Ladies and gentlemen,
welcome to kleptocracy tour of London.
We’re going to see the sites of corruption now.
Just there, on the other side of the road,
you’ll see a building.
Britain is the world’s biggest enabler of financial crime.
There is just so much of this property owned by oligarchs.
It's kind of extraordinary.
And we probably only know a tiny fraction of it as well.
The second biggest house in London after Buckingham Palace
belongs to a Russian fertilizer tycoon
and former member of the upper house of the Russian parliament.
We've found £1.5 billion worth of UK property that's owned by Russians
who are either connected to corruption
or have close ties to the Kremlin.
If oligarchs want to get away with something,
London is a one-stop shop that lets them get away with it.
Roman Abramovich,
who’s known President Putin for decades.
Worth an estimated $12 billion,
he owns the London soccer club Chelsea.
They keep that money in the form of property in West London,
in superyachts, fine art, football clubs.
You name it, they buy it.
We sell it to them.
For some time, I’ve been complaining about
the number of homes in our city
owned by Russian oligarchs close to Putin.
Surely, Mr. Abramovich
should no longer be able to own a football club in this country.
In the last few weeks, ever since the invasion of Ukraine,
there has been a belated realization in our political class
that selling much of our capital city to Russian oligarchs was a bad idea.
London has long been a playground for the wildly rich.
We will continue working through our hit list of oligarchs,
focusing on their houses, their yachts,
and every aspect of their lives.
We must tackle the oligarchs here and go after their money.
One hundred billion pounds
is laundered through the City of London every year.
We are the world’s best butler,
and I don’t think that gets enough attention.
[INVESTIGATORS]
My name is Oliver Bullough.
I’m a journalist and the author of
I write about financial crime, kleptocracy, corruption,
and how the UK is central
to laundering the proceeds of crime all over the world.
So the Russian economy is incredibly unequal.
Approximately 500 people,
500 people around Vladimir Putin,
own more wealth than the bottom 99.8 percent of the population.
And uniquely for a major economy,
more than half of that wealth is not in Russia
but is owned outside Russia.
And when I started researching that,
I realized quite quickly that they didn’t do it alone.
They had help.
And their help was from lawyers, accountants,
company formation agents,
all the other professional classes in this country.
And I don’t think that gets enough attention.
So I like to try and expose our own role
in helping Russian oligarchs loot the world.
Ladies and gentlemen,
welcome to kleptocracy tour of London.
The kleptocracy tours is not my idea.
It was my friend Roman Borisovich came up with this idea.
It’s based on the Hollywood tours.
You know, in Hollywood, you can--
they’ll point out Charlie Chaplin’s house
or Scarlett Johansson’s hairdresser.
Here we do the same thing in a bus,
but we don’t point out stars.
We point out oligarchs.
So that house, that duplex apartment with a view over the Thames,
that belongs to Vladimir Putin’s former deputy prime minister.
Or this delightful mews house
belongs to the son of one of Putin’s oldest friends.
Or that penthouse apartment
with a delightful view over Hyde Park,
that belongs to the richest man in Ukraine.
Witanhurst, the second biggest house in London after Buckingham Palace,
belongs to a Russian fertilizer tycoon
and former member of the upper house of the Russian parliament.
You know... how did that happen?
It’s amazing.
Dmitri Firtash is a Ukrainian oligarch.
He became astonishingly wealthy working with Gazprom,
the Russian gas company,
to sell gas to Ukraine.
That made his company, Rosukrenergo,
essentially a vehicle of Russian foreign policy
because the gas price is one of the most important levers
that Russia has over its neighbors.
And if it jacks up the gas price,
then their governments have to do what they’re told.
Dmitri Firtash has essentially acted as a vehicle for Gazprom,
the Russian gas company, and therefore Vladimir Putin,
to impose his will on the Ukrainians
when the Ukrainians have tried to elect governments
that have not been Kremlin-friendly in the past.
Russian state gas giant Gazprom
sold Firtash gas at well below market prices,
which he then sold in Ukraine for large profits.
Companies he controlled made more than $3 billion on the arrangement.
This is a man, incredibly powerful,
powerful enough to essentially overcome opposition
from the government of his own country.
Having made this very large amount of money
from raising the gas price for Ukraine,
he brought that money to Britain.
I was interested just to try and find out
what Mr. Firtash owned in this country.
And I turned to every journalist’s best friend, the phonebook,
and typed “Firtash” into 192.com to see what I could find.
And I found an address in Knightsbridge.
And I went to have a look at it,
and it was a rather disappointing, slightly squalid basement flat,
which struck me as odd because if I were an oligarch,
I wouldn't have chosen to live in that flat.
I poked around to see if there was anything else around there.
Walked around to the other side of the block
and realized that this basement flat had essentially been repurposed
as the back exit to an absolutely gigantic mansion
on the other side of the block.
It is an astonishingly lavish property.
You can only see half of it because half of it is underground.
There’s a swimming pool in its second basement.
I'm not sure exactly how much it cost,
but a property publication estimates about £60—six, zero—million.
He bought himself a place in high society
by giving money to Cambridge University
that allowed him to meet senior royalty
right up to the Duke of Edinburgh.
But I think the real crowning glory
of his integration to the British establishment
came in February 2014,
when our government sold him a tube station,
which happens to directly adjoin his mansion in Knightsbridge.
There is still—
and I’ve been writing about this and thinking about this for a while—
something amazing just about the idea that someone can be rich enough
to buy a tube station.
I don’t know of anyone else who owns their own tube station,
but Dimitri Firtash has Brompton Road tube station.
It’s been closed since the 1930s,
but it’s still got all the platforms, still got the shafts.
It’s still all there.
If you've stolen money, you have a problem,
which is that anyone can see that you’ve got more money
than you should have.
But in the 20th century, particularly in the second half,
we developed this wonderful idea of the shell company.
And a shell company is a corporate structure,
an investment vehicle.
It looks like any other company,
but all it does is pretend to be something other than you.
So it's a little bit like wearing gloves.
It keeps your fingerprints off whatever it is you are holding.
Now, if you’re being particularly careful,
you don't just use one shell company,
but you use multiple shell companies
because it is possible for the police to find out
who owns a shell company, eventually.
It’s like wearing gloves and more gloves and more gloves.
And every time the police take one pair of gloves off,
all they find is another glove.
February 2014, he was in Vienna
and was arrested on an American arrest warrant.
It turned out for this whole time
that the UK had been enthusiastically selling him
anything he wanted to buy.
The Americans had been investigating the provenance of his money
and became particularly suspicious about a deal he’d made in India
to try and corner the country’s titanium operations.
So he has actually been, ever since, battling extradition from Austria
to the United States.
It’s been eight years now.
Firtash says he's asked American officials
for permission to leave Austria and return to Ukraine,
where his industrial plants, he says,
have all been transformed into defense production.
I did see that Mr. Firtash asked if he could go back to Ukraine.
Ukraine doesn't have, as I understand it,
an extradition treaty with the United States.
So I could understand why that might be somewhere he’d like to go.
I don’t think the Austrians are likely to let him leave
until the legal proceedings are ended.
The Americans certainly, I think,
would have a spectacular sense of humor failure about that.
Aren’t you afraid?
It seems that it was said that you would be immediately
extradited to the USA from here?
If you are afraid of wolves, don’t go to the woods.
In the last... few weeks,
ever since the invasion of Ukraine,
there has been a belated realization in our political class
that selling much of our capital city to Russian oligarchs was a bad idea.
So obviously, a lot of people have been sanctioned.
Roman Abramovich, most famously, but also Oleg Deripaska,
who’s also a very influential and wealthy man,
and a lot of other important but not as high-profile people.
Sadly, attempting to take on these people from a standing start
is like attempting to run a marathon
when you’ve spent the last two years lying on the sofa.
[Indistinct shouting]
You’re starting off something bad!
You are radicalizing us!
You are weaponizing our ways!
In March 2022, a small group of anarchists briefly occupied
a house which was thought to belong to Oleg Deripaska,
though he says it belongs to members of his family.
I did pop in on the house in Belgrave Square.
There were four anarchists, as far as I could tell,
all of them sitting, dangling their feet
off the balcony above the front door.
And there were certainly 20,
if not 25 uniformed officers of the Metropolitan Police,
plus a special tree-climbing unit in helmets with harnesses
and a cherry picker.
I think the government ministers here in the UK
have been quite embarrassed by
their failure to respond to this problem in the past.
And it did certainly struck me as ironic
that so many officers of the law
were paying attention to this property
now that some anarchists had sat on its balcony
when for decades they hadn’t paid any attention to it at all.
Seems to be representative of our approach to property in this country
that once it’s owned,
we will defend it with everything we’ve got,
but we don’t pay any attention to
the money that does the buying in the first place.
I think my favorite gimmick is Michael Gove saying that
we could house refugees in the properties of oligarchs.
I want to explore an option which would allow us to use the homes
and properties of sanctioned individuals
for as long as they are sanctioned for humanitarian and other purposes.
You know, it's just a headline.
Again, it’s just these attempts to grab headlines
without recognizing that what’s really needed
is to take tackling kleptocracy
as seriously as we take tackling terrorism.
So far, I have seen zero sign
that the government is prepared to even think about
doing what it takes to do that.
[A legal representative for Dmitry Firtash asserts that]
[there is no case to be made against him as a result of the US indictment]
[and that the relevant Indian transaction “never happened.”]
[Firtash himself insists the indictment is politically motivated.]