But the financier’s real qualification for office seems to be the accruement of a fortune so great that it enabled him to donate £147,500 to the Tories. So now he has been given a lovely lifetime place in parliament to rule over us with a peerage, plus the added bonus of a ministerial job with all those nice perks of office and status.

Offord will find himself in good company in the House of Lords. The Financial Times last year worked out that the elevation of billionaire Tory benefactor Michael Spicer made him the 22^nd former donor to be given a peerage in 13 years. Between them, they had given more than £50m to the three main parties.

Boris Johnson displays a special fondness for placing pals and party donors in the upper chamber; such folk comprise about one quarter of the people he has ennobled. The prime minister even overruled the appointments’ commission to force disgraced former party treasurer Peter Cruddas into the Lords. Lo and behold, the grateful new peer bunged another half a million into Tory coffers a few days after taking up his seat.

Yet Britons like to believe their country is not corrupt, preferring to lecture others on good governance. The harsh truth is the House of Lords, an archaic institution stuffed with people who bought seats or inherited titles, serves as a grotesque symbol of the blatant corruption that stains our nation. Instead of hiding the fact that well-connected people can buy power and influence, we hand them fancy titles, silly crests and scarlet robes.

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Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

Perhaps this is part of the same deluded exceptionalism that makes many Britons believe their empire was less brutal, damaging and greedy than others. Yet once again, we see how Britain is being built on foundations of stolen loot, led by the City of London as its accountants, bankers, estate agents, financiers and lawyers wash mountains of dirty cash for the planet’s dodgiest people. Another scandal has broken with the Pandora Papers, the latest massive cache of leaked papers, giving a glimpse into the hidden wealth, tax dodging and money laundering of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. And with sickening inevitably, we see once again how our nation sits at the epicentre of these tawdry activities.

Take the revelations about the Aliyevs, the ruling family of oil-rich Azerbaijan which is led by a friend of Prince Andrew and has been home to huge British investment. When I visited Baku in 2012, I met an astonishingly brave woman called Khadija Ismayilova, who has endured blackmail, been filmed on hidden cameras having sex in her home and been imprisoned on trumped-up charges to stop her exposing corruption.

Another activist told me why he always locked his car: “Not just to stop people taking things but to stop the police planting drugs or a weapon.” Now we learn that a network of offshore companies tied to this gruesome family and its close associates has traded almost £400m of UK property over the past 15 years — including flogging a £67m property to the Queen’s crown estate.

Yet this is an autocratic regime frequently condemned for its nefarious activities that include rigged elections. Ismayilova and other journalists risked their liberty to fight for the democratic values we claim to espouse, revealing how their first family benefitted from state contracts awarded through hidden shell companies — including the £177m showpiece Crystal Hall used for the Eurovision Song Contest, which gave me cover to enter the country as a journalist. The European Union and human rights groups have condemned the “widespread and pervasive” corruption that scars Azerbaijan. Yet the Aliyevs were not stopped from buying and selling many lucrative properties in Kensington, Knightsbridge and Mayfair. One purchase was even made through an offshore company owned by the ruler’s son when he was 11.

Again, these sleazy disclosures cut deep into the heart of the UK establishment. They include one Russian businessman whose companies have backed 34 Tory MPs and made millions from an allegedly corrupt Russian pipeline deal, while another prominent Tory donor who backed Johnson’s leadership campaign was reportedly involved in one of Europe’s biggest corruption scandals. Only last month it emerged that George Osborne won business from a firm run by Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin and banned from the United States. It came through his friendship with the firm’s chairman Lord Barker, a former Tory minister in the coalition given a life peerage.

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Similarly, half of Russian money-laundering involves Britain while our lawyers earn fortunes from their oligarchs fighting legal battles in London’s courts. No wonder Putin sees the West as so weak. The Pandora Papers show how even Raffaele Amato — the mobster tied to a dozen murders who inspired the gangster TV show Gomorrah — was able to use a shell company registered in the UK to buy property.

Five years ago, David Cameron hosted a landmark anti-corruption summit in London that underlined the self-deception — just a few weeks before losing the Brexit ballot and going off to lobby for Lex Greensill. We pour vast sums in aid into combating corruption around the world, then ignore how much of it is stolen by repulsive regimes.

The current chancellor Rishi Sunak seems complacent, claiming Britain’s track record on tackling money laundering is “very strong” while promoting freeports, So is it any wonder the Government does so little to stem the flow of dirty money, let alone shut down the tax havens under our jurisdiction that do so much harm to the world? Looters and thieves need help to stash their stolen cash. And according to the Tax Justice Network, the three places that do most to support such practices are the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda — all of which come under our flag. An analysis of these latest documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found 956 companies in offshore havens tied to 336 leaders, politicians and senior officials — with more than two-thirds set up in the British Virgin Islands.

Westminster could stop providing cover for crooks, despots and dodgy oligarchs with ease, if it were not so complicit. The Government has repeatedly pledged to bring in a register of the owners of the 100,000 offshore-owned properties; instead, we discover former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie saved themselves £312,000 in stamp duty using such tactics. The National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit has an annual budget of about £4m — which one quarter of the sum spent by its target, Zamira Hajiyeva, wife of a fraudulent Azerbaijani banker, in Harrods on jewellery and designer clothes. Needless to say, her £15m Knightsbridge home was owned by a company based in the British Virgin Islands.

Meanwhile, governments encourage City advisory firms to spread like knotweed in the undergrowth of Whitehall, where they rake off big sums from taxpayers even as they advise plutocrats and multinationals how to avoid paying fair dues to the exchequer. The “Big Four” accountancy firms have been accused by parliament of using expertise from staff seconded to the Treasury to help clients avoid tax. But as the civil service was cut back, ministers increased use of these consultancies. The pandemic boosted their earnings again as normal rules on tendering were ditched. So we see a firm such as Mckinsey pay out fines over links to a destructive South African corruption scandal and its lethal role in the US opioid addiction crisis, yet its advisers are still hired on hefty daily rates by Whitehall.

More from this author

The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

Britain needs to wake up. The mother of democracy has given birth to a system that aids kleptocrats and thieves. And as the famous saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. When appointing his latest minister, Johnson claimed he scoured the country for the best talent and gave Offord the job and peerage because he had “a huge amount to offer”. Few will be fooled.

The Prime Minister’s words drip with contempt for all those artists, carers, doctors, factory workers, retailers, teachers, scientists and soldiers who might contribute far more to the benefit of our nation in return for the £323 attendance allowance in the Lords — a tax-free daily sum roughly the same as the weekly minimum wage. Behind our facade of democracy, led by such a selfish and soiled elite, lies a country hideously stained with corruption.

It’s not cheap to buy secrecy, not by ordinary standards. If you set up a company offshore, it will cost you hundreds of pounds – a British Virgin Islands vehicle is more like £1,000 – and if you use that company to own UK property, you’ll be liable for a special “enveloped dwellings” tax of up to £226,950 a year. However, if you don’t mind paying those fees, the secrecy you’ve bought is world class.

In this way, it’s easy for the rich and the powerful to hide their wealth behind shell companies, and thus buy protection from public scrutiny. In this way money-laundering operations are allowed to undermine the foundations of Western stability. In order to stop this happening, I think we should give them anonymity free.

The latest Government spreadsheet reveals that there are 96,693 properties owned by offshore companies in England and Wales, held everywhere from Abu Dhabi (five properties) and Alderney (44 properties) to Wyoming (19 properties) and Zimbabwe (three properties). The most favoured jurisdictions are of course the tax havens that everyone knows about – Panama, Switzerland, the Seychelles, Jersey, Luxembourg and the rest of them – but dozens of less likely countries appear on the list too.

Further reading

Time's up for the Big Four

By Liam Halligan

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it does not necessarily cost the exchequer money. The majority of those companies owning UK property will be entirely innocent: many investment funds prefer to hold their properties offshore, which is just how the globalised economy works. And they’re all paying their enveloped dwellings tax too.

But hiding among the pension funds and embassies are some very worrying people indeed. Take 28, Wilton Place, in Belgravia, for example. This is owned by Ocral Enterprises Ltd, of Panama, and the person who owns that company is a secret held by whatever lawyer created it. Media reports tell us that this was (or, perhaps, still is) the London home of Gamal Mubarak, son of the former dictator of Egypt, though other companies suggest it is owned by an Omani businessman.

If it is owned by the Mubarak family, that means this handsome terraced property, just a gentle stroll away from Hyde Park, was almost certainly bought with money stolen from the Egyptian people. And this house is not alone, other offshore-owned properties are linked to Russian politicians, Nigerian governors, illegal arms dealers, Kazakh ex-spooks, as well as thieves and crooks from all over the world.

Further reading

Left behind – life beyond the London bubble

By James Bloodworth

The London property market is perhaps the single most favoured destination for kleptocrats to stash the money that they’ve stolen. Whole chunks of our capital city have become a scaled-up, multi-billion-pound version of the Kingsland Road electronics shops that specialise in selling iphones nicked from tourists in the West End. But at least police officers can keep an eye on these shops and, by watching who is going in and out, make a direct connection between the thief and his fence. The offshore holding companies, however, obscure what’s happening, and make law enforcement’s task far harder. Where ordinary crimes have just two phases – steal, then spend – kleptocracy gains an extra one. Before the kleptocrat spends the money he has stolen, he obscures his ownership of it: steal, hide, spend.

He steals a fortune in the country he rules, hides it offshore, then spends it in London. Perhaps as much as a trillion dollars are stolen every year from the world’s poorest countries in this way – money that could be spent on medicines, roads, education or security, but is instead going into high-end property, luxury goods and lawyers’ fees.

The world has a truly parlous record of tracking down this stolen wealth, confiscating it and returning it to its true owners. Kleptocrats can retain top-end lawyers, and fight through the courts in every jurisdiction they’ve use to obscure their fortune. Former Ukrainian prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko was arrested in the United States back in 1999, tried and jailed for corruption, and yet – almost two decades on – his assets are still out there hiding in the well-protected country of the mega-rich that I call ‘Moneyland’. If even the US authorities struggle to extract stolen assets from behind Moneyland’s offshore ramparts, it’s not surprising less-resourced countries can’t either.

Further reading

Nomi Prins: The central banking heist has put the world at risk

By Liam Halligan

For every $1,000 stolen each year, and stashed offshore, perhaps as little as 25 cents is ever confiscated. That means that, thanks to the offshore structures available in Moneyland, grand corruption is basically a one-way bet for the clever kleptocrat.

The damage that the looting of the world is doing to the structure of civilisation is obvious. The Nigerian and Ukrainian states are so enfeebled by corruption they have lost control of whole provinces. The Kremlin elite has mastered offshore skulduggery in its aggressive efforts to steal fortunes, and to prevent the rest of the world uniting against it. Insiders in the Venezuelan regime have made billions from the black market in their own currency, stashing the proceeding in Miami real estate, while ordinary people are struggling to buy food or medicine.

If you are a believer in the values that Western civilisation claims to be based on, then there is no upside to the secrecy available offshore for those willing to pay for it. So why do I think it should be available for free?

The problem is that there are and will always be people with a legitimate need for anonymity. Back in 2016, the Panama Papers leak revealed that Emma Watson – the actress who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films – had used a BVI company to own London property. Her reasons for doing so were entirely understandable: she has been plagued by stalkers and didn’t want her name and address available on the Land Registry. There are thousands of others out there like her, who would be placed at risk if their names were revealed.

Further reading

China is playing the West for fools

By Isabel Hilton

Under my proposal, these people would be able to essentially go ex-directory, to make sure their address was a secret between them and the Land Registry, and only available beyond that to people with a good reason for knowing it. Right now, only those who can afford it can access anonymity, but it should also be available to anyone at risk.

Once we have established a system where those with a legitimate right to anonymity can secure it, we can strip away everything else. Under the current system, kleptocrats can keep their property ownership secret not just from the public but also from the authorities; this must end. As soon as crooks and thieves are no longer able to conceal their ownership offshore, they’ll be reduced to the status of thieves trying to flog iphones in Hackney, the link between their crime and their expenditure will be obvious and overt, making their prosecution far more straightforward.

If Britain truly wishes to drive dirty money out of its economy, it needs a whole new approach to ownership information, where transparency is the default option. This simple reform would prevent the looting of some of the most vulnerable places in the world, and do more long-term good than our aid budget.

Moneyland: Why Thieves & Crooks Now Rule The World & How to Take It Back, by Oliver Bullough, is published by Profile Books

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