Hello, I'm Oliver Bullough, welcome to Hyde Park. For 400 years Londoners have been
coming here to freely speak, to freely assemble, to sunbathe, to horse ride, to do
all the things that are most fun to do in London in an open space. But we're not
here to talk about for Hyde Park, we're here to talk about One Hyde Park,
the building behind me which is probably the most exclusive gated community in
the world. The epitome of what I call, in my new book, Moneyland.
The penthouse up there was bought by a Ukrainian oligarch
just under 10 years ago for £140m. At the time that was
eight hundred times more expensive than the average house in London. The other
properties have gone to the wealthy nomadic elite from all over the world
and their money has utterly transformed not just this building but
all of this part of London. Money has poured in from Angola, from Nigeria, from
Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine; you name it the money has come here and pushed house
prices beyond the reach of any ordinary person. But the effect hasn't just been
extraordinary on this part of London, it's been absolutely devastating on the
countries where the money comes from. On Angola where poverty is now at appalling
proportions; in Nigeria where whole chunks of the country are outside of central
government control; on Ukraine, the part of the country, part of Ukraine, where
that gentleman made his fortune is no longer in central government control.
The money has been sucked out of places that desperately need it and dumped right
here in a place where we really, really don't need it at all. And as we walk
along I'm going to show a few of the things that money gets spent on, some of
the people who've been spending it, and why it is that we don't know anything about it.
A trillion dollars is stolen every year from the world's poorest
countries and spent in places like this. A trillion dollars is an enormous amount
of money, if you were to count to a trillion that would take you
approximately 31,000 years; it's a vast number. And really if you've got that
much money you need expensive things to spend it on. So what's it gonna be?
Well cars obviously, there's a McLaren concession here, clothes, Burberry.
Watches. Watches are a good way of spending money. There are three Rolex
concessions, one in One Hyde Park, one on the Brompton Road, and another one in
Harrods. And just look at Harrods. Harrods is the most amazing shop, you can buy
anything expensive in Harrods. If you look at the
turnover of the British fishing industry, every year £725m, it's a lot
of money. The turnover of Harrods, one shop, £2bn. But if all this
money is being spent and frankly to be honest most of its going on property
because really if you want to spend a lot of money you need to spend it on
property, why don't we know about it? Well we don't know about it because they're
doing it through shell companies. So let me try and show you how that works.
So this is, let's say this book is a house. I own it, you can see I own it I've got it
in my hand. But if instead of owning it directly I own it via a plain wrapper, a
shell company in, let's say, in the British Virgin Islands. And then that
shell company in the British Virgin Islands you know that's owned via a trust
in let's put it in Jersey. There you go, now you can't see anything at all. And
just to be on the safe side let's own the trust in Jersey with an anonymized
bank account in, let's put it in Switzerland. There you go now all it
looks like is, well it doesn't like anything really does it, because that's
Switzerland - Jersey - British Virgin Islands, all concealing my ownership of this
house. Simple. Now we're gonna have a look at one person who's bought one of those houses.
What we're looking at here, apart from me obviously, is sixty million
pounds worth of house. And if that doesn't look like much house for £60m
that's because you're only looking at half of it, it goes down
as much as it goes up. In the second basement there is a swimming pool.
This belongs to a gentleman called Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian who made an
absolute fortune by essentially allying with Gazprom, with Vladimir Putin, to
overcharge everyone in Ukraine for gas. The deal he imposed on Ukraine
back in 2006/7 was so onerous that essentially it destroyed the government
in Ukraine, the government collapsed and he made an absolute fortune. But once
you've made an absolute fortune in Ukraine you don't really want to spend
it there so he came here to spend it instead. And oh did he spend it!
He spent it in Cambridge University, he was on the guild of benefactors, by 2011 only
three years after he'd arrived he was hanging out with the Duke of Edinburgh.
That's pretty impressive social climbing for anyone from Ukraine. And then
obviously he needed somewhere to live so he bought this in 2012 from mega
developer Mike Spink. But even this wasn't really enough and if you look in
the distance, that's a tube station. £53.3m
He bought that from the Ministry of Defense in early 2014. But sadly the problem for
him is that the American authorities took a rather less relaxed attitude to
the origin of his wealth than the British one's did. And they've indicted
him for corruption and he's currently facing, he's a sitting in Vienna battling
extradition to the United States. So he doesn't even get to enjoy this beautiful
house. But the moral of the story isn't really about appalling houses or Rolexes,
it's about the fact that this entire part of London, in fact this entire city
is making a living from sucking in money from people who really shouldn't have it
and taking it from places that really, really need it. And we don't really even
get anything from it because all it means is we don't have shops that normal
people might want to go to, like, people who don't want Rolexes. And we don't have
houses that normal people can live in because no one can afford a £60m house
apart from Ukrainian billionaires. And this is essentially the
message of Moneyland. That we have created a system that benefits only the
richest and it really works against everyone else in the world and so I hope
if you read the book you'll understand a few reasons why this is so bad and a few
of the tools that we can start using to try and turn the tide back to the world
as it used to be, before money essentially broke free of any kind of control.