The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-24)

20 The Sunday Times April 24, 2022

WORLD NEWS

elections”. He was referring to Brexit, the

burning issue of the time.

The election required a big push from

the Conservative Party for extra funding.

That year the party received a total of

£1.5 million from Russian-linked donors

— the highest in a single year. According

to a Foreign Office minister from the

time, the Russian donations were a big

problem because they discouraged the

government from going after the oli-

garchs. He said the message from the

leadership of the party was: “Don’t rock

the boat because we need the dosh.”

During the campaign, Johnson was

challenged on Radio 5 Live about his

party’s Russian financial links and his

decision to delay the Russia report. He

repeated the customary line that it was

wrong to “cast aspersions on everybody

who comes from a certain country just

because of their nationality”.

He went on to claim that it was normal

for the intelligence committee’s reports

to be delayed. Yet Grieve says all of his

other reports were published immedi-

ately after delivery during his four years

as chairman.

Johnson chose to celebrate his com-

manding election victory in December

2019 at the former KGB spy Alexander

Lebedev’s 60th birthday party.

SANCTIONS AT LAST

By the time the exit from the EU was final-

ised the next month, the Covid-19 pan-

demic was coming in from China and the

world was about to change. On Thursday

March 19 2020, Johnson was forced to

wrestle with the biggest decision of his

career. Would the financial markets go

into meltdown if he locked down the

whole of London?

As Whitehall waited for an answer, the

prime minister found time to slip away

for a “personal engagement” with his

friend Evgeny Lebedev, then 39, son of

Alexander and owner of the Evening

Standard and The Independent, whom

he had secretly nominated for a peerage.

Two days earlier he had received the

embarrassing news that Lebedev’s nomi-

nation was being blocked on national

security grounds. After reassuring his

friend, Johnson did eventually prevail

and Lebedev was elevated to the Lords,

where he has not contributed to a single

debate apart from his introductory

speech or cast a single vote since joining

the chamber 16 months ago.

Lebedev strongly denies being an

agent for Russia or a “security risk”. He

has said that he opposes Putin’s invasion

of Ukraine but warned people against

descending into “Russophobia” which he

describes as “bigotry” and “discrimina-

tion”. His father has not spoken.

It was not until after the pandemic had

eased in July 2020 that Dominic Raab, as

the foreign secretary, finally took the

action that had been promised in

response to the foreign affairs committee

report two years earlier. He announced

that restrictions were being imposed on

25 Russian people using the 2018 Sanc-

tions and Anti-Money Laundering Act for

the first time.

However, the measures were nothing

that would make Putin lose sleep. Those

targeted were chiefly mid to low-ranking

officials who had been linked to the death

of the auditor Sergei Magnitsky in cus-

tody. None of the officials was believed to

have property or substantial assets in the

UK and the sanctions were imposed more

than a decade after Magnitsky died. The

US had brought in its own Magnitsky Act

seven years earlier.

When the government published the

long-delayed intelligence committee

report there was no evidence of any of

the redactions that No 10 had claimed

were delaying its release, according to

Grieve.

Both sides of the Brexit debate in West-

minster had become fixated on what the

report would say about alleged Russian

interference in the Brexit campaign. It

had little to say on the subject. However,

it painted a stark picture of the threat

posed by Russia to the safety of the UK on

a number of fronts: through espionage,

serious crime, and interference in demo-

cratic elections. “In our opinion — until

recently, the government had badly

underestimated the Russian threat and

the response it required,” the report says.

BREXIT MEDDLING

Russian influence in the UK had become

“the new normal”. The MPs noted that

oligarchs were able to buy a place in the

British establishment using their illicit

finance. “PR firms, charities, political

interests, academia and cultural institu-

tions were all willing beneficiaries of Rus-

sian money, contributing to a ‘reputation

laundering’ process,” the report said.

Evidence was released for the first

time from Lynne Owens, director-general

of the National Crime Agency. The NCA,

she said, simply did not have the funding

to tackle the oligarchs. “We are, bluntly,

concerned about the impact on our bud-

get because these are wealthy people

with the best lawyers,” Owens said.

The headline news from the report

was about Russian interference in the

elections. The committee found there

was some “credible” open-source evi-

dence that Russia had attempted to inter-

vene in the 2014 Scottish independence

referendum. However, the MPs were

frustrated by the failure of the govern-

ment to commission any meaningful

investigation into Russian meddling in

the Brexit vote.

“In response to our request for written

evidence at the outset of the inquiry, MI

initially provided just six lines of text,”

the report said. It called on the intelli-

gence agencies to produce an assessment

of potential Russian interference in the

referendum and publish an unclassified

summary of its findings.

The government largely batted away

the key proposals of the report. While

agreeing that Russia remained a “top

national security priority”, it pointed to

the Magnitsky sanctions as evidence that

the law was sufficiently robust and flatly

refused to investigate the Brexit vote. “A

retrospective assessment of the EU refer-

endum is not necessary,” it said.

The senior Foreign Office source said

there was never any chance that Brexit-

eer ministers would commission such an

investigation. “To ask them to re-exam-

ine the validity of that victory is a failure

to understand human nature,” the source

said. The issue was so sensitive that For-

eign Office officials feared they might lose

their jobs if they raised it. “We work for

ministers and they are in charge and they

have our P45. Officials have political

sense,” the source added.

Johnson was challenged by Sir Keir

Starmer, the Labour leader, in the Com-

mons about the government’s failure to

implement the report’s recommenda-

tions. He snapped back: “Let us be in no

doubt what this is really all about: this is

about pressure from the Islingtonian

Remainers who have seized on this

report to try to give the impression that

Russian interference was somehow

responsible for Brexit.”

The more the opposition pushed for

an investigation into Russian interfer-

ence in the Brexit vote, the more the gov-

ernment retreated to a defensive corner.

The important issue of tackling Russia

was lost in the febrile debate over Brexit.

In the end, the recommendations in

the report were largely buried and the oli-

garchs remained untouched. “I was dis-

appointed,” Grieve said. “In many cases,

the government responded saying ‘yes’,

acknowledging that we made the right

points. They never did anything about it.”

DESPERATE FOR ‘LETHAL KIT’

Meanwhile, the writing was on the wall

for Ukraine. By the end of 2020, tensions

in the country’s east between Ukrainian

forces and the Russian separatists were

rising. Officials in Ukraine’s London

embassy were becoming more “desper-

ate” than ever “to buy lethal kit”, a senior

Tory source has confided.

There was a pressing need for anti-

tank weapons that could be used to coun-

ter the threat of a mass invasion across

the Russian and Belarusian borders. The

source said: “We were just sitting on our

hands about selling lethal kit, because...

we didn’t want to offend the Kremlin. We

didn’t want to offend them for economic

reasons and we didn’t want to give the

Kremlin an excuse to act... we were very,

very muted by a desire for us not to take

an economic hit in any conceivable way.”

The source said Vadym Prystaiko, the

new Ukrainian ambassador to London,

tried to secure a meeting with Raab, then

foreign secretary, after he took charge of

the embassy in September 2020. But

Raab was too busy see him.

Last week Prystaiko said diplomati-

cally: “I was trying to reach out to one of

your politicians, and it was not easy... I

understand that your secretaries are

quite busy.” The Foreign Office defended

Raab, saying he had met the Ukrainian

foreign minister in October 2020.

Prystaiko believes that the weapons

sale ban was based on a faulty calcula-

tion: that Ukraine was incapable of

defending itself against mighty Russia

and therefore it was not worth risking the

Kremlin’s displeasure by selling arms to

his country. The politicians “didn’t want

to waste their relationships with Russia

helping a nation which won’t be able to

use [the weapons] effectively”, he said.

In June last year the government

agreed to help Ukraine to rebuild its navy,

which had been severely weakened by

Russia’s seizure of the Crimean naval

base, Sevastopol, in 2014. Eight new war-

ships would be built under the agree-

ment and supplies of ship-based missiles

would be provided.

But it was too little too late. The war-

ships were not built in time for the inva-

sion. “We had to scrap this project,” Prys-

taiko said. “It was delay after delay.”

Prystaiko believes that Ukraine would

have been “much better prepared” if Brit-

ain had responded sooner to his coun-

try’s pleas for defensive weapons.

MURDEROUS BELLIGERENCE

It took the mobilisation of Russia’s huge

war machine for the government to

finally act. As more than 100,000 Russian

troops massed on the border at the end of

January, Britain finally agreed to send

anti-tank weapons to the Ukrainian army.

The threat of the invasion gave the Brit-

ish government a new impetus — the type

of focused activity the two parliamentary

committees had called for years before.

Suddenly, Johnson — dogged by allega-

tions of Covid rule-breaking in Downing

Street — was eager to take up the cudgels

against Russia.

On February 10 Liz Truss, now the for-

eign secretary, introduced “an unprece-

dented package of co-ordinated sanc-

tions” that could be used if Russia

invaded. The targets would include

banks, the energy sector, and individuals

with close ties to the Kremlin.

Johnson ordered the NCA to hunt

down “corrupt Russian assets hidden in

the UK” with the creation of a new “dedi-

cated kleptocracy cell”, it was

announced that the register of properties

owned by opaque foreign companies

would finally be introduced and unex-

plained wealth orders were reformed to

protect the police from incurring sub-

stantial legal costs.

Within three weeks of the invasion of

Ukraine on February 24 the government

had imposed sanctions on 18 Russian oli-

garchs with a combined wealth of

£30 billion. They included Abramovich;

Alisher Usmanov, who has had strong

financial ties to Arsenal and Everton foot-

ball clubs; and Andrey Guryev Jr, whose

family is understood to own Witanhurst,

London’s largest home after Buckingham

Palace.

Inevitably, there were questions about

why Britain could not have acted with

such impunity before.

Truss told the foreign affairs select

committee earlier this year that since

2019 the government had been “risk

averse” about sanctions as a result of a

legal case taken by Bank Mellat, an Ira-

nian private bank. A court found that the

bank had been unlawfully sanctioned by

the UK over allegations it was assisting

companies that were financing Iran’s

nuclear programme and British taxpay-

ers were forced to foot a $100 million bill

in compensation.

The excuse would carry little weight in

Ukraine. In the end, the government’s

critics say too little was done to help the

country. “When the history of the war is

written, questions will be asked about

whether it could have been averted if the

British government had shown Putin ear-

lier that his oligarch cronies would be

made to personally pay for his murder-

ous belligerence and the British govern-

ment had armed Ukraine when it first

began beseeching ministers to do so long

ago,” the anti-corruption campaigner

Borisovich said.

Last week, the former minister Whit-

tingdale said Britain had reneged on its

responsibility to supply lethal weapons

to Ukraine “to deter a Russian invasion”.

Meanwhile, the Russian bombard-

ment of Ukraine continues. In his speech

last week, Zelensky put the argument

simply: “If we had access to all the weap-

ons we need, which our partners have

and which are comparable to the weap-

ons used by the Russian Federation, we

would have already ended this war.”

A government spokesman said: “The

UK has been front and centre of the inter-

national response to Putin’s barbaric

invasion of Ukraine, building an interna-

tional coalition which continues to pro-

vide unprecedented financial, military

and diplomatic support to President Zel-

ensky and the Ukrainian people. The

prime minister was one of the first world

leaders to raise concerns about Russian

hostilities in a speech at Mansion House

in November 2021.”

The spokesman said Britain had a long

record of responding to Russia’s aggres-

sion alongside Nato and its international

partners including sanctions after the

2014 invasion of Crimea; helping the

Ukrainian army with training since 2015;

and leading action to expel more than 150

Russian diplomats from Nato and other

countries after the Salisbury attack.

between Johnson and the committee’s

chairman, the Conservative MP Tom

Tugendhat. That would have been “at the

front of Johnson’s mind” when deciding

whether to take up the committee’s rec-

ommendations, the source said.

There was now a new weapon that

could be deployed against the oligarchs.

Unexplained wealth orders had been

introduced earlier in the year to give the

police powers to seize assets of non-Euro-

peans where the source of their wealth

was suspicious. But the device would

prove toothless.

The Home Office had confidently pre-

dicted that the orders would be deployed

in about 20 cases a year at a cost to the

taxpayer of up to £10,000 each. But such

cases pitted the underfunded National

Crime Agency (NCA) against some of the

best-paid and finest legal brains in the

country. There was no contest.

Only four cases were brought under

the orders over the next two years. One

was particularly damaging: a court battle

over the ownership of £80 million of

property linked to the ruling family of

Kazakhstan, a former Soviet state. The

family were ably defended by the law

firm Mishcon de Reya, which persuaded

the judge that the NCA had overlooked

“cogent evidence” that the properties it

owned were bought legitimately.

The legal bill for the case — after the

NCA was refused grounds to appeal in

June 2020 — is understood to have been

£1.5 million. It was a third of the entire

annual budget for the NCA’s international

corruption unit. Not one order would be

obtained against anyone after 2019.

FOOL’S ERRAND

The responsibility of tackling Russia fell

on new shoulders in July 2018 after John-

son resigned as foreign secretary in a dis-

pute over May’s Brexit plans. His replace-

ment was Jeremy Hunt, who, looking

back, does not recall a single discussion

about targeting oligarchs. “I can’t

remember having those at all, actually.

No, I don’t think so,” he said last month.

“I generally thought we should be more

hawkish. But I don’t remember having

discussions on that point.”

It was during Johnson’s time out of

office that he made a rare admission. In

September 2018 he was asked at a Wash-

ington fundraising dinner about his big-

gest mistake. He replied: “When I

became foreign secretary, I thought there

was no objective reason why we should

be quite so hostile to Russia... I made the

classic mistake of thinking it was possible

to have a reset with Russia. I wanted to

engage with Putin and Sergey Lavrov.” He

said he now felt this was a “fool’s errand”.

When Johnson returned to office as

prime minister in July 2019, the intelli-

gence and security committee was final-

ising its report on Russia. The work had

taken almost two years and in those final

months a lengthy process of redaction

was taking place to protect state secrets.

Its chairman, the former attorney-gen-

eral Dominic Grieve, had expected the

finished report to be published within

days when it was sent to Johnson in late

October. But nothing happened. When

he began to raise concerns, Grieve says

Downing Street blamed the need for fur-

ther redactions.

Grieve is adamant that all the redac-

tions had been completed and he there-

fore describes No 10’s explanation as

straightforwardly “untrue”. He believes

the government did not want to release

the report before the December 2019

general election because “some of the

evidence was germane to interference in

Oligarchs

versus the UK

police? It was

no contest

→Continued from page 19

GETTY IMAGES;CHINGIS KONDAROV, GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS;

INVESTIGATION

Boris Johnson on apparently good terms with Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign

minister, in 2017, long after the Kremlin began its seizure of Ukrainian territory

but before the devastation wreaked on Mariupol, centre, and Borodyanka

After Brexit

ministers looked

to Moscow and

had “no time”

for the Ukrainian

ambassador,

Vadym

Prystaiko

base of Sevastopol in 2014.

The help comes too late

and the warships are not

built in time for the Russian

invasion.

January 2022

More than 100,000 Russian

troops mass on the eastern

border of Ukraine. Britain

finally agrees to send

anti-tank weapons to the

Ukrainian army.

February 24

Putin launches a full-scale

invasion of Ukraine. Within

weeks the UK government

imposes sanctions on 18

Russian oligarchs with a

combined wealth of

£30 billion.

Officials at Ukraine’s London

embassy are increasingly

“desperate to buy lethal kit”

but the UK government does

not oblige. According to a

source, ministers “didn’t

want to offend the Kremlin”.

March 2021

Russia is named the No 1

threat to UK security in an

integrated review of security,

defence and foreign policy

published by the

government.

June 2021

The government finally

agrees to help Ukraine

rebuild its navy, severely

weakened by Russia’s seizure

of the key Crimean naval

committee is sent to No 10. It

is not published. Dominic

Grieve the Conservative

chairman of the

committee, alleges that the

government “sat on it and sat

on it” and then “came out

with a completely bogus

explanation as to why

publication couldn’t take

place” — namely that further

redactions were needed.

Grieve said all the redactions

had been completed by this

point, so Downing Street’s

explanation was

straightforwardly “untrue”.

July 2020

Dominic Raab, the foreign

secretary, announces

restrictions on 25

Russian officials,

using the 2018

Sanctions and

Anti-Money

Laundering Act for the

first time. None of the

officials were believed to

have property or substantial

assets in the UK.

claimed were delaying the

report’s release.

September 2020

The new Ukrainian

ambassador to London,

Vadym Prystaiko, is

appointed. He tries to secure

a meeting with Raab, but he

is too busy to give him an

audience. The Foreign

Office said Raab had

met the Ukrainian

foreign minister in

October 2020.

December

2020

Tensions

are rising in

eastern

Ukraine.

DON’T ROCK

THE BOAT, WE

NEED THE

DOSH

Tory leadership

July 2020

The Russia report is

published exactly as it had

been handed to Downing

Street ten months earlier. It

paints a stark picture of the

threat posed by Russia to the

safety of the UK on a number

of fronts: through espionage,

serious crime and

interference in democratic

elections. “In our opinion,

until recently, the

government had badly

underestimated the Russian

threat and the response it

required,” the

report says.

There is no

evidence of any

of the redactions

that No 10 had

After Brexit →Continued from page 19

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→Continued from page 19