In April
2021, Abramovich became a Portuguese citizen as part of their Nationality Act;
his genealogy was vetted by experts who look for "evidence of interest in
Sephardic culture". Though Reuters noted that there is little known
history of Sephardic Jews in Russia,] Abramovich has donated money to projects
honouring the legacy of Portuguese Sephardic Jews in Hamburg, Germany
Putin has used British rich man’s law to avoid
scrutiny, at a crippling cost to us all
Nick Cohen
The price of justice in the UK has helped the Russian
super-rich stay fixtures in our culture
Sat 26 Feb
2022 19.00 GMT
Truth is
meant to be the first casualty of war, but in Britain the ability to tell the
truth about Russia was gunned down before Putin ordered his armies to advance.
You need to
write about Russian power to understand fully the anger and shame plutocratic
censorship brings. Anger because Britain is our country, and claims to be a
free country, and yet foreign oligarchs can manipulate the truth here as surely
as Putin can in Russia. Shame because we cannot perform the first duty of
journalists and speak in plain English without our newspapers accepting the
risk of staggering legal costs.
In the safe
space of the House of Commons, Labour MP Chris Bryant quoted from leaked
government documents, which stated Roman Abramovich should be watched because
of “his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt
activity and practices”. God help anyone who says as much outside when the
government has not put him on its sanctions list.
Bear the
costs of challenging wealth in mind when you wonder how London became a centre
of corruption. Anglo-Saxon law brings class justice rather than real justice.
The verdicts of individual judges are not to blame – whatever their faults,
they do not take bribes. But the price of reaching a verdict is so high that
few dare run the risk of being left with the bill. A system can be rigged even
if the people in charge of it are honest, and there is institutional prejudice
in the English justice system in favour of wealth that is as pervasive as
institutional racism in the police.
Let one
example stand for thousands. The Parisian intellectual Nicolas Tenzer tweeted
that the French equivalents of George Galloway and Nigel Farage acted as the
Kremlin’s “useful idiots” when they appeared on Putin’s propaganda channel RT.
RT sued, claiming that not only had Tenzer libelled the station but that he was
guilty of an “encroachment on the dignity” of its journalists – as if security
guards did not strip its hacks of dignity every time they went to work.
Naturally, the French courts found against RT. Astonishingly to anyone involved
in the struggles for free speech in the UK, the cost of the case was just
€10,000 (£8,400).
Compare
that with the price of writing about the Putin regime in the UK. In January
2021, after Putin’s agents had poisoned him but before he was jailed, the
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny praised Catherine Belton’s Putin’s
People. It is indeed the book of the moment, which shows how KGB men created
the world’s most dangerous rogue state. Abramovich, three other Russian
billionaires and Putin’s energy company Rosneft sued.
The case
was trivial. Belton’s publishers HarperCollins settled it agreeing to make
changes to the text most readers wouldn’t notice. Yet although it never went to
a full hearing, the case, it was revealed to me, cost HarperCollins £1.5m – 178
times the price of the libel trial in France. In effect, HarperCollins was
fined a small fortune for publishing an anti-Putin book by the English legal
system.
If we were capable of feeling shame at the misery
Britain’s corruption inflicts, we would radically reform the law
You may not
care about journalists when it is the police’s job to arrest the corrupt. “Our”
rich man’s law ensures, however, that the police have pretty much given up. The
government introduced unexplained wealth orders in 2018 as a “full-spectrum”
assault on illicit wealth being laundered through the property market. It did
not realise that the fantastically wealthy could hire London’s best lawyers,
who are more than a match for the barristers the state can afford.
When the
National Crime Agency lost a case against the family of Rakhat Aliyev, a former
deputy chief of the Kazakh state security service, it had to pay £1.5m in legal
costs, which seems to be becoming a standard charge in the high court. Its
annual budget for tracking down money launderers was all but wiped out.
The story
of the world in the 21st century is of a rise in the power of dictatorial
states and their accomplices and the collapse in the power of democratically
accountable police forces and journalists who are meant to combat them.
If we were
capable of feeling shame at the misery that Britain’s corruption inflicts on
the world, we would radically reform the law. We would move closer to a
continental legal system. We would make judging a career in its own right and
phase out the recruitment of judges from the ranks of barristers and
solicitors, who appear to think obscene costs are reasonable. We would stop
selling English law as a luxury service in the global marketplace and say its
first duty should be to meet the needs of the people of this country. And we
would impose limits on the fees the lawyers of the super rich can charge in the
high court.
As it is, I
suspect nothing will happen. Aside from Private Eye and a handful of patriotic
MPs, no one highlights how a section of legal London profits from Russian
billionaires. The lawyers who went for Catherine Belton included Hugh
Tomlinson, who is on the board of Hugh Grant’s Hacked Off, which says it wants
to hold “power to account”, not act as its servant, and Geraldine Proudler, who
until recently was on the board of the Scott Trust, which regulates us here at
the Guardian and Observer and ensures we maintain the highest ethical
standards.
Get off
your high horse, lawyers tell me when I raise an eyebrow. Everyone would do the
same if they had the chance.
And if not
everyone, then many would and do. It’s not only lawyers who simper pieties
about respecting human rights while slipping wads of oligarchical cash into
their pockets. Politicians, footballers, estate agents, private school head
teachers, hedge fund managers, bankers, art gallery owners and whole sections
of the professional class are hooked on dirty money.
The
Treasury opposes every anti-corruption measure because, I suspect, it sees
their dependence clearly. It regards the British economy with deep pessimism.
It notes the poor quality of our managers and entrepreneurs, and the
self-inflicted wound of Brexit, and concludes that dirty money is better than
no money.
As Russian
tanks roll across Europe, a true cause for anger and shame is that at no point
have we had a public debate about whether we want a future where we are living
off immoral earnings and are so frightened of immoral lawyers we no longer dare
describe what this country has become.
Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
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