The labyrinth that is British complicity in kleptocracy
On Monday, I sat on a stage at London’s Frontline Club and asked a real person questions in front of an audience (as well as people on a screen). I used to do this kind of thing so often, that I was rather blasé about it, but it’s been two years since I did anything like it. And it felt great. We were talking about whistleblowing, and were joined (by video, from an undisclosed location, for obvious reasons) by the great Howard Wilkinson, who exposed on the largest money laundering scheme in history while at Danske Bank.
If you’re likely to be in London, please keep an eye on the Frontline Club web site because – now that Covid-19 is hopefully waning once more – I’m planning to get back to doing kleptoscope events every month. If you’re not able to come in person, the club streams them live. The next one will be on February 21, when I’ll be talking to Catherine Belton, her lawyer, and her publisher about defamation. If you do come, say hello!
DOWN WITH THIS KIND OF THING
It is fair to say that the British government decision to break its promise to the White House and not impose transparency on offshore-owned property or clean up the country’s hot mess of a corporate registry (which I wrote about last week) did not go down well. The government’s own anti-corruption champion said the move was “about as popular as a bucket of cold sick”, and others were less polite.
The timing was hilarious – in a not-actually-funny-at-all kind of way – in that Vladimir Putin is currently giving his best demonstration of how unrestrained kleptocracy threatens the world. So it was genuinely awful to see the government that oversees the world’s biggest laundromat decide it couldn’t be bothered to do even the most basic of checks on the provenance of the cash that it’s washing.