British Politics

Not sure about the lie's Pete, i think they are just a bit thick and believe whatever their masters tell them.

 

Great innit

And the lefties seem powerless to stop him because nobody gives a **** about birthday cake

 

Pompey admitted he lied about Abramovich donating money to the Tories
he's quite proud of lying
he even said I lied
when I asked him when I lied he said I was banned because I lied
when I asked him again how I lied he changed the subject
he just lies non-stop because he knows he's incapable of telling the truth

 

WAR IN UKRAINE
How the oligarchs’ Russian money tree took root in Britain

Opposition politicans say ministers have failed to make life tough for the scores of billionaires who enjoy the benefits of working and playing in Londongrad

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Robert Watts

Saturday March 05 2022, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times

A minute’s walk from Mayfair’s Berkeley Square lies Novikov, a restaurant that could make a fair claim to be the beating heart of Londongrad. Step downstairs and you enter an oligarch’s playground, where a 37-page wine list offers rare Californian reds at £8,600 a bottle.

Its proprietor, Arkady Novikov, has been described as the “blini baron” and “Putin’s favourite restaurateur”. His relationship with the president dates back to when Putin ran the FSB, Russia’s intelligence agency.

After the former spymaster rose to the presidency, Novikov provided catering for Kremlin parties. His Mayfair restaurant opened in 2011, with financial backing from another former spy, Alexey Chepa, a Russian MP and media mogul.

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Novikov’s London venue was quickly turning over £100,000 a day, attracting celebrities such as Rita Ora, Rihanna and Prince Harry as well as the capital’s burgeoning community of affluent Russians with a hunger for the Asian-Italian themed cuisine.

Novikov set up home in nearby Chelsea. His daughter attended the prestigious King’s College School, Wimbledon.


When Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and the West imposed limited sanctions, Novikov was unafraid to talk tough. “I do not think much about these sanctions — I am not a little girl to feel offended by them,” he said dismissively.

Novikov’s little-known story epitomises how wealthy Russians connected to Putin have savoured London’s delights and exploited its wealth.

The former chef is relatively small fry in the “Moscow-on-Thames” ecosystem, perhaps worth a mere £200 million. He is certainly not someone with the 10 or 11-figure fortunes of Roman Abramovich, Alisher Usmanov or Oleg Deripaska — all fellow Russians better known for snapping up mansions, country estates or our sports clubs.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has also made many observers look back in disbelief at why Britain opened its doors to so much Russian money and belatedly worry over what chance underpowered law enforcement agencies have of imposing sanctions with real bite. The Sunday Times Rich List, the annual UK wealth rankings published since 1989, has featured a growing number of Russians in recent years. Last year’s top 250 included 13 Russian individuals, with a combined wealth of £69.5 billion.



Abramovich, now selling Chelsea FC, has been a Rich List fixture for years on the strength of his football ownership, his portfolio of properties and his stake in Evraz, the steel company he floated in London in 2011.

Usmanov, a former Arsenal shareholder, makes the Rich List even though his business empire is largely based overseas. In 2008, the metals baron bought Beechwood House, a grade II-listed property in Highgate, north London, for £48 million. He also has Sutton Place, a Surrey-based Tudor mansion once owned by a courtier of Henry VIII.

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Oleg Deripaska, right, has not been sanctioned by Britain
ALAMY
Another Rich List regular, Mikhail Fridman, has based himself and his LetterOne conglomerate in London. He spent £65 million buying the rundown gothic mansion Athlone House, also in Highgate.

Fellow Russians to make the Rich List include Denis Sverdlov, an electric vehicle entrepreneur who served as a telecoms minister in Putin’s government as recently as 2013, and Nikolay Storonsky, the co-founder of the London-based bank Revolut. Storonsky, whose father worked in a senior role at the Kremlin-controlled energy giant Gazprom, has said: “The war is wrong and totally abhorrent ... I am horrified and appalled at its impact.”

But those who make it on to the Rich List account for only a small percentage of the wealthy Russians who have either moved to the UK or bought assets here since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Take Andrey Guryev, for example. Since the Ukraine invasion, the fertiliser billionaire has been pictured at the Kremlin for a meeting with Putin. Guryev owns Witanhurst, a 65-room mansion thought to be the second biggest home in London after Buckingham Palace. But because the property’s £300 million value is only a fraction of his estimated £4.5 billion wealth, Guryev does not appear in the Rich List.

We also focus on “identifiable wealth” — assets that can be tracked down with reliable evidence or where individuals have themselves produced authoritative financial information. Many oligarchs — and other wealthy individuals — deliberately hide their wealth by exploiting weak UK financial reporting standards or by shifting cash offshore.

Bluntly, we cannot even be sure how many oligarchs and other wealthy Russians close to Putin’s regime have money here. Some experts have estimated a figure of around 500 oligarchs in the UK. Thousands more have undoubtedly bought property.

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Witanhurst is thought to be the second biggest home in London
ALAMY
But it’s not simply individuals. Analysis of nearly 7,000 UK companies owned by Russian nationals identifies many that are either owned or controlled by the Russian state.

Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled energy colossus, has six companies operating in London. The latest accounts of the largest of these entities show assets of £628 million.

VTB, Russia’s second largest bank, is majority owned by the Russian government. Its investment bank, VTB Capital, has a large London presence, with assets of more than £1.2 billion sitting on the balance sheet of its main company.

Then there’s Rosneft. The energy giant is 40 per cent owned by the Russian government and chaired by the oligarch Igor Sechin. A close ally of Putin who served as the country’s deputy prime minister, Sechin’s demeanour has earned him the moniker of “Darth Vader” in Moscow’s political circles. Rosneft Marine (UK) Limited, a fuel trading subsidiary registered at a service address in a mews house in Bermondsey, southeast London, shows £40.7 million of net assets.

So how and why did London become Londongrad, a playground-cum-piggy-bank for Kremlin-linked Russians?

“There were push and pull factors,” explains Ben Cowdock, lead investigator at Transparency International, an organisation set up by ex-employees of the World Bank to investigate corruption nearly 30 years ago. “Oligarchs who grew hugely wealthy from privatisation of old state-owned assets wanted to get their money away from the instability of Russia and into a safer environment.”

London offered a network of accountants, wealth managers and other advisers adept at moving money on to the British Virgin Islands, Jersey, the Isle of Man and other low-tax and covert destinations.

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Roman Abramovich has announced his intention to sell Chelsea Football Club
BEN STANSALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The UK became an attractive place to own property — to live in and or as an investment. Cowdock and his colleagues have found £1.5 billion of UK property now owned either by Russians accused of financial crime or with links to the Kremlin. The majority of this is owned through offshore companies.

In addition, private schools, top universities, Harley Street medicine, the West End, Premier League football and other leading sporting venues all had their draw as did the capital’s booming public relations firms and its cash-hungry political parties.

“There wasn’t just the opportunity to launder dirty money,” Cowdock said. “Reputations could be laundered too. Philanthropy and gifts to political parties that could buy influence and respectability. After a while this influx developed a momentum of its own.”

For nearly three decades Westminster politicians of all stripes have fawned over super-rich Russians, offering more and more generous sweetheart visas to lure tycoons from Moscow to London.

It began in 1994 with John Major’s “investor” visa scheme. This allowed wealthy individuals to buy UK residency for £1 million. The scheme grew more generous under Tony Blair and in 2008 New Labour’s arch enforcer Lord Mandelson, George Osborne — then shadow chancellor — and Deripaska were caught hobnobbing together on board the oligarch’s superyacht off Corfu.

Even the left-wing firebrand Ken Livingstone, who served as London mayor between 2000 and 2008, implored that he wanted “Russian companies to regard London as their natural base in Europe”.

The chumminess continued under David Cameron, who enjoyed an at times jocular relationship with Putin. That was until the pair fell out over gay rights.

Still, in 2014 Lubov Chernukhin, whose husband Vladimir is a former Putin minister, paid £160,000 to play tennis with Cameron at London’s chichi Hurlingham Club. She has also hosted a dinner with the former prime minister Theresa May.

At the same time ministers were handing out more and more visas and residencies to the world’s super-rich, including many Russians.

During Gordon Brown’s time in Downing Street the UK introduced its “Tier 1 visa programme”. The “golden visa” system allowed those with £2 million of investment funds and UK bank accounts to live here and apply to become permanently resident after five years. The wait was cut to two years for those prepared to bring in £10 million to the UK.

There were about 3,000 successful applicants between June 2008 and April 2015, 700 of them Russian millionaires.

Between the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the end of last year, another 406 Russians were awarded visas — plus another 699 to partners, children and other dependents. Just 20 applications made by Russians were refused.

Even the novichok poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal by Russian agents operating on British soil in Salisbury in March 2018, which resulted in the death of Dawn Sturgess, did not stop the policy. Ninety-two golden visas have been given to Russians since then, with only six refused.

Some politicians claim that Britain always benefits from attracting billionaires, arguing that these people create businesses, jobs and in doing so generate large sums of tax revenue.

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Tony Blair stands aside as President Putin shakes hands with Mikhail Fridman in 2003

This is certainly not always the case. Often these people keep their businesses offshore and contribute unremarkable sums to the UK public finances.

Last month, as Putin’s forces made final preparations for their campaign against Ukraine, Priti Patel, the home secretary, finally announced an end to the golden visa system.

Patel acknowledged how the visas had been hijacked by “corrupt elites who threatened our national security and push dirty money around our cities”.

Even if there is the political will to successfully track down and end London’s positions as the favoured destination for kleptocrat cash, that does not mean it is possible.

“Those backing Putin have been put on notice: there will be nowhere to hide your ill-gotten gains,” Boris Johnson said soon after the Kremlin’s tanks crossed into Ukraine.

Ministers announced that they were freezing the assets of more than 100 individuals and “entities”. But just eight individuals were named — Gennady Timchenko, Kirill Shamalov, Boris and Igor Rotenberg, Petr Fradkov, Denis Bortnikov, Yury Slyusar and Elena Georgieva.

Not one of these Russia-based business grandees is a household name and an extensive trawl of both Companies House records and shareholder registers of stock market business reveals little that could be pinned here.

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President Putin with the former Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/GETTY IMAGES
Notable by their initial absence were Abramovich, Usmanov and Deripaska. This trio are among 35 individuals the lawyer and anti-Putin campaigner Alexei Navalny has said should be subject to Western sanctions. Navalny, already imprisoned, appeared by video link in court in Russia last week on embezzlement charges that could keep him in jail until 2032.

The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Layla Moran, recently read out the entire list of 35 in parliament. Abramovich has strongly denied that he is close to Putin. Deripaska has been subject to US sanctions since 2018.

On Thursday Usmanov was added to the list, along with Igor Shuvalov, who has held roles in the Russian government and owns two London apartments worth £11 million.

However, the British government is playing catch-up to the US and the EU — where yachts are routinely being seized by police.

And even for those who have been hit with sanctions, it may take weeks or even months for these measures to take effect — giving plenty of time for assets to be moved to secretive boltholes.

What about those UK subsidiaries of Gazprom and other Kremlin-controlled companies? This is unclear. Transparency International said it is possible that while much of wealth is listed on UK balance sheets the money could still be stowed in foreign bank accounts.

Jonathan Benton, a former detective superintendent who has had senior roles at the National Crime Agency and the Metropolitan Police, said Britain’s law enforcement agencies were underpowered.

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Gennady Timchenko’s £41million yacht was seized in Italy this weekend
FABRIZIO TENERELLI/EPA
“In my time it was a David and Goliath situation,” said Benton, who set up the corporation investigations outfit Intelligent Sanctuary. “Wealthy individuals were able to pay for large legal teams and the best QCs.

“Public bodies obviously do not have those kinds of resources. It’s not simply that they don’t have enough people — they don’t have the right people. If you’re digging into a billionaire you can be talking about examining hundreds or even thousands of bank accounts across many jurisdictions. The FBI does pay more for good investigators.”

Ministers hope that the new Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill will improve financial transparency by giving Companies House new powers to verify the information it receives and end the loophole whereby UK properties can be owned through offshore companies.

Over the past 20 years thousands of British lawyers, bankers, wealth managers, estate agents, accountants and PR consultants have filled their boots helping some kleptocrats launder their money and reputations.

Many of these people will now be ruminating about the part they played in the creation and smooth running of Londongrad.

Back in Mayfair, the public outrage at Putin’s assault on an independent neighbour has not been lost on Novikov’s management. Would-be diners heading to the restaurant’s homepage are now greeted with a banner reading “Peace for Ukraine”.

The simple image with its neutral wording stops short of criticising Putin by name. But the message may suggest one of the Russian president’s long-term associates has lost his appetite.

Robert Watts is the compiler of The Sunday Times Rich List

 

Interesting read, who would have thought that Teflon Tony, Gordon Brown and even Red Ken would have been instigators of the Russian invasion of London

Still, i suppose there was no war then

 

Bring your own bullets.

 

I agree. But why did we elect him as leader?

 

Quite ironic really, Brexiteers using a French word in mistake for an English one.

 

What username do you use when you post on your club board? 'Farked' seems to have been created just so you can post on this one thread, which is rather peculiar, and quite sad.

 

What is Evgeny Lebedev’s stance on Ukraine?

Last week Lebedev wrote an open letter urging Putin to stop the war on the front page of his London newspaper the Evening Standard.

He wrote: “As Europe stands on the brink of another world war, and the world on the brink of a possible nuclear disaster, I plead with you to use today’s negotiations to bring this terrible conflict in Ukraine to an end.”

A statement published alongside a photograph of a paramedic performing CPR on a girl injured by shelling read: “On this page are the final minutes of a six-year-old child fatally injured by shells that struck her Mariupol apartment block on Sunday.

“She is still wearing her pink jacket as medics fight to save her. But it is too late. Other children, and other families, are suffering similar fates across Ukraine.”

He added: "As a Russian citizen I plead with you to stop Russians killing their Ukrainian brothers and sisters.

“As a British citizen I ask you to save Europe from war."


https://www.nationalworld.com/news/politics/evgeny-lebedev-russia-boris-johnson-peerage-3598729

 

Been posting on the Norwich board for three years with that name. What us your point.? It seems that having lost several arguments you are now bitching about something else.

 

So Russia is opening humanitarian corridors and the one leading from Kiev goes to Belarus and the one leading from Kharkiv goes to ****ing Russia

 

crazed leftie wants Putin to rule the world

 

I can't say I paid much attention to you until recently, which caused me to have a look around, and then make the observation I did.

Like most others on here, I've lost no arguments against you, and there seems to be a minimal number of posts from you anywhere but on this thread.

As I said, it's peculiar, and sad.