2 V2 Tuesday March 15 2022 | the timestimes2
D
oes it make me a
terrible person that
I don’t want to house
a Ukrainian refugee
for six months?
Or even for six
weeks? Even for an
extra 12 quid a day
from the government?
I’ve nothing against Ukrainians.
Quite the opposite. Like pretty much
everyone I admire their courage and
am saddened by their plight. I
welcome a Ukrainian, Svitlana, into
my home once a week, every
Thursday at 8am. Svitlana is our
cleaner, but she has also become
something of a family friend. She
house-sits for us when we go on
holiday. My wife gave her a big hug on
the morning of the invasion. But I
won’t be applying to put up one of
Svitlana’s compatriots. It’s a big leap
between not giving a toss about a
stranger and living with them for
half a year. On a sliding scale of
charity, there’s a lot you can do in
between the two extremes.
I can’t pretend we don’t have
the space. We’ve got four
bedrooms, only two of which
are occupied. The third sees
occasional use when snoring
sees me ejected from the
marital bed. The fourth is a
study but could be converted for
sleeping and indeed periodically
has been for a succession of house
guests over the past three decades. In
that time we’ve had four long-term
lodgers, their stays lasting months or
years, and several other guests who
stayed for weeks at a time. Some paid
a token amount, most didn’t. Only
one of these arrangements ended
disputatiously, but I can’t deny I have
preferred the periods when it’s just
been the one nuclear family — my
own — under the one roof.
The longest three weeks of my life
were the three my family spent
hosting my German exchange partner
when I was 14 in 1979. The second
longest would be the French exchange
partner’s visit the previous year. I
hated the German boy and liked the
French kid, yet his presence was
scarcely more bearable, which shows
it doesn’t necessarily matter if youTheir mansions have been impounded
but don’t think Russia’s billionaires are
beaten: the last crackdown against them
failed miserably, warns Oliver Bullough
A
couple of years ago,
an American
academic asked me
to meet for a coffee.
His name was
Andrew. He wanted
to hear about
Chinese-owned
assets in London and what the British
government was doing to ensure their
owners had earned their wealth
legally. I get such requests thanks to
my role as a guide on the London
Kleptocracy Tours, which show off
oligarch-owned properties in the
pricier parts of Knightsbridge and
Belgravia, and I like to help if I can.
We met at a café in a rather grand
building on Trafalgar Square that,
funnily enough, Ukrainian oligarchs
had swapped between them in 2016 to
settle an argument. I think Andrew
had been hoping that I would share a
few contacts, but it seemed not to have
occurred to him that essentially the
people he was looking for would not
exist. There was no concerted law
enforcement effort against Chinese
money laundering, I told him, so there
was no investigator he could talk to.
Back in 2013 the National Audit
Office calculated that of every
hundred pounds earned by criminals
just 26p is ever confiscated. And if
anything that understates the failure,
because it doesn’t take into account
the far larger volume of illicit wealth
that is stolen overseas and either
imported to the UK or laundered
through the British financial system.
Financial skulduggery isn’t just
something that happens in the UK —
Britain operates as a gigantic loophole,
undercutting other countries’ rules,
massaging down tax rates, neutering
regulations, laundering foreign
criminals’ money. It’s also educating
their children, solving their legal
disputes, easing their passage into
global high society, hiding their crimes
and generally letting them dodge the
consequences of their actions.
“If someone’s rich, whether they’re
Chinese or Russian or whatever, and
they need something done, or
something hidden, or something
bought, then Britain sorts that out for
them,” I told Andrew. “We’re not a
policeman, like you guys, we’re a
butler — the butler to the world.”
This world-leading British industry
exists to solve problems for its clients,
discreetly and profitably, as Jeeves did
for Bertie Wooster. And if you take
away Jeeves’s immaculate appearance,
his educated accent and his ability to
quote Marcus Aurelius, you have not a
butler but a consigliere.
Thanks to the work of Transparency
International and Global Witness, as
well as the publicity generated by our
London Kleptocracy Tours (they’re
based on the Hollywood Tours, but my
friends and I highlight properties
belonging to people accused of
corruption rather than involved infilms), many MPs have become
increasingly concerned about Britain’s
failure to do anything about the dirty
money flowing through its system.
To answer their concerns and to cut
through the problems created by
criminals hiding their wealth in
multiple jurisdictions the government
brought in a new tool, the unexplained
wealth order, in 2018. Since UWOs
passed into law just before the
screening of the McMafia TV show,
they inevitably came to be dubbed the
McMafia law, and were hyped in the
press. Ministers revelled in the
unaccustomed praise and their new
image as sheriffs riding into London
Town to drive out the bad guys.
UWOs are designed to cut through
all the offshore defences and political
obfuscation that can be built around
criminal wealth to stop the authorities
from confiscating it. If served with one,
the owner of wealth has to explain
where it came from, whereas normally
prosecutors have to show that it’s
criminal. The Home Office estimated
that about 20 UWOs would be issued
each year, at a cost of no more than
£1.5 million over the next decade,
set against the recovery of at least
£6 million of criminal wealth. Sadly,
the initiative often ran aground on the
shoals that have doomed many similar
ideas in the past: the government’s
failure to fund adequately the agencies
tasked with enforcing the law meant
they did not have the resources to
properly investigate.
National Crime Agency (NCA)
officers were at first excited about
these new powers but 2018’s first
UWO was a bit of a disappointment,
being targeted at property owned by
the wife of an Azeri banker who had
already been jailed in Baku. In
Azerbaijan he had been prosecuted for
embezzlement, but since it is a place
dominated by a small clique of
oligarchs, his real crime is more likely
to have involved falling out with the
ruling family. He wasn’t exactly the
kind of whale that the government
had said it was going after.
However, 2019 brought better news,
with the announcement of an
unexplained wealth order against
properties linked to the ruling family
of Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet
kleptocracy that had been dominated
by former president Nursultan
Nazarbayev since independence in- Back in 2015 Global Witness had
published an extensive report into
London properties that appeared to be
owned either by the president’s
grandson or by Rakhat Aliyev, who
had divorced the president’s daughter
Dariga Nazarbayeva in 2007 but then,
shortly before the report came out,
killed himself in an Austrian prison
cell while awaiting trial for murder.
It was true that Aliyev had fallen out
with his ex-father-in-law and been
driven out of the first family, which
meant that targeting him wasn’t quite
Robert Crampton
I won’t be
buying
a blazer
What is added or
subtracted each year
from the 700-odd items
that go to make up the
basket of goods whose
price fluctuations
are used to measure
inflation is an
interesting cultural
indicator. Avocado and
protein shakes in, wing
collars and pocket
watches out, that sort
of thing. I’ve always
thought that basket
itself sounds quaintly
passé. Surely it ought
to be a recycled,
dangerously fragile
cardboard box these
days? Or bike pannier?
Anyway, men’s suits
have been jettisoned
this year, for which
much thanks. The
weird thing, however,
is that suits have been
replaced by “a formal
jacket or blazer”, which
sounds like a fudge
devised by a committee
of, well, men in suits.
I know a fair few men
still required to wear
suits to work and some
who even want to, but
very few who have any
dealings any longer
with anything
resembling a blazer.
If suits are old-school,
blazers are prehistoric.
One step forward, two
steps back.My new
excuse to
be lazy
I like the sound of the
“three-minute rule”,
an idea put forward
by Dr Jennifer Wild,
a psychologist at
Oxford University. It’s
her solution to
procrastination.
Wild recommends
that, if there’s some
task you ought to
perform but keep
putting off, tell yourself
you’ll do it only forthree minutes. People
actually then end up
jogging or vacuuming
or whatever for longer
than three minutes,
she says, rather than
not at all. And even if
they don’t persist, at
least they’ve still done
three minutes.
Next time I fail to fill
the dishwasher straight
away after tea, but leave
the dirty plates piledup on the side, and my
wife (or more likely
son) nags me about it,
I’m going to give the
three-minute rule a
go. Stack for precisely
180 seconds, then
summarily bin the
task half-done, walk
away and start again
the following day.
It’ll be interesting to
see how this approach
goes down.get on. The imposition on your space,
privacy, routines, relaxation, is simply
too great. In some ways Nicholas
was worse than Stefan because we
felt we had to hang out and chat.
Pretty soon we ran out of material.
I remember once asking him if they
had breakfast in France.
Reading my colleague Emma
Duncan’s account yesterday of hosting
a Sudanese bloke made me admire
Emma’s generosity but wince at the
memory of evening meals making
stilted conversation over a language
barrier with a stranger. I particularly
dreaded the embarrassing revelations
of unshared values: like when
someone says they’re deeply religious
or they love Black Lace; or that
women should stay at home and
cook. My son once brought a friendDon’t despise me, but I’d
rather not let a Ukrainian
refugee stay at our home
Crushing the
on holiday with us who revealed
himself as a casual antisemite within
hours of arrival.
Or what if they’re boring? Years ago
my wife and I put up a Polish chap
for a few nights, a lapsed friend of
her family from way back, but one
to whom she felt an obligation when
he got in touch. He was pleasant
enough, Tadeusz. But he was also
stupefyingly dull. Every minute in his
company felt like an hour.
It’s entirely possible, of course, that
he felt the same way about me. As
indeed might a potential Ukrainian
guest. Neither party should have to
take the risk. I’ll have to do my bit in
other ways.