in ports, and so on. He himself only probably get to use it on rare occasions.
To me it seems like theft to do it. Perhaps why I'm personally opposed to it, is that a few a years back I read about a government trying to take over the teachers pensions fund in Ontario. The teachers were paying out to a private firm to invest their pensions, and the firm did so well, it was worth billions of dollars.
The government running a large deficit at that time, seeing that huge sum (worth 227 Billions now) started getting wet dreams how they could take it over. They backdown.
But just seeing this kind of thing is off putting. It's just thievery.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/russian-money-canada-1.4102...
Wow. Kudos to London for having this. Publishing allegations without proof is something that should be punished. Throwing out unsubstantiated allegations without paying for it destroys all faith in the media.
To make it concrete: it seems perfectly reasonable for a journalist to publish a first-person story about an event, potentially a crime, that they witnessed. The fact that Britain's legal system threatens journalists who would do that isn't great.
The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs (ARTE 2006)
Russian Godfathers (BBC 2005)
Also highly recommended: Paul Klebnikov's Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. Berezovsky, for a while London's best-known oligarchic resident, this article doesn't even bother to mention. Berezovsky, who likely had Klebnikov murdered in 2004 for exposing him.
https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Russia-Oligarchs_A/dp/...
Yet when people do this for housing, its accepted as normal.
The Soviet Union was so vast and disorganized, both accidentally and intentionally, that for decades after it collapsed they showed a trade surplus based on selling the resources hoarded to meet future central planning goals. You had a huge trade surplus, but the money just seemed to disappear. Officially there was nothing to spend it on, but individuals bringing back anything cheap and in-demand within their personal allowance ($2000 I think?) created an enormous grey/black market with no regulation, taxation or statistics. Many of these oligarchs were cogs in the middle of this machine and ideally suited to essentially become "fixers" on both sides of the market.
For coverage of the formation of the "new Russia", _Nothing is True and Everything is Possible_ is good.
This standard has been proposed for US libel law, though so far the efforts have not made progress.
And the outcome may not be that bad overall, perhaps lower prices in London and more activity in places that want it will work out better for everybody.
e.g. there are funds that allow you to own fractional shares of rental properties spread across the entire country -- REITs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#U...
Commercial properties, obviously, but also residential properties.
The wealthy of all civilizations at all times in history have been corrupt. There is nothing interesting about that.
What is interesting about this situation is that London is incidentally a good place for Russian money. No one is trying to argue that London would be a magical, affordable Utopia without them.
It's just interesting that the conditions in London were most suitable for so many of these people exfiltrating money from their home country.
Personal random excerpts (not pointing to anything specific, they just popped up when I read the article):
- these oligarchs were mere capos, who answered to the don
- England itself has been a silent and handsomely compensated partner in Putin’s kleptocratic designs
- “We must go after the oligarchs,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared after the invasion of Ukraine, doing his best to sound Churchillian. But, as the international community labors to isolate Putin and his cronies, the question is whether England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so.
- At a fund-raising auction at the Tory summer ball in 2014, a woman named Lubov Chernukhin—who was then married to Vladimir Chernukhin, one of Putin’s former deputy finance ministers—paid a hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the top prize: a tennis match with Johnson and David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time. Johnson defended the match, decrying “a miasma of suspicion” toward “all rich Russians in London.” A Russian magnate told Catherine Belton, “In London, money rules everyone. Anyone and anything can be bought.” The Russians came to London, the source said, “to corrupt the U.K. political elite.”
- Libel tourism is another chronic English problem that everyone bemoans but nobody does anything about. This has meant terrific business for the oligarchs’ morally flexible attorneys; according to the British trade publication The Lawyer, some law firms charge a “Russian premium” for their services, of up to fifteen hundred pounds an hour.
Disclosure: I work for a swiss bank (therefore a potentially indirect antagonist to the London Exchange/Marketplace - but I'm just an IT-guy :P ).
During the past years I kept reading in the news and saw on TV some docs about russian interests in London (they never mentioned anything about other cities/regions, it was always all about "London", I don't know why), therefore none of these news should be surprising, but apparently they still are?
Additionally I'm totally/absolutely surprised by UK's government's attitude change:
not just a sudden 360-degrees change from "welcome investors" to "don't you dare to talk to us" but even a "what you owned here is history" (maybe I'm mis-interpreting but I understood that that's the general direction of where things are going there - maybe I'm wrong??).
Cheers
That's amusing: you're end up in the same position, but appearing to have changed?
In the US, many people blame the liberal party for things regarding Ukraine that didn't even happen, but what the conservative party has openly done is somehow overlooked. It's not the first issue on which we've seen this phenomenon (economics, etc.), but it's an excellent example.
This could have a seriously important effect on the war by opening Russian's eyes to what is going on.
He said that there were already two all cash offers, and one was over price. I said: who buys them all cash? He said: Russians, for their kids.
Large cities, like NYC, SF, London, Paris, and Vancouver are seen as good places to park money in real estate, as they are international hubs.
In the UK in particular the government is beholden to the bankers in the City of London and they want no such crackdown.
It's already the case where when you buy real estate in the UK with an LLC (which should be illegal IMHO) you need to declare who the beneficial owner is with the company registered with Companies House. This is routinely not done and there is absolutely no enforcement. That would be a start but it doesn't go near far enough.
Another example: all US citizens and permanent residents have to declare all their foreign assets to the government every year, typically twice: once to the IRS, another time to the Treasury Department. These forms are known as Form 8939 and FBAR respectively.
Guess what you don't have to declare? Real estate holdings. Why is there a carve-out for real estate? It's disgusting.
We have a housing crisis in the West. It's a complex problem but there are a number of factors:
1. NIMBYism stopping building of denser living;
2. Tax advantages and policies that make it more profitable to build ultra-luxury housing; and
3. The ease to which the wealthy can park their money in such real estate, which creates a lot of demand.
I would like to see this all go much farther. If you own real estate in a given jurisdiction you should be a resident for tax purposes in that jurisdiction. That should allow the government to tax your worldwide income. Want the anonymity of ownership through an LLC? Without a clear beneficial owner established then just punitively tax such property. Anonymity is a privilege you should pay through the nose for.
I'd accept a carve-out for owning "working" property, which is to say an apartment building where the units are rented out. But individual residential property? Get the hell out.
And any property where no beneficial owner can be established (and thus taxed) should just be seized. We seem totally fine with seizing the assets of poor people (ie civil forfeiture). Let's apply that to wealthy tax evaders, oligarchs and despots instead.
Amen. Social contract dodgers are wrecking the west. We can't afford to let crazy rich people run things, it isn't efficient or right.
For some weird reason they get called "elites" if they're American, but oligarchs if only if they're Russian, even though they're the same class of wildly disproportionately powerful people.
the richest people in russia got that way by plundering the country of its natural resources and the remnants of the soviet-era industry.
those are not the same.
> the richest people in russia got that way by plundering the country of its natural resources and the remnants of the soviet-era industry. > those are not the same.
Importantly, the wealth of the richest in the oligarchy is maintained (or destroyed like in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky) by the use of force by the authoritarian. The power of the authoritarian is in turn backstopped financially by the oligarchs.
The wealth of the richest in the US is maintained by the economic system and its associated laws (however flawed). There is a conceivable path to make the system fairer in the US via elections, but not in Russia.
To be honest, the poster child for American businesses are Intuit, Equifax, that company that manufactures EpiPens, or the company that manufactures insulin etc. They all essentially exist by rent-seeking without creating value, enforced through lobbying or regulatory capture.
Painting American companies and Russian companies in such stark contrast is overly simplistic. And pretending American elites are any more altruistic than Russian elites would be insanity.
Wouldn't it be some combination of JPMorgan, Google, Boeing, Berkshire Hathaway, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Cardinal Health or something (you can mix in whatever Fortune 500 companies you want)?
The rent-seeking companies appear to me to be a far smaller portion of the economy than others that inarguably produce economic value.
Random exceptions don't invalidate the point of the parent comment.
This may have been the case through the 1960s but post 1970s American is very much back on the crypto-aristocrat track with people inheriting vast wealth or being given jobs as money managers or financiers due to family influence and then rent-seeking the hell out of anything that smells like money.
You can try to make an argument that EV tax credits are bad and should be abolished, but the two situations just aren't even in the same universe.
It really is a wide difference in degree.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-qui...
Oligarchs don't have power outside the authoritarian apparatus of the state. Oligarchs exist entirely at the pleasure of the leader and have no true autonomy. If an Oligarch tries to 'branch out', they end up in jail or dead.
> Kolomoisky siphoned billions of dollars from PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest financial institution, which he co-owned, in an audacious laundering scheme, cleaning the money through a web of companies around the world, U.S. federal prosecutors allege ... transferring more than $750 million to Kolomoisky’s business interests in the United States ... secretly amassed a real estate empire, buying at least 22 properties, including a skyscraper in Cleveland with vaulted ceilings that featured one of the largest bank lobbies in the world, a shuttered Motorola facility rising from the farm fields of northern Illinois and the former headquarters of Mary Kay Cosmetics in Dallas
... The flow of Kolomoisky dollars into the U.S. finally ended in December 2016 when Ukraine regulators nationalized PrivatBank on suspicions of widespread fraud. The losses to the institution prompted criminal investigations by the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. Last February, agents from the U.S. Justice Department jetted to Kyiv to talk with law enforcement agents about the ongoing case in the U.S.
... Though the federal government has set up targeting orders in places like Miami and and New York to screen property purchases for laundering, the orders do not extend all over the country and do not apply to commercial transactions ... The Justice Department finally pushed to seize some of the real estate in August, but much of the damage was done, with buildings devalued, factories shuttered, and steel workers without jobs.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikesallah/ukraine-bill...
> At one time, Kolomoisky and his associates were the largest commercial landlords in Cleveland, owning 2.8 million square feet. One of the properties that has drawn the FBI's attention is the Warren Steel plant in Ohio ... Valeria Gontareva, former chair of the National Bank of Ukraine, the nation's chief regulator, said the level of fraud on the institution was larger than any crime ever perpetrated on a Ukrainian bank.
U.S. DoJ filings, Aug 2020, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-seeks-forf...
https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/10/06/what-the-pandora-pape...
> Kvartal 95 was bought by 1+1 TV channel owned by Ihor Kolomoiskyi which gave the company good terms of cooperation and higher prices. Kolomoiskyi started to support Zelenskyy and Kvartal as comedians and now keeps backing them as politicians ... The Pandora Papers disclosed that since 2012, an offshore company affiliated to Kolomoiskyi’s 1+1 group at least once paid more than $1 billion to Zelenskyy’s offshore firm SVT from the British Virgin Islands, for the popular TV show “Make a Comedian Laugh” created by Kvartal 95. And Maltext owns half of SVT ... Zelenskyy’s and Kolomoiskyi’s companies made a transaction worth $40 million in 2012. Under the documents, this was “contribution to capital,” or investment, paid by the oligarch to the now-president.
Documentary (enable subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp0WWZbNGq4
I'm a little confused because neither what you quoted, nor the article you linked to mention Zelensky.
That being said, after winning the election, Zelensky supposedly successfully silenced Kolomoisky after Kolomoisky made attempts to speak out and started issuing recommendations on how the country should be run. This was something Zelensky did not like, as he saw it undermining his authority. Supposedly the two have maintained a relationship behind closed doors.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/03/revealed-anti-o...
https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers/pandora-papers-r...
> Zelenskyy’s and Kolomoiskyi’s companies made a transaction worth $40 million in 2012.
He did the opposite.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/21/fac...
"Despite a recently concluded investigation by Senate Republicans that found no wrongdoing by the Bidens, claims to the contrary have continued to circulate on social media."
You may remember this as a right-wing line about him corruptly helping his son. It was the opposite.
> It's true that Joe Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid to persuade Ukraine to oust its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in March 2016. But it wasn't because Shokin was investigating Burisma. It was because Shokin wasn't pursuing corruption among the country's politicians.
> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/21/fac...
And somehow none to the liberal party? This kind of bias throws the rest of the article into suspicion.
In general it feels like you're trying to extrapolate American politics onto British politics. For example, "liberal" in the UK (and I think most of the world) doesn't mean what it has come to mean in the USA. And the Conservative party at the moment tends to raise more of its money from large donations from wealthy individuals than the main opposition party in the UK [0].
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-w...
Mind Gell-Mann Amnesia. Remember last time this outlet covered a subject you know about.
Most of the Russian money in politics is flowing through the Conservative party. They're currently in power, traditionally more wealth friendly, and rely on big-money individual and corporate donors to a greater degree than Labour (who have union funding and also many more members to pay subs). That said, the last Labour government (up to 2010) was also beguiled by rich people, and there are definitely a few Labour backbenchers who have been bought off.
This does not correlate at all with the polonium and Novichok cases.
I live quite close to Salisbury and have no idea apart from "bloody tall", how high the spire thrusts skywards. Apart from anything else we'd generally measure it in feet.
I'd better spell it out: One of the gentlemen accused of poisoning a Russian ex-pat in Salisbury (Hants. UK) claimed that he was a tourist and came to see the cathedral in Salisbury. He quoted the height of it to quite a degree of accuracy as proof of his touristic intentions. He really did not smear novichok on Mr Skripal's door.
And if they had been visiting the spire, which they probably weren't, it's likely they would have gotten information about it in their native language which would use meters.
It's just not really a fun thing to do in your own town. And to be fair most tourist attractions are hugely overrated.
The “tallest church” explanation is kind of like of someone saying they buy playboy magazine for the articles. It’s transparently false to the point of absurdity.
Doesn't really prove anything. Could just be a really strange individual who memorises statistics. To 3 significant figures doe.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/09/26/skr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_church_buildin...
It's just an observation of something that doesn't add up.
If one makes an explicit effort to get into Britons' good graces, why would then they do something as exceptionally damaging as those two assasinations? This makes no sense, and the article doesn't address it.
Why would he think he should act differently abroad? Remember: he's a psychopath.
--
Edit: a flagged comment replying to this called this hysterical hyperbole because I used the words "literally" and "psychopath".
In the latter case I understand this to be the assessment of more or less every foreign intelligence service on earth. The flagged comment suggested "sociopath" is better; I do not see evidence of Putin's ability to feel remorse or of his conscience generally. Also, psychopaths are not unusual; up to 3% of the human population could be psychopaths, and the point was not to stress his personal violence, but his remorseless consistency.
In the former case: OK, let's go with "very nearly literally" -- there may be some days where Putin's regime, if not Putin quite directly, does not have someone at least jailed, threatened or ruined for opposing him, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say there are very few days like this. He runs a regime that threatens every single citizen who opposes him, and he could stop it if he chose. He chooses not to.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I could have clarified more to avoid provoking a flame war.
So I have clarified more.
I'm a bit surprised that what I have done here is frowned upon when it was an attempt to reach consensus.
FWIW, enter "sociopath" in Wikipedia and you are redirected to the "Psychopathy" page.
The colloquial distinction is that sociopaths are still capable of a limited form of remorse.
The past view that Putin was not necessarily a psychopath hinged on the idea that his government was more than just him. For example that other people in his regime might have chosen to use a chemical weapon on British soil, but not necessarily Putin himself, directly.
The Ukraine war totally explodes the myth that Russia's foreign policy is under the control of anyone but Putin.
Either way, the point I was making is not that he is evil or violent, but that there's no reason to believe he would think he should act any differently when having people killed on foreign soil; he's unconstrained by any such deference or restraint.