One of the subtle ways in which this failure of government to act is effected, is by claiming that there is sound regulation or legislation already.
PECUNIA NON OLET PROFESSIONAL
is an international financial center, processing trillions of pounds of transactions every year.’ ‘Together with the presence of a highly developed professional services industry,’ the agency said, ‘this increases the attractiveness and vulnerability of the UK’s financial system to exploitation by those engaged in money laundering.’ Anti-corruption campaigners and financial experts argue that London has served as a hub for this illicit activity for too long.”
The core of this report was headed ‘All roads lead to London’, and explained: “The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that billions of dollars of dirty money are moved through or into Britain each year, according to the UK’s government’s own national risk assessment of money laundering. The US ABC News titled a report, 14th January 2019 “’Londongrad’: The real-life fight against dirty money flowing into London from foreign countries”. Indeed it is no accident that Britain, and notably London is known throughout the world as the Londongrad Laundromat. The British Government were warned about the SLP loop-hole, and this leads us to a wider problem of the British Government having failed adequately to act against money-laundering in London. They became popular with organised criminals in the former Soviet Union because, unlike limited companies, owners’ identities did not have to be revealed in official paperwork.” (The Times, 4th October, 2019: ‘Criminals used Scottish Limited Partnerships’ loophole to launder billions’.) Last year the UK government announced plans to clamp down on Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs), which were set up in 1907 to assist agricultural businesses. Three years ago, according to a report in ‘The Times’: “Foreign criminals were able to launder billions of pounds of dirty money through the UK because of a failure to close a business loophole, investigative reporters have claimed. Indeed Conservative Governments have long implied approval of them until very recently, not least by doing nothing about features of SLPs that in modern conditions had notably proved disturbing. The Scottish Conservatives had little to say about them over almost the last century. Meanwhile, one of the few things the British Government seemed to have found acceptable in Scotland, at least until quite recently, is something that was invented around 1907: Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs). This is the atmosphere in which our politics is being conducted. Scottish Conservatives are to be found instead, focusing on a homegrown paranoid critique of the Scottish Government that is obviously, so exaggeratedly ‘over-the-top’ the hysteria is obviously artificial a desperate tactic grasped only because it has to be angrily apocalyptic merely to stand any comparison with the lunacy that everyone can see has infected Conservative politics in Westminster. Instead of embracing the bracing political realities of a Scotland devolved, and face the weaknesses in the Scottish Conservative ranks the quite obvious lack of talent or ideas from the thin gruel of the membership or elected politicians, Scottish Conservatives spend their efforts now carefully circumnavigating the cataclysmic disaster zone that is Boris Johnson in all his shifty charm of the dysfunctional disarray in Downing Street and Whitehall, the Brexit NI Protocol blunder, the PPE scandal, and now the Money Laundering disaster that has spilled out of the financial sector to expose our Foreign Policy to public international embarrassment.
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