Peter and Oliver will be joined by Dr. Elisabeth Schimpfossl, whose newly published Rich Russians, from Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie, takes a deep dive into the lives of the most famous group of super-rich on the planet.
Speakers
Oliver Bullough – chairs our Kleptoscope series that investigates corruption and dirty money in London. Bullough is an award-winning journalist and the author of two books about Russian history and politics, The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame be Great and now Moneyland, why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to take it back. He is also an expert guide for the Kleptocracy Tours initiative, which exposes money laundering via property in London.
Peter Pomerantsev is a Soviet-born British journalist, author and TV producer. He is also a visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics. He specialises in propaganda and media development, and has testified on the challenges of information war to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defence Select Committee. He writes for publications including the Financial Times, London Review of Books, Politico, Atlantic and many others. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House and Gordon Burns Prizes. It is translated into over a dozen languages. He is working on his next book, which looks at developments in the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ across the world.
Dr. Elisabeth Schimpfossl is Lecturer in Sociology and Policy at Aston University. Her research focuses on Russia’s new upper class, as well as media and journalism. Her book Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie (Oxford University Press) was published in May 2018.
Guy Shrubsole is a writer and campaigner on issues of land transparency, who runs the blog Who Owns England?
]]>Steve Goodrich of Transparency International will share the organisation’s latest insights into the offshore companies that own 40,000 properties across London, and describe his attempts to see behind them and discover their true owners.
Anna Minton, author of Big Capital, will tell the inside story of London’s housing crisis, and lay out who is to blame.
Jon Benton, until earlier this year head of the National Crime Agency’s International Corruption Unit, will talk about why it is so hard to investigate money laundering through property.
On July 5th the Frontline Club will be screening in collaboration with The Tax Justice Network – Michael Oswald’s and John Christensen’s new film, ‘The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire’.
The Spider’s Web’ is a documentary film that shows how Britain transformed from a colonial, to a global financial power. At the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it behind obscure financial structures in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions and Britain and its offshore jurisdictions are the largest global players in the world of international finance. How did this come about, and what impact does it have on the world today? This is what the Spider’s Web sets out to investigate.
With contributions from leading experts, academics, former insiders and campaigners for social justice, the Spider’s Web reveals how in the world of international finance, corruption and secrecy have prevailed over regulation and transparency, and the UK is right at the heart of this.
Join us post-screening for a panel discussion with some of the creators of the film and leading financial experts.
Chair: Oliver Bullough. Oliver is an award winning investigative journalist and chair of all the Kleptoscope nights at the Frontline Club. Bullough writes extensively for the Guardian on topics of tax evasion, dirty money and money laundering. Before this, Bullough lived in Russia working primarily for Reuters and has written extensively on the country.
Speakers
John Christensen: John is the co-producer of ‘The Spider’s Web’ and Chair of the Tax Justice Network. He is a former economic advisor to the government of Jersey. His research in offshore finance has been widely published.
Dr Abby Innes: is the Assistant Professor of political economy at the LSE European Institute. Before her PhD, Dr Innes worked as a political analyst in the Office of the Government, Czechoslovakia; as Assistant to the General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry and as a researcher for the Policy Studies Institute.
Will Snell: from Tax Justice UK, is a newly launched sister organisation of the Tax Justice Network, but also independent from it. Focused on the UK, it’s just released an analysis of general election political party manifestos from a tax justice perspective http://www.taxjustice.uk/
http://www.taxjustice.uk/
Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uM2cdhfAGA
Run Time: 1 hr 19 minutes.
You can get a sneak preview of the film and hear an interview with the director Michael Oswald in the Taxcast, the Tax Justice Network’s monthly podcast: http://www.taxjustice.net/2017/05/24/britains-second-empire-may-2017-tax-justice-network-podcast/
Listen to the Guardian Audio: Offshore in Central London, the curious case of 29 Harley Street, by Oliver Bullough here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2016/may/06/offshore-in-central-london-the-curious-case-of-29-harley-street
There was great interest in the screening of the film Secret City and the Q&A with Michael Chanan – professor of film and video at the University of Roehampton and The New Statesman’s first video blogger – which followed on Monday 14th January at the Frontline Club.
Chanan’s film, along with fellow filmmaker and senior lecturer in journalism at the University of West England Lee Salter, delves into the history and power that is hidden behind the traditions and ceremony of the Lord Mayor and the City of London Corporation, the organisation which governs the City of London; predating the UK parliament and allowing businesses to vote in local elections.
The evening’s chair, Joris Luyendijk, writer for the Guardian’s Banking Blog, started the off the discussion after the film:
I think I had a bit of a Jimmy Saville moment, when you see something quite shocking and you realise it’s been hiding in plain sight for all this time.
To which Chanan replied:
You Google for images . . . of the floor of the London Stock exchange and I couldn’t find any. There are any number of the floor of New York, the floor of Hong Kong and none of London’s. Why not? Eventually working backwards I found this stuff [archive footage from 1939 and 1951] it’s not on Google, you have to go to a real old fashioned archive. And then looking at it I thought “Wait a minute, in 1951 they’re not yet quite so ashamed of making these claims, about the City being a state within a state, about the . . . Lord Mayor being monarch of everything he sees except his own monarch. . . . Those kinds of phrases.” So since then they’ve become a lot more careful about their public image.
Chanan was very clear that he wanted the film to be as independent and freely distributed as possible and on being asked about whether he had sought help from the BBC he said:
We did think of trying to get them to commission the film but gave up very quickly. We went through the arguments with our producer . . . maybe they would do it if you could bring some revelations. The whole problem with big revelations is that you can’t find that; you can’t get that; they’re completely closed. So we gave up that idea.
Rev. William Taylor, a City of London Councillor for nearly seven years and who featured in the film, was called upon in the audience to give his point of view:
What you have in the City Corporation is that it holds together a consensus that we have found it very hard to think about in this county about the importance of the financial services to our economy. We think . . . that the financial services is the goose that’s laying the golden egg . . . they’re so important to us. And we’re just realising that in fact the goose is fouling its nest and the eggs that it’s laying are toxic and they’re not doing us any good and we need to put it out of it’s misery. . . . What we need is a way of opening that up to clinical judgment and I think the film has really done that.
The discussion then turned to the Corporation’s role with respect to European law to which Chanan said:
The explanations to why we’re not in the Euro . . . are that these things are not a matter of British government policy because British government policy in areas like that, whichever party is in power, are effectively determined by the City. And the City did not want to be in the Euro. There are a couple of reasons for that at least. One is . . . that would open the City to the potential of European directives but the other is that it refuses to accept any other European financial centre as its competitor as it would have to.
One of the final statements came from an audience member who works in the City:
Most people in the City are not corrupt but there are incentives within the system which cause all the problems that we have. . . . When you’re in the City you understand the parameters within which you’re working and you never question that and therefore it’s only when you step outside and actually look . . . that you begin to question the whole rationale. And it’s only when you question the whole rationale that you seen this is not about bad people or corruption it’s about a system which is clearly not fit for what we need, it dwarfs everything else. . . . It is a system that is designed in such a way that it has certain effects and that’s what we need to attack. It’s not the people, it’s the systemic flaws.
Secret City is being screened all over the UK within the next few months, find out where on secretcity-thefilm.com
Watch the trailer for Secret City below
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By Nicole Hunt
Monday looks to be the biggest day of what should be an interesting week internationally. Kicking off with the ongoing EU debt crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosts French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Berlin to iron out amendments to the new EU fiscal stability treaty that was agreed last month.
Italian bank Unicredit opens its €7.5bn rights issue, having discounted shares by about 43 per cent in a bid to raise funds. Investors will be watching the sale closely to gauge market support for European banks.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak begins a three-day visit to China at the invitation of President Hu Jintao. Discussions are expected to focus heavily on regional security in the wake of the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.
Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy trial, which has dragged on for nearly two years, finally comes to an end as the jury is scheduled to deliver its verdict in Kuala Lumpur. In addition to Ibrahim’s freedom – he faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty – the verdict will also determine who will run against Prime Minister Najib Razak in the country’s next elections, which are not due until June 2013 but look increasingly likely to be called this year.
Attentions turn Stateside on Tuesday as New Hampshire Republicans cast their ballots in the presidential primary. Following the 3 January Iowa Caucus, in which Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum by just eight votes, Michelle Bachman announced that she was dropping out of the race.
In Washington, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announces whether to move the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock, which represents how close humanity is to ‘catastrophic destruction’. The last time the clock was moved, in January 2010, the BAS’ outlook was somewhat positive, moving the minute hand back one minute from five to six minutes before midnight.
Tuesday also marks the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre.
The High Court in London is expected to rule on Wednesday whether the Occupy London protesters can remain in their camp outside of St Paul’s Cathedral. Despite legal action from the City of London Corporation, the camp has been in place since 15 October.
The World Economic Forum releases its annual Global Risk Report ahead of the Davos Forum, which opens on 25 January. Last year’s report found that the financial crisis had ‘drained’ the world’s ability to deal with shocks.
The European Central Bank’s Governing Council meets in Frankfurt on Thursday to decide whether to raise, lower, or maintain the euro area’s interest rate. After last month’s meeting, during which the interest rate was decreased to 1 per cent, ECB President Mario Draghi announced major refinancing operations to support bank lending and market activity.
Alleged al Qaeda member Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who pled guilty in October to attempting to set off an explosive device in his underwear on a Detroit flight on Christmas Day in 2009, is sentenced in Detroit.
India is hoping to celebrate a milestone anniversary on Friday. If no new cases of polio are reported between now and then, the country will mark its first-ever year without any new cases. The World Health Organisation considers a disease to be eradicated when no new cases are reported for three consecutive years. Apple is set for a massive sales boost as the iPhone 4S goes on sale in China and 21 other countries in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.
Apple is set for a massive sales boost as the iPhone 4S goes on sale in China and 21 other countries in South America, the Caribbean and Africa.
Saturday marks the one year anniversary of the resignation of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whose 23-year rule was ended after nearly a month of protests dubbed the Jasmine Revolution. The success of protests in Tunisia spurred similar movements across the region, with widely varying results in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco and Syria.
In Taiwan, voters go to the polls to elect a new President for a four year term. Incumbent Ma Ying-jeou faces challenges from China-sceptic Tsai Ing-wen and pro-Beijing James Soong.
Elections also take place in Kazakhstan on Sunday, following President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s snap decision to dissolve Parliament on 16 November. The vote is expected to see at least one opposition party enter Parliament, usually dominated by Nazarvbaeyev’s Nur Otan party, though that party is likely to be close ally Ak Zholl.
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