Time to purge London of Putin’s crooked plutocrats

ONE VERY powerful weapon at the UK’s disposal against the Kremlin is a clampdown on property and other assets owned here by Vladimir Putin’s billionaire cronies.

Indeed Whitehall sources last night disclosed that Britain’s ‘FBI’ – the National Crime Agency – is currently drawing up a list of potential UK targets to hit with visa and financial sanctions.

But – in truth – unless the latest development in the Salisbury poisoning brings about a total change of mindset, the threat is likely to be viewed with derision in Moscow.

Since the turn of the millennium, the UK has flung open the gates to a tide of Russian roubles, choosing to ignore the fact that many of them are tainted. This is despite Putin’s incursion into Ukraine in 2014 and the hounding of BP’s chief executive out of Russia, in fear for his safety.

It is true that, after the Skripals were poisoned in March, there have been signs of a tougher approach. Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, was hit by delays to his UK visa application, forced to take out Israeli citizenship and put on ice a billion-pound project to rebuild his stadium.

Yet London remains a honeypot for the billionaires minted out of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. To men who made their piles from that country’s vast oil and mineral reserves, a penthouse in the cosmopolitan British capital, with children installed at elite public schools, is infinitely preferable to the greyness of Novosibirsk.

And London-based banks have for years been ready to act as a sluice for corrupt cash. Britain’s openness to legitimate foreign capital is one of our economy’s great strengths and not all the Russian money that has poured into London is dirty. But campaign group Transparency International estimates that Russians account for £729million of the £4.4billion of property here bought with ‘suspicious wealth’.

In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings, MPs passed the so-called ‘Magnitsky Amendment’, which enables the UK to freeze the assets of those found to commit gross human rights violations, but it has not yet been activated.

Suspected dodgy tycoons can also be slapped with an ‘unexplained wealth order’, forcing them to reveal how they got the cash to buy assets here.

Only two orders have been issued since the powers came into effect earlier this year and neither were for Russians.

Many of these Russians are friends or associates of Putin, including Igor Shuvalov, a high-ranking politician who owns two apartments not far from the Houses of Parliament, purchased for £11.4million, according to Transparency International. The City also plays host to scores of Russian companies which have raised around £140billion here in the last decade.

In Belgravia, aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska roosts in the splendid former home of the famous Conservative politican and diarist Chips Channon.

He is one of the big investors behind aluminium company EN+ Group, which was given clearance late last year to float on the London stock market – despite concerns from MI6. Both he and the company have subsequently been named on US sanctions lists, leaving City watchdogs with red faces.

The latest developments in the Skripal poisoning may be a catalyst for a longoverdue purge. If we are to hit Putin and his allies where it hurts – in the pocket – we will have to get tough on the crooked plutocrats of Londongrad.

YESTERDAY at We s t - minster, Theresa May made perhaps the most momentous statement of her political career.

In a dramatic scene in the Commons, she effectively accused the Russian state of an act of war by instructing its military intelligence agency, the GRU, to assassinate the defector Sergei Skripal in March.

Backed up by a wealth of irrefutable evidence about the two Russian intelligence agents who carried out the assignment, which ultimately resulted in the death of a British citizen and three other serious poisoning cases, May’s assertion has huge implications, not only for Britain’s relations with the rogue Russian regime, but also for European and Western foreign policy as a whole.

The Salisbury incident is truly shocking. It is the first time that a Briton has been killed on our home soil by a chemical weapon deployed by a foreign power. Yet until it happened, Britain seemed utterly indifferent to the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s government.

Crippled

After Putin authorised another wellpublicised assault on British soil in 2006, when ex-Russian secret policeman Alexander Litvinenko was killed with a radioactive poison in London, the initial shock and anger soon fell away to apathy, thanks to the feebleness of our Government’s response.

True, the British authorities were quick to name the Russian suspects, but the speed of this early announcement was not matched by resolute action from the Government.

Huffing and puffing in Whitehall produced half-measures, which can only have reassured the Kremlin and Russian spymasters that they could get away with assassination.

Since then we have all become aware of the litany of charges against Russia, like its seizure of Crimea, its bloodsoaked intervention in Syria on the side of President Assad’s tyranny and its shooting-down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 over rebel-held Ukraine in 2014.

But all those atrocities happened abroad, it was argued. They were nothing to do with us, so a slap on the wrists would do.

In contrast, from the start of the Skripal case, the Prime Minister has been far tougher, imposing sanctions, expelling Russian diplomats, galvanising Nato, and even winning the support of Donald Trump’s White House and the EU for her actions.

Admittedly, this was partly because the potential consequence of the Salisbury poisoning were even more serious than the Litvinenko case, given that Novichok put hundreds of lives at risk.

Nevertheless, our Government has, despite all its problems with Brexit, displayed a commendable spirit of resolution that has been all too absent until now.

Through her clear- sighted resolution, Theresa May has mounted a direct challenge to Putin’s regime.

And although it has taken six months to name the alleged perpetrators, it has been worth the wait. Thanks to the thoroughness of the investigation, the sheer weight of incriminating material she was able to announce in the Commons means that the Russian state cannot slide away from its responsibility for this crime.

What her statement also did yesterday was to blow apart the absurd conspiracy theories about the Salisbury assault that have been circulating, many of them promoted by Putin’s regime or by Kremlin sympathisers.

The evidence, gathered by 250 detectives from 11,000 hours of CCTV footage, shows incontestably where the blame lies. This raises the question as to why the Kremlin resorted to such an act. The answer lies in Putin’s security policy, which is so important to his macho political persona and the image of his regime’s invincibility.

As a former KGB intelligence officer himself, he has made ruthlessness a central part of his strongman reputation, thereby enhancing his appeal among the Russian people.

When he first came to power in 2000 on his election as Russian president, there were profound weaknesses in the country’s security agencies, epitomised by the defections of agents like Litvinenko and Skripal.

Merciless

So much information was leaking after the fall of communism that Western intelligence thought that they had crippled Russia’s GRU agency, giving MI6 and the CIA a window directly into Russian policymaking which helped them to predict the Kremlin’s actions.

But Putin changed all that through a pitiless crackdown. Internal security was vastly improved and leaks closed.

The CIA has privately admitted that many of its contacts in Moscow have gone silent. Some have disappeared. Others simply do not respond to efforts to contact them.

Dealing mercilessly with the defectors is an essential part of that security crackdown.

Since March, it has often been asked why Skripal, a former double agent, should still be a target, so many years after Putin let him out of the Gulag and allowed him to retire to Britain. It appears that Putin’s intelligence services have decided that letting defectors sleep soundly at night offers too much temptation for others to follow suit.

Kill one, frighten 10,000 is an old tactic, and one that the Russians seem to have adopted. Washington certainly believes that putting the fear of God into potential doubleagents was the real reason for poisoning Sergei Skripal.

Yet the Salisbury attack may also reflect Putin’s wider, geopolitical strategy, with its focus on dividing the West through surprise, propaganda and intimidation. Years ago he decided the West, particularly America and Britain, wanted to get rid of his regime.

Instead of asking what he could do to allay Western concerns, he adopted the opposite course by using Russian wealth from the country’s energy resources, plus the long experience of Soviet spycraft, to mount campaigns of disinformation and denial.

Until Salisbury, that strategy appeared to be working.

But the Novichok assault led to an unprecedented act of unity, due in part to the British Government’s resolve.

The West hung together and backed Britain. The question now is whether this accord will last. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that she would be trying to mobilise the EU to harden sanctions on Russia and co-ordinate counter-measures against Russian intelligence operations in Europe.

That could be easier said than done. The wall of unity is already showing signs of cracking. Apart from the awkwardness created by Brexit, Putin’s policy of divide and conquer is also having an impact, for the Russian president has been romancing allies in the EU.

Last month, he was a guest at the Austrian foreign minister’s wedding, and Vienna’s Rightwing government is one of the loudest voices in the EU clamouring for improving relations with Moscow.

Sanctions

In Italy, the new government is led by a critic of sanctions against Russia, so imposing new ones is unlikely to win Rome’s support.

Yet Britain cannot possibly let the Salisbury attack slide away into unpunished oblivion as it did the Litvinenko case.

The need for action is all the more important because, worryingly, the balance of global power is sliding away from the West. The U.S. Britain and the EU are still economically potent, of course, but the rise of China as both an economic and military superpower adds to the challenge posed by Russia and other states.

Even Turkey, a member of Nato, is moving away from the West under President Erdogan. The fact is that the Salisbury outrage is a graphic indicator that the world is becoming a less stable place. It was a rare but disturbing episode that exposed the nature of the escalating global war between spy agencies.

In its wake, that war is likely to intensify.

Which makes it all the more imperative that the Government is robust and vigilant — and that the West remains resolute and united in the face of Putin’s ruthlessness.