To impress the English you must be overly kind to dogs and horses, extremely wealthy, or gushingly enthusiastic about football. Abramovich was at least two of these. Previously unknown outside of Russia, his purchase of Chelsea FC in 2003 made him England’s favourite oligarch.

He stood for all the others. Like them, Abramovich bought Francis Bacons, yachts, and football clubs. He was expensively divorced. He purchased a Kensington townhouse for 90 million pounds, then plotted grandiose subterranean extensions to it. His security detail were told they were not allowed to bring firearms into the West London private schools his shoal of children swam through. His weirdly thin background, like his face, was enigmatic. His trajectory — from penniless orphan, to middling rubber duck salesman, to billionaire tycoon — mirrored the unlikely CVs and fluke-strewn ascents of so many mega-wealthy products of Russia’s insane Nineties. Unlike Abramovich though, many of his old rivals and partners from that time met… abnormal ends.

But so what? Abramovich entered London high society when views of Putin’s Russia were charged with hopeless optimism. Putin, wrote Neal Acheson in 2004, was an “agent of sweeping change”. His reforms might one day make “a relatively law-abiding and governable Russia” a fact, rather than a dream. In the academy, favourable verdicts (grandly blessed by Perry Anderson in 2015) rained down on Russia. It was a vibrant, investor-friendly middle-income country; it was a respectable member of OECD; it was less statist in its control of energy markets than Brazil! Abramovich then, was an envoy from a developing country, not a one-man image-softening operation sent from an anguished, ramshackle, authoritarian state, still held together and animated by the most salient, deathless force in Russian political history — imperial ambition.

These wonky arguments added a watery academic gloss to London’s embrace of Russians like Abramovich. Ever since John Major’s Conservatives introduced ‘Golden Visas’ that fished for millionaire investors in the Nineties, every British government, and London Mayors Johnson and Livingstone, had courted Russian money. A butler class formed to enthusiastically count the cash.

Behind the biscuit tin version of London — Union Jacks on the Mall, Notting Hill selfies, and recumbent deer in Richmond Park — was a bleaker reality. To arrive here from Russia was to find networks of bankers, estate agents, accountants, wealth managers, PR flacks, politicians, and a legal system all eager to take your money, over-educate your children, Harley Street your wife, Isle of Man your taxes, gag journalists, and angelify your reputation.

None of them cared where the money came from. London could bury your secrets for you. “This country’s nothing but an off-shore laundry”, spits Logan Roy in Succession, “for turning evil into hard currency.”

That quiet part was rarely said out loud. The English are a discreet and sentimental people after all. In 2005, Ken Livingstone, at a Westminster address to 1,200 Russian political and business leaders, invoked the “warmth and sympathy” the English felt for their old wartime ally against Hitler. Sympathy was a sound basis for deal-making: “Russians,” he said, “are welcome in this city, both as individuals and for the business that they bring.” Since 1998, according to anti-money laundering groups, around a hundred billion pounds of Russian money has washed through London, and into property and commodities. The welcome was accepted.

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If Livingstone represented the grasping yet oddly dewy-eyed side of Londongrad’s rise, his successor articulated the jokey cynicism the English felt towards the oligarchs. Boris Johnson was just as enthusiastic about Russian money as Livingstone, but prepared to laugh — like so many other toff-adjacent Brits — at Russian vulgarity too. In 2012 he urged oligarchs to flood London’s courts with libel actions. “If one oligarch feels defamed by another oligarch, it is London’s lawyers who apply the necessary balm to the ego,” he told the CBI’s annual conference that year. “I have no shame in saying to the injured spouses of the world’s billionaires: if you want to take him to the cleaners, take him to the cleaners in London…”

It was like a joke. Except the estranged wives and litigious oligarchs were components of Putin’s increasingly despotic regime. The key figures of Russian state capitalism, who were now building nests in London, had begun the 2000s calling the President Mr Putin. Then they called him Boss. Then — another joke, at least to begin with — Tsar. Abramovich found ways to deal with Putin. Against a backdrop where oligarchs were assassinated, exiled and imprisoned, the Chelsea owner did everything he could in order to keep himself safe.

The pair were close. Just how close was revealed by Abramovich’s successful defence of a landmark high court claim brought by his fellow oligarch and mentor Boris Berezovsky in 2012. “Mr Abramovich enjoyed very good relations with President Putin and others in power at the Kremlin,” the judgement recorded. “It was also clear that Mr Abramovich had privileged access to President Putin, in the sense that he could arrange meetings and discuss matters with him.”

That somebody who had folded so neatly into the scrim of English life — celebrated on Stamford Bridge’s terraces to the tune of the Only Fools And Horses theme, lunching on his yacht with Sir Paul McCartney — was so close to a despot ought to have caused alarm. The press preferred to write about his fleet of supercars, his record-breaking transfer deals, and a floated West End musical about Abramovich’s life. The Premier League’s attitude was summed up by its then chief executive, Richard Scudamore: “Football is not a business but a sport dependent on… speculation… there’ll always be rich men ready to pour more money into clubs just to be part of the game.”

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Abramovich was not on equal terms with Putin, even as he became lauded in London. He was a boyar to Putin’s Tsar. “I don’t think there is a percent of independence in him”, said one analyst who knew Abramovich in the Nineties. He was just like the others. The oligarchs’ power and privilege was theoretical, and utterly dependent on Putin. He could ruin them on a whim, as he did to Boris Berezovsky soon after he came to power. The truth was that the oligarchs were more like hostages than independent actors, more like courtiers than policy-makers, and more driven by venality than belief. Putin made them dependents, and walked them over a plank with a very deep drop.

Perhaps English politicians such as Johnson and Livingstone thought men like Abramovich could be moderated by the West, and could help to remake Russia in its image, as the academics thought was already happening. None chose to see the umbilical cords that ran back to the Kremlin. As the 2000s passed into the 2010s, it looked like the West was becoming as corrupt and irrational and nihilistic as Russia, rather than bringing Russia in line with its rules based system. “It was as if a virus,” wrote Catherine Belton in Putin’s People, “was being injected into it.”

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Now the virus is burning itself out. Two weeks of war have forced British politicians to shift 30 years of oligarch-tickling policy. They would no longer be able to take whatever they wanted. Abramovich has been hit with sanctions ranging from asset freezes to travel bans. Johnson says there will be no “safe havens” for Putin allies, not even in London’s courts. Yesterday’s West End final edition of the Evening Standard: “ROMAN’S EMPIRE IN RUINS.” Discarded copies, with crumpled Abramovich faces staring blankly out from them drifted through Berkeley Square.

Given his wealth and notoriety, Abramovich barely left a paw print on English life. Yes, he increased the bank balance of butler class functionaries; yes he will most probably leave Chelsea, his plaything and ornament, tarnished. But his wallflower shyness and refusal to be interviewed make him a ghost. Just as he reportedly moved through his A-List New Years Eve parties on St Barts barely saying anything, Abramovich’s time in England will be defined by his silences not his actions. He will not be ruined though. So much of his wealth is stored off-shore in secret bank accounts that there will always be a fallback for him.

Londongrad will be rebranded, and its lackeys will find new clients. Money from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and above all China will need to be laundered. Their tycoons will need crisis PR. Their powerful urges to litigate against each other will need to be satiated. Other Romans are here already. They keep buying football clubs. Not even war will break London’s filthy habits.

Londongrad may be where Russian oligarchs go for their financial transactions of various legitimacy, but La Belle France is where they play. Last weekend, France 2’s Journal, a TV news show given more to sobriety than sensationalism, took its viewers on a visual tour of how Russia’s new rich live it up locally, from the ski chalet in Courchevel to the Cap-quelque-chose-ou-autre summer house. What stuck on the retina — and in the French craw — were the pontoons running into the bright blue sea so that the oligarchs could park their yachts.

And what yachts! Amore Vero, owned by Igor Sechin, head of the Russian state oil company Rosneft, has a Thunderbirds-esque swimming pool that turns into a helipad. Worth £90 million, the Amore Vero has now been seized by French customs in a night-time raid on a dockyard near Marseille. “He is one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted and closest advisers, as well as his personal friend”, the accompanying EU sanction notice alleges.

Some years ago, The Hollywood Reporter, covering the Cannes film festival, happened to ask a local estate agent how many ultra-rich Russians there were on the French Riviera. He estimated 20,000 of them. “They bring their funny money from Russia through Cypress into the Riviera. They’ve kept the market moving for 10 years. So they can be a little thuggish — who cares?” In a detail one would blush to make up, the secretive Kremlin billionaire Suleiman Kerimov (the subject of a long-running tax evasion and money laundering investigation by the French authorities) is believed to own the sumptuous villa on the Cap d’Antibes used in the Michael Caine movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

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The Med may be the place for Putin’s friends, but the family and the real intimates head to Biarritz for their holidays. France’s glittering south-west coast has been irresistible to rich Russians since the middle of the 19th century. (It was once dubbed the “queen of resorts and the resort of kings.”) Flunkies of the imperial court came both for the climate and for the coddling offered by the beach-side Hôtel du Palais, originally built in the 1850s for the French Empress Eugénie. And it was in Biarritz that the then-head of the Federal Security Service received an urgent phone call from Boris Yeltsin, in the Summer 1999, asking him to become prime minister.

Around the same time Putin accepted the rule of all the existing Russias, and those to be regained, the Kremlin appointed an honorary vice consul in Biarritz, a town of less than 30,000 people. Nearby Bordeaux, France’s seventh largest city, received no diplomatic outpost. “It was because Putin’s circle has an affection for this place,” admitted the man selected for the job, otherwise known as biographer Alexandre de Miller de La Cerda. The “To Do” list of the Kremlin’s man in Biarritz has included hosting debutante balls in the casino for the children of the Russian elite — an opportunity for Putin’s courtiers to feel like the heirs to the czarist aristocracy. Indeed, a sojourn in Biarritz is an attempt to confer class and legitimacy on Russian’s nouveau riche.

As one might expect, the Putins are tight-lipped about their property holdings in Biarritz, though various news agencies have identified at least three, beginning with the villa located at 9, rue de la Frégate (the street once home to Igor Stravinsky), in the town centre, bought in 1996 for around $400,000. The title deed is in the name of one of Putin’s daughters. According to Time magazine, in 2012 another Putin daughter bought a property in the town with her husband, Kirill Shamalov, an oil-executive reputed to be worth $1.25 billion. (He is also one of the founders of Bank Rossiya, which the US Treasury Department identified in 2014 as the “personal bank” for Putin and his close associates.) The seller of the property was oil trader Gennady Timchenko, one of Putin’s oldest friends.

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What’s wrong with buying a few holiday homes? Well, as a civil servant of the Russian state, Putin was barred in 1996 from taking money out of the country. He was also officially only earning circa $1,000 a month. Currently, the self-described “galley slave” ascetically proclaims no individual wealth at all, beyond a small plot of land, a modest pension pot, three Russian cars, a couple of homely apartments, and a Skif M1 trailer tent. Lyudmila Putin’s financial records, filed during her marriage to Putin, show only relatively miniscule sums. She supposedly earned just 121,000 rubles ($3,800) during the whole of 2012. The following year, Villa Suzanna was purchased in her name and that of her new husband, the head of a non-profit with no known money. The villa had been on the market for around £5 million.

“Luxury property is a preferred means of laundering money stemming from corruption or embezzlement of public funds”, Sara Brimbeuf of Transparency International France told France 24 News. When Time magazine asked Father Panteleimon, the priest at the Russian Orthodox Church in Biarritz, about the Kremlin elites who visited his parish, he replied: “what they do here just doesn’t look good.” Nor does it look good to French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who has created a “task force” of customs officers, tax officers and ministry officials to draw up a list of oligarch-controlled assets in France and begin seizing them.

Fabien Roussel, the French Communist Party’s personable candidate in the upcoming election for the Élysée, tweeted a suggestion: storm the oligarch’s summer palaces and use them “to welcome refugees from Ukraine”. He got 2,500 likes; he normally gets a hundred. At the capitalist end of the French spectrum, luxury brands Hermès, Chanel and LMVH — all beloved of Russian oligarchs — have announced suspension of activity in Russia itself.

And the EU, of which France currently holds the presidency (and, a cynic would aver, always holds the political reins), has sanctioned 400 times more Russian entities than Downing Street. Le Maire claims that the total amount of Russian assets frozen amount to “almost 1,000 billion dollars”.

“No oligarch will slip through our net”, promises Le Maire, adding that oligarchs’ “partners, their children, their property holding companies” would be affected, “such that they won’t be able to hide behind financial constructs”. Like owning villas.

While Macron’s parlaying with Putin sometimes smacks of appeasement, his fellow Frenchmen are taking a harder line. It’s less Bienvenu à Biarritz, more “Fuck Poutine” — as another local daubing proclaims.

The Government has announced new measures to “flush out the oligarchs, criminals and kleptocrats who think they can use UK property to hide their illicitly obtained wealth”. But let’s be honest: these people don’t “think” they can use UK property in this way — they know they can, which is why they’ve been doing so on a massive scale.

According to the anti-corruption campaigners, Transparency International, £6.7 billion in “questionable funds” have been invested in UK property since 2016 — £1.5 billion of which was bought by Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin. No wonder that London is a described as a “laundromat” for “suspicious wealth”.

Boris Johnson may claim that “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” but, quite obviously, the UK has been — and still is — a place for dirty money. And the Government is now struggling to do anything about it. Yesterday, Keir Starmer confronted the Prime Minister: “Why are we giving Putin’s cronies 18 months to quietly launder their money out of UK property?”

Good question. Back in 2016, the Government hosted a “landmark” anti-corruption summit at Lancaster House in London. David Cameron, Prime Minister at the time, was very clear about what Britain would do: “First, we will expose corruption so there is nowhere to hide.”

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His specific pledge was to create a “new public register of beneficial ownership” for foreign companies operating in the UK. Instead of hiding behind shell companies and other legal smokescreens, “everyone in the world will be able to see who really owns and controls each and every company”. An accompanying press release promised that this “will include companies who already own property in the UK, not just those wishing to buy”. And to emphasise Britain’s leadership on this matter, it was stated that “this will be the first register of its kind anywhere in the world”.

Well, it might have been had ministers got on with the job; but they dawdled. This week, Boris Johnson finally committed his government to the necessary measures. “We are going faster and harder to tear back the façade,” he said. Let’s hope so — because it’s been almost six years since the Tories promised the property register and it hasn’t happened yet.

In 1085, William the Conqueror ordered a Great Survey, which covered every county of England and named over 13,000 places. Yet William’s surveyors completed their work — which became the Domesday Book — in 1086.

It seems ridiculous that its modern-day equivalent should take so much longer. Admittedly, there are nearly 100,000 properties owned by foreign companies in the UK. Establishing their true ownership is no small task. But that’s all the more reason why the effort should have started years ago. Why then was it delayed?

We can’t really blame David Cameron. Hosting the corruption summit was one of his last acts as PM. Can we blame his successor? Did Theresa May drop the idea when she took over? No, it continued as official policy under her administration — and also Boris Johnson’s. Rather, the problem was the glacial pace of implementation. 

There was a consultation 2017, followed by a draft bill — and yet more consultation. In 2018, the Government expressed its intention for the register to be operational by 2021. That deadline was missed. In fact, until the events of last week, the necessary legislation hadn’t even been scheduled. When pressed to do so, ministers just answered that “we will legislate when parliamentary time allows”. 

This week, a panicked Government pulled its finger out and by Tuesday, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill made its long overdue appearance. It’s as if it were already drafted, ready-and-waiting to go — so why did it take Putin’s bloody war to prompt ministers to act?

Some might suspect undue influence, but there’s no need for conspiracy theories. The Government’s inactions are consistent with this country’s general lack of transparency over property ownership. 

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For instance, it should be possible to go to an official website and freely access a map showing exactly who owns every piece of land in the country. But you can’t. For a fee, the Land Registry does provide limited information on individual plots. However, to get this data for the whole of England and Wales would be extortionately expensive. Guy Shrubsole — author of Who Owns England? — puts the cost at £72 million. 

Even then, about a sixth of the land in this country isn’t registered at all. There is no requirement that it has to be, unless sold or inherited. The Government could put this right if wanted to — for instance by requiring registration as a condition of receiving farm subsidies — but it hasn’t. Indeed, far from empowering the Land Registry, there were two attempts (while George Osborne was Chancellor) to flog it off to the highest bidder. Fortunately, the privatisation was cancelled by Osborne’s successor, Philip Hammond.

True transparency isn’t just about who owns the land, but also about who controls it. In particular, we need a public register of land options — legal agreements which give property developers an exclusive right to purchase potential building sites. The urgency is that options enable land-banking — the practice of sewing up the supply of potential building sites so that property developers can ration the supply of new housing to the market.  

In 2016, one Cabinet minister, Sajid Javid, had the guts to condemn the land-bankers. Measures to improve transparency were subsequently proposed. But, true to form, the Government has yet to follow through. In fact, it hasn’t even responded to the public consultation which closed in October 2020. 

It’s as if ministers don’t want to blow the lid on the murky world of British property. And no wonder. Government policy still operates on the basis that escalating property prices are a good thing. And nothing can be allowed to get in the way. For instance, Rishi Sunak wasted billions of pounds on propping up the housing market during the pandemic — when it clearly didn’t need any help.

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Encouraging overseas investment in British property is an integral part of this insane, inflationary obsession. The Tier 1 Investor Visa scheme is a prime example. Introduced under Gordon Brown in 2008, the idea was to dish out visas on the condition that the recipient invested at least a million pounds in the UK economy. Needless to say, no distinction was drawn between job-creating investment and property speculation which only pushes up the cost of housing. 

Last month, after years of criticism, the scheme was finally shut down with “immediate effect”. Apparently, the Government was concerned that the route was being exploited by money launderers and other criminals. Nothing gets past the Home Office.

Of course, I’m not saying that the London property market is entirely sustained by foreign corruption and criminality. Most of the money that flows into it — including overseas sources — is above board.

Yet this is an under-taxed and under-regulated industry that provides an ideal environment for the world’s worst people. And for what? Inflating land values enriches the wealthy, while those without property — especially the young — pay the price. Our economy is weakened and our democracy damaged.

When William I ordered his Great Survey, it was an act of domination — of taking control of a conquered land. A modern-day Domesday Book would be the precise opposite: a means by which we take back control of our own country.