Butler to the World: The Book the Oligarchs Don't Want You to Read - How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away With Anything by Oliver Bullough

Author:Oliver Bullough [Bullough, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, White Collar Crime, History, Europe, Great Britain, 20th Century, Political Science, Corruption & Misconduct
ISBN: 9781250281937
Google: abI9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: St.Martin's
Published: 2022-06-14T20:54:00+00:00

* * *

Partnerships are a very ancient instrument and for centuries existed only in the common law established by judicial decisions, but the Victorians codified them in an 1890 act which contained seventeen words that would a century or so later cause all the trouble: “in Scotland a firm is a legal person distinct from the partners of whom it is composed.” The law does not say why a Scottish partnership (and from 1907, when they were introduced, a limited partnership) was different from a partnership in England, Ireland or Wales, or give any details about what that meant, but those seventeen words established a distinction that would prove extremely costly for Moldova’s national bank and extremely profitable for the bank robbers and their butler.

There were only a few hundred Scottish limited partnerships in existence for most of the twentieth century, and they were largely used to hold agricultural tenancies because they allowed Scottish landlords to deprive tenants of rights. Like all partnerships, SLPs had no obligation to publish the kind of financial accounts that companies have to, and were not themselves taxed; any money flowed through to the partners, who paid tax as individuals. Unlike partnerships elsewhere in the United Kingdom, however—thanks to those seventeen words—SLPs could own property, enter into contracts, sue or be sued and generally behave like a company. And because the liability of partners in SLPs could be limited, as with a company but unlike in a traditional partnership, they only risked the money they had specifically invested, rather than everything they owned. If the venture went bankrupt, the rest of their assets were not at risk. No disclosure, no taxes, no drawbacks, no risks: this gave SLPs the “Heads I win, tails you lose” quality so appreciated by very wealthy people looking to structure their business affairs in the most profitable way. And the qualities that appealed to Scotland’s largest landowners also, as it turned out, appealed to Eastern Europe’s most sophisticated money launderers.

Leask was not the only investigator exploring the strange world of SLPs, or the only one finding it hard to do so. SLPs were difficult to probe because, unlike the corporate registrations I found at 29 Harley Street, the documents relating to limited partnership were filed on the Companies House website as images, rather than entered as data. That meant if you wanted to analyze the documents, you had to read each entry individually; data mining software was useless. That was not only time consuming and frustrating but, at the time, expensive. Obtaining the documents related to every SLP would have cost more than £6,000. Richard Smith, however, ran through what he could and revealed a situation even more worrying than anyone had thought.

He calculated that if you picked a random SLP from the register you would be more likely than not to find one owned by anonymous offshore companies, registered at a nondescript house somewhere in Scotland, perfectly designed for financial crime. Some 80 percent of all SLPs created in the previous eight years were on exactly this pattern.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.