When four protesters occupied the London mansion owned by the family of Russian oligarch and freshly sanctioned billionaire Oleg Deripaska, it didn't take long for the police to arrive.
The street was cordoned off, dozens of officers fronted with riot shields and helmets, and a crane was shipped in to try and coax the squatters down from the balcony of one of London's most opulent homes.
The activists said they wanted to "liberate" the Deripaska property and hand it over to Ukrainian refugees.
The protest occurred just a few days after the oligarch had his assets frozen in the UK due to his ties to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin.
Australia sanctioned the billionaire for the same reasons.
The urgency of the counter-squatter operation was in stark contrast to the snail-like pace that UK authorities have pursued allegations of “dirty money” from Russia entering London, raised in the Moscow's Gold report published by the UK Parliament in 2018.
The irony was not lost on Tom Keatinge, director of Financial Crime and Security Studies at RUSI.
"I think somebody commented that there were 20 policemen there that day," he told the ABC.
"And that's 20 more policemen than had paid any attention to [this issue] in the last 20 years."
Mr Deripaska has vigorously denied all allegations of financial crimes.
He has called for an end to the war in Ukraine.
However, he is now one of over 1,000 individuals and entities hit by UK sanctions since Russia invaded Ukraine due to being "closely associated with the government of Russia and Vladimir Putin".
Included in the sanctions list was the owner of Chelsea FC Roman Abramovich, a Putin favourite who bought the Premier League team in 2003 and helped deliver 21 trophies to the London club he will now be forced to sell.
The UK government's Office of Financial Sanctions describes Mr Abramovich as being "involved in destabilising Ukraine and undermining and threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine" via a steel company he had a 29 per cent shareholding in.
The company has denied it provides material for Russian tanks.
These Russian billionaires, and others of their ilk, have not just been favourites of the Kremlin.
They have been given the red carpet treatment by British governments for more than two decades.
How a 'golden visa' let Russian money flow in
The flood of Russian money into London can be traced to the introduction of the "golden visa" scheme in the UK in 1994.
That system allowed the mega-rich from Russia and beyond into the UK if they had a British bank account and could invest at least $AUD3.5 million in the UK.
Labour MP Chris Bryant has been an outspoken critic of the scheme that was abolished last month.
"If you could show that you have £2 million ($3.5 million) or £5 million ($8.8 million) or £10 million ($17.7 million) to invest, you didn't have to prove where it came from," he told the ABC.
About 2,500 Russians were granted "golden visas", including Roman Abramovich.
Tom Keatinge thinks the Russians who moved to the UK weren't just buying property.
"That money has also found its way into society — the sponsorship of cultural events, the sponsorship of academic organisations and indeed into the pockets of the Conservative party [in the form of donations] as well," he said.
"It's not just a criminal issue for the UK, it's become a national security issue because this money has essentially sought to influence the country from the inside."
The UK tries to fix its Russian money problem
Mr Keatinge had been warning the government since 2014 of the dangers of Russian money flooding into London.
It's only now, after President Putin launched his war in Ukraine, that the government has taken broader measures to deal with illicit wealth from Russia.
In March, the House of Commons passed a law aimed at cracking down on the system that allowed wealthy elites to buy property through overseas shell companies and hide their assets.
Despite the Economic Crime and Transparency Bill's good intentions, Mr Keatinge said it has been rushed.
"It's a bit of a botched job," he said.
"It's got a lot of loopholes in it, and we're already being promised a second Economic Crime Act later in the year to fill in the gaps and fix the flaws."
It's not as if the source of Russian oligarchs' wealth has not been known about for years.
Many made their money before Vladimir Putin was even in power.
Russia's 90s gold rush
After the fall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Russia had its own unique version of a gold rush.
Under President Boris Yeltsin, state-owned assets were privatised and businessmen with the inside running became instant billionaires at the expense of Russian taxpayers.
Bill Browder, an American financier who was once Russia's largest foreign investor, has described the state sanctioned plundering that created the system of oligarchs as, in his view, "an orgy of stealing, which was unprecedented in the history of business".
After Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, Mr Browder said the oligarchs were issued an ultimatum: They could continue to run their businesses if they stayed out of politics and provided funds when required.
If they didn't take that threat seriously, they soon found reason to.
Russia's then-richest man, the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed for eight years for tax and fraud charges after he made the mistake of raising issues of corruption with President Putin.
Mr Putin consolidated his power.
He picked old friends from his days as a KGB agent and installed them into positions of power in state-run companies, creating his own class of oligarchs — politically and fraternally aligned and dependent on him for their expanding wealth.
After the Russian financial crisis of 1998, during which the country defaulted on its debts, several banks collapsed and the rouble lost 60 per cent of its value, the oligarchs had realised they could not safely invest their money at home.
As the UK opened up as a financial hub, Russian money increasingly flowed into the UK, through property, football teams, high-end department stores and the British private school system.
The city, in some circles, started to be referred to jokingly as "Londongrad".
The "golden visa" policy came at a cost.
In a recent report, Transparency International identified that at least $2.6 billion worth of properties in the UK were owned by Russians accused of financial crime or who have links to the Kremlin.
Much of those homes are at ritzy London addresses such as Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Belgravia.
Why did the UK fail to act for so long?
The UK has had plenty of opportunities to shut down the flow of cash from Russia.
Many thought that action would come in 2018, after the cathedral city of Salisbury was the scene of an assassination attempt on former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal.
The British Government said it was "overwhelmingly likely" that President Putin personally ordered the hit, a claim Russia has denied.
Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok that had been developed by the Russian state and was later used in the attempted murder of opposition politician Alexei Navalny.
The poison had been smeared on the door handle at the Skripal family home.
That same year, Tom Keatinge contributed to a parliamentary report titled "Moscow's Gold" in which he called on the government to end "the flow of dirty money into the UK", and "sanction more Kremlin-connected individuals."
The report did not suggest any individual mentioned in this article was connected with the "flow of dirty money", though it did note that Mr Deripaska had been placed on a sanctions list by the US in 2018 .
But despite the nerve agent attack on British soil, the crackdown never happened, much to Mr Keatinge's frustration.
"The concerns that I raised and indeed a very senior group of MPs in the Foreign Affairs Committee raised in 2018 were just overlooked, kicked into the long grass, and I'm afraid that chicken has come back to roost," he said.
In 2018, a system of unexplained wealth orders was introduced so that a person could be compelled to explain how they owned property they did not appear to have the funds to legally afford.
But in the four years after they were introduced, the new laws have only been used in four cases, none involving Russian oligarchs.
In February, Chris Bryant used parliamentary privilege to reveal that nearly three years ago the Home Office had identified Roman Abramovich as someone who had links to the Russian state and to "corrupt activity and practices."
"I have hold of a leaked document from 2019, from the Home Office, which says in relation to Mr Abramovich: '... [He] remains of interest to [Her Majesty's government] due to his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices," Mr Bryant told the House of Commons.
"An example of this is Abramovich admitting in court proceedings that he paid for political influence."
Mr Bryant has told the ABC he is stunned that the government didn't act on that advice back in 2019.
"I cannot comprehend why. The Conservative government here has been so slow on all these different elements," he said.
"They've known all about this for a very long time and done absolutely nothing."
Roman Abramovich has long denied having close links to Mr Putin.
"Mr Abramovich has never been charged with participating in money laundering and does not have a criminal record," his lawyer said in 2018.
Questions raised about Tories and Russian money
In recent years, the Conservative Party has been the beneficiary of large political donations of money from individuals with Russian links.
The British Labour Party has estimated that close to $3.5 million has been given to the Conservative Party or its constituent associations from donors linked to Russia since Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019.
Labour MP Chris Bryant wants an investigation into the relationship between the Conservatives and Russian money.
"I think there are some people in Britain, and in particular, in the Conservative Party, who [saw] dollar signs or rouble signs or pound signs or whatever. And no questions asked," he said.
"I want an investigation into that whole nexus."
