By Tom Mayne and John Heathershaw

Key Points:

• Kleptocracy is a defining feature of the new global politics. Just as terrorism and organised crime are spreading transnationally, merging with state actors, so are kleptocratic economies where corruptly obtained finance and oligarchic business blend with political elites.
• A global kleptocratic network can generate billions of dollars through grand corruption schemes. Definitions of kleptocracy tend to present it as a feature of government, yet properly understood, it is transnational and networked – involving multiple persons, entities and jurisdictions, with corrupted monies transferred across borders with the witting or unwitting help of professional service providers known as enablers.
• The UK’s kleptocracy problem entails the laundering of corrupted financial flows and reputations of political elites and oligarchs from high-risk countries by British enablers for their clients to achieve security and status in the UK. As with established organised crime networks, extreme violence and theft are rare, while the mundane activities of so-called “whitecollar” crime are commonplace and essential.
• The government has long ignored the potential harms caused by the influx of kleptocratic flows into our financial centres, the post-Soviet phenomenon of “Londongrad” being only one example of this problem. Efforts to tackle it were too late to weaken the Russian kleptocratic system before the two invasions of Ukraine. Sanctions may mark the “end of Londongrad” but this should not be equated with victory against the UK’s kleptocracy problem.
• Kleptocracy needs transnational solutions. There is little point in countering kleptocracy through traditional means based on establishing a predicate crime (which is often impossible to prove) and reliance on mutual legal assistance from hostile states, meaning that political incumbents rarely have assets seized. A solution would involve introducing illicit enrichment offences or identifying kleptocratic networks in a similar way that terrorist networks are.

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