The remarks were made Thomas Mayne, Visiting Fellow at Chatham House, an independent think tank focusing on international affairs. Mayne is part of a recent Chatham House report on the “British kleptocracy problem,” which leads to the same broad conclusion.
The moderator of the Open Forum webinar acted as moderator Joy MacknightEditor of The Banker, part of the Financial Times Group, UK.
London is the center of dirty money is quite widely accepted, but the crisis in Ukraine has once again brought the matter to the spotlight, he said.
Transparency International UK recently reported that such “suspicious assets” could be worth £ 6.7 billion. Real estate in central London, such as the City of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, make up a huge part of this value.
The Independent UK reveals a related mechanism: “It is held by British overseas and Crown Dependency companies. The secrecy offered by these offshore financial centers is often used by those who want to hide their ownership of the property.”
“As Prime Minister Tony Blair, we have been promised that the governments will deal with it. We have been promised that the final ownership of the property will become a public register. It will be presented to Parliament on need to address it, said the anti-money laundering director of the London CDD. Darren Jones.
After the conflict in Ukraine, Britain passed the Financial Crimes Act in a hurry. It marked the establishment of a register of foreign units and their beneficial owners and required the registration of overseas units owning land. However, the responsibility stops at the resources and manpower needed to open multiple layers of a particular business to reach a true owner, even in accounting.
Reacting to the act from the practitioner’s perspective, Jones said, “If they don’t, they might as well not bother to accept the law.”
So it is no wonder that financial criminals from all over the world consider London a safe haven. The audience question pointed to two such people from India: Vijay Malaya and Nirav Modi who have been in the UK playing through the British legal system, even cheating on money in India. The panel quoted many such cases, some of which even enjoyed media attention.
It’s about a lot of money, he points out Farzana Baduel, CEO, Curzon PR, but “sometimes we do not know who we work for.” A cultural-socio-economic organization can have a different front when it is funded from questionable sources and is not always known.
“So far for the past 25 years, we have relied on these assets to fund our financial services, to fund our economy and have turned a blind eye to this money, and a good example of this is the golden visa problems,” Mayne said. is part of his latest collaborative study, Criminality Notthingstand, a report by the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence program on how and why the unexplained wealth order (UWO) in the UK has failed against kleptocracies.
Mayne also said their investigations have shown that half of these visas are issued to individuals who may pose a “security risk.”
“The UK has incredible soft power around the world, but we are resting on the laurels of our past and watching the breakdown of our honesty. I have worked with more than 18 different governments and they say face to face ‘ugh,’ we can buy your prime ministers,” Farzana Baduel said.
“Britain has to be very careful about its reputation because you can rest on its laurels for so long. After a while they will haunt us. Do we really want to be seen as a country where our governance is weak and yet can we lecture other countries about their lack of governance? People call us hypocrites, “he added.
The crisis in Ukraine has helped to link the score between dirty money and its potential risk, but the big question is, as Thomas Mayne says, “Will the attack on Ukraine finally change Britain’s position?”
Source: ANI
Source: The Nordic Page