What if the oligarchs strike back?
There is growing concern about war fatigue, that Westerners will lose interest in the grinding Russian invasion of Ukraine, and just let Vladimir Putin take whatever he wants. Clearly, you wouldn’t be subscribing to this newsletter if you were the kind of person who isn’t passionately concerned about the horror being inflicted on the Ukrainians, but there is a second front here that is also prone to fatigue and which isn’t getting enough attention: what about the oligarchs?
In the immediate shock of Putin’s invasion, Western countries sanctioned hundreds of oligarchs, officials and hangers-on, but that particular campaign appears to have stalled. A couple of months ago there was a lot of discussion of “moving from freezing to seizing”, but if any progress has been made in that battle, I’ve not heard of it. And this time we don’t have anyone but ourselves to blame. It isn’t the lack of weapons deliveries that is holding us back, but our own lack of urgency.
- “The G7 must stop dragging their feet and step up. The same gaps that allowed kleptocrats to amass and hide their vast illicit wealth are now preventing even the most willing authorities from finding it. They need to match their ambitious rhetoric of holding Russian elites accountable with real, hard work to fix the broken systems. These countries must invest sufficient resources and empower authorities with mandates to trace and confiscate the assets that are directly linked to crimes. This cannot be a short-term effort: governments must make these task forces permanent to help route out all dirty money beyond the current crisis. It’s time for kleptocrats to pay the price,” said Maira Martini, corrupt money flows expert at Transparency International, in a report published last month.
The report is worth reading in full, not least because it makes clear the urgency of moving from the splashy headline-grabbing raids on yachts to the steady, careful, methodical work to investigate the origin of the funds used to buy those yachts. The policy proposals won’t be a surprise to many of you. They are divided neatly into three areas.
- Nowhere to Hide, which means transparency of company and property ownership, so we can see what kleptocrats own.
- No One to Help, which means that professionals are stopped from helping kleptocrats.
- No Impunity, which means that law enforcement agencies prosecute kleptocrats and the people who help them.
Sanctions should have been the beginning of our action against the kleptocrats, but I am beginning to worry that they might be the end.