Scots firms ‘being used to launder dirty money from Russia’

●Demand for crackdown as concerns grow in wake of nerve agent attack

Prime Minister Theresa May has been warned she must take action over controversial Scottish shell companies used to funnel hundreds of millions of pounds out of former Soviet countries in the wake of the nerve agent attack blamed on Vladimir Putin’s government.

Scottish Limited Partnerships have been condemned as a legal means to facilitate organised crime, money laundering and tax evasion, with thousands set up using ordinary addresses in Scotland through 100-year-old legislation.

Demands for financial penalties on Russia in the wake of the Salisbury attack have focused on the so-called Magnitsky Amendment, seeking restrictions on individuals suspected of human rights abuses.

However, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford said SLPS could no longer be ignored as scrutiny falls on wealthy Russians sheltering their assets in the UK.

The call came as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson faced embarrassment after admitting that he played a game of tennis with the wife of a former Russian minister who donated £160,000 to the Conservatives.

Lubov Chernukhin – a long-standing donor – bid for the game at a fundraising auction at a Tory event. The match took place in 2014, when Mr Johnson was mayor of London.

Mr Johnson said yesterday there should not be a “miasma of suspicion on all Russians” and insisted the donation was “not a matter for me”.

In presidential elections yesterday, Mr Putin secured a landslide victory, but turnout fell on 2012 numbers in an election that featured no major opposition candidates.

Mr Blackford has written to the Prime Minister calling on her to bring together party leaders and impose new restrictions on SLPS, which are operated under financial regulations reserved to Westminster.

He told The Scotsman: “Now is the time for the UK government to show that it is serious and finally take the tough action needed.”

One SLP registered in Glasgow was used to transfer £160 million out of Russia last year. A network of 21 SLPS was involved in a billion-dollar fraud that siphoned money worth more than a tenth of Moldova’s GDP from the former Soviet republic’s banks.

While SLPS and most of their users are legal, they have been linked to

Vladimir Putin looks set to be Russia’s president for six more years as an exit poll and early returns last night suggested he had easily won a fourth term.

The vote was tainted by widespread reports of ballotbox stuffing and forced voting, but the complaints are likely to do little to undermine Mr Putin.

The Russian leader’s popularity remains high despite his suppression of dissent and reproach from the West over Russia’s increasingly aggressive stance in world affairs and alleged interference in the 2016 US election.

Mr Putin’s main challenges in the vote were to obtain a huge margin of victory in order to claim an indisputable mandate. The Central Elections Commission said he won about 72 per cent of the vote, based on a count of 22 per cent of the country’s precincts.

Russian authorities sought to ensure a large turnout to bolster the image that Mr Putin’s socalled “managed democracy” is robust and offers Russians true choices.

He faced seven minor candidates on the ballot. His most vehement and visible foe, anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, was rejected as a candidate because he was convicted of fraud in a case widely regarded as politically motivated.

Mr Navalny and his supporters called for an election boycott but the extent of its success could not immediately be gauged.

The election took place on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, one of the most dramatic manifestations of Mr Putin’s drive to reassert Russia’s power.