How London became the world’s kleptocracy capital

I spoke to the authors of an important new book about Britain’s complicity in global corruption —from offshore havens to Westminster itself.

John Heathershaw is one of the UK’s foremost experts in kleptocracy and corruption. In January 2023, the Exeter university professor received a curious email. It offered “a small piece of paid work where you might be able to add your professional value”.

The sender? A British public relations firm called CTD Advisors. The “small piece of paid work”? Writing a short article for an academic news site, talking up supposed ‘improvements’ made by Uzbekistan’s autocratic government.

The article would appear independent—but in reality, Heathershaw would be handed “£3,000 straight away.” (That’s well above the going rate for freelance journalism—I can personally vouch for that.)

Heathershaw declined. But the episode offered a rare glimpse into how Britain helps oligarchs and autocrats from post-Soviet states protect their wealth, launder their reputations, and influence UK democracy—via legal firms, PR advisors, political donations, and an entire ecosystem of “enablers.”

And sometimes, the approach is far less polite than a nicely-worded email.

At the same time Heathershaw was being offered money to write puff pieces for Uzbekistan, he and his colleagues—Tena Prelec and Tom Mayne—were being threatened with legal action by a Conservative donor over a report they’d written on the UK’s kleptocracy problem.

The legal threat was eventually dropped. But it speaks volumes about how hard it is even to write honestly about one area where Britain is, unfortunately, genuinely world-leading.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said that tackling kleptocracy is one of the new government’s top foreign policy goals. He’s promised a major summit in London on countering illicit finance.

But if Britain really wants to fight kleptocracy, it must also reckon with its own role in enabling a global system that lets corrupt elites loot public wealth—and move it across borders with impunity.

This week, I sat down with Heathershaw, Prelec and Mayne—the authors of the excellent Indulging Kleptocracy—to discuss exactly that.

The UK sits at the centre of a vast web of offshore jurisdictions—sunny places to stash dirty money. Successive governments have promised to crack down. But the British Virgin Islands, perhaps the worst offender, recently ignored its pledge to publish registers of company ownership.

It’s hard to overstate what a key role Britain’s offshore world plays in global corruption. Behind so many drugs cartels and money laundering, lie opaque shell companies in the BVI and elsewhere.

What’s really striking is that ‘Londongrad’ didn’t just start in the 1990s. From the 1950s on, Britain’s bankers, accountants and PR professionals realised there was a way out of post-imperial decline: to become, as Oliver Bullough puts it, ‘butlers to the world’.

Today, London is the global capital of reputation management. You can sue journalists into silence, scrub your internet history, buy football clubs, and donate anonymously to Royal charities, Russell Group universities and major art institutions—all for a price.

And then there’s British politics.

Russian Britons make up just 0.1% of the UK population—but wealthy Russians donated £3.5 million to the Conservative Party between 2010 and 2019.

Foreign governments have bought access to Westminster through shady All-Party Parliamentary Groups and lavish freebies for MPs. Tony Blair, Prince Andrew and others have advised corrupt regimes such as Kazakhstan.

The recently announced Elections Bill still doesn’t go far enough to stop foreign money from distorting our democracy.

One moment from my conversation with the authors really stuck with me. Over the sweep of human history, kleptocracy is the norm. Insiders get rich. Everyone else loses.

“Donald Trump is normal,” Heathershaw told me. “Anti-corruption is unusual.”

That’s why building—and defending—the institutions that tackle kleptocracy matters so much. We could start by dismantling the London-based enabling industry. And by finally taking big money out of British politics.

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