How London became the money-laundering capital of the world...

On the Andrew Marr programme on 23rd March 2012, the writer Max Hastings reported a conversation he had had with a ' senior central banker' recently in which he had been told that today, London is considered to be the money laundering capital of the world. Max Hastings was commenting on the recent shooting of a Russian banker in London, but his piece was all the more relevant not only because Russia is now said to be controlled by a 'gangster culture', but because of his report of the large number of Russian, so-called businessmen (among the 200,000 or so Russians now living in the UK), who have moved to this country to carry on their activities here. A lot of these people seem to carry their criminal baggage with them, but there appears to be an apparent disregard within Government for any concern that London may have become the leading business centre for the world's funny money.

How can we have got to this state of affairs, when, on paper, we have some of the strictest anti-money laundering legislation in the world? The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that despite our many laws and regulations, they have never been effectively enforced by the financial regulators, and the banks and financial institutions appear to know that as long as they continue to pay lip service to the rules, they will not be required to implement them too effectively.

Only this year has the FSA managed to bring a money laundering charge against a financier, and he is a very small fish indeed. In an insider trading case against Richard Anthony Joseph, it has added charges of money laundering. It has charged him with eight counts of insider dealing and two counts of money laundering. Full story...

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