Pictured: Conservative MP Bob Seely
Five months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of communism, I travelled to Ukraine to witness the joyous first Easter celebrations since the Second World War.
I went on to spend four years as a foreign correspondent in countries that, like Ukraine, had been part of the Soviet Union.
To this day I retain a love of that part of the world and its people.
So I was perhaps more interested than most to hear what the Prime Minister had to say when he stood up in a packed Commons chamber on Tuesday to announce the Government’s response to the Kremlin’s move into Ukraine.
As I stood listening by the Serjeant at Arms’ chair, I welcomed the announcement of sanctions against five Russian banks and three corrupt billionaires.
It is a start, but Boris Johnson needs to go much further in the coming days and weeks.
It was recently reported that Russians accused of corruption or who have links to the Kremlin have bought up property in Britain amounting to £1.5billion – 28 per cent of it in Westminster, a stone’s throw from Parliament.
In addition, some 2,189 UK-registered companies are involved in Russian money laundering and corruption cases involving a staggering £82billion. These are shocking figures.
Many of the multi-billionaire oligarchs at the heart of these cases are not simply dodgy businessmen but trusted members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and often called upon to do the regime’s dirty work.
Pictured: Boris Johnson speaking during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons
And yet they have been welcomed by our financial institutions with open arms, not least in the City of London, which has consistently lobbied for a light-touch regulatory regime to help it attract business.
Kleptocrats and oligarchs have, as a result, found a safe haven for the billions they looted from their own people.
To fight this tide of dirty money, the Prime Minister has promised an Economic Crimes Bill, which is expected to reform Companies House in such a way that it is transformed from a registry of companies to a regulator of them, and the introduction of rules requiring those holding property through offshore shell companies to declare their identities.
But where is that Bill? We need it now. It should not take an international crisis to stir us into putting our house in order.
Can it really be in our nation’s interests for tens of thousands of properties to be owned by shadowy offshore trusts which hide their true ownership, or for there to be so few checks on establishing UK firms, when they have been used so often to transfer billions from Russia and former Soviet states, the fruits of one of the greatest thefts in history?
Meanwhile, the journalists, newspapers, websites and publishers – here and abroad – who have bravely sought to highlight oligarchs’ financial scandals find themselves confronting the awesome power of some of the most prestigious law firms in the world.
Our libel laws are being abused, data privacy legislation is being weaponised, and individuals and organisations are harassed via lawsuits known as Slapps (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) that are designed to intimidate, frighten and bankrupt. No wonder it’s called ‘lawfare’.
Some firms effectively offer dirt-digging services dedicated to seeking ‘kompromat’ – compromising material – on those looking to expose wrongdoing by their clients.
Many of the oligarchs at the heart of these cases are not simply dodgy businessmen but trusted members of Putin’s inner circle and often called upon to do the regime’s dirty work
Given that their paymasters tend to be some of the most corrupt – and powerful – people on earth, this is an alarming state of affairs.
Lawyers are not the only winners when it comes to oligarchical largesse. They are also willing to spend millions on PR – and the UK is an influence-peddler’s paradise.
Rich Russians with an image problem can pay for the best PR advice, the best legal advice, have the best reputation launderers on speed dial and, I’m sad to say, can call on senior former politicians and officials here in Britain to help them navigate their way round the rules, which are broken so rarely because there are so few to break.
Chillingly, the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) now warns that the position is so dire that our own agencies, including the National Crime Agency and Serious Fraud Office, are hopelessly ill-equipped to take on Putin’s kleptocrats.
The ISC reported that ‘the NCA lacks the resources required in terms of financial investigators, technical experts and legal expertise’ to bring them to heel.
Combined with the cash that billionaires can throw at the legal profession, this means that prosecutors, police and lawyers acting on behalf of the British people are being effectively silenced – in our own country – by high-end lawyers in the pay of the sinister clique around Putin.
The fact that some people are too powerful, too rich, or too malign to be prosecuted is a scandal which threatens the rule of law. How can any of this be in the interests of the British people, or the interests of justice?
What I find particularly offensive is that, while hundreds of British Armed Forces personnel serve in the Baltic states – a potential front line in any conflict with Russia – a class of wealthy facilitators at home peddle their services to the mega-rich cheerleaders of a criminalised, authoritarian regime, which boasts of its nuclear arsenal.
Yes, we want and need UK law firms and the City to thrive. But I fear that there are many lawyers now doing their collective reputations great harm, while the taint of dirty Russian money will damage the City’s relationship to the many Russian investors who want nothing to do with Putin.
It is in everyone’s interests to clean up our system, not least the pin-striped enablers currently abusing it, whom history will judge with contempt.
The Kremlin mocks us because it sees through our Janus-like policies towards them.
On the one hand we declare that we stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Ukraine, on the other we block any moves that threaten to impede the flow of funny money through London.
That duality sums up our attitude. In the past decade, we have gone from complacency to panic to complacency and back again to panic.
Rather than shuffling between two extremes, we should instead have had a policy that is considered, thoughtful and robust.
A policy that does not shut us off from the world, but makes clear our intent to protect our values and our institutions.
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