Always a bit baffled by why someone whose journalism is published by Rupert Murdoch is mainstream media, while someone broadcasting to millions via channels owned by Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or Google is somehow an insurgent. They're all billionaires, and information that's brought to you by a billionaire-owned algorithm is no purer than information brought to you by a billionaire-employed editor.

In 2012, Coutts (the bank that is being publicly whipped at present) was fined £8.75 million by British regulators "because it failed to take reasonable care to establish and maintain effective anti-money laundering (AML) systems and controls". It was called out for: "failing properly to identify and record all politically exposed persons (PEPs)"; and for not applying "appropriate ongoing monitoring to its existing high risk customers to ensure that changes in circumstances and risk profiles were identified".

5,500 bank branches have closed since 2015, meaning tens of thousands of elderly people struggle to access any financial services at all, but apparently the most important banking issue in Britain is whether Nigel Farage has to move his account from one bit of Natwest to another. UK banks spend £34 billion on financial crime compliance a year, yet hundreds of billions of dirty money flow through our financial system anyway, but the most important banking issue in Britain is whether Farage has to move his account from one bit of Natwest to another.

A more than usually grotesque reminder that the important part of the phrase "anti-money-laundering compliance" is the word compliance, and not the bit about being anti-money-laundering.

ft.com/content/3e1b5b… Question: How does the fact that Prigozhin's mother heats her home with gas show that the warlord is not laundering money?
Answer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We don't help Ukraine by ignoring the evidence of our eyes.

- Ukraine deserves help and support.
- Ukraine is the victim of a totally unjustified war.
- Ukraine has also had a deeply-embedded and hard-to-eradicate corruption problem since 1991.

https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1587727517003169793?s=20&t=7waR-ulMSCCUqXKCyRSUPA

Ukrainian corruption was different to Russian corruption, being less centralised, which allowed society to be more pluralistic. But comparing the situation in Ukraine, where everything from courts to ministries to police was totally corrupted, to France or Germany is absurd.

I just got asked onto @TimesRadio (which was nice) to talk about this article.

It is a near-perfect example of the kind of gimmick that UK politicians have chucked out over the last few months, like chaff behind a Mi-8. 1/n

thetimes.co.uk/article/liz-tr… I thought I'd look at it here too in the hope that I might encourage journalists to ask more questions about these kind of "policies" and at least provide more context when putting them in their newspapers. 2/n

I just called up by someone who's worked on previous UK cases against oligarchs, who is looking in horror at what's (not) happening.

"The issue is that we have a whole service industry that constructs complexity. They are people who exist to make sure assets are impenetrable." "And it's not passive either. They work with tax havens to craft more impenetrable structures, then sell them to their clients, then we have to try to penetrate them without any people or money."

FFS, people, please stop tweeting out this nonsense like it's real. It's never going to happen. "Concerns"? I bet they do. The National Crime Agency failed to maintain an Unexplained Wealth Order against property owned by the daughter of the ex-president of Kazakhstan, after a legal challenge. Imagine what her lawyers would have done if the NCA had just taken the house.

Hi everyone, a brief self-publicising interlude, sorry about that.

I have a book out next week, it's called Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals.

And it feels depressingly timely. 1/7 You may have heard about how no government could conceivably be doing more than @BorisJohnson is doing to fight Putin and help Ukrainians, from our prime minister himself.

Read about how the UK government sold Putin's man in Ukraine an actual tube station, that's chapter 7. 2/7

Just looking at the Economic Crime Bill. I can't see anything about Companies House in it. They aren't honestly going to miss this opportunity to close the biggest loophole of all, are they?

gov.uk/government/pub… Ah, I see, they've published a White Paper on Companies House.

gov.uk/government/pub…

Holy crap. And there was Putin thinking shifting out of dollars into euros would keep things safe.

https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1497696378461593605?s=20&t=5ic1VAYr32HVERbn5D2FIg

This is the whole statements. Some interesting points to look out for.

https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1497700006647709700?s=20&t=5ic1VAYr32HVERbn5D2FIg

Wow.

https://twitter.com/ArmedForcesUkr/status/1497257281515405312?s=20&t=KGHH3x7A8zd46112OJAtuA

He's with his top officials, saying they're all in place, and defending Ukraine. It looks like it was filmed by the government office on Institutska, in the middle of Kyiv.

Does anyone have details of organisations that are helping Ukrainian refugees in Poland, Moldova and other countries please? Here's one.

https://twitter.com/ngespino/status/1497160346406199296?s=20&t=ymwQSeKlOauS8NcEy5VAUA

I'm always surprised no one ever fact checks this talking point that NATO's post-Cold War expansion took the alliance up to Russia's border. Thanks to Norway, NATO's had a border with Russia since it was created in 1949. nytimes.com/2021/06/14/opi… I appreciate the Norway-Russia border is not of the greatest strategic importance but, by highlighting the fact they've shared a border since 1949, I'm pointing out the flaw in Russia's framing of "NATO enlargement" as a process, whereby NATO creeps ever closer to its borders.

Win/win for Global Britain.

Win1: the government looks good.
Win2: the chronic under-funding of the UK's enforcement agencies, and the total absence of checks on company ownership information, means no oligarchs will be actually inconvenienced.

https://twitter.com/Billbrowder/status/1386645558534844417?s=20

I have nothing against sanctions particularly but, if you use them (as the UK does) without doing any of the hard investigative and regulatory work first, then they're essentially a shiny red cherry on top of a non-existent cake.

Whatever the #RussiaReport says (and my prediction is that it will be [redacted]), I hope it helps Brits recognise that being the world's primary supplier of klepto-services is both an unsustainable and an unconscionable way for a democracy to make a living. The desire to maintain business ties with Russia stopped Blair, Brown and Cameron from taking the necessary steps to limit Russian actions in the UK after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Hard to believe Johnson will be the man to make up that shortfall, but hope dies last.

I had a friend in Abkhazia (breakaway statelet in the ex-USSR) whose dad I got drunk with once, while he told me his own experience of social distancing. It was caused by war rather than epidemic, but I thought I might share it with you. 1/7 He (the dad, not the friend) had lost three fingers as a child when messing around with a detonator from a coal mine, so couldn’t fight on either side when local separatists fought against Georgian forces in 1992-3. Instead he tended his farm, and kept his head down. 2/7

Do you remember the tale of Kevin Brewer from last year? He was the man who created companies in politicians' names (@JamesCleverly and @vincecable) to show them how easy it was to use a UK company to commit fraud, was prosecuted as a result and left £22,000 the poorer. 1/n The government was pretty psyched about the case (though went mysteriously quiet when people realised what had really happened). 2/n gov.uk/government/new…

Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who bought a Florida mansion from Trump for $95 million, and a New York condo for $88 million, has been arrested in Monaco on corruption charges.
lemonde.fr/police-justice… For the record, I think Rybolovlev bought the mansion from Trump at any inflated price so as to take advantage of Florida's "homestead" asset protection rules (since he was going through a divorce at the time), rather than to buy influence. But I appreciate others think otherwise

I have had a brilliant idea for solving the UK's Brexit problem, which I will call The Brexit Bond, and which will make me famous through the ages. 1/n The problem is that lots of people in the UK think Brexit will be brilliant and will make us all rich, but also lots think it won't be brilliant and will make us all poor 2/n.

This story is absolutely insane. At first glance, you think "well done, Companies House, at last they're getting serious about the epidemic of fraud enabled by the misuse of British corporations". gov.uk/government/new… Yay, Business Minister Andrew Griffiths, you think. Finally, someone is bothering to check the bona fides of the 700,000 or so new companies created each year in the UK.