I found the strongest parts to be the criticism (and warning) about private prosecutions, and the chapter about Gibraltar and the gambling industry, and the book is worth reading for them alone. It festooned to its logical conclusion in the Cayman Islands, which has been built entirely on shell companies to hide the fortunes of the corrupt elected, dictators, rich executives and of course every kind of criminal imaginable.

I found this an interesting read, and a real eye opener about how the UK makes its money from the cleaver use of money movement here and abroad. I did not give five stars as while I overall felt the level of clarity was strong, I would have appreciated a higher level of explanation of some of the finer economic topics such as how Eurodollars work. I am surprised non-domicile status didn’t come up as a reason for oligarchs settling in London, since I think the UK is the only country in the world with this setup.It’s possible that he had been concerned I would refuse to open my address book to him, but it seemed not to have occurred to him that I would have no address book to open; that, essentially, the people he was looking for would not exist.

G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves does for Bertie Wooster – the author presents a series of case studies showing how Britain has facilitated the use of tax havens, complex financial structures and tax loopholes to allow shady individuals to squirrel money away. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. An excellent expose of the inability of successive British governments, post WWII, to govern GREAT Britain with integrity. A polemical take on how the UK's post-imperial institutions - banks, law firms, public relations companies, schools and universities - rushed to serve the corrupt super-rich, laundering individuals' reputations and washing their dirty money so they can enlarge their fortunes still further. It has come to the point where if you are rich enough, you can bring a criminal case yourself in England, because the police can’t afford it.The term Special Relationship—which was popularized, if not invented, by Churchill—has become a cliché, invoked increasingly dutifully by American politicians and increasingly needi-fully by British ones, but it still reflects a deep and enduring connection that goes far beyond what the two countries have with anyone else. In his Sunday Times-bestselling expose, Oliver Bullough reveals how the UK took up its position at the elbow of the worst people on Earth: the oligarchs, kleptocrats and gangsters.

Here too, there is no direct benefit to the government of the UK, but it keeps The City humming, and those are the people in power. Instead, they have moved back to their luxury accommodations all the way over in Kensington, a couple of miles west. The unmatched financial and legal infrastructure that had allowed the UK to conquer a quarter of the world was quietly repurposed to do the bidding of individuals from dubious regimes that it had sometimes fostered, and others who had seized control of their nation’s resources and needed a place to hide what they creamed off. Over time our biggest growth industry, the new source of the City’s wealth and power, was as 10% fixers for fraudsters and worse.The result is always calm seas, and life goes on for Jeeves’ master, Bertie Wooster, spoiled, incompetent upper class brat. This is a serious topic, in demand of more attention, in the same vein as legal access and harmful identity politics. The Suez Crisis of 1956 was the nadir of Britain's twentieth century, the moment when the once-superpower was bullied into retreat.