16 Leaders The Economist May 7th 2022
dealing with over 40 cases when she was assassinated in 2017.
How can defenders of press freedom fight back? An easy place
to start would be for liberal governments to scrap archaic laws
that criminalise defamation, which are still surprisingly com
mon. They should also curb bogus lawsuits, as the European
Commission is currently contemplating. Next, independent
media need to find new sources of funding. Charities can chip
in, as can crowdfunding and rich proprietors who care about
free speech. Public broadcasters can play a useful role, but only
if they have enough safeguards to be truly independent.
In more repressive places the task is harder, but technology
can help. Where reporting on the ground is too risky, satellite
imagery and big data sets allow journalists to pull together stor
ies from afar. Free countries should offer them asylum, and a
safe place to keep working. Where censorship is tight, citizens
can use virtual private networks to access blocked content and
online tools to capture web pages before they are censored.
Journalists in free countries can help those in autocracies.
Crossborder collaborations have exposed scandals such as Peg
asus and the Panama papers. The Washington Post’s cloudbased
publishing system allowed Apple Daily, a beleaguered prode
mocracy tabloid in Hong Kong, to keep publishing for longer
than it otherwise could have.
The struggle will be uphill. The pandemic has given govern
ments a plausible excuse to curb press freedom: nearly 100 have
done so in the name of public safety. Donald Trump has shown
how a demagogue can undermine trust in the media, and others
are copying him. In a survey last year, almost 60% of respon
dents in 28 countries said journalists deliberately mislead the
public. Some do, of course, and World Press Freedom Day is a
moment for journalists who enjoy protectiontoaskthemselves
if they are making the best use of their freedom.n
O
f thebarrageofsanctionstheWesthasinflictedonRussia
over its invasion of Ukraine, the most symbolically power
ful, if not the most economically consequential, have been those
targeting the cronies of Vladimir Putin. Britain’s government
trumpets the fact that it has announced measures against more
Putinlinked plutocrats than any other country. It is less keen to
talk about why that might be. London has long been a destina
tion for dirty money. Corrupt capital flows to Britain from all
over the world, but no one doubts that Russian loot is a major
contributor to a moneylaundering problem that the National
Crime Agency puts conservatively at £100bn ($125bn) a year.
Dodgy money has been lured to London by some of the same
things as the clean variety, including a longstanding openness
to foreign investment and strong property rights. Another at
traction, however, is the financial secrecy of
fered by both Britain and its network of off
shore satellites, from Jersey to the Cayman Is
lands. That has helped make Britain murkier
than classic havens such as Panama and Liech
tenstein, according to a respected global finan
cialsecrecy index. Political obsequiousness
has also played a part. Successive governments
looked to woo oligarchs and their billions—for
instance, by hawking “investor visas” that gave them residency.
The politicians overplayed the benefits and underestimated
the costs of unfurling the welcome mat. In the macroeconomic
scheme of things the gains were small and concentrated, mostly
filling the pockets of a select group of bankers and lawyers. The
costs were more pervasive. London’s growing reputation as a re
pository for tainted money has undermined its financial centre
and tarnished its legal system (see Britain section).
The government has pledged to clean things up. But if it is se
rious, it will have to go beyond the halfbaked measures of the
past. In 2016 Britain became the first g20 country to set up a pub
lic register of company owners. But it did not finish the job. The
register is thinly policed: of the halfdozen convictions so far for
knowingly submitting false data, the most highprofile was of
anactivistwhoposedasanexministertoexposeitsflaws. Simi
larly, government attempts to rein in Britain’s offshore territo
ries have been halfhearted—witness the scandal engulfing the
British Virgin Islands, whose leader has been arrested on allega
tions of drugsmuggling and moneylaundering.
Ministers do seem more determined this time. They have
scrapped the visasforcash scheme; proposed reforms to a libel
law that lets oligarchs scare off critics; and sped up an econom
iccrime bill that, among other things, will force more trans
parency on foreign owners of British property. What Britain real
ly needs, however, is not more laws but better enforcement.
One priority is the oversight of lawyers, who play a central
role in putting together crooked offshore structures and fending
off scrutiny of those who engage in financial chicanery. Ethical
standards have slipped as more lawyers have
been tempted by plutocrats’ fat cheques. This
has put cracks in the industry’s “good chap” sys
tem of regulation, which relies heavily on self
policing. It is time for the statutory regulator,
the Solicitors Regulation Authority, to show
some teeth, and punish those falling short. The
largest fine it has announced to date was
£232,500, little more than a toptier firm might
charge a deeppocketed Russian client for a week’s work.
A second priority is to make government investigators and
prosecutors more effective. Corruption cases are hard; money
trails are complex and cross borders. In Britain the task of build
ing such cases is spread across over 100 agencies and police forc
es. Their combined budget for fighting crossborder corruption
is just £40m50m, around the same as the annual wage bill of
the three bestpaid players at Chelsea, a football club that Ro
man Abramovich, an oligarch under sanctions, is looking to sell.
As a result, corruptionfighting agencies suffer from a chron
ic lack of forensic investigators, and prosecutors lack the bud
gets to bring more than the occasional case. That needs to
change. Cleaning up Britain’sdirtymoney problem is not rocket
science, but it will cost money.n
If the government really wants to take on the oligarchs, it should fund its corruption-fighters properly
Dismantling Londongrad
Britain’s dirty-money problem