John Helmer — PRIVATE BLIND EYE – HOW THE LAST BRITISH INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST TURNS ONE ON RUSSIA

What Private Eye has failed to investigate is how Chernukhin has been able to import and invest a fortune in the UK, with the imprimatur of the British Government, financial regulators, and banks – a fortune whose origin when he was a state official in Moscow Chernukhin declines to explain....

On the say-so of Kasyanov and Kudrin, Chernukhin supervised VEB’s takeover of most Russian pension fund contributions; management of Soviet-era debts owed to Moscow by states like Czechoslovakia and Vietnam; and bail-out loans for companies designated by Kasyanov, Kudrin, or Putin as politically valuable; these included state media companies. When Kasyanov began to threaten Putin with political competition, he was dismissed from the prime ministry in 2004. At the same time Chernukhin was fired from the chairmanship of VEB. He then moved to London.

The High Court papers and media reports indicate that he took with him and then spent at least £150 million acquiring personal and commercial assets. As he did that, Chernukhin was sheltered by the British Government which granted him British citizenship. In 2006 Moscow reporters were asking in print where Chernukhin’s money had come from. “Why”, wrote Semyon Goncharov of KM.ru, “don’t the British authorities ask the Russian oligarchs the question: where, thanks to what, and at the expense of whom did they get their fortunes?… As for Vladimir Chernukhin, the British authorities may have been embarrassed to ask him where the former deputy Minister got 135 million dollars to buy the office building of Midland Bank, because his official salary is clearly not enough to collect such money.”

Chernukhin was asked last month to clarify the appearance of this discrepancy and to account for the origin of his wealth in line with the current British statutes. He refused to reply....

Dances with Bears

PRIVATE BLIND EYE – HOW THE LAST BRITISH INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST TURNS ONE ON RUSSIA
John Helmer

Rigged Game — The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire

At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it behind obscure financial structures in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance. 

How did this come about, and what impact does it have on the world today? This is what the Spider’s Web sets out to investigate....

Rigged Game
The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire
Don Quijones

Tony Norfield — Finance, Power & Brexit

Here is an interview I did recently with Esteban Mercatante for the Argentine-based Spanish language journal Ideas de Izquierda and which I believe will also be published in the near future at leftvoice.org. His questions centred on my book, The City. My answers give some background to the analysis and comments on recent developments, including Brexit....

Economics of Imperialism
Finance, Power & Brexit

Tony Norfield, Marxist economist, finance professional and author of The City: London and the Global Power of Finance (2016)

Adam Ramsey — A fire in the world’s laundromat

The Italian author and journalist [Roberto Saviano] is well-known world-wide as the leading expert in the Calambrian mafia. Saviano has written about crime in Italy and about international drug money. He’s followed the flows of cash and he’s been awarded numerous prizes and honourary degrees for his work. But of all of the places he’s researched, he holds particular contempt for one.

Speaking last year, Saviano said:

“If I asked you what is the most corrupt place on Earth, you might tell me, well it’s Afghanistan, maybe Greece, Nigeria, the South of Italy and I will tell you it’s the UK.”

This isn’t because he thinks that the police in Britain generally accept more bribes than others, nor that our politicians stuff their brief cases with brown envelopes more than others. Rather, it’s because of the role of the City of London in laundering the proceeds of crime across the world. It’s because of the place that London takes at the heart of the planet’s biggest network of tax-havens and secrecy areas; which extends to our Overseas Territories, through the Crown Protectorates, and into the imperial metropolis itself.

But it’s not just Saviano, and it’s it just about the Cayman islands. Last year, the MPs of the Home Affairs Select Committee investigated London’s role in money laundering. Here’s their own summary of what their report says:

Open Democracy
A fire in the world’s laundromat
Adam Ramsay

Peter Yeung — UK is most corrupt country in the world, says mafia expert Roberto Saviano

'It’s not the bureaucracy, it’s not the police, it’s not the politics but what is corrupt is the financial capital'

You knew this already without having got be told.

The Independent (UK)
UK is most corrupt country in the world, says mafia expert Roberto Saviano
Peter Yeung
ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Joe Mellor — Most corrupt country on planet is Britain, says Mafia expert

Fearless journalist Roberto Saviano, who has dedicated his career to exposing the Italian mafia, has claimed that it is Britain that is the most corrupt country on Earth.

The London Economic
Most corrupt country on planet is Britain, says Mafia expert

Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor

Dan Glazebrook — Britain is the heart and soul of tax evasion

The British government’s claim to be tackling tax evasion is about as credible as Al Capone claiming to be leading the fight against organized crime. In fact, Britain is at the heart of the global tax haven network, and continues to lead the fight against its regulation.

The 11 and a half million leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca have proven, once again, what we have already known for some time – that the ‘offshore world’ of tax havens is a den of money laundering and tax evasion right at the heart of the global financial system.

Despite attempts by Western media to twist the revelations into a story about the ‘corruption’ of official enemies – North Korea, Syria, China and, of course, Putin, who is not even mentioned in the documents – the real story is the British government’s assiduous cultivation of the offshore world. For whilst corruption exists in every country, what enables that corruption to flourish and become institutionalized is the network of secretive financial regimes that allow the world’s biggest criminals and fraudsters to escape taxation, regulation and oversight of their activities. And this network is a conscious creation of the British state.

Of the 215,000 companies identified in the Mossack Fonseca documents, over half were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, one single territory in what tax haven expert Nicholas Shaxson calls a “spider’s web” of well over a dozen separate UK-controlled dens of financial chicanery.

In addition, the UK was ranked number two of those jurisdictions where the banks, law firms and other middlemen associated with the Panama Papers operate, only topped by Hong Kong, whose institutional environment is itself a creation of the UK. And of the ten banks who most frequently asked Mossack Fonseca to set up paper companies to hide their client’s finances, four were British: HSBC, Coutts, Rothschild and UBS.….

The entire UK-controlled web is home to offshore deposits estimated in 2009 to be worth $3.2 trillion, 55 percent of the global total….

The remnant of empire.

Whilst ostensibly involved in a process of ‘decolonization’, in fact the UK hung on to a large global network of small, sparsely-populated islands: “The British empire”, Shaxson wrote, “had faked its own death.” These islands were to serve the same imperial purpose the empire had always had: the projection of British power and the channeling of African, Asian and Latin American wealth into Britain. But whilst some of the islands, such as Diego Garcia and the Falklands, were to serve as crucial military outposts, many of the others were developed as a means of facilitating the financial plunder of the former colonial world.

In Shaxson’s words, the role of these tax havens is to “capture passing foreign business and channel it to London just as a spider’s web catches insects” whilst also acting as a “money laundering filter that lets the City get involved in dirty business while providing it with enough distance to maintain plausible deniability.”…

Indeed, much of Cameron’s battling with Europe has been driven precisely by the desire to maintain the impunity of the City and its web of tax havens in the face of attempts by the EU to regulate the banking sector.…

RT
Britain is the heart and soul of tax evasion
Dan Glazebrook

James Pheby — Panama Papers reveal London as centre of 'spider's web'

The files leaked from Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca exposed Britain's link to thousands of firms based in tax havens and how secret money is invested in British assets, particularly London property.

Critics accuse British authorities of turning a blind eye to the inflow of suspect money and of being too close to the financial sector to clamp down on the use of its overseas territories as havens, with the British Virgin Islands alone hosting 110,000 of the Mossack Fonseca's clients.

"London is the epicentre of so much of the sleaze that happens in the world," Nicholas Shaxson, author of the book "Treasure Islands", which examines the role of offshore banks and tax havens, told AFP.

The political analyst said that Britain itself was relatively transparent and clean, but that companies used the country's territories abroad -- relics of the days of empire -- to "farm out the seedier stuff", often under the guise of shell companies with anonymous owners.
"Tax evasion and stuff like that will be done in the external parts of the network. Usually there will be links to the City of London, UK law firms, UK accountancy firms and to UK banks," he said, calling London the centre of a "spider's web".

"They're all agents of the City of London -- that is where the whole exercise is controlled from," Richard Murphy, professor at London's City University, said of the offshore havens.

Old news but now it is on the front page.

Yahoo News
Panama Papers reveal London as centre of 'spider's web'
James Pheby/AFP

Vladimir Platov — Great Britain is a centre of “money laundering”

Who knew?

New Eastern Outlook
Great Britain is a centre of “money laundering”

Vladimir Platov

George Monbiot — The City’s stranglehold makes Britain look like an oh-so-civilised mafia state

To an extent unknown since before the first world war, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. It is not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It’s that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bailouts, quantitative easing and delays in interest-rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that – as the Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott, puts it – financial markets are “one of the last bastions of socialism left on Earth”.…

Property in this country is a haven for the proceeds of international crime. The head of the National Crime Agency, Donald Toon, notes that “the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK.”…

The speculative property market is just one current in the great flow of cash that sluices through Britain while scarcely touching the sides. The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. In fact, the relationship seems to work the other way. Behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons sits the Remembrancer, whose job is to ensure that the interests of the City of London are recognised by the elected members. (A campaign to rescind this privilege – Don’t Forget the Remembrancer – will be launched very soon.)

The City is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain’s financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.

Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging.…

How can this be?

At next month’s Conservative party conference, corporate executives will pay £2,500 to sit with a minister. Doubtless, because we are assured that there is no link between funding and policy, they will spend the day discussing the weather and the films they have seen. If we noticed such arrangements overseas, we might be inclined to regard them as corruption. But that can’t be the case here, not least because the invitation explains that “fees associated with business day & dinner are considered a commercial transaction and therefore do not constitute a political donation”.

The government also insists that there is no link between political donations and seats in the House of Lords. But a study by researchers at Oxford University found that the probability of so many major donors arriving there by chance is 1.36 x 10-38: roughly “equivalent to entering the National Lottery and winning the jackpot 5 times in a row”. Why does the Lords remain unreformed? Because it permits plutocratic power to override democracy. Both rich and poor are kept in their place.….

These are just some excerpts. It's worse, much worse. The culture is corrupt.

The Guardian | Comment Is Free
The City’s stranglehold makes Britain look like an oh-so-civilised mafia state
George Monbiot

A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

Vladimir Platov — Billions of Dollars Laundered Through United Kingdom Banks

The UK National Crime Agency recently stated that “hundreds of billions of US dollars” are laundered through banks in the United Kingdom every year. London holds first place among world capitals with regard to the volume of drug trade and money laundering. Describing the global international drug trade network, Roberto Saviano, an Italian investigative journalist and author of Gomorrah, a book on the Neapolitan mafia, said a few days ago of the international drug trade that “Mexico is its heart and London is its head”. He also reminded readers of the British bank HSBC’s £1.2 billion fine for money laundering for a Mexican drug cartel in 2012.…

First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/13/billions-of-dollars-laundered-through-united-kingdom-banks/

New Eastern Outlook
Billions of Dollars Laundered Through United Kingdom Banks

Vladimir Platov

William K. Black — The City of London is so Criminogenic That It Boggles Even Its Banking Apologists

Forget Wall Street as the global bad guy. The City is worse. Wall Street actually conducts its worst deals there because the rules and regulators are even laxer. The leaders of the UK have concluded that finance is really the only game they have left and to loose financial hegemony would be disastrous for Britain. So most anything goes.
New Economic Perspectives
The City of London is so Criminogenic That It Boggles Even Its Banking Apologists
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

John Helmer — Sergei Pugachev Is The Boy On The Burning Deck – Condemned By The Uk High Court, Only The Financial Times To Hang On To

High finance, Russian style. How an oligarch got his money. The City seems to think it is just fine?

Dances with Bears

Sergei Pugachev Is The Boy On The Burning Deck – Condemned By The Uk High Court, Only The Financial Times To Hang On To

John Helmer

Michael Hudson — Big Banks Are Knee-Deep in the Dirty Money-Laundering Business

U.S. and UK financial firms are pretending they haven't been deeply involved in the dark side of banking.

Alternet
Big Banks Are Knee-Deep in the Dirty Money-Laundering Business
Michael Hudson | Distinguished Research Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, Kansas City

Rowan BosworthDavies — How the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan made the 2008 financial crisis inevitable

The consequences of Thatcher and Reagan's Friedman and Hayek-inspired free market utopianism and market fundamentalism. Adds more detail to Bill Black's exposé.

Max Keiser
How the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan made the 2008 financial crisis inevitable
Rowan BosworthDavies

Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson — Mrs. Thatcher’s Mean Legacy — The Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization

We typically honor the convention to refrain from to speak ill of the recently departed. But Margaret Thatcher probably would not object to an epitaph focusing on how her political legacy was to achieve her professed aim of “irreversibly” dismantling Britain’s public sector. Attacking central planning by government, she shifted it into much more centralized financial hands – the City of London, unopposed by any economic back bench of financial regulation and “free” of meaningful anti-monopoly price regulation.

Mrs. Thatcher transformed the character of British politics by heading a democratically elected Parliamentary government that permitted financial planners to carve up the public domain with popular consent. Like her actor contemporary Ronald Reagan, she narrated an appealing cover story that promised to help the economy recover. The reality, of course, was to raise Britain’s cost of living and doing business. But this zero-sum game turned the economy’s loss into a vast windfall for the Conservative Party’s constituency in Britain’s banking sector.

By underpricing her privatization of British Telephone and subsequent vast monopolies, she made it appear that customers would be the big gainers, rather than large financial institutions. And by giving underwriters a windfall 3% commission (formerly based on floating the stock of much smaller start-up companies), Mrs. Thatcher oversaw the start of Britain’s Great Polarization between the creditor 1% and the increasingly indebted 99%.

Attacking rent-seeking in government, she opened the floodgates to economic rent-seeking in its classical sense: land rent in real estate (with debt-inflated “capital” gains) to make British property so high-priced that employees who work in London must now live outside it, taking highly expensive privatized railroads to work. Privatization also created vast new opportunities for monopoly rent for privatized public utilities, along with predatory financial takings by increasingly predatory banking.

Michael Hudson
Mrs. Thatcher’s Mean Legacy — The Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization
Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson

Also Michael Hudson, “Let us glory in our inequality.”

Ann Pettifor — Mark Carney's 'shock' appointment means more of the same

Osborne's choice for governor of the Bank of England will do nothing to prevent the next collapse of the financial system...

Carney is a central banker steeped in the culture and practices of Goldman Sachs's investment banking arm. Before becoming Canada's central bank governor, he spent 13 years with Goldman Sachs in its London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto offices. He held a range of senior positions. The most significant was as managing director of investment banking.

In a speech made recently Carney made the right noises. He complained of "a system that privatises gains and socialises losses" and endorsed the approach that sets capital and leverage ratios for banks. He's even commended the Occupy movement for being "constructive".

But there is nothing in his speeches that indicates that he will help give Britain's real economy the protection it needs from its over-mighty – and still very dangerous – banking sector. Nothing, in other words, that indicates the real economy – the productive sector – will be given priority over the City's preference for reckless global speculation.

The Guardian (UK)

Mark Carney's 'shock' appointment means more of the same
Ann Pettifor | Director of Prime: Policy Research in Macroeconomics and a fellow of the New Economics Foundation

UK Police put Occupy on ‘terror’ list

City of London Police have sparked controversy by producing a brief in which the Occupy London movement is listed under domestic terrorism/extremism threats to City businesses.


The document was given to protesters at their “Bank of Ideas” base on Sun Street – a former site of financial corporation UBS. City police have stepped up an effort to quell the movement since they occupied the building on 18 November, with the document stating: “It is likely that activists aspire to identify other locations to occupy, especially those they identify with capitalism.

“Intelligence suggests that urban explorers are holding a discussion at the Sun Street squat. This may lead to an increase in urban exploration activity at abandoned or high profile sites in the capital.” The Occupy movement is listed alongside threats posed by theRevolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia(FARC), Al Qaeda and Belarusian terrorists.  

Read the rest at Yahoo News

Police include Occupy movement on ‘terror’ list

by Adam Parris-Long | Yahoo! News 

Conspiracy theory no longer. Lock down on Wall Street and the City.