A friend in London provides services to the super-rich, some of them Russian. He wears lovely suits, works from a patrician address and can play up his private-school accent to impress clients. Though always law-abiding himself, he’d never be so vulgar as to ask clients if they had ever stolen, say, Russian mineral wealth. I suspect he’s now going through his client list in a panic.
Who are London’s enablers, and how do they justify themselves? In 1992, a Russian named Alex walked into a Hamptons estate agents in Kensington and bought flats in cash, for between £200,000 and £320,000 each. This was probably “the first sale of London property to private buyers from the ex-USSR in modern British history”, writes Oliver Bullough in Moneyland. Then Londongrad mushroomed.
