Britain Targets Russian Billionaires

As the U.S. goes after a handful of Russian oligarchs with its latest round of sanctions, the U.K. is under pressure domestically and from abroad to tighten controls and shed its reputation as a place to launder corrupt money. The U.K. National Crime Agency estimates that more than £90 billion ($127.5 billion) of such money enters the U.K. each year, feeding a vast industry of property companies, lawyers, bankers, and accountants. A lot of that comes from Russia, and ends up in high-end real estate. About a fifth of suspicious property purchases from 2008 to 2015, £729 million worth, were made by Russians, according to anticorruption watchdog Transparency International. “In terms of the levels of financial flows that go through London, it’s likely that it’s one of the biggest hubs of money laundering in the world,” says Ben Cowdock, the group’s lead researcher on dirty money in the U.K.

On April 10 the top U.S. sanctions official, Sigal Mandelker, issued a warning while in London, saying U.K. banks will face “consequences” if they continue to do business with blacklisted individuals and entities. “The government’s in a very difficult situation,” says Tom Keatinge, head of the Royal United Services Institute’s Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies in London. There are “expectations that you’re going to be able to roll up billions of pounds of illicit Russian finance.”