Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

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All the more relevant with events unfolding in Ukraine as some of that money has been financing Russian tanks.

Bullough has a gift for making complex financial information comprehensible and strives to leaven this depressing story with jokes and deft character sketches . Here too, there is no direct benefit to the government of the UK, but it keeps The City humming, and those are the people in power. Bullough begins by showing how old colonialists found a new niche in recreating the further-flung outposts of empire – the self-governing protectorates of the British Virgin Islands, the Caymans, Gibraltar – as looters’ havens.The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain’s twentieth century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat. Bullough is a compelling and expert guide to the newly-dug sewers flowing through the heart of our political, legal and financial establishment. The City, London’s financial hub, “must be protected at all costs”, no matter how many millions of lives are shattered elsewhere around the world. We feel a bit under threat here, so I’ve told my liaison to your office that should there be catastrophic loss at Fort Meade, we are turning the functioning of the American SIGINT system over to GCHQ … it’s just a precaution, but if we go down, you run the show. The term Special Relationship—which was popularized, if not invented, by Churchill—has become a cliché, invoked increasingly dutifully by American politicians and increasingly needi-fully by British ones, but it still reflects a deep and enduring connection that goes far beyond what the two countries have with anyone else.

deserve[s] praise for going beyond moralizing and pointing out how an industry geared to enabling the corrupt is not just unsavory but can hurt a country's real economic prospects.The life story of Father Dmitry, the Orthodox priest I chose as my central figure, seems to me to mirror the life of his whole nation, which is beset by depression and alcoholism. Exploring the way in which Britain services oligarchs, builds tax havens and launders money, Oliver Bullough presents a startling, if sometimes overdramatic, picture of current policy on economic crime. Gambling was determined to be the savior of the tiny and artificial economy of this peninsula on a rock, no bigger than a large park. From grasping bankers to opportunistic lawyers and feckless MPs, unable and unwilling to withstand the schemes of the global rich, Oliver Bullough has drilled down to the root of the malaise that's rotting the UK system.

Butler to the World 's main message - that Britain needs to clean up its act not just for its own good but for that of the world - rings all the louder because of current geopolitics . A polemical take on how the UK's post-imperial institutions - banks, law firms, public relations companies, schools and universities - rushed to serve the corrupt super-rich, laundering individuals' reputations and washing their dirty money so they can enlarge their fortunes still further. Instead, they have moved back to their luxury accommodations all the way over in Kensington, a couple of miles west. In other words, how Britain, including its overseas territories, has become a ‘butler to the world’ and how successive governments have been good on rhetoric but poor on action when it comes to tackling global financial corruption.

This is a serious topic, in demand of more attention, in the same vein as legal access and harmful identity politics. Znałam tu osoby , które mając dobre życie; dom, rodzinę, pracę straciły wszystko przez uzależnienie od hazardu. Found this quite confusing and technical at times - perhaps more on me than on the author - and didn’t feel it lived up to its potential to discuss oligarchs and their wider role in British life, but definitely learned a lot from this book. Unbeknownst to Mullin and indeed to pretty much everyone else, the Treasury and the private equity industry were actually seeking to loosen those same regulations, so limited partnerships would have to report even less information to the authorities than they already did. And, fundamentally, over the last eighty years, that secret side of Britain has had a far more significant impact on the world than its avowed public policies.