Meanwhile the Chancellor of the Exchequer has moved out of his Downing Street flat after it was discovered his wife considers herself non-domiciled in Britain so that she pays no taxes on the IT fortune she inherited in her native India. The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain’s twentieth century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. With the brilliant concept of Britain as the butler, Bullough lifts the lid and explains in a very clear and intelligible way why and how Britain is facilitating illicit finance across the world.

I found the book focused more on how terrible the result of helping is, or how bad the respective choices or policies the UK made are. In the chapter ‘Giving Evidence’, the author describes the UK’s woeful record on tackling money laundering, leaving him to conclude that what measures are in place are designed to give the impression of extreme activity while actually doing nothing. Alongside his 2018 book Moneyland – a quest into that Narnia of libel laws and tax havens and old-school-tie discretion that makes London so attractive to extortionists – he organised “kleptocrat tours” of the capital, his equivalent of Hollywood Hills rubber-necking, bus trips around Knightsbridge and Mayfair pointing out the mansions where the cronies of the world’s worst dictators and biggest tax dodgers hide their billions. The fact is the stories that he tells, sordid tales of a nation flogging its real estate and its services and its football clubs and its good name to the shadiest and highest bidder, no questions asked, have been hiding in plain sight for decades.It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

Wielka Brytania - amoralny najemnik ukrywający prawdziwą naturę za fasadą urokliwej tradycji, literackich nawiązań, nieskazitelnej garderoby i wyniosłych manier. I did not give five stars as while I overall felt the level of clarity was strong, I would have appreciated a higher level of explanation of some of the finer economic topics such as how Eurodollars work. The lessons were learned in the British Virgin Islands, where it dawned on some lawyers that they could make a decent living setting up shell companies for the rich overseas.Oliver Bullough's Butler to the World shows where the chums and others have led us: to an underpowered, rather than superpowered, UK that's subservient to "tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals". New role for Britain since losing its empire officially (Suez crisis) is providing financial / offshore services to anyone who will pay them for it. And, fundamentally, over the last eighty years, that secret side of Britain has had a far more significant impact on the world than its avowed public policies. As early as 1907, records show debates in London using the excuse that Britain would simply lose money if other jurisdictions taxed less than London did, and that there was no point in tightening laws until other countries did so as well.

This is a serious topic, in demand of more attention, in the same vein as legal access and harmful identity politics. Here's how summarizes what I just explained: "It operates as a gigantic loophole, undercutting other countries’ rules, massaging down tax rates, neutering regulations, laundering foreign criminals’ money. Butler to the World 's main message - that Britain needs to clean up its act not just for its own good but for that of the world - rings all the louder because of current geopolitics . The first few chapters cover a good bit of pop history, interweaving personal stories and grander historical trends.There are some good points I wasn’t aware of or wasn’t clear on, but the writing is gossipy and meanders.

Successive UK governments, while occasionally handwringing about closing those loopholes, were, he shows, complicit in this practice, working on that time-honoured imperial principle: well, if we don’t do it, someone else will. For more than 60 years our financial system has been corroded by greed - and has in turn corrupted our politics. Found this quite confusing and technical at times - perhaps more on me than on the author - and didn’t feel it lived up to its potential to discuss oligarchs and their wider role in British life, but definitely learned a lot from this book. Indeed many of these offshore financial centres are former British colonial possessions too small to win independence but granted a considerable degree of political autonomy as British Overseas Territories.I never cease to be staggered by the bilge spewed up by our politicians about, say, restrictions being placed on Russian oligarchs because of Ukraine, knowing that they still have massive access to their ill-gotten gains and are unlikely to starve any time soon. In his forceful follow-up to Moneyland, Oliver Bullough unravels the dark secret of how Britain placed itself at the center of the global offshore economy and at the service of the worst people in the world. We pride ourselves on values of fair play and the rule of law, but few countries do more to frustrate global anti- corruption efforts.