BUTLER TO THE WORLD

A scathing portrait of the U.K. as a kind of ATM, maintained by servile bankers, for the use of nefarious characters around the world.

Continuing themes he sounded in Moneyland, Welsh financial journalist Bullough delivers a book that couldn’t be timelier given current efforts to impound the expatriated wealth of Russian oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine. His argument is unsparing: that the U.K. “has spent decades not helping America but picking its pocket, undermining its government, and making the world poorer and less safe.” The vast financial complex known as the City of London, for example, rivals institutions of Zurich for keeping the ill-gotten gains of “some of the worst people in existence” tucked safely away. London is far from alone. Former outposts of the British Empire such as Gibraltar and Mustique do yeoman—no, butler—service in hiding assets, laundering money, and offering casinos in which to gamble one’s fortune away. Seeing all this, Bullough writes, the U.S. long ago “copied Britain’s lax regulatory regime” to discourage dollar flight across the Atlantic, but even so, other nations, such as the Netherlands via Curaçao, “understood the profits to be made from gaming the system” and raised the stakes. Britain responded by further relaxing the rules, which is why places like the British Virgin Islands are now money havens for “North Korean arms smugglers, crooked Afghan officials, American tax dodgers, South American drug cartels, Kremlin insiders, corrupt football administrators and far too many criminals to name.” As Bullough writes in this eye-opening account, other U.K. entities seek new ways to serve, from “Scottish limited partnerships” to hidden accounts on Jersey, all of which help disguise money trails.

A stinging case for developing a regulatory regime to force the U.K. “to seek a different way to earn a living.”