The author contends that this amenability to corruption has been a key factor in London's rebirth as a global financial sector, the engine of the national economy. He likens it to a cancer that grows ever larger, to the point where operating will cripple the patient.
He traces the roots of the current problem way back to 1955, at the height of the Cold War, and an innovation designed to allow the Soviet Union to acquire US dollars without being subject to the purview of American regulatory authorities, an innovation that led to the birth of the Eurodollar market.
The Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has vowed to deal with the matter, and that Russian oligarchs will have "nowhere to hide" their dirty money, which the author notes wryly is an effective admission that the money is already there.
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he real story, however, is far more alarming, but requires some telling, because you can’t understand London’s love affair with Russian money without understanding the story of how the City was reborn as both a financial centre and the engine of our national economy. They are, in fact, the same story.
Once you understand this, you can see why government after government has been so reluctant to drive the oligarchs’ money away. They’re like doctors watching a cancer grow bigger and bigger in a vital organ: operating will cripple their patient, so they leave it in place, even though — eventually — it will kill him. But this choice can’t be postponed much longer. If we want to save British democracy, we need to take a scalpel to a tumour that was seeded all the way back in 1955.
Back then, the Soviet Union had a problem. Its great rival the United States had ended World War Two as the undisputed centre of the world’s economy; if the USSR wanted to trade with the world, it needed dollars. The global financial system was less globalised in those days. In order to secure democratic control over wealth, governments imposed limits on money in ways that are hard to comprehend now. They restricted how much money you could move across borders, for instance, or what interest rates you could charge on loans you made.