• ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds’
inequalityWill you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?

 
Before we look at the situation in the Ukraine, we offer our congratulations to Johnson for snatching a possible victory from the jaws of defeat, as he tells us C-19 is over, gone, no more.

‘Now was the time for personal responsibility,’ which is rather rich coming from a person with no sense of personal responsibility, and a reckless disregard for others.

Neither the World Health Organization nor the British Medical Association agree with his announcement which is designed only to appease the spineless lunatics on the Tory backbenches.

Omicron will not be the last variant, but Johnson has already found a way of dealing with that: tests will no longer be free; therefore, people are less likely to bother, which, in-turn means there will be fewer reported cases. Simples!

Cynicism to one-side, as this column has written before, C-19 risks becoming the disease of poverty.  Without free test those in more deprived areas will not be able to afford them, as is already the case if they need to self-isolate. They often live in overcrowded housing which spreads diseases faster. This could lead to a self-perpetuating cycle for the disadvantaged.
 

‘C-19 risks becoming the disease of poverty’

 
C-19 is more infectious than the flu and has worse health outcomes. As it mutates vaccine efficacy falls and abandoning public health measures could lead to people continuing to be infected.

Despite this, 175,000 dead, and ‘partygate’, it appears that, in the minds of his spineless MPs, Johnson remains the man. The question now is what will the electorate say? In the May local elections perhaps, the people will have the courage to do what his MPs didn’t.

There are continuing signs of discontent; in Wycombe, the constituents of Steve Baker are concerned about his environmental position and have set up a ‘Steve Baker Watch’ group and are launching a crowdfunding page to raise money.

The campaigners told the Guardian: ‘Steve’s Net Zero Watch campaign will make people’s lives in Wycombe miserable. He wants to stop us getting cheaper clean energy, insulating our homes and creating a better future for our children. We’ve had enough!’

Baker, who as chair of the European Research Group was instrumental in pressing for a hard Brexit, helped set up the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG), which has close links to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a lobbyist group that has been accused of denying climate science.

The NZSG has a strange approach to global warming, favouring cuts to green taxes, an increase in fossil fuel production to address the energy crisis, and recently pushed for fracking in the UK.

Now the main event; Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine.

They say timing is everything, if so, Putin may have judged the invasion of the Ukraine quite well.

Europe post-Merkel is a mess, France is focused on elections, and other European nations appear not to see, or care about the threat. In an already isolationist US Biden looks increasingly a lame duck.

We are making a lot of noise doing little. Johnson’s priority is his own survival, and the invasion provides him with the prefect distraction. He tries to sound like Churchill, whereas his actions are more akin to Neville Chamberlain. Brexit, of course, will feature as he continues to hype up our role as being bigger and more influential than it is. And, a new slogan, ‘out in front’.

Putin actions are another example of what I have long written; we are experiencing the politics of the 1930s.

‘we are experiencing the politics of the 1930s’

WW1 led to the demise of empires and self-determination in the Balkans and eastern Europe. There was a pandemic. The roaring 20s culminated in the Wall Street Crash, which led to the US turning isolationist. The discontent and unemployment the crash caused led to the rise of fascism and ended in WW2.

More recently, the fall of the Soviet Union led to the re-establishment of many Balkan and east European states. The roaring noughties was followed by the GFC which had a direct correlation to the rise of modern-day Fascism, now known as ‘Populism’. One of Populism’s prime exponents, Donald Trump, believed in ‘America first’, I.E., isolation. To cap it off we also had a pandemic. Now we have the Ukraine.

The harsh reality is that the West has neither the intention, nor the ability, to militarily defend Ukraine; Putin knows this. Ukraine might be his first move to re-establish the old/new Russian empire whose border runs down the Eastern edge of Germany.

The west’s problem is that we have indulged Russia / Russians for too long and have looked the other way too often. This is especially true of the UK and the Tory Party.

In September 2011, Cameron visited Moscow seeking business for the City of London, despite having full knowledge of the facts that are currently concerning MPs. Litvinenko had been murdered five years previously, and Russia had given one of the Met’s suspects in the case a seat in parliament.

Now the government is seeking to overlook all of this, imposing some half-hearted sanctions on Russian banks who are bit-part players and three HNW’s sanctioned by the US in 2018.

Johnson’s warning of ‘more to come’ has taken away any element of surprise, therefore any ‘visible’ assets will be moved to a friendlier country. I use the term ‘visible’ as most are ‘hidden’ inside shell companies.

Johnson has consistently promised a public register of beneficial ownership of UK property to overcome the opaqueness of the shell companies that own swaths of UK property. To date, Companies House still doesn’t have the power or the resources to verify information registered with it.

He has belatedly acted to close the tier 1 visa scheme for wealthy ‘investors’.

In the 8-years to September 2015, 764 of the 3,396 people who paid for these so-called visas were Russian, bringing in C. £800m of Russian investment. The flow slowed considerably after April 2015, when the UK authorities began to check the origin of the money used to support these investments. In the final quarter 2018 only 16 Russians applied for a golden visa. (1)

However, latest Home Office data shows 798 investor visas were granted in the year to September 2021, of which 82 were award to Russians.
 

‘allowing illicit finance to be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat”

 
In 2020 parliament’s joint intelligence and security committee said that it was ‘welcoming oligarchs with open arms’, allowing illicit finance to be recycled through what has been referred to as the London ‘laundromat’’.

‘Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal’, and there are a lot of Russians with very close links to Putin who are well integrated into the UK business and social scene, and accepted because of their wealth. This level of integration – in ‘Londongrad’ in particular – means that any measures now being taken by the government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation.’
 
Assessing the value of Russian financial assets in the UK is difficult.
 

  • According to Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, at the end of September (2017), Russian investors held financial assets in the UK worth a total of $3.5bn (£2.6bn). (1)
  • The Office of National Statistics provides a broader measure of all Russian investment in the UK, and, at the end of 2016 assessed it at £25.5bn. (1)
  • Other reports show that in the 10-years to 2018, £68bn has flowed from Russia into Britain’s offshore satellites such as BVI, Caymans, Gibraltar, Jersey, and Guernsey. (1)

 
This money doesn’t reside there, it is just registered there to obscure its origins. The French economist Thomas Piketty estimates that more than half of Russians’ total wealth is held offshore in this manner C. $800bn (£597bn) – and by a tiny number of people, perhaps just a few hundred. ‘Rich Russians live between London, Monaco and Moscow,’ Piketty wrote in a blogpost in April. ‘Post-communism has become the worst ally of hyper-capitalism.’ (1)

Analysts at Deutsche Bank, in 2015, looked at discrepancies in the records of money that flows into and out of the UK. They concluded that since the early 1990s, £133bn had arrived here without ever being publicly accounted for. They estimated that ‘less than half’ of that sum was likely to be Russian, which means that Russians could have secret holdings here of up to £67.5bn, on top of the officially declared figure. (2)
 

‘since the early 1990s, £133bn had arrived here without ever being publicly accounted for’

 
This money doesn’t only buy status and assets, it also buys influence.

Johnson thinks the government is excelling themselves in dealing with this: ‘I don’t think any government could conceivably be doing more to root out corrupt Russian money – and that is what we’re going to do, and I think we can be proud of what we’ve already done and the measures we have set out.’

Why then, in 2014, did Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of one of Putin’s ministers, pay £160,000 to play tennis with Boris Johnson and David Cameron? Let’s face it, Borg, and Federer they ain’t!

The answer is simple. Since 2010 successive Tory government have allowed Russians, including many close to the Kremlin, to turn London into the ‘money-laundering capital of the world’. Last week it was revealed that £1.5bn of UK property had been purchased by Russians accused of corruption or linked to the Kremlin.

As far back as 2018 the Commons foreign affairs committee said that ‘reacting in an ad hoc way to the Kremlin’s behaviour has led to a disjointed approach’ and that ‘the assets… support Putin’s campaign to subvert the international rules-based system’.

The explanation for all of this is simple; they have received C. £2m in donations from these people since Boris Johnson took power in 2019.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to conclude that the Russians who have given money to the Tories, only did so because they were given UK nationality by the Tories.

Influence is key, as The Sunday Times reported, people who have donated at least £250,000 to the Conservatives have been invited to join an ‘advisory board’, giving special access to the PM, cabinet ministers, and senior government advisers.

The 14 identified members of the group have a combined wealth of at least £30bn and have donated £22m to the party. Among them are property tycoons, financiers, two people with connections to the Kremlin, a tobacco magnate, and an internet entrepreneur currently facing trial for rape and sexual assault (both of which he denies).
 

‘The Tories embrace of rich Russians has led to London being awash with their money’

 
The Tories embrace of rich Russians has led to London being awash with their money

In 2013, analysis by the estate agency Knight Frank estimated that almost a tenth of all buyers at the top end of the London market came from Russian. Another agent, Savills calculated that Russians like to buy the biggest houses of any group of purchasers. Average house prices in Kensington have risen eightfold over the past two decades, partly due to Russian buyers. (1)

In 2011, a Russian bought Park Place, a stately home near Henley-on-Thames, for £140m. (1)

In 2018, 2,806 Russian children attending private schools in England, they are separate to those who benefit from the Tier 1 vias scheme. (1)

This ‘love’ of London might be Putin’s Achilles heel. Whilst the headlines created from sanctioning the oligarchs look good, they miss the point; their influence over Putin is zero, they are at his beck and call.

If there is any influence it lies with the members of the Duma, the Senate, the presidential council, the top echelons of the security and defence services, top state television employees. They are the ones who draft, rubber-stamp, promote and carry out Putin’s decisions. Some even advise him.

Many of them love to travel to Europe and the US. They educate their children here. They own properties here. Their lifestyle is based on luxury yachts, villas, skiing, and enjoying the best restaurants and hotels the west can offer. They post pictures of themselves doing all of this on Instagram.

If the visas required to do this are denied they become ‘imprisoned in Russia’. This could soon lead to discontent. As a former BBC Moscow correspondent wrote today: ‘The message to them will be clear: if you want to enjoy your western lifestyles, you need a new leader who respects western values; until then, you’re banned’.
 

‘Stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change’

 
Notes:

  1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/25/how-britain-let-russia-hide-its-dirty-money

 
A rewrite for Philip this week as business as usual was totally eclipsed by the unfolding situation in Ukraine; it seems that the invasion and Johnson’s declaration that Covid has been defeated should see him cling on, at least until the local elections in May.

With the Met sending out questionnaires asking if there was any mitigation of the fact that they broke the law, Partygate seems to have descended into farce; whilst the Tories may be laughing, the real loser is democracy.

Philip then describes just how grubby this country has really become; as the Chinese proverb would have it – ‘the fish rots from the head’.

Philip has long predicted a return to the politics of the 1930s, and Putin’s war certainly supports that.

And then, of course, there is the inevitable sleaze – ‘It will be interesting to see how Johnson and the Tories deal with the inevitable questions about their links to Russia and aiding money laundering. Much was done to attract their funds and turn a blind eye to everything else they got up to.

Where all of this end’s is anyone’s guess. In spite of all the talk from Europe, we are powerless without the US. I would be very surprised if America gets involved. There is the UN but then there was the League of Nations – much good that did!’

This week’s lyrics follow the theme of the article. We start with Nine Inch Nails and ‘The Hand That Feeds’, and finish with the Stones ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. Наслаждаться!

@Coldwar_Steve
 

Philip Gilbert 2Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.

Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s

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