"Butler to the World
By Oliver Bullough
St. Martin's, 278 pages, $28.99
Oliver Bullough is a British journalist whose stock in trade is murky money. Rich bad guys, often of the Russian kind, loathe him for his dogged reporting on the sources of their wealth. He's also been a guide on London Kleptocracy Tours, modeled on tours of Hollywood: Busloads of tourists drive around the British capital to gawk at houses that belong to oligarchs and others who've beggared the treasury in their native lands. Which lands? Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Nigeria, among others, in addition to Russia, of course, which has no equal in these matters.
Mr. Bullough, a lively and clever writer, has alighted on a lively and clever metaphor around which he builds "Butler to the World." His metaphor, alas, can't sustain the weight of a book and must be stretched and contorted to cover too much ground. It would have been more effective in an op-ed essay or a pamphlet. A more serious problem lies in Mr. Bullough's distinct antipathy to capitalism. He dislikes money-making and rich people, not just kleptocrats.
Postwar Britain, Mr. Bullough says, needed a "new business model" after being displaced by the United States as the world's superpower. If the U.S. became the world's policeman -- as it was once fashionable to say -- Britain became its butler, turning itself into "the geopolitical equivalent of Reginald Jeeves," the factotum to Bertie Wooster, an upper-class twit in the comic novels of P.G. Wodehouse. Butlers, writes Mr. Bullough, have all the traits of quintessential Britishness. These are "manners, resourcefulness, [and] reserve," which enable Britain to solve problems for its clients "discreetly and profitably."
Mr. Bullough's long subtitle -- "How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away With Anything" -- tells us what he thinks, his words unminced. The book is touted as a follow-up to "Moneyland" (2019), in which he portrayed a borderless world where the nihilist and unaccountable global rich can secure havens for their ill-gotten gains and even for their own persons. (Fancy a Maltese passport?)
In a speech in 1962, Dean Acheson, former U.S. secretary of state, observed harshly that Britain had lost an empire but had "not yet found a role." Acheson was mistaken, in Mr. Bullough's view. After the Suez debacle of 1956 -- when Egypt's strongman Gamal Nasser nationalized the canal and the U.S. refused to help the Brits take it back -- Britain, he says, did find a role. It became "an amoral servant of wealth wherever it could be found, using the skills it had built up over centuries of empire-building." In a word, "butlering."
As evidence of this amorality, Mr. Bullough points us to Britain's active promotion, after Suez, of the "Eurodollar," the term used to describe offshore dollar-denominated bonds or interbank deposits -- i.e., holdings unburdened by U.S. regulation. Showing his anti-capitalist hand, Mr. Bullough tells us that the Eurodollar "allowed Britain's merchant banks to free wealth from democratic controls."
Mr. Bullough, likewise, objects to the tax advantages conferred on companies and individuals by places like the British Virgin Islands -- a butlering outpost, as he sees it, in the balmy Caribbean. When you "cut past the legal terminology," he asks, what are the BVI selling? Essentially, "discreet and affordable asset protection services," guaranteed by the "solid presence of the British flag." That sounds conventional, does it not, for anyone in business? And yet, in Mr. Bullough's telling, "discreet and affordable asset protection" is presented to us as if it were a form of sex-trafficking in minors.
In a similar vein, Mr. Bullough objects on moral grounds to jurisdictions (like the BVI) that offer more favorable corporate tax rates than, say, the U.S. In his view, Britain's "offshore archipelago" offers easy tax avoidance to American companies that "love the US government's protection but not having to pay for it." But he glides over the fact that countries seek to tax income where it is earned -- few, if any, of these companies have substantive operations in the British Virgin Islands. He's indignant, also, that the Cayman Islands -- another British overseas territory -- are "now the world's leading domicile for hedge funds" -- gasp! -- whose money "flows seamlessly in and out with its owners' information jealously protected." Again, he doesn't tell us why this is a bad thing. Nor does he seem to know that it has been this way for 30 or more years. Alongside the Caymans, Mr. Bullough's wall of shame includes Jersey, Guernsey, Gibraltar, the Isle of Man and Anguilla, as well as "the United Kingdom itself."
Where Mr. Bullough's book has real value is in its accounts of some truly awful people -- the kleptocrats and oligarchs who should have been his sole focus. Riveting it is to read of Dmitry Firtash, "Putin's man in Ukraine" until 2014, who purchased a disused London Tube station for GBP 53 million from the British Ministry of Defense. A local entrepreneur had offered half that amount to turn the station into a party and convention center. But Firtash outbid him -- and left the station boarded up. It abutted his GBP 60 million mansion near Harrods, and he wanted to snuff out any disturbance before it began. (Although Firtash isn't on the list, the U.K. government has sanctioned 1,289 Russian individuals as of July 20, as a consequence of the war in Ukraine. Mr. Bullough, to be fair, completed his book before the war, but these asset freezes hardly constitute "butlering.")
Breathtaking, too, was the theft of GBP 1 billion from a bank in Moldova, money that ended up deposited in a Scottish Limited Partnership -- a type of company whose regulatory burdens are not entirely strenuous. SLPs are rarely used for giant heists in Eastern Europe. Most are quite kosher and offer a legitimate business niche. But Mr. Bullough would like to outlaw them.
"Butler to the World" is a book by a man who imagines money everywhere to be stashed (my pejorative verb, not his). And this money, inherently distasteful, evades taxes and works always secretly for some nefarious purpose. His is a Manichaean view of wealth, part Boy Scout, part Thomas Piketty.
Mr. Bullough writes that "a butler does not only work for criminals, remember, but for anyone rich enough to be able to employ his services." Wealthy people, "whether their wealth is dirty or clean," all seek the same things, he says: low taxes and "no transparency." Much too glibly, he conflates privacy -- the legitimate right of everyone engaged in business -- with opaqueness. Do some bad actors from the Russosphere (or indeed, from within our own societies) exploit Western rules of privacy? You bet. But the right response isn't to dilute -- or, worse, to anathematize -- privacy. It is for the authorities to be alert to crime. Yet Mr. Bullough melds the Clean Rich with the Dirty Rich, making them one consolidated cadre of avarice and turpitude. And in doing so, he concludes that the provision of any service to the rich -- whether by bankers or lawyers or, for that matter, butlers -- is just one big groveling disgrace.
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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society." [1]
Numa (Maxima's owner, formerly Numavičius), who has amassed billions of euros from selling alcohol to the poor of Lithuania and avoiding taxes, also uses the services of the UK.
1. REVIEW --- Books: By Jove, We'll Take Your Money
Varadarajan, Tunku.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 23 July 2022: C.9.
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