Government accused of ‘shocking complacency’ over awards to seven Putin cronies
Seven Russians now under sanctions were awarded controversial “golden visas” by the UK after Vladimir Putin’s regime first invaded Ukraine in 2014, the government has admitted.
The government closed the “tier 1 investor visa” scheme in February amid the build-up of Russian forces on Ukraine’s border as it prepared to broaden its occupation beyond Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
Continue reading...Global Ports Holding facility in Turkey may be breaching UK sanctions by letting vessel dock, say lawyers
A London-headquartered port operator could be breaching sanctions laws by allowing Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich to dock his $600m (£460m) superyacht Solaris at a port that it operates in Turkey.
Legal experts said Global Ports Holding, which has been listed on the London Stock Exchange since 2007, was taking “a very big risk” by allowing a superyacht owned by a sanctioned individual to use one of its ports.
Continue reading...Amanda Melling’s visit follows fears UK tax havens may offer loophole for those trying to avoid clampdown
A Foreign Office minister has flown to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) to hold urgent discussions on how sanctions against Russian oligarchs with cash stored in the secretive islands can be implemented, amid fears. UK tax havens may provide a loophole for those trying to escape the international clampdown.
Amanda Milling’s visit follows news that a succession of oligarchs appeared to have hidden their assets in trusts based in the BVI in a bid to put them beyond reach of UK sanctions. British sanctions laws apply in the overseas territories, and enforcement officers are supposed to have full access to registers of beneficial ownerships.
Continue reading...From its biggest private house to a disused tube station, London has long been an attractive place for the Russian president’s cronies to buy property. Their ill-gotten wealth permeated the capital at the expense of us all
For years, if not decades, the luxury property market in London and south-east England has been feasting on investment from Russia and former Soviet states. The oligarch’s mansion, with fantastical multi-level interiors containing swimming pools, art galleries and vintage car collections, has become the stuff of legend. Estate agents, lawyers, accountants, financial institutions, property companies, public relations agencies, architects and interior designers have all done well out of this abundant cash.
Meanwhile, campaigners and journalists have been sounding the alarm. London, they have long pointed out, appeared to be uniquely attractive to “suspicious wealth” – as the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International UK puts it – from all over the world, and from the former Soviet Union in particular. These alarms were mostly ignored until now, when suddenly it appears problematic to have been complicit in the workings of elites whose leader has started the most dangerous war in Europe since 1945.
Continue reading...Authorities clamp down on wealthy individuals placed on EU sanctions list over Russian invasion of Ukraine
Italian police have seized villas and yachts worth at least €140m (£126m) from four high-profile Russians who were placed on an EU sanctions list after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sources said on Saturday.
A police source said a villa owned by the billionaire businessman Alisher Usmanov on Sardinia, and a villa on Lake Como owned by the Russian state TV host Vladimir Soloviev, had both been seized.
Continue reading...Deputy PM defends response to invasion after criticism the government has acted too slowly over sanctions
Russian elites could have their property seized and handed over to Ukrainian refugees, the deputy prime minister has suggested.
Dominic Raab made the remarks as he defended the UK’s response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the prime minister, Boris Johnson, called for an emergency UN summit after a Russian attack on a nuclear power station in Ukraine.
Continue reading...Critics say end of scheme risks billions in overseas investment due to myth that ‘foreign money is dirty money’
London lawyers who help the global super-rich apply for “golden visas” to enter the UK have called on the government to reconsider its decision to abolish the Tier 1 investor visa scheme, warning that it would be “enormously damaging” to the economy.
Kyra Motley, a partner at the law firm Boodle Hatfield, said the UK was jeopardising billions of pounds in overseas investment “because of a popular myth that foreign money is dirty money”.
Continue reading...Gary Hersham has been selling houses to the very rich for decades. At first, £1m was a big deal. Now he sells for £50m, £100m, even £200m. What does it take to stay on top in this cut-throat business?
Ring ring. Gary Hersham’s phone was going, as usual. The super-prime London estate agent blew through the Mayfair office of his company, Beauchamp Estates, scattering employees behind him. As he climbed into the passenger seat of the company car, a Volkswagen Golf rather than his personal BMW, I asked where we were going. “I don’t know!” he said. He found a postcode, and announced it to the driver. Ring ring. Hersham’s mobile has the high-pitched jangle of an old-fashioned telephone at fire-alarm volume. “I didn’t ask you for that,” he roared down the phone as we sat stationary outside his office. “What makes you assume that’s what I was doing? Could I speak to Emily please?” Emily, his fantastic secretary. Ring ring. Someone else was calling. “We’ve got to wait for Marcus!”
Enter, at a trot, Marcus O’Brien, Hersham’s protege: tall, slicked hair, suited and groomed, just 30. (Hersham is 68.) O’Brien had been out for a big dinner the night before, knowable only from his stating the fact: there was no sickly pallor, despite being crammed into the back seat of the Golf, which was now winding its way through Mayfair, past the members’ clubs and hedge funds and townhouses, a neighbourhood in which Hersham has been selling property for 43 years. His agency has sold houses for quantities of money that seem increasingly conceptual as they rise: Belgrave Square (£50m), Caroline Terrace (£60m), Grosvenor Crescent (£100m). Then the ultimate, a career peak in an already elevated range, the most expensive house ever sold in Britain: 2-8a Rutland Gate in Knightsbridge, sold in early 2020 for £215m.
Continue reading...While wealthiest got richer, 140m people fell into poverty as jobs were lost, wiping out years of gains for poorest, report finds
Twenty new “pandemic billionaires” have been created in Asia thanks to the international response to Covid-19, while 140 million people across the continent were plunged into poverty as jobs were lost during the pandemic, according to Oxfam.
A report by the aid organisation says that by March 2021, profits from the pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and services needed for the Covid response had made 20 people new billionaires as lockdowns and economic stagnation destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of others.
Continue reading...New ONS figures reveal inequality gap growing ever wider before the coronavirus pandemic
The richest 1% of households in the UK each have fortunes of at least £3.6m, according to new official figures that show the inequality gap was yawning even before the pandemic struck.
At the other end of the scale, the poorest 10% of households have just £15,400 or less, with almost half burdened with more debts than they had in assets, according to figures released on Friday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Continue reading...Our 20 favourite pieces of the year
After growing up in a Zimbabwe convulsed by the legacy of colonialism, when I got to Oxford I realised how many British people still failed to see how empire had shaped lives like mine – as well as their own
Continue reading...From climate crisis to anti-racism, more and more corporations are taking a stand. But if it’s only done because it’s good for business, the fires will keep on burning
In early 2020, bushfires raged across Australia. More than 3,000 homes were destroyed, reduced to ash and rubble by the unrelenting onslaught of flames. Tragically, 34 people died in the fires themselves, with an estimated 445 more dying as a result of smoke inhalation. More than 16m hectares of land burned, destroying wildlife and natural habitats. Nearly 3 billion animals were affected. So massive were the fires that the smoke was visible over Chile, 11,000km away. The record-breaking inferno that engulfed Australia was described as a “global catastrophe, and a global spectacle”. As reported in the New Statesman, Australia had come to symbolise “the extreme edge of a future awaiting us all” as a result of the climate crisis. The Australian government’s inquiry into the bushfires unequivocally reported that “it is clear that we should expect fire seasons like 2019–20, or potentially worse, to happen again”.
If we turn the clock back to less than a year earlier, 15 March 2019 marked the day that 1.4 million children turned out at locations around the world, on “strike” from school in support of action against the climate crisis. In Australia, the strikes were especially targeted at the government’s dismal record of inaction, with many politicians being climate-change deniers. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, was vocal in his criticism of the strikes. He wanted students to stay in school instead of engaging in democratic protest. His public statement said: “I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future, and I think it is important we give them that confidence that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well. I don’t want our children to have anxieties about these issues.”
Continue reading...Chinese Communist party to crack down on almost weekly creation of billionaire company bosses
China’s president has vowed to “adjust excessive incomes” in a warning to the country’s super-rich that the state plans to redistribute wealth to tackle widening inequality.
According to reports in state media, Xi Jinping told officials at a meeting of the Chinese Communist party’s central financial and economic affairs commission on Tuesday, that the government should “regulate excessively high incomes and encourage high-income groups and enterprises to return more to society”.
Continue reading...Data leak published by ProPublica fuels calls to tighten up system which sees ultra-wealthy pay little or no tax
The revelation last week that the 25 richest US billionaires have paid very little tax even as their fortunes have soared has reignited demands for wealth taxes on both sides of the Atlantic.
An unprecedented leak of “a vast trove” of 15 years of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data to the investigative news site ProPublica has provided a staggering insight into the legal strategies the very rich deploy to avoid tax.
Continue reading...ProPublica investigation shows how little US super-rich, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, reportedly paid between 2014 and 2018
The 25 richest Americans, including Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, paid a “true tax rate” of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018, according to an investigation by ProPublica, despite their collective net worth rising by more than $400bn in the same period.
Related: Global economy set for fastest recovery for more than 80 years
Continue reading...Lack of prenuptial agreement with Bill Gates could herald $73bn divorce settlement as fears focus on future of couple’s charity
Melinda Gates, a philanthropist and campaigner for female empowerment, could be about to become the world’s second-richest woman, with a fortune estimated at $73bn.
In her divorce petition filed on Monday at King County superior court in Seattle, Washington, Melinda Gates stated that her marriage to multibillionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, one of the richest men on the planet, had “irretrievably broken” and called on the courts to divide up the couple’s combined $146bn (£105bn) fortune
Continue reading...Court rules that Temur Akhmedov had worked with his father to help him avoid £453m settlement
The son of an oligarch caught up in the world’s largest divorce case has been told to pay £75m to his mother after a judge at the high court in London found he was “a dishonest individual who will do anything to assist his father”.
Temur Akhmedov was found to have worked together with his father, the billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov, to hide hundreds of millions of pounds of assets – including several mansions, a superyacht, a helicopter and an extensive art collection – in order to avoid paying a £453m divorce settlement.
“Temur has learned well from his father’s past conduct and has done and said all he could to prevent his mother receiving a penny of the matrimonial assets,” the judge, Gwynneth Knowles, said in a ruling on Wednesday. She ruled that he should pay his mother more than £75m.
Continue reading...Holdings of more than 40,000 hectares in London, Scotland and Newmarket make Dubai ruler one of UK’s biggest landowners
The controversial ruler of Dubai has acquired a land and property empire in Britain that appears to exceed 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres), making him one of the country’s largest landowners, according to a Guardian analysis.
The huge property portfolio apparently owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum and his close family ranges from mansions, stables and training gallops across Newmarket, to white stucco houses in some of London’s most exclusive addresses and extensive moorland including the 25,000-hectare Inverinate estate in the Scottish Highlands.
Continue reading...Abigail Disney has parted with $72m – and thinks the rich need to pay far more tax. As Covid widens the inequality gap, she and an international league of the super-rich are urging governments to take their money
Abigail Disney has always been very, very rich, or, as she describes it, “too rich”. The money came with her name: she is the granddaughter of Roy Disney who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney Company in 1923. Disney, 61, refuses to say how much she has, but acknowledges she would have been a billionaire in her own right had she not realised in her 20s that it was her fortune that was making her miserable, and decided to start giving it away.
She has been donating to good causes ever since – $72m (£52m) and counting, mostly to groups helping women in prison, women living with HIV, and victims of domestic violence. But giving it away is no longer enough. She wants the tax collector to take more money, not only from her, but from “all of the absurdly rich people across the world”.
Continue reading...The hedge fund manager earns Britain’s biggest salary. He also avoids meat, likes yoga and supports Extinction Rebellion
Hedge fund manager Sir Chris Hohn once made a point of telling a high court judge that he was an “unbelievable moneymaker”. This week Hohn proved his point – definitively – when it was revealed that he paid himself just shy of £1m-a-day last year.
Hohn collected $479m (£343m) in annual dividend payments from his The Children’s Investment (TCI) fund in the biggest ever personal payday in the UK after doubling profits at his Mayfair hedge fund, run from an office a couple of doors down from Louis Vuitton’s flagship store.
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