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.

Kleptoscope 5 looks at this under-acknowledged economic catastrophe, and asks why it is so hard to recover assets stolen by kleptocrats. And what role does London play as both a safe haven for looted money, and a laundering centre for money being invested elsewhere?

As usual, the evening is hosted by investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, who will introduce a panel of hugely experienced and knowledgeable practitioners from the three spheres of asset recovery: law enforcement, private practice and civil society.

William Bourdon is a French lawyer who specialises in corporate, media and criminal law. In 2001, he founded Sherpa to “defend the victims of crimes committed by economic operators”, and has sought to bring cases against kleptocratic rulers of countries with assets in France: including Senegal, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Congo-Brazzaville. He recently created PPLAAF, a platform to protect whistle blowers in Africa (https://pplaaf.org).

Daniel Hall is a director at Burford Capital, a firm that specialises in funding asset recovery cases. He has spent more than a decade investigating fraud and financial crime, with a particular emphasis on sovereign cases.

David O’Mahony  is a barrister at 7BR and specialises in offshore issues. He has been instructed in cases involving money laundering and criminal fraud, civil and commercial law, arbitration, domestic and international financial regulation and international crime. He advises on public and private international law and international criminal law and has deep knowledge of the law of bribery and corruption.

.

After two successful Kleptoscope talks discussing the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, we come closer to home, with an exploration of Britain’s offshore tax havens. The Channel Islands, Cayman Islands and others pay host to enormous capital flows, as well as untold thousands of shell companies, but are they are they as dubious as they are painted?

Hosted by investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, Kleptoscope #3 will bust myths and uncover the facts about Britain’s big companies hiding away from view.

Oliver 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. He is also an expert guide for the Kleptocracy Tours initiative, which exposes money laundering via property in London.

Professor Ronan Palan is one of the world’s leading academic experts on tax havens . He will sketch out the dimensions of the offshore world.

Professor Anastasia Nesvetailova, also of City University, specialises in the way the finance industry uses offshore jurisdictions.

John Christensen worked as an economic adviser to the States of Jersey, before founding the Tax Justice Network. He is a top campaigner against tax havens, and has done more than almost anyone to put them in the international spotlight.

This talk will feature groundbreaking stories focusing on Arab Spring countries, exploring how kleptocrats from the region have used the services of the British capital to retain and launder their money.

Ala’a Shehabi, of Bahrain Watch, will reveal how Bahraini officials built luxury artificial islands in the sea, hid the transactions behind layers of offshore companies, then spent the proceeds on high-end real estate in London and how this fuelled the uprising in 2011 and subsequent repression in the country.

Ben Cowdock from Transparency International will present a new TI-UK report on dirty money in the UK, its role in the Arab Spring and the need for urgent reform in the UK’s asset recovery regime. He will address the UK’s role as a safe haven for corrupt money, giving an overview of the systemic weaknesses of the UK’s mechanisms against the laundering of corrupt funds.

Finally, Richard Brooks of Private Eye will demonstrate the map he and his colleagues created of all the properties in England and Wales that are owned offshore. The map gives crucial insights into the role of anonymous companies in distorting the British property market.

Oliver 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. He is also an expert guide for the Kleptocracy Tours initiative, which exposes money laundering via property in London.

Obermayer and fellow Süddeutsche journalist Frederik Obermaier soon found themselves immersed in a secret world where complex networks of shell companies help the super-rich to hide their money. In the face of the largest data leak in history, they activated an international network of fellow journalists to investigate every line of enquiry. Working in strict secrecy for over a year, they uncovered incriminating cases involving aristocrats, kings, international dictators, celebrities and European prime ministers.

We will be joined by Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier – in conversation with The Guardian‘s Luke Harding – to hear the inside story of what Edward Snowden has called “the biggest leak in the history of data journalism.”

Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer are award-winning investigative journalists at Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest broadsheet. The first people to have access to the Panama papers, they were previously part of the international team of journalists who revealed the Offshore Leaks, Luxembourg Leaks and Swiss Leaks.

                                                             – Oliver Bullough

Following the release of the Panama Papers and with David Cameron hosting a major conference in London aimed at tackling cross-border corruption, the Frontline Club held a timely debate on how best to investigate – and combat –transnational organised crime, money laundering and tax evasion.

Drew Sullivan, co-founder and editor of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), began by highlighting the common misconception that corruption has little impact on the everyday lives of most people.

“When you think of corruption in England you think that someone stole some money but in developing countries such as Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine Russia, when you have corruption it can significantly impact the economy and destroy lives.”

Citing the role the UK plays at the heart of the global money laundering system, author and journalist Oliver Bullough, who chaired the debate, said that one of the most amazing things about the Panama Papers, was “that it was able to connect people not being paid in Azerbaijan with people buying flats in Knightsbridge”.

Merion Jones, former head of investigations at BBC Newsnight, said that with billions of pounds funnelled through British accounting firms and out to tax havens in the British dependencies, “London is at the core of this theft”.

“You can’t find the people involved, their money is invisible, the companies often disappear, and that what was so great about the Panama Papers. It gives us a chance to dig in after these corporate villains and find out what they’re really doing, that which is technically illegal and what is immoral.”

Daniel Balint-Kurit, leader of the Special Investigations team at Global Witness, stressed that while it is easy to write off “fantastically corrupt” countries, the issue of offshore-companies was pervasive and widespread and affected companies and people here.

The phrase "fantastically corrupt" seems appropriate, and it's neither Nigeria nor Afghanistan, but here. https://t.co/sY6fDi9q79

— Peter Hiett (@NotAsGoodAsPete) May 11, 2016

“What we do know is that companies registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVIs) are an established vehicle for corruption.”

What many people don’t understand, said Sullivan, is that the so-called ‘criminal services industry’ is a multi-billion dollar industry that is not just operating in British overseas territories but in almost every country around the world.

“There’s an entire second economy out there that the developing world uses and it’s the offshore industry.”

According to Sullivan, we are witnessing “the largest transfer of wealth from poor countries to the rich countries since the Conquistadores” and that is why the revelations in the Panama Papers are predominately centred around businesses based in the developing world.

With an estimated $300 billion dollars moving from the developing to developed world each year worldwide, the knock on effect of this massive transfer of wealth is not only to bankrupt these source countries but also create a huge discrepancy between the amount of money sent back in aid versus the amount of capital taken out of the country.

“It is a bit like bailing out a sinking boat with a teaspoon,” said Sullivan and “you are going to end up with some really poor countries that are really unstable, which in turn creates a very dangerous world and an unstable nightmare that is going to blow up and some point in our faces.”

For Balint-Kurit,while many of the companies involved in these operations are based in London or listed on the London stock exchange, the legal and financial systems that support them, coupled with “a lack of curiosity from investors and completely moronic arguments from the powers-that-be” have made holding those responsible to account almost impossible.

“There is supposed to be the principle of open justice in this country but now we are seeing it privatised.”

Daria Kaleniuk: "In Ukraine we can't get our stolen assets back or even tell our #anticorruption story b/c of operation of UK legal system."

— Chido Dunn (@chidodunn) May 11, 2016

What is required, said Balint-Kurit, “is a cast iron rule that corporate structures need to be transparent from the very top,” revealing who their investors are down to the private contractors they employ.

The major problem with the system, said Holly Watt from the Guardian, “is that it is deliberately very complicated and this why the issue of transparency is so important” so that in the end it will be the commercial advantage to outing these transactions that forces big accountancy firms to “turn game keeper”.

Another problem, said Sullivan, is that as well as being woefully underfunded and understaffed, law enforcement is national while crime is international.

“In the wild there’s no natural predator to these groups and the consequence is that they continue to thrive.”

There is also an assumption that these problems are not inter-connected and can be addressed in degrees at a local level, but if there was one thing the Panama Papers proved said Sullivan, was that in a global world, “other people’s crime is our problem”.

What do a dead poet, organised crime and the air we breathe have in common?
On Thursday 21 November the Frontline Club screened The Carbon Crooks – director Tom Heinemann’s exposé of the massive fraud and failures within global carbon trading schemes.

Heinemann introduced his picture thus:

“This film is a about a system where, one could say everybody are crooks, or nobody are crooks. . . . How can you nail a whole system? That was the challenge in this film. Maybe you’ll find a lot of crooks in this film, or maybe you’ll find no crooks.”

Director Tom Heinemann. Photography Credit: George Symonds

The first question from the audience asked: “The VAT carousel has been known for 20 years. How is it possible that they didn’t think of it for emissions trading?”

“That’s a very good question,” said Heinemann, “that the EU Commission didn’t want to answer me either. . . . I don’t know who designed the system, but I’m sure someone has some red ears, somewhere. It took them way too long to stop this. Way too long.”

“Are we going to move away from market-based mechanisms?” followed another audience member.

“Well, I’m a journalist. I ask questions, I don’t give the answers,” began Heinemann. “But, my impression is that . . . the politicians today say, ‘We can’t do it better so we’ll pick the second or third best system.’ What can we do about this? I don’t know. Kevin Anderson, the advisor for the British government on climate issues has stopped flying. He has said, ‘I’ve used my credits.’”

https://twitter.com/CCESltd/statuses/403805857760428032

In response to a question on police investigations Heinemann explained:

“The real problem here is that most of the scam money came from organised crime. We have drug dealers, terrorist funders – the scum of the earth – have laundered money into these VAT carousels. There are a lot of investigations going on . . . there are employees of Deutsche Bank still accused of laundering carbon credit money.”

On why the authorities refuse to answer where the missing – traceable – credits have gone:

“Why don’t they tell us? Maybe it’s too embarrassing,” offered Heinemann. “Maybe it would reveal that these credits have been in so many ‘honest hands.’ . . .  You heard the Director of Europol, Rob Wainwright, saying it’s easier to hack into a carbon credit registry than stealing a car. I mean, that’s really trustworthy isn’t it? These questions need to be asked by people other than me, because there are a lot of people who don’t want to talk to me any more.”

Heinemann then expanded on the connection between carbon trading and international development:

“Gold Standard admits to us that half of their projects – about 60 – throughout the world are based on a system called ‘suppressed demand’. Meaning, you ask the poor people, ‘If I brought in a money tree, and you pluck it every day, would you then change your behaviour?’ . . . It’s not a big part of the system but a very important story. Because it was created by a lot of NGOs, based on a mathematical economic theory where the Danish professor says, ‘In the old days we had the vicar, we could go and get redemption. Today we have a long mathematical formula.’ So it fits!”

Heinemann concluded with his forecast for future carbon control:

“The head of communication for DONG Energy, a 80% state-owned Danish energy company, admits it has never been cheaper to pollute than today. It is cheaper than ever. Then there’s something wrong with the system. . . . The problem is that the market cannot reduce carbon emissions, apparently.”

More information about the film can be found at The Carbon Crooks website.