Britain is still the money-laundering capital of the world, according
to a special six-page investigation published in this fortnight’s
Private Eye.
Richard Brooks, a former tax inspector responsible for Private
Eye’s groundbreaking exposés of corporate tax avoidance, turns his
attention to the dirty money flowing through our banks and tax havens.
Weeks after a US senate committee slammed Britain’s biggest bank,
HSBC, for facilitating vast money-laundering operations, including
washing money from Mexican drug cartels, he finds that light-touch
banking regulation and a thriving network of tax havens, have
made Britain the centre of an embezzlement industry that steals billions
from the world’s poor.
Brooks has spent months tracking high-profile corruption cases
as they make their way through British courts. He zeroes in on one of
the most outrageous cases, that of James Ibori, former governor of the
Delta State in Nigeria, who between 1999 and 2007, funnelled £200m of
pounds of state money through British banks to fund an outrageously
lavish lifestyle.
While many Nigerians went without basic education and social care, Ibori spent stolen loot on a Bentley, private school fees for his children, properties in
Hampstead, a fleet of armoured Range Rovers and dozens of gambling trips
to Las Vegas.
With the help of a British solicitor, Bhadresh Gohil, Ibori managed
to sneak Nigerian wealth out of the country and launder it through HSBC
and Barclays bank accounts.
It’s a complex story, in which dirty money zips between secretive tax
havens, obscure front companies, and British high street banks. But, as
Sasha Wass QC told the jury at Ibori’s eventual trial, ‘If you’re
confused by this … that is exactly the idea.’
It was only when the eight police officers who make up the Met’s
Proceeds of Corruption unit painstakingly followed the money that they
managed to piece together what Judge Pitts, who sentenced James Ibori to
13 years at Southwark Crown Court in April this year, called ‘one of
the biggest money laundering cases ever seen’.
But despite Ibori’s long sentence, the British banks who facilitated
his crimes and so many others like it, have not seen the inside of a
court room and are unlikely to any time soon.
The regulation-free tax havens where stolen loot is stashed and the
bankers who wash the money are still a long way from proper regulation.
Private Eye points out that Lord Green, a current trade minister
and member of the Treasury team deciding how to reform Britain’s banks,
was chief executive of HSBC during the years it was turning over
hundreds of millions of pounds of dirty money. Source
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