May a Crackdown on Kleptocrats Assist Ukraine?

However early final week that quiet was shattered by black-clad activists who occupied the creamy-white mansion at No. 5 and hung protest banners from its entrance balcony. They proclaimed that they had been seizing the home, which reportedly belongs to a Kremlin-allied aluminum magnate named Oleg Deripaska, on behalf of Ukrainian refugees.

The police quickly arrived to evict them, in a present of power that struck many observers as ironic. “There have to be 20 law enforcement officials outdoors the Belgrave Sq. property occupied by anarchists, which is I reckon roughly 20 greater than ever checked the provenance of the cash that purchased it,” Oliver Bullough, a British writer and journalist recognized for his investigations into corruption, wrote on Twitter.

The protest was an unusually public outburst of a long-simmering combat over London’s standing as a spot the place folks like Deripaska, who acquired huge wealth by way of their relationships with corrupt post-Soviet governments, might launder their cash and reputations with out encountering inconvenient scrutiny from authorities regulators.

For years, anti-corruption consultants have warned that accepting cash from these people, sometimes called “kleptocrats,” threatened British democracy and supported hostile autocratic regimes overseas, together with the one in Russia. However a lot of London’s legislation corporations, property brokers, charitable foundations and politicians welcomed the kleptocrats with open arms.

Now, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that has modified. Public opinion has hardened towards anybody related to Putin. The British authorities is cracking down, imposing sanctions on Deripaska, together with hundreds of others it described as oligarchs, political allies or propagandists for Putin, in an effort to isolate the Russian president from elite assist.

However, consultants say, it could be too little, too late.

‘Ten years in the past, it was a special scenario’

Attempting to parse the relationships between Britain’s elite and Russian oligarchs, or between these oligarchs and the Kremlin, can really feel a bit bit like watching a pointillist portray.

Up shut, any single relationship or contact can appear ambiguous. British politicians, companies and charities are likely to insist that their contacts with rich Russians are merely enterprise transactions or personal friendships. And Russian elites in London usually bristle at claims that they could act on behalf of the Kremlin. In lots of instances, such defenses are in all probability true.