Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

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Highly readable... deserve[s] praise for going beyond moralizing and pointing out how an industry geared to enabling the corrupt is not just unsavory but can hurt a country's real economic prospects.” — Financial Times A horribly brilliant account of just how much historical integrity Britain has sacrificed at the altar of dirty money. Bullough is a compelling and expert guide to the newly-dug sewers flowing through the heart of our political, legal and financial establishment.” —James O'Brien, author of How Not to be Wrong The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain’s twentieth-century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat. In the immortal words of former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, ‘Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.’ But the funny thing was, Britain had already found a role. It even had the costume. The leaders of the world just hadn’t noticed it yet. I travelled in a dozen countries to meet all the people I needed for the stories I wanted to tell, and wrote them down in Let Our Fame Be Great. Penguin published it in the UK in 2010. It won the Oxfam Emerging Writer Prize and was short-listed for the Orwell Prize, with prize judge James Naughtie calling it “an extraordinary book... a wonderful part-travelogue, part-history”. Basic Books published it in the United States, where the Overseas Press Club awarded it the Cornelius Ryan Award for “best nonfiction book on international affairs”.

Royal historian Tessa Dunlop’s incisive, crisply written book, subtitled “A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy”, uses oral history techniques to help give the familiar tale of the relationship between the youthful Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip context and texture. By contrasting verbatim testimonies of ordinary people with the rarefied life of the royal couple, Dunlop gives the narrative greater immediacy and relevance than it might otherwise have possessed, while elegantly conveying a kaleidoscopic vision of 40s Britain on the verge of change. Now She Is Witch The lessons were learned in the British Virgin Islands, where it dawned on some lawyers that they could make a decent living setting up shell companies for the rich overseas. It festooned to its logical conclusion in the Cayman Islands, which has been built entirely on shell companies to hide the fortunes of the corrupt elected, dictators, rich executives and of course every kind of criminal imaginable. An American financial lawyer found the BVI law firm (before the internet, when research was nearly impossible and telephoning was absurdly expensive) and told them what he wanted to set up. So they did. He even wrote the laws for island governments to adopt. I found the author’s tone throughout insufferably priggish, e.g. ~‘all innovations in finance are just to rob people’ and the book as a whole is a one-sided diatribe against the British government. Nevertheless, it had some interesting discussions and history. For example, I wasn’t aware of the Eurodollar or its role in possibly ending the Bretton-Woods agreement (not sure this is necessarily a bad thing like the author suggests…), the recent history of Gibraltar and the BVI, or the 2009 Russia-Ukraine gas dispute. There was no concerted law enforcement effort against Chinese money laundering, I told him, so there was no investigator who could talk to him about it. There have been essentially no prosecutions so none for him to look into, and there is almost no research into where the money has been going, how it’s been getting there, or indeed how much of it there is. There is a chapter on the considerable lengths the British government has gone to ensure nothing changes. There have been cases where members of Parliament have (naively) thought they could introduce bills to regulate this known and obvious criminal activity. The latest is an MP by the name of Roger Mullin:

This is a truly remarkable book. Bullough builds relentlessly, starting with relatively ordinary crime and insufferable selfishness. But every chapter steps it up a notch or ten, as the UK and its former colonies engage in a race to the bottom of morality. It is well researched, well documented, engagingly written, and endlessly diverting. But the story is revolting. He shows how, time and again, wealthy individuals arriving in the UK rely on the same army of professional advisers who help them buy up prime real estate, with the properties registered using a web of offshore shell companies. Generous public donations to universities, arts foundations and political parties bestow a certain kind of British respectability, and grease the way for introductions to members of the royal family and ministers. Unbeknownst to Mullin and indeed to pretty much everyone else, the Treasury and the private equity industry were actually seeking to loosen those same regulations, so limited partnerships would have to report even less information to the authorities than they already did. They had no interest in whether Eastern European money launderers could or could not do business, but they did want investments to be even more profitable than they already were. Remember how the Bank of England doomed controls on international money flows in the 1950s? The Treasury was doing exactly the same thing now. In sum, “Britain has essentially outsourced responsibility for stopping money laundering to the money launderers, and is failing to stop dirty money as a result. Much of the time the same bodies tasked with regulating professionals’ financial transactions are also charged with lobbying government on their behalf, while also relying on those same professionals’ membership fees to keep solvent.” It is business as usual in the UK.

His work has appeared at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, [13] and in GQ, [14] Granta, [15] and The Guardian. [16] [17] [18] Bibliography [ edit ]Because of the shared language, Americans and Brits often think their countries are more similar than they actually are, which is something I am as guilty of as anyone. When I do research in the United States, I am consistently amazed by the willingness of officials to sit down with me and talk through their work. I call them without an introduction, and yet time and again they trust me to keep specific details of our discussions off the record. Court documents are easy to obtain, and prosecutors are willing to talk about them. Politicians, meanwhile, seem to have a genuine belief in the importance of communicating their work to a wider public, which means they’re happy to talk to writers like me. American journalists complain about their working conditions, just like everyone does everywhere, but, for a European, doing research into financial crime in the US is as heady an experience as letting my sons loose in a Lego shop. In this book, I reveal that hidden side of Britain, which I fear the vast majority of people have no idea exists and which will shake anyone’s confidence in its worth as a close ally. The country’s public image is as the home of Harry Potter, Queen Elizabeth II, top flight soccer, and socialized healthcare; as an exporter of whiskey, Hollywood baddies, late-night television personalities, and endless costume dramas. But behind the scenes, there is an entirely different country, one which—in a career of writing about corruption, money laundering, and financial crime—I have gradually come to glimpse, understand, and grow alarmed by. It was an understanding that crystallized during a conversation that took place a couple of years ago, with an American academic called Andrew. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting. When I left Russia in 2006, I was exhausted by it, however. I had seen too much misery and never wanted to write about Chechnya again. But I had promised to give a talk to a society in London. After the talk, I was asked if I would ever write a book about what I had seen. I wrote down a few thoughts, took them to a friend who knew about books, and she introduced me to a publisher.