“No one in government cared until the war”: how the UK left it too late to fight financial crime

It’s not like anyone sat down in London and said, ‘how do we attract all this money?’. There isn’t an ‘attract illicit finance to the UK’ strategy department in the Cabinet Office”. Yet over decades of experience monitoring the financial connections between the UK and Russia, Tom Keatinge has seen that whenever our government has had the opportunity to address international money laundering and tax avoidance, “it always seems to have gone in the direction of enabling this to occur. Doors have been left ajar.”