13 ms·

How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London

450 points by null_object 5y ago

jka 5y ago
Here's hoping for more transparency and analytical rigour with regards to the volume and cost of prime real estate ownership within London (and other cities worldwide)
- smcl 5y ago
  I hope so too, but I think this is very wishful thinking. If Oligarch owned properties somehow get returned to the market, they'll just get snapped up by a different collection of semi-anonymous billionaires.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    But fewer of them. Shrinking demand is good.
  - jka 5y ago
    Agreed; it's not really a free market, in that sense. They share information among themselves and have common interests that they try to develop over time. It's all very shady.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Yeah it's not suddenly going to make hosting more affordable sadly. It would be great if investors would be banned from the housing market though. Houses should be bought to live in, not as investments. It used to be like that but due to this practice it's almost impossible for our generation to buy a house now :(
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      So much this. Shelter is a basic necessity. If someone told you they were supporting a policy because it would cause food and water to outpace the rate of inflation, you would call them a greedy asshole. Yet when people do this for housing, its accepted as normal.
    - brigandish 5y ago
      I agree, though I also wonder what could be the unintended consequences.
i_like_waiting 5y ago
I am realistically wondering now, what changes does this bring. If London won't be interesting anymore for oligarchs, what will happen with prices of accomodation in center? If Switzerland is not a neutral country anymore, where will the money go? There should be prisoners dilemma and therefore some country should emerge to fill this "market need"
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  If money can't be explained it should be seized. The properties should be nationalised and then sold on auctions. Money should be used to rebuild Ukraine and legal assistance to get war criminals tried.
  - forum_ghost 5y ago
    Guilty, until proven innocent. Excellent starting point, I wonder what other rights should we dispense with.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    The UK does have unexplained wealth orders. The haven't been used much though, at least so far.
- AeroNotix 5y ago
  The geographic or political consolidation of tyranny is not a bad thing. The sooner we get to a point where tyranny overtly seeks tyranny, for all to see, the better.
- nostromo 5y ago
  China.
  - ImprovedSilence 5y ago
    Dubai
  - csee 5y ago
maerF0x0 5y ago
It was kind of a hear-say thing that was presumed about the Vancouver, British Columbia (and surrounding area) Real estate market too https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/russian-money-canada-1.4102132 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/russian-money-canada-1.4102...
- newyankee 5y ago
  There was a case where a guy committed a multi million $ fraud in some Indian state and safely ran after to BC. The BC police did not cooperate in investigation or so I heard. Rich countries are happy to accept shady money as long as it is not done loudly and impacts lie in some third world country far away without strong legal capabilities.
alecco 5y ago
Unsurprisingly, they blame conservatives. But the city has been a stronghold of Labour for a very long time. BoJo’s tenure was after this happened. Mind Gell-Mann Amnesia. Remember last time this outlet covered a subject you know about.
- pmyteh 5y ago
  The authority of English local government is highly constrained, and very little of what makes London attractive to kleptocrats was put in place by city hall (either under Johnson or his Labour predecessor or successor). Most of the Russian money in politics is flowing through the Conservative party. They're currently in power, traditionally more wealth friendly, and rely on big-money individual and corporate donors to a greater degree than Labour (who have union funding and also many more members to pay subs). That said, the last Labour government (up to 2010) was also beguiled by rich people, and there are definitely a few Labour backbenchers who have been bought off.
formvoltron 5y ago
Apple should create a special update for all iOS devices that are Russian language. This update can include feeds of real news and images and videos from the Ukraine. This could have a seriously important effect on the war by opening Russian's eyes to what is going on.
SquibblesRedux 5y ago
Does anyone know of an infographic that bluntly shows where the Russian oligarch wealth comes from originally and how it is aggregated and concentrated?
- staticautomatic 5y ago
  It comes from the privatization of government-run businesses during the fall of the Soviet Union.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Specifically, resource extraction businesses, like mining metals or drilling oil and natural gas. There may be some exceptions, but it seems to be the vast majority of them.
eps 5y ago
> Putin personally told me of his plan to acquire the Chelsea Football Club in order to increase his influence and raise Russia’s profile, not only with the elite but with ordinary British people. This does not correlate at all with the polonium and Novichok cases.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  Anyone arriving at an airport in the UK with a Russian accent will be asked the height of Salisbury cathedral. An answer correct to 0.5m will lead to instant arrest. I live quite close to Salisbury and have no idea apart from "bloody tall", how high the spire thrusts skywards. Apart from anything else we'd generally measure it in feet. I'd better spell it out: One of the gentlemen accused of poisoning a Russian ex-pat in Salisbury (Hants. UK) claimed that he was a tourist and came to see the cathedral in Salisbury. He quoted the height of it to quite a degree of accuracy as proof of his touristic intentions. He really did not smear novichok on Mr Skripal's door.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    While I agree that the "tourist" excuse was likely bullshit, I suspect someone that recently visited a tourist site would know more about it than someone who lived near it all their life. They just learned about it, how often do you think about it? And if they had been visiting the spire, which they probably weren't, it's likely they would have gotten information about it in their native language which would use meters.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The question would have been asked in immigrations upon their arrival, so it would be before visiting the tourist site.
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago
        So any assassin targeting somebody in any other location would be fine, it has nothing to do with the famous case as those people were interviewed after the trip, and now I would be suspect because I read this thread and know it's 123 meters. As an American I'm sure I'd be fine, but it's just a silly entry question.
Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30721216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30721216
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pvg 5y ago
  These links only make sense if the submission has had some discussion
codedokode 5y ago
> Russian oligarchs have donated millions of pounds to the Conservative Party I don't understand how this is possible. Is it legal in Britain for foreigners to finance political parties?
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Naturalised citizens in the USA can donate too, can't they? The point is these guys have visas, residency etc., they aren't a criminal class, in the UK. It's funny how until the Ukraine crisis, every time I mentioned how serious a problem this was, people told me I was exaggerating. Even in the first week of the war, that happened here on HN. The London Laundromat is a significant corrosive influence.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    > they aren't a criminal class, in the UK. Well, they _are_ a criminal class here. It's just they've been getting away with it for some time because they're under the protection of another criminal class - our leaders. With any luck the ramifications of this Russia/Ukraine business will cause the unravelling of much more than that little squirt Putin.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      I see your point (and upvoted it). It depends how you see it, I suppose. What I mean is this: Basically all of these oligarchs come here to do legitimate business, just with unexplained wealth. And that's the loophole; unexplained wealth. You have to spend it in a way that brings you attention, before anyone even asks. So here they are not acting criminally; their wealth is only criminal if someone can prove it was illegally obtained in Russia, and that is quite a high bar, considering the source of the wealth and the system in which it was created. It's not just for Russian oligarchs, either; unexplained wealth is at least as big a problem from the middle east. And as you likely know, campaigners even tried to get Donald Trump to explain how he bought a golf course with cash using an unexplained wealth order. I do wonder if that will get revisited, since it was almost certainly cash of dubious, and quite likely Russian, origin.
skeeter2020 5y ago
> amassed a giant fortune by taking control of businesses that once belonged to the Soviet state. The Soviet Union was so vast and disorganized, both accidentally and intentionally, that for decades after it collapsed they showed a trade surplus based on selling the resources hoarded to meet future central planning goals. You had a huge trade surplus, but the money just seemed to disappear. Officially there was nothing to spend it on, but individuals bringing back anything cheap and in-demand within their personal allowance ($2000 I think?) created an enormous grey/black market with no regulation, taxation or statistics. Many of these oligarchs were cogs in the middle of this machine and ideally suited to essentially become "fixers" on both sides of the market.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Do you know any trusted sources about the structure of the soviet union and its collapse ?
  - rodgerd 5y ago
    This article https://www.ft.com/content/503fb110-f91e-4bed-b6dc-0d09582dd007 https://www.ft.com/content/503fb110-f91e-4bed-b6dc-0d09582dd... touches on it, mostly with a focus on the transition from Yeltsin's robber-barons to Putin's inner circle of billionaire nationalists.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      Thanks, I already saw this earlier. I was more interested in the systemic flaws of the USSR. Failure in economic modeling, blinding ideology, that sort of thing.
      - pvg 5y ago
        Kotkin (of the New Yorker interview recently making the rounds, the Stalin bio, etc) wrote Armageddon Averted - one interesting and fairly brief summary.
  - _jal 5y ago
nickdothutton 5y ago
Property in (certain parts of) london is just an asset class.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  In the UK in general. e.g. there are funds that allow you to own fractional shares of rental properties spread across the entire country -- REITs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#U... Commercial properties, obviously, but also residential properties.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
I'd love a similar article on how America's oligarchs are buying America. For some weird reason they get called "elites" if they're American, but oligarchs if only if they're Russian, even though they're the same class of wildly disproportionately powerful people.
- venachescu 5y ago
  Sure, you can see a lot of shallow similarities between these two groups but it would miss a pretty important structural difference. Oligarchs don't have power outside the authoritarian apparatus of the state. Oligarchs exist entirely at the pleasure of the leader and have no true autonomy. If an Oligarch tries to 'branch out', they end up in jail or dead.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  I think the term started life in Russian (just before my time) before being translated directly into English. It's got little to do with Oligarchy in Plato's sense, but it originated as a reference to it. Incidentally, the term Aristocracy is also used in a corrupted sense, but not in the context of Russia.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- space_rock 5y ago
  Because in Russia the KGB associated people took political and economic power. Hence ruled by few as is the definition. I'm assuming you believe Mark Zuckerberg has a iron grip on your country and will have you killed if you cross him?
  - ElevenLathe 5y ago
    In Russia, KGB spooks became oligarchs. In the US (~50 years earlier), oligarchs created the CIA to do their dirty tricks for them. It's a distinction without a difference.
  - jka 5y ago
alexklark 5y ago
Piggies got fat enough, they can be finally eaten.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
chernevik 5y ago
https://archive.is/m7yx0 https://archive.is/m7yx0
commandlinefan 5y ago
> donated millions of pounds to the Conservative Party And somehow none to the liberal party? This kind of bias throws the rest of the article into suspicion.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymous_sorry 5y ago
  The Conservative Party have been in power in the UK since 2010. It wouldn't be surprising if those aiming to buy influence focussed their donations on them. In general it feels like you're trying to extrapolate American politics onto British politics. For example, "liberal" in the UK (and I think most of the world) doesn't mean what it has come to mean in the USA. And the Conservative party at the moment tends to raise more of its money from large donations from wealthy individuals than the main opposition party in the UK [0]. [0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-which-party-received-the-most-donations/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-w...
- TillE 5y ago
  If foreign billionaires are giving money to the Liberals, it's probably in an attempt to sabotage Labour, for the benefit of the Tories.
jmyeet 5y ago
My sincere hope is that the Ukraine war might actually lead to changes such that people (both foreigners and domestic) won't be able to hide or park money in real estate. I'm not hopeful that this will happen but I can but hope. In the UK in particular the government is beholden to the bankers in the City of London and they want no such crackdown. It's already the case where when you buy real estate in the UK with an LLC (which should be illegal IMHO) you need to declare who the beneficial owner is with the company registered with Companies House. This is routinely not done and there is absolutely no enforcement. That would be a start but it doesn't go near far enough. Another example: all US citizens and permanent residents have to declare all their foreign assets to the government every year, typically twice: once to the IRS, another time to the Treasury Department. These forms are known as Form 8939 and FBAR respectively. Guess what you don't have to declare? Real estate holdings. Why is there a carve-out for real estate? It's disgusting. We have a housing crisis in the West. It's a complex problem but there are a number of factors: 1. NIMBYism stopping building of denser living; 2. Tax advantages and policies that make it more profitable to build ultra-luxury housing; and 3. The ease to which the wealthy can park their money in such real estate, which creates a lot of demand. I would like to see this all go much farther. If you own real estate in a given jurisdiction you should be a resident for tax purposes in that jurisdiction. That should allow the government to tax your worldwide income. Want the anonymity of ownership through an LLC? Without a clear beneficial owner established then just punitively tax such property. Anonymity is a privilege you should pay through the nose for. I'd accept a carve-out for owning "working" property, which is to say an apartment building where the units are rented out. But individual residential property? Get the hell out. And any property where no beneficial owner can be established (and thus taxed) should just be seized. We seem totally fine with seizing the assets of poor people (ie civil forfeiture). Let's apply that to wealthy tax evaders, oligarchs and despots instead.
- hkt 5y ago
  > And any property where no beneficial owner can be established (and thus taxed) should just be seized. Amen. Social contract dodgers are wrecking the west. We can't afford to let crazy rich people run things, it isn't efficient or right.
- deleted 5y ago
rainworld 5y ago
Once again posting these old docs for the benefit of anyone wanting to understand where these oligarchs come from and what their relationship is to Putin: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs (ARTE 2006) https://youtu.be/oLNKqbwec0s https://youtu.be/oLNKqbwec0s Russian Godfathers (BBC 2005) https://youtu.be/ZLPxyDlQfBc https://youtu.be/ZLPxyDlQfBc Also highly recommended: Paul Klebnikov's Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. Berezovsky, for a while London's best-known oligarchic resident, this article doesn't even bother to mention. Berezovsky, who likely had Klebnikov murdered in 2004 for exposing him.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  This book about Berezovsky is also good: https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Russia-Oligarchs_A/dp/1476771901 https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Russia-Oligarchs_A/dp/...
- dntrkv 5y ago
  I'm about a third of the way through "All The Kremlin's Men", and it's been really good so far. Some really interesting stories from Putin's early days.
Yajirobe 5y ago
A short video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9RQrcv3T8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9RQrcv3T8
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
walterbell 5y ago
U.S. investigation of Zelensky's Oligarch, Sept 2020, https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/with-deutsche-banks-help-an-oligarchs-buying-spree-trails-ruin-across-the-us-heartland/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/with-deutsc... > Kolomoisky siphoned billions of dollars from PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest financial institution, which he co-owned, in an audacious laundering scheme, cleaning the money through a web of companies around the world, U.S. federal prosecutors allege ... transferring more than $750 million to Kolomoisky’s business interests in the United States ... secretly amassed a real estate empire, buying at least 22 properties, including a skyscraper in Cleveland with vaulted ceilings that featured one of the largest bank lobbies in the world, a shuttered Motorola facility rising from the farm fields of northern Illinois and the former headquarters of Mary Kay Cosmetics in Dallas ... The flow of Kolomoisky dollars into the U.S. finally ended in December 2016 when Ukraine regulators nationalized PrivatBank on suspicions of widespread fraud. The losses to the institution prompted criminal investigations by the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. Last February, agents from the U.S. Justice Department jetted to Kyiv to talk with law enforcement agents about the ongoing case in the U.S. ... Though the federal government has set up targeting orders in places like Miami and and New York to screen property purchases for laundering, the orders do not extend all over the country and do not apply to commercial transactions ... The Justice Department finally pushed to seize some of the real estate in August, but much of the damage was done, with buildings devalued, factories shuttered, and steel workers without jobs. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikesallah/ukraine-billionaire-oligarch-money-laundering-investigation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikesallah/ukraine-bill... > At one time, Kolomoisky and his associates were the largest commercial landlords in Cleveland, owning 2.8 million square feet. One of the properties that has drawn the FBI's attention is the Warren Steel plant in Ohio ... Valeria Gontareva, former chair of the National Bank of Ukraine, the nation's chief regulator, said the level of fraud on the institution was larger than any crime ever perpetrated on a Ukrainian bank. U.S. DoJ filings, Aug 2020, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-seeks-forfeiture-two-commercial-properties-purchased-funds-misappropriated https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-seeks-forf... https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/10/06/what-the-pandora-papers-tell-about-zelenskyy-his-offshore-companies-and-his-favorite-oligarch/ https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/10/06/what-the-pandora-pape... > Kvartal 95 was bought by 1+1 TV channel owned by Ihor Kolomoiskyi which gave the company good terms of cooperation and higher prices. Kolomoiskyi started to support Zelenskyy and Kvartal as comedians and now keeps backing them as politicians ... The Pandora Papers disclosed that since 2012, an offshore company affiliated to Kolomoiskyi’s 1+1 group at least once paid more than $1 billion to Zelenskyy’s offshore firm SVT from the British Virgin Islands, for the popular TV show “Make a Comedian Laugh” created by Kvartal 95. And Maltext owns half of SVT ... Zelenskyy’s and Kolomoiskyi’s companies made a transaction worth $40 million in 2012. Under the documents, this was “contribution to capital,” or investment, paid by the oligarch to the now-president. Documentary (enable subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp0WWZbNGq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp0WWZbNGq4
pipeline_peak 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220318230703/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/how-putins-oligarchs-bought-london https://web.archive.org/web/20220318230703/https://www.newyo...
madrox 5y ago
The older I get, the more jaded I become at the illusion of democracy in society. Lobbies don't even need to bribe politicians to change their minds. They simply donate money to candidates whose thinking already aligns with their interests. As long as a politician's success is correlated to their ability to raise money, this will continue to happen for good and for ill.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jacquesm 5y ago
London is the worst by far but there is a lot of Russian money floating around in other countries as well and lots of it was gained through illicit means and whitewashed in all manner of ways, including gifts to politicians and start-up investments.
- ardit33 5y ago
  Yep... NYC as well. I remember when I was looking to buy a place back in 2014. I saw one I liked in Brooklyn, and asked the agent to see it. He said that there were already two all cash offers, and one was over price. I said: who buys them all cash? He said: Russians, for their kids. Large cities, like NYC, SF, London, Paris, and Vancouver are seen as good places to park money in real estate, as they are international hubs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zepearl 5y ago
Super-heavy and long article, at least for me (italian mothertongue). Still, quite interesting. Personal random excerpts (not pointing to anything specific, they just popped up when I read the article): - these oligarchs were mere capos, who answered to the don - England itself has been a silent and handsomely compensated partner in Putin’s kleptocratic designs - “We must go after the oligarchs,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared after the invasion of Ukraine, doing his best to sound Churchillian. But, as the international community labors to isolate Putin and his cronies, the question is whether England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so. - At a fund-raising auction at the Tory summer ball in 2014, a woman named Lubov Chernukhin—who was then married to Vladimir Chernukhin, one of Putin’s former deputy finance ministers—paid a hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the top prize: a tennis match with Johnson and David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time. Johnson defended the match, decrying “a miasma of suspicion” toward “all rich Russians in London.” A Russian magnate told Catherine Belton, “In London, money rules everyone. Anyone and anything can be bought.” The Russians came to London, the source said, “to corrupt the U.K. political elite.” - Libel tourism is another chronic English problem that everyone bemoans but nobody does anything about. This has meant terrific business for the oligarchs’ morally flexible attorneys; according to the British trade publication The Lawyer, some law firms charge a “Russian premium” for their services, of up to fifteen hundred pounds an hour. Disclosure: I work for a swiss bank (therefore a potentially indirect antagonist to the London Exchange/Marketplace - but I'm just an IT-guy :P ). During the past years I kept reading in the news and saw on TV some docs about russian interests in London (they never mentioned anything about other cities/regions, it was always all about "London", I don't know why), therefore none of these news should be surprising, but apparently they still are? Additionally I'm totally/absolutely surprised by UK's government's attitude change: not just a sudden 360-degrees change from "welcome investors" to "don't you dare to talk to us" but even a "what you owned here is history" (maybe I'm mis-interpreting but I understood that that's the general direction of where things are going there - maybe I'm wrong??). Cheers
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  > a sudden 360-degrees change That's amusing: you're end up in the same position, but appearing to have changed?
ayngg 5y ago
I don't think this is limited to Russian oligarchs, I thought that because of its trust and crown dependencies system, London is a popular place for people to hide this kind of stuff. Russian oligarchs and other unsavory individuals like corrupt leaders in Africa, the Middle East and the developing world all dump their ill gotten gains into the opaque system away from prying eyes. The stuff you can actually see, like mansions in Knightsbridge are probably just the tiniest tip of the iceberg, everything else is held in such opaque ways that nobody even knows who it actually belongs to. It is so blatant that you couldn't really call it a dirty secret.
- eevilspock 5y ago
  Oh everything and everyone is for sale. I mean look, most of us have sold our souls so that we can get free web search and free email, and cheap delivery of goods to our doorstep at the touch of button on our iPhones. We prefer to look the other way if not outright deny the huge social costs of an ad-supported web, of the costs to the planet of our one-click to our doorstep shopping convenience in terms of plastic, paper and energy use, and how much of these conveniences rest on the exploitation of people who have no choice but to work for as little as possible, a tiny fraction of what we get paid.
  - AYBABTME 5y ago
    I don't think the average person has much choice in term of whether they use ad-based products or not. Where do you go to pay for a search engine? Even paid newspapers and paid cable TV is serving us ads.
    - eevilspock 5y ago
      The key is that we don't try very hard to resist these things. Maybe some social media posts, or a comment on HN, or a vote on election day. All things that are free (oh there's that word again) and don't require us to actually give up anything. Because that's exactly what morality is about: the giving up of something that benefits you but causes harm to someone else. How many people choose to take a pay cut to work for as socially responsible company as they can? How many forgo the convenience and time savings of Amazon and shop at places that are more expensive because they are local small businesses or businesses that pay and treat their workers better? How many spend less on gadgets and luxuries and redirect those funds to making the world better, or to enable them to take the aforementioned socially responsible pay cut? How many advantaged people forgo using that advantage to gentrify neighborhoods and displace the disadvantaged to less desirable places? How many advantaged people forgo hoarding education resources for their children at the expense of children for whom society is already rigged against (e.g. liberal NYC has the most segregated schools in the country)?
volkadav 5y ago
now newyorker.com should cover how the kleptocrats bought NYC too, but that'd make a lot of powerful people in NYC uncomfortable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  The media did a wonderful job burying the story about how Hudson Yards was set up to sell visas to foreign "investors" building luxury apartments for themselves in a southwest extension of Harlem to promote "economic development".
stelliosk 5y ago
Jonathan Pie: How Putin Weaponized London’s Greed | NYT Opinion https://youtu.be/YAblAQENQhE https://youtu.be/YAblAQENQhE
wolverine876 5y ago
The Russian oligarchs and Putin had friends in conservative parties in many countries in the West (and maybe elsewhere?), including the US and UK. How are those parties escaping a reckoning? In the US, many people blame the liberal party for things regarding Ukraine that didn't even happen, but what the conservative party has openly done is somehow overlooked. It's not the first issue on which we've seen this phenomenon (economics, etc.), but it's an excellent example.
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
London is known as "The Laundry" in Russia. No one in power has cared for two decades and only care now because it serves their interests to. Maybe they will crack down on it, maybe it will get swept under the rug again if the Russian invasion of Ukraine dies down as an important news story, either way, the root issue of why this was allowed in the first place won't be addressed and it will continue to occur with nationals of other countries.
- magpi3 5y ago
  That no one in power has cared is less remarkable that the fact that democracy's supposed watchdogs (i.e. the media) don't care, until now that is. At least this is definitely the first I have heard of it. EDIT: After fully reading the article, I realized that the author of the article deals with this issue: U.K.'s libel laws make it dangerous for media watchdogs to call out oligarchs explicitly.
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/05/21/london-is-a-laundromat-for-russias-dirty-money-uk-report-warns.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/05/21/london-is-a-laundromat-f...
    - 12907835202 5y ago
      All the weird American candy stores in London that never have any customers have suddenly shut up shop since the Ukraine invasion. There's also this photo of a pit within one of the stores being filled with cement just before being shutting down: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/tebfqa/almost_all_of_the_american_candy_stores_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/tebfqa/almost_all_o... I've been trying to find out more about what was going on other than money laundering but haven't been able to find much
      - GFlaneur 5y ago
        This is covered in the last issue of Private Eye Issue 1568. There is no online version, only in print. From memory, the owner set up multiple other business used to secure COVID loans from UK Gov and also had the candy store business buy those business from him. The business was/is a front for these other activities. If you are interested then I can maybe scan the article.
gumby 5y ago
> in England, a person bringing a libel suit does not have to prove that an assertion is untrue, so long as there’s evidence of “serious harm”; instead, the author must prove that it is true. This is a fiendishly burdensome standard This standard has been proposed for US libel law, though so far the efforts have not made progress.
B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
All I can think of is that in Dubai (and similar places) the real-estate dealers must be exceedingly pleased. And the outcome may not be that bad overall, perhaps lower prices in London and more activity in places that want it will work out better for everybody.
fmajid 5y ago
The Russians did not come to London to corrupt the political elite. The elite was already corrupt, they just came to avail themselves of this corruption.
- smt88 5y ago
  > The elite was already corrupt, they just came to avail themselves of this corruption. The wealthy of all civilizations at all times in history have been corrupt. There is nothing interesting about that. What is interesting about this situation is that London is incidentally a good place for Russian money. No one is trying to argue that London would be a magical, affordable Utopia without them. It's just interesting that the conditions in London were most suitable for so many of these people exfiltrating money from their home country.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    The difference between London and, say Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin is that the UK hasn't had a democratic revolution since Cromwell or land reform. Its entire political, legal and economic structure is organized to protect the interests of the aristocracy starting with the Queen, including such things as draconian libel laws whose intent is illustrated by the jailing of Oscar Wilde for daring to importune a Marquess. The hereditary aristocracies of every other European country have been successfully defanged. No wonder why Russian oligarchs felt so congenial (except for the old money turning its nose down at them).
steve76 5y ago
known 5y ago
dukeofdoom 5y ago
I don't understand taking other people property is legal if they legally acquired the property in the first place. I specifically don't get how you can take Roman Abramovich, Chelsea Football Club or his yachts away without proving in court him acquiring these things broke the law. And if you do start retrospectively punishing people, why not go after someone like Bill Gates who is just an American Oligarch just doesn't get called that, but rather a billionaire. He too used all kinds of shady connections to aquaria his wealth. I get the instinctive hatred for extremely rich people and their wealth. But the one thing I've come to realize as I myself become richer, every new thing I buy atomically means I get less time to enjoy my previous possessions. We all just have 24 hours in a day. So practically all those possession of the ultra rich are often just paper deeds. There is on sum, a much greater benefit of something like a Mega Yacht to all the people that work there, worked to build it, work to maintain in, crew it, dock it in ports, and so on. He himself only probably get to use it on rare occasions. To me it seems like theft to do it. Perhaps why I'm personally opposed to it, is that a few a years back I read about a government trying to take over the teachers pensions fund in Ontario. The teachers were paying out to a private firm to invest their pensions, and the firm did so well, it was worth billions of dollars. The government running a large deficit at that time, seeing that huge sum (worth 227 Billions now) started getting wet dreams how they could take it over. They backdown. But just seeing this kind of thing is off putting. It's just thievery.
lenkite 5y ago
"But, by making it perilous to publish allegations, however well documented, that haven’t yet resulted in a criminal conviction, the legal system can grant well-financed malefactors a free pass from scrutiny." Wow. Kudos to London for having this. Publishing allegations without proof is something that should be punished. Throwing out unsubstantiated allegations without paying for it destroys all faith in the media.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Lol. Yes the British press is well respected for truth telling.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  "Unsubstantiated allegations" and "hasn't yet resulted in a criminal conviction" are substantially different things. Investigative journalism plays an important role in our (American) society and justice system, and I think we're much better off for it. To make it concrete: it seems perfectly reasonable for a journalist to publish a first-person story about an event, potentially a crime, that they witnessed. The fact that Britain's legal system threatens journalists who would do that isn't great.
archhn 5y ago
"Putin's Oligarchs" ... as if a man from a working class family rose to power without the consent of Russia's oligarchy. Why does western media always obsessively focus on the front man?
sigsergv 4y ago
In russian satire London is often depicted as a laundry/safe haven for stupid and ignorant oligarchs from esUSSR. It's more a status symbol that something really useful.

450 points by null_object 5y ago

jka 5y ago

Here's hoping for more transparency and analytical rigour with regards to the volume and cost of prime real estate ownership within London (and other cities worldwide)

smcl 5y ago
I hope so too, but I think this is very wishful thinking. If Oligarch owned properties somehow get returned to the market, they'll just get snapped up by a different collection of semi-anonymous billionaires.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  But fewer of them. Shrinking demand is good.
- jka 5y ago
  Agreed; it's not really a free market, in that sense. They share information among themselves and have common interests that they try to develop over time. It's all very shady.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Yeah it's not suddenly going to make hosting more affordable sadly. It would be great if investors would be banned from the housing market though. Houses should be bought to live in, not as investments. It used to be like that but due to this practice it's almost impossible for our generation to buy a house now :(
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    So much this. Shelter is a basic necessity. If someone told you they were supporting a policy because it would cause food and water to outpace the rate of inflation, you would call them a greedy asshole. Yet when people do this for housing, its accepted as normal.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    I agree, though I also wonder what could be the unintended consequences.

i_like_waiting 5y ago

I am realistically wondering now, what changes does this bring. If London won't be interesting anymore for oligarchs, what will happen with prices of accomodation in center? If Switzerland is not a neutral country anymore, where will the money go? There should be prisoners dilemma and therefore some country should emerge to fill this "market need"

intricatedetail 5y ago
If money can't be explained it should be seized. The properties should be nationalised and then sold on auctions. Money should be used to rebuild Ukraine and legal assistance to get war criminals tried.
- forum_ghost 5y ago
  Guilty, until proven innocent. Excellent starting point, I wonder what other rights should we dispense with.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  The UK does have unexplained wealth orders. The haven't been used much though, at least so far.
AeroNotix 5y ago
The geographic or political consolidation of tyranny is not a bad thing. The sooner we get to a point where tyranny overtly seeks tyranny, for all to see, the better.
nostromo 5y ago
China.
- ImprovedSilence 5y ago
  Dubai
- csee 5y ago

maerF0x0 5y ago

It was kind of a hear-say thing that was presumed about the Vancouver, British Columbia (and surrounding area) Real estate market too https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/russian-money-canada-1.4102132 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/russian-money-canada-1.4102...

newyankee 5y ago
There was a case where a guy committed a multi million $ fraud in some Indian state and safely ran after to BC. The BC police did not cooperate in investigation or so I heard. Rich countries are happy to accept shady money as long as it is not done loudly and impacts lie in some third world country far away without strong legal capabilities.

alecco 5y ago

Unsurprisingly, they blame conservatives. But the city has been a stronghold of Labour for a very long time. BoJo’s tenure was after this happened. Mind Gell-Mann Amnesia. Remember last time this outlet covered a subject you know about.

pmyteh 5y ago
The authority of English local government is highly constrained, and very little of what makes London attractive to kleptocrats was put in place by city hall (either under Johnson or his Labour predecessor or successor). Most of the Russian money in politics is flowing through the Conservative party. They're currently in power, traditionally more wealth friendly, and rely on big-money individual and corporate donors to a greater degree than Labour (who have union funding and also many more members to pay subs). That said, the last Labour government (up to 2010) was also beguiled by rich people, and there are definitely a few Labour backbenchers who have been bought off.

formvoltron 5y ago

Apple should create a special update for all iOS devices that are Russian language. This update can include feeds of real news and images and videos from the Ukraine. This could have a seriously important effect on the war by opening Russian's eyes to what is going on.

SquibblesRedux 5y ago

Does anyone know of an infographic that bluntly shows where the Russian oligarch wealth comes from originally and how it is aggregated and concentrated?

staticautomatic 5y ago
It comes from the privatization of government-run businesses during the fall of the Soviet Union.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Specifically, resource extraction businesses, like mining metals or drilling oil and natural gas. There may be some exceptions, but it seems to be the vast majority of them.

eps 5y ago

> Putin personally told me of his plan to acquire the Chelsea Football Club in order to increase his influence and raise Russia’s profile, not only with the elite but with ordinary British people. This does not correlate at all with the polonium and Novichok cases.

gerdesj 5y ago
Anyone arriving at an airport in the UK with a Russian accent will be asked the height of Salisbury cathedral. An answer correct to 0.5m will lead to instant arrest. I live quite close to Salisbury and have no idea apart from "bloody tall", how high the spire thrusts skywards. Apart from anything else we'd generally measure it in feet. I'd better spell it out: One of the gentlemen accused of poisoning a Russian ex-pat in Salisbury (Hants. UK) claimed that he was a tourist and came to see the cathedral in Salisbury. He quoted the height of it to quite a degree of accuracy as proof of his touristic intentions. He really did not smear novichok on Mr Skripal's door.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  While I agree that the "tourist" excuse was likely bullshit, I suspect someone that recently visited a tourist site would know more about it than someone who lived near it all their life. They just learned about it, how often do you think about it? And if they had been visiting the spire, which they probably weren't, it's likely they would have gotten information about it in their native language which would use meters.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The question would have been asked in immigrations upon their arrival, so it would be before visiting the tourist site.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      So any assassin targeting somebody in any other location would be fine, it has nothing to do with the famous case as those people were interviewed after the trip, and now I would be suspect because I read this thread and know it's 123 meters. As an American I'm sure I'd be fine, but it's just a silly entry question.

Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30721216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30721216

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pvg 5y ago
These links only make sense if the submission has had some discussion

codedokode 5y ago

> Russian oligarchs have donated millions of pounds to the Conservative Party I don't understand how this is possible. Is it legal in Britain for foreigners to finance political parties?

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Naturalised citizens in the USA can donate too, can't they? The point is these guys have visas, residency etc., they aren't a criminal class, in the UK. It's funny how until the Ukraine crisis, every time I mentioned how serious a problem this was, people told me I was exaggerating. Even in the first week of the war, that happened here on HN. The London Laundromat is a significant corrosive influence.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > they aren't a criminal class, in the UK. Well, they _are_ a criminal class here. It's just they've been getting away with it for some time because they're under the protection of another criminal class - our leaders. With any luck the ramifications of this Russia/Ukraine business will cause the unravelling of much more than that little squirt Putin.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    I see your point (and upvoted it). It depends how you see it, I suppose. What I mean is this: Basically all of these oligarchs come here to do legitimate business, just with unexplained wealth. And that's the loophole; unexplained wealth. You have to spend it in a way that brings you attention, before anyone even asks. So here they are not acting criminally; their wealth is only criminal if someone can prove it was illegally obtained in Russia, and that is quite a high bar, considering the source of the wealth and the system in which it was created. It's not just for Russian oligarchs, either; unexplained wealth is at least as big a problem from the middle east. And as you likely know, campaigners even tried to get Donald Trump to explain how he bought a golf course with cash using an unexplained wealth order. I do wonder if that will get revisited, since it was almost certainly cash of dubious, and quite likely Russian, origin.

skeeter2020 5y ago

> amassed a giant fortune by taking control of businesses that once belonged to the Soviet state. The Soviet Union was so vast and disorganized, both accidentally and intentionally, that for decades after it collapsed they showed a trade surplus based on selling the resources hoarded to meet future central planning goals. You had a huge trade surplus, but the money just seemed to disappear. Officially there was nothing to spend it on, but individuals bringing back anything cheap and in-demand within their personal allowance ($2000 I think?) created an enormous grey/black market with no regulation, taxation or statistics. Many of these oligarchs were cogs in the middle of this machine and ideally suited to essentially become "fixers" on both sides of the market.

agumonkey 5y ago
Do you know any trusted sources about the structure of the soviet union and its collapse ?
- rodgerd 5y ago
  This article https://www.ft.com/content/503fb110-f91e-4bed-b6dc-0d09582dd007 https://www.ft.com/content/503fb110-f91e-4bed-b6dc-0d09582dd... touches on it, mostly with a focus on the transition from Yeltsin's robber-barons to Putin's inner circle of billionaire nationalists.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Thanks, I already saw this earlier. I was more interested in the systemic flaws of the USSR. Failure in economic modeling, blinding ideology, that sort of thing.
    - pvg 5y ago
      Kotkin (of the New Yorker interview recently making the rounds, the Stalin bio, etc) wrote Armageddon Averted - one interesting and fairly brief summary.
- _jal 5y ago

nickdothutton 5y ago

Property in (certain parts of) london is just an asset class.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
In the UK in general. e.g. there are funds that allow you to own fractional shares of rental properties spread across the entire country -- REITs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust#U... Commercial properties, obviously, but also residential properties.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

I'd love a similar article on how America's oligarchs are buying America. For some weird reason they get called "elites" if they're American, but oligarchs if only if they're Russian, even though they're the same class of wildly disproportionately powerful people.

venachescu 5y ago
Sure, you can see a lot of shallow similarities between these two groups but it would miss a pretty important structural difference. Oligarchs don't have power outside the authoritarian apparatus of the state. Oligarchs exist entirely at the pleasure of the leader and have no true autonomy. If an Oligarch tries to 'branch out', they end up in jail or dead.
ogogmad 5y ago
I think the term started life in Russian (just before my time) before being translated directly into English. It's got little to do with Oligarchy in Plato's sense, but it originated as a reference to it. Incidentally, the term Aristocracy is also used in a corrupted sense, but not in the context of Russia.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
space_rock 5y ago
Because in Russia the KGB associated people took political and economic power. Hence ruled by few as is the definition. I'm assuming you believe Mark Zuckerberg has a iron grip on your country and will have you killed if you cross him?
- ElevenLathe 5y ago
  In Russia, KGB spooks became oligarchs. In the US (~50 years earlier), oligarchs created the CIA to do their dirty tricks for them. It's a distinction without a difference.
- jka 5y ago

alexklark 5y ago

Piggies got fat enough, they can be finally eaten.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

chernevik 5y ago

https://archive.is/m7yx0 https://archive.is/m7yx0

commandlinefan 5y ago

> donated millions of pounds to the Conservative Party And somehow none to the liberal party? This kind of bias throws the rest of the article into suspicion.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anonymous_sorry 5y ago
The Conservative Party have been in power in the UK since 2010. It wouldn't be surprising if those aiming to buy influence focussed their donations on them. In general it feels like you're trying to extrapolate American politics onto British politics. For example, "liberal" in the UK (and I think most of the world) doesn't mean what it has come to mean in the USA. And the Conservative party at the moment tends to raise more of its money from large donations from wealthy individuals than the main opposition party in the UK [0]. [0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-which-party-received-the-most-donations/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/general-election-2019-w...
TillE 5y ago
If foreign billionaires are giving money to the Liberals, it's probably in an attempt to sabotage Labour, for the benefit of the Tories.

jmyeet 5y ago

My sincere hope is that the Ukraine war might actually lead to changes such that people (both foreigners and domestic) won't be able to hide or park money in real estate. I'm not hopeful that this will happen but I can but hope. In the UK in particular the government is beholden to the bankers in the City of London and they want no such crackdown. It's already the case where when you buy real estate in the UK with an LLC (which should be illegal IMHO) you need to declare who the beneficial owner is with the company registered with Companies House. This is routinely not done and there is absolutely no enforcement. That would be a start but it doesn't go near far enough. Another example: all US citizens and permanent residents have to declare all their foreign assets to the government every year, typically twice: once to the IRS, another time to the Treasury Department. These forms are known as Form 8939 and FBAR respectively. Guess what you don't have to declare? Real estate holdings. Why is there a carve-out for real estate? It's disgusting. We have a housing crisis in the West. It's a complex problem but there are a number of factors: 1. NIMBYism stopping building of denser living; 2. Tax advantages and policies that make it more profitable to build ultra-luxury housing; and 3. The ease to which the wealthy can park their money in such real estate, which creates a lot of demand. I would like to see this all go much farther. If you own real estate in a given jurisdiction you should be a resident for tax purposes in that jurisdiction. That should allow the government to tax your worldwide income. Want the anonymity of ownership through an LLC? Without a clear beneficial owner established then just punitively tax such property. Anonymity is a privilege you should pay through the nose for. I'd accept a carve-out for owning "working" property, which is to say an apartment building where the units are rented out. But individual residential property? Get the hell out. And any property where no beneficial owner can be established (and thus taxed) should just be seized. We seem totally fine with seizing the assets of poor people (ie civil forfeiture). Let's apply that to wealthy tax evaders, oligarchs and despots instead.

hkt 5y ago
> And any property where no beneficial owner can be established (and thus taxed) should just be seized. Amen. Social contract dodgers are wrecking the west. We can't afford to let crazy rich people run things, it isn't efficient or right.
deleted 5y ago

rainworld 5y ago

Once again posting these old docs for the benefit of anyone wanting to understand where these oligarchs come from and what their relationship is to Putin: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs (ARTE 2006) https://youtu.be/oLNKqbwec0s https://youtu.be/oLNKqbwec0s Russian Godfathers (BBC 2005) https://youtu.be/ZLPxyDlQfBc https://youtu.be/ZLPxyDlQfBc Also highly recommended: Paul Klebnikov's Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia. Berezovsky, for a while London's best-known oligarchic resident, this article doesn't even bother to mention. Berezovsky, who likely had Klebnikov murdered in 2004 for exposing him.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
This book about Berezovsky is also good: https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Russia-Oligarchs_A/dp/1476771901 https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Russia-Oligarchs_A/dp/...
dntrkv 5y ago
I'm about a third of the way through "All The Kremlin's Men", and it's been really good so far. Some really interesting stories from Putin's early days.

Yajirobe 5y ago

A short video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9RQrcv3T8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ9RQrcv3T8

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

walterbell 5y ago

U.S. investigation of Zelensky's Oligarch, Sept 2020, https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/with-deutsche-banks-help-an-oligarchs-buying-spree-trails-ruin-across-the-us-heartland/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/with-deutsc... > Kolomoisky siphoned billions of dollars from PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest financial institution, which he co-owned, in an audacious laundering scheme, cleaning the money through a web of companies around the world, U.S. federal prosecutors allege ... transferring more than $750 million to Kolomoisky’s business interests in the United States ... secretly amassed a real estate empire, buying at least 22 properties, including a skyscraper in Cleveland with vaulted ceilings that featured one of the largest bank lobbies in the world, a shuttered Motorola facility rising from the farm fields of northern Illinois and the former headquarters of Mary Kay Cosmetics in Dallas ... The flow of Kolomoisky dollars into the U.S. finally ended in December 2016 when Ukraine regulators nationalized PrivatBank on suspicions of widespread fraud. The losses to the institution prompted criminal investigations by the Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. Last February, agents from the U.S. Justice Department jetted to Kyiv to talk with law enforcement agents about the ongoing case in the U.S. ... Though the federal government has set up targeting orders in places like Miami and and New York to screen property purchases for laundering, the orders do not extend all over the country and do not apply to commercial transactions ... The Justice Department finally pushed to seize some of the real estate in August, but much of the damage was done, with buildings devalued, factories shuttered, and steel workers without jobs. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikesallah/ukraine-billionaire-oligarch-money-laundering-investigation https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikesallah/ukraine-bill... > At one time, Kolomoisky and his associates were the largest commercial landlords in Cleveland, owning 2.8 million square feet. One of the properties that has drawn the FBI's attention is the Warren Steel plant in Ohio ... Valeria Gontareva, former chair of the National Bank of Ukraine, the nation's chief regulator, said the level of fraud on the institution was larger than any crime ever perpetrated on a Ukrainian bank. U.S. DoJ filings, Aug 2020, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-seeks-forfeiture-two-commercial-properties-purchased-funds-misappropriated https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-seeks-forf... https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/10/06/what-the-pandora-papers-tell-about-zelenskyy-his-offshore-companies-and-his-favorite-oligarch/ https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/10/06/what-the-pandora-pape... > Kvartal 95 was bought by 1+1 TV channel owned by Ihor Kolomoiskyi which gave the company good terms of cooperation and higher prices. Kolomoiskyi started to support Zelenskyy and Kvartal as comedians and now keeps backing them as politicians ... The Pandora Papers disclosed that since 2012, an offshore company affiliated to Kolomoiskyi’s 1+1 group at least once paid more than $1 billion to Zelenskyy’s offshore firm SVT from the British Virgin Islands, for the popular TV show “Make a Comedian Laugh” created by Kvartal 95. And Maltext owns half of SVT ... Zelenskyy’s and Kolomoiskyi’s companies made a transaction worth $40 million in 2012. Under the documents, this was “contribution to capital,” or investment, paid by the oligarch to the now-president. Documentary (enable subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp0WWZbNGq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp0WWZbNGq4

pipeline_peak 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220318230703/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/how-putins-oligarchs-bought-london https://web.archive.org/web/20220318230703/https://www.newyo...

madrox 5y ago

The older I get, the more jaded I become at the illusion of democracy in society. Lobbies don't even need to bribe politicians to change their minds. They simply donate money to candidates whose thinking already aligns with their interests. As long as a politician's success is correlated to their ability to raise money, this will continue to happen for good and for ill.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jacquesm 5y ago

London is the worst by far but there is a lot of Russian money floating around in other countries as well and lots of it was gained through illicit means and whitewashed in all manner of ways, including gifts to politicians and start-up investments.

ardit33 5y ago
Yep... NYC as well. I remember when I was looking to buy a place back in 2014. I saw one I liked in Brooklyn, and asked the agent to see it. He said that there were already two all cash offers, and one was over price. I said: who buys them all cash? He said: Russians, for their kids. Large cities, like NYC, SF, London, Paris, and Vancouver are seen as good places to park money in real estate, as they are international hubs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

zepearl 5y ago

Super-heavy and long article, at least for me (italian mothertongue). Still, quite interesting. Personal random excerpts (not pointing to anything specific, they just popped up when I read the article): - these oligarchs were mere capos, who answered to the don - England itself has been a silent and handsomely compensated partner in Putin’s kleptocratic designs - “We must go after the oligarchs,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared after the invasion of Ukraine, doing his best to sound Churchillian. But, as the international community labors to isolate Putin and his cronies, the question is whether England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so. - At a fund-raising auction at the Tory summer ball in 2014, a woman named Lubov Chernukhin—who was then married to Vladimir Chernukhin, one of Putin’s former deputy finance ministers—paid a hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the top prize: a tennis match with Johnson and David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time. Johnson defended the match, decrying “a miasma of suspicion” toward “all rich Russians in London.” A Russian magnate told Catherine Belton, “In London, money rules everyone. Anyone and anything can be bought.” The Russians came to London, the source said, “to corrupt the U.K. political elite.” - Libel tourism is another chronic English problem that everyone bemoans but nobody does anything about. This has meant terrific business for the oligarchs’ morally flexible attorneys; according to the British trade publication The Lawyer, some law firms charge a “Russian premium” for their services, of up to fifteen hundred pounds an hour. Disclosure: I work for a swiss bank (therefore a potentially indirect antagonist to the London Exchange/Marketplace - but I'm just an IT-guy :P ). During the past years I kept reading in the news and saw on TV some docs about russian interests in London (they never mentioned anything about other cities/regions, it was always all about "London", I don't know why), therefore none of these news should be surprising, but apparently they still are? Additionally I'm totally/absolutely surprised by UK's government's attitude change: not just a sudden 360-degrees change from "welcome investors" to "don't you dare to talk to us" but even a "what you owned here is history" (maybe I'm mis-interpreting but I understood that that's the general direction of where things are going there - maybe I'm wrong??). Cheers

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
> a sudden 360-degrees change That's amusing: you're end up in the same position, but appearing to have changed?

ayngg 5y ago

I don't think this is limited to Russian oligarchs, I thought that because of its trust and crown dependencies system, London is a popular place for people to hide this kind of stuff. Russian oligarchs and other unsavory individuals like corrupt leaders in Africa, the Middle East and the developing world all dump their ill gotten gains into the opaque system away from prying eyes. The stuff you can actually see, like mansions in Knightsbridge are probably just the tiniest tip of the iceberg, everything else is held in such opaque ways that nobody even knows who it actually belongs to. It is so blatant that you couldn't really call it a dirty secret.

eevilspock 5y ago
Oh everything and everyone is for sale. I mean look, most of us have sold our souls so that we can get free web search and free email, and cheap delivery of goods to our doorstep at the touch of button on our iPhones. We prefer to look the other way if not outright deny the huge social costs of an ad-supported web, of the costs to the planet of our one-click to our doorstep shopping convenience in terms of plastic, paper and energy use, and how much of these conveniences rest on the exploitation of people who have no choice but to work for as little as possible, a tiny fraction of what we get paid.
- AYBABTME 5y ago
  I don't think the average person has much choice in term of whether they use ad-based products or not. Where do you go to pay for a search engine? Even paid newspapers and paid cable TV is serving us ads.
  - eevilspock 5y ago
    The key is that we don't try very hard to resist these things. Maybe some social media posts, or a comment on HN, or a vote on election day. All things that are free (oh there's that word again) and don't require us to actually give up anything. Because that's exactly what morality is about: the giving up of something that benefits you but causes harm to someone else. How many people choose to take a pay cut to work for as socially responsible company as they can? How many forgo the convenience and time savings of Amazon and shop at places that are more expensive because they are local small businesses or businesses that pay and treat their workers better? How many spend less on gadgets and luxuries and redirect those funds to making the world better, or to enable them to take the aforementioned socially responsible pay cut? How many advantaged people forgo using that advantage to gentrify neighborhoods and displace the disadvantaged to less desirable places? How many advantaged people forgo hoarding education resources for their children at the expense of children for whom society is already rigged against (e.g. liberal NYC has the most segregated schools in the country)?

volkadav 5y ago

now newyorker.com should cover how the kleptocrats bought NYC too, but that'd make a lot of powerful people in NYC uncomfortable.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
The media did a wonderful job burying the story about how Hudson Yards was set up to sell visas to foreign "investors" building luxury apartments for themselves in a southwest extension of Harlem to promote "economic development".

stelliosk 5y ago

Jonathan Pie: How Putin Weaponized London’s Greed | NYT Opinion https://youtu.be/YAblAQENQhE https://youtu.be/YAblAQENQhE

wolverine876 5y ago

The Russian oligarchs and Putin had friends in conservative parties in many countries in the West (and maybe elsewhere?), including the US and UK. How are those parties escaping a reckoning? In the US, many people blame the liberal party for things regarding Ukraine that didn't even happen, but what the conservative party has openly done is somehow overlooked. It's not the first issue on which we've seen this phenomenon (economics, etc.), but it's an excellent example.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

London is known as "The Laundry" in Russia. No one in power has cared for two decades and only care now because it serves their interests to. Maybe they will crack down on it, maybe it will get swept under the rug again if the Russian invasion of Ukraine dies down as an important news story, either way, the root issue of why this was allowed in the first place won't be addressed and it will continue to occur with nationals of other countries.

magpi3 5y ago
That no one in power has cared is less remarkable that the fact that democracy's supposed watchdogs (i.e. the media) don't care, until now that is. At least this is definitely the first I have heard of it. EDIT: After fully reading the article, I realized that the author of the article deals with this issue: U.K.'s libel laws make it dangerous for media watchdogs to call out oligarchs explicitly.
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/05/21/london-is-a-laundromat-for-russias-dirty-money-uk-report-warns.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/05/21/london-is-a-laundromat-f...
  - 12907835202 5y ago
    All the weird American candy stores in London that never have any customers have suddenly shut up shop since the Ukraine invasion. There's also this photo of a pit within one of the stores being filled with cement just before being shutting down: https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/tebfqa/almost_all_of_the_american_candy_stores_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/tebfqa/almost_all_o... I've been trying to find out more about what was going on other than money laundering but haven't been able to find much
    - GFlaneur 5y ago
      This is covered in the last issue of Private Eye Issue 1568. There is no online version, only in print. From memory, the owner set up multiple other business used to secure COVID loans from UK Gov and also had the candy store business buy those business from him. The business was/is a front for these other activities. If you are interested then I can maybe scan the article.

gumby 5y ago

> in England, a person bringing a libel suit does not have to prove that an assertion is untrue, so long as there’s evidence of “serious harm”; instead, the author must prove that it is true. This is a fiendishly burdensome standard This standard has been proposed for US libel law, though so far the efforts have not made progress.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago

All I can think of is that in Dubai (and similar places) the real-estate dealers must be exceedingly pleased. And the outcome may not be that bad overall, perhaps lower prices in London and more activity in places that want it will work out better for everybody.

fmajid 5y ago

The Russians did not come to London to corrupt the political elite. The elite was already corrupt, they just came to avail themselves of this corruption.

smt88 5y ago
> The elite was already corrupt, they just came to avail themselves of this corruption. The wealthy of all civilizations at all times in history have been corrupt. There is nothing interesting about that. What is interesting about this situation is that London is incidentally a good place for Russian money. No one is trying to argue that London would be a magical, affordable Utopia without them. It's just interesting that the conditions in London were most suitable for so many of these people exfiltrating money from their home country.
- fmajid 4y ago
  The difference between London and, say Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin is that the UK hasn't had a democratic revolution since Cromwell or land reform. Its entire political, legal and economic structure is organized to protect the interests of the aristocracy starting with the Queen, including such things as draconian libel laws whose intent is illustrated by the jailing of Oscar Wilde for daring to importune a Marquess. The hereditary aristocracies of every other European country have been successfully defanged. No wonder why Russian oligarchs felt so congenial (except for the old money turning its nose down at them).

steve76 5y ago

known 5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago

I don't understand taking other people property is legal if they legally acquired the property in the first place. I specifically don't get how you can take Roman Abramovich, Chelsea Football Club or his yachts away without proving in court him acquiring these things broke the law. And if you do start retrospectively punishing people, why not go after someone like Bill Gates who is just an American Oligarch just doesn't get called that, but rather a billionaire. He too used all kinds of shady connections to aquaria his wealth. I get the instinctive hatred for extremely rich people and their wealth. But the one thing I've come to realize as I myself become richer, every new thing I buy atomically means I get less time to enjoy my previous possessions. We all just have 24 hours in a day. So practically all those possession of the ultra rich are often just paper deeds. There is on sum, a much greater benefit of something like a Mega Yacht to all the people that work there, worked to build it, work to maintain in, crew it, dock it in ports, and so on. He himself only probably get to use it on rare occasions. To me it seems like theft to do it. Perhaps why I'm personally opposed to it, is that a few a years back I read about a government trying to take over the teachers pensions fund in Ontario. The teachers were paying out to a private firm to invest their pensions, and the firm did so well, it was worth billions of dollars. The government running a large deficit at that time, seeing that huge sum (worth 227 Billions now) started getting wet dreams how they could take it over. They backdown. But just seeing this kind of thing is off putting. It's just thievery.

lenkite 5y ago

"But, by making it perilous to publish allegations, however well documented, that haven’t yet resulted in a criminal conviction, the legal system can grant well-financed malefactors a free pass from scrutiny." Wow. Kudos to London for having this. Publishing allegations without proof is something that should be punished. Throwing out unsubstantiated allegations without paying for it destroys all faith in the media.

Spooky23 5y ago
Lol. Yes the British press is well respected for truth telling.
woodruffw 5y ago
"Unsubstantiated allegations" and "hasn't yet resulted in a criminal conviction" are substantially different things. Investigative journalism plays an important role in our (American) society and justice system, and I think we're much better off for it. To make it concrete: it seems perfectly reasonable for a journalist to publish a first-person story about an event, potentially a crime, that they witnessed. The fact that Britain's legal system threatens journalists who would do that isn't great.

archhn 5y ago

"Putin's Oligarchs" ... as if a man from a working class family rose to power without the consent of Russia's oligarchy. Why does western media always obsessively focus on the front man?

sigsergv 4y ago

In russian satire London is often depicted as a laundry/safe haven for stupid and ignorant oligarchs from esUSSR. It's more a status symbol that something really useful.