Super-heavy and long article, at least for me (italian mothertongue). Still, quite interesting. Personal random excerpts (not pointing to anything specific, th

Super-heavy and long article, at least for me (italian mothertongue). Still, quite interesting. Personal random excerpts (not pointing to anything specific, they just popped up when I read the article): - these oligarchs were mere capos, who answered to the don - England itself has been a silent and handsomely compensated partner in Putin’s kleptocratic designs - “We must go after the oligarchs,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared after the invasion of Ukraine, doing his best to sound Churchillian. But, as the international community labors to isolate Putin and his cronies, the question is whether England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so. - At a fund-raising auction at the Tory summer ball in 2014, a woman named Lubov Chernukhin—who was then married to Vladimir Chernukhin, one of Putin’s former deputy finance ministers—paid a hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the top prize: a tennis match with Johnson and David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time. Johnson defended the match, decrying “a miasma of suspicion” toward “all rich Russians in London.” A Russian magnate told Catherine Belton, “In London, money rules everyone. Anyone and anything can be bought.” The Russians came to London, the source said, “to corrupt the U.K. political elite.” - Libel tourism is another chronic English problem that everyone bemoans but nobody does anything about. This has meant terrific business for the oligarchs’ morally flexible attorneys; according to the British trade publication The Lawyer, some law firms charge a “Russian premium” for their services, of up to fifteen hundred pounds an hour. Disclosure: I work for a swiss bank (therefore a potentially indirect antagonist to the London Exchange/Marketplace - but I'm just an IT-guy :P ). During the past years I kept reading in the news and saw on TV some docs about russian interests in London (they never mentioned anything about other cities/regions, it was always all about "London", I don't know why), therefore none of these news should be surprising, but apparently they still are? Additionally I'm totally/absolutely surprised by UK's government's attitude change: not just a sudden 360-degrees change from "welcome investors" to "don't you dare to talk to us" but even a "what you owned here is history" (maybe I'm mis-interpreting but I understood that that's the general direction of where things are going there - maybe I'm wrong??). Cheers