I recorded all the interviews I refer to in this book, and their transcripts are in my possession. When interviews were off the record, it was normally for the source’s protection or occasionally because they are not authorized to talk about their work. There were also many people who talked to me at length, sharing insights important to the development of the ideas in the book but whose words I haven’t used because I wanted to keep things short and pithy. To them, thank you for your time, and I hope you’re not too offended.
The field of corruption studies is expanding but not as quickly as corruption, so there are always new cesspits to explore. If you’re keen to start digging into one but don’t know where to start, drop me a line. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn, or—if you’ve got the makings of an investigative journalist—you probably won’t find it too hard to guess my email address.
I also think empire studies needs to expand too. Britain dominated—commercially, militarily or both—large tracts of the world for five centuries, and it is sad that this history is becoming a political battleground in which all nuance is stripped away. Britain is remarkable in many ways, but nothing it ever does will be as remarkable as the fact that a small island in the Atlantic used to rule a quarter of the world’s surface, and I find it depressing that there isn’t more curiosity among British politicians and other public figures about what that means and how it resonates in the UK today. Criticizing the empire does not automatically make you unpatriotic. As in every family, there are both heroes and villains among our ancestors, and it does us no good to pretend there aren’t.
On that note, I have just read and enjoyed Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the consequences of empire broader than the ones I discuss in this book.
While researching Butler to the World, I have read hundreds of books, reports, articles and other publications, as well as watched television programs and listened to podcasts. It isn’t possible for me to list every secondary source that fed into my writing, but here is a summary for each chapter of the most important books or other secondary sources I have read, with occasional suggestions for further reading.
We know about the Ukrainian oligarchs exchanging ownership of the “grand building” on Trafalgar Square thanks to the Panama Papers. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) wrote about the affair on December 15, 2017, and you can find the article online. The building housing the bookshop was the more valuable of two that were exchanged; the other was in Knightsbridge and worth £75 million.
The P. G.Wodehouse quotes and references throughout this book come from the three-volume Jeeves Omnibus, and I hugely enjoyed having an excuse to sit down and systematically read my way through it all.
If you’re interested in becoming a literal butler (rather than a metaphorical one), there are many training schools in Britain, often with international branches. Some courses are also available online, and very reasonably priced. The British Butler Institute’s website, for example, will instruct you in “how to open and close a door,” “napkin presentation” or “seating a guest” for a mere £4.99 a pop.
The judge’s speech was made by Sir Geoffrey Vos, chancellor of the High Court, to the Chancery Bar Association’s annual conference on January 19, 2018.
The Suez Veterans’ Association has a website—www.sunsandcanal.co.uk—which contains many details of the organization. I am hugely grateful to Richard Woolley and Jeff Malone for sharing their archive of SVA newsletters with me, and for sharing their time and memories.
For the broader history of the Suez Crisis, I enjoyed Keith Kyle’s Suez and John Darwin’s Unfinished Empire.
Richard Fry’s essay is contained in a collection of speeches by George Bolton that he edited and that was published under the title A Banker’s World; the various Bolton quotes mostly come from there as well. The trilemma idea originated in Catherine R. Schenk’s The Decline of Sterling. She has also written interestingly about the origins of the Eurodollar market, the relationship between the City and government and much more. She took time to talk me through Eurodollars and corrected my misconceptions, for which I am very grateful, although if I’ve ballsed it up anyway that is of course entirely my fault.
Among other works on Eurodollars that I found useful were Anglo-American Development, the Euromarkets, and the Deeper Origins of Neoliberal Deregulation, by Jeremy Green, who also wrote The Political Economy of the Special Relationship, which develops the same themes at greater length. Gary Burn’s The State, the City, and the Euromarkets is a classic, as is his The Re-emergence of Global Finance. The original investigation into the phenomenon is Geoffrey Bell’s groundbreaking The Eurodollar Market and the International Financial System. Andrea Binder’s The Politics of the Invisible, Offshore Finance and State Power was very useful as well.
Andrew Shonfield’s British Economic Policy Since the War (1958) is strangely not as dated as it should be; in fact, I’d quite like someone to write a similarly approachable book about economics today. David Kynaston’s Club No More, the fourth and final volume of his magisterial series on the City of London, has useful material on the development of offshore finance.
The City Lives interviews can be found on the British Library website. Many of them have been transcribed, but the original recordings are also available, and hearing the actual voices of these pioneers is fascinating. I had fun in the Bank of England archives, guided by their extremely helpful archivists, although the place is not nearly as grand as it sounds like it should be.
I’m afraid I can’t remember where I read the story of the Irish farmer and the petrol tank. I’ve looked and asked around, but couldn’t find it. If anyone knows, please drop me a line.
Vanessa Ogle’s “Funk Money, the End of Empires, the Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event” was published in the journal Past & Present. She is currently writing a history of tax havens, and frankly I wish she’d hurry up and publish it because if it’s as good as that article, I’d find it extremely useful. Lewis Hunte’s Memoirs of a Caribbean Lawyer is available online, as well as if you pop into his office. There are no book-length histories of the BVI, but there are a few useful articles in academic journals. The Chicago economist was Simon Rottenberg, who wrote about his visit in Caribbean Quarterly.
The Tanzanian radar scandal has been very well documented by campaigners from the Corner House and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and also in Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World.
In the BVI, thanks to Freeman Rogers for sharing some really useful articles from the BVI Beacon’s archive.
You can read a bit about my great-grandmother’s serial escaper cousin Billie Stephens in Pat Reid’s The Colditz Story, if you’re so inclined. The book misses out on the best bit though. When Billie returned to London, he was locked up to await debriefing, but he wanted to have a drink at the Ritz so he climbed out of the window. He was too drunk to shin back up the drainpipe on his return, however, and had to knock on the door to be let back in. He was a total legend, and if there is a heaven he’s sure to have busted out just to have a look at the other place.
For the modern history of Gibraltar, I relied on Fortress to Democracy, The Political Biography of Sir Joshua Hassan by Sir William Jackson and Francis Cantos, Rock of Contention by George Hills and Gibraltar: a Modern History, by Chris Grocott and Gareth Stockey.
For issues around gambling, I relied on Better Betting with a Decent Feller by Carl Chinn and Vicious Games by Rebecca Cassidy, which is superb. Thanks to James Noyes for talking me through the issues. I found the insights in Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism very important for understanding how online gambling sucks people in. I also very much appreciated the many parliamentary reports into the betting industries, which provided useful statistics, insights and transcripts. I really like parliamentary reports, and if I was in charge I’d make sure there were more of them.
In reply to a detailed list of questions, I received a courteous email from Victor Chandler directing me to his authorized biography Put Your Life on It: Staying at the Top in the Cut-Throat World of Gambling, which was written by Jamie Reid and published just as I was finishing this manuscript. It is an extraordinary book, full of drama and incident far beyond the snippet I’ve focused on here, and someone should make it into a film. I also found his YouTube channel very useful for getting his take on how he revolutionized gambling.
In Gibraltar itself I am hugely grateful to the couple who showed me around, who I’m not going to name just in case my conclusions prove controversial. You know who you are though, and thank you very much for your kindness, insights and hospitality.
I had lots of interesting chats while I was on the peninsula, most of which I refer to in the chapter. Thanks to everyone who took the time to talk, and of those I do not quote thanks particularly to Marlene Hassan Nahon.
The Ian Rankin novel that tackles Scottish limited partnerships and the genteel enablers of organized crime is Rather Be the Devil. It’s great, as are all the Rebus books. The Kroll report into the Moldovan bank heist is easily discoverable online. I am very grateful to David Leask and Ian Fraser for helping me understand all this, and also to Richard Smith, who’s an old co-conspirator. His blogs on Naked Capitalism are full of important insights. Graham Barrow was extremely helpful, as is his wont.
The Bellingcat/Transparency International report on SLPs—“Smash and Grab, The UK’s Money Laundering Machine”—was published in 2017 and is available on both organizations’ websites. There’s not much written about limited partnerships, but Elspeth Perry showed me around what there is with patience and kindness. Thank you.
If I’ve failed to mention any of the very many scandals that SLPs have been implicated in, then my apologies; it’s hard to keep track of them all.
I have been looking for a way to tell the story of Dmitry Firtash ever since learning he’d bought a Tube station, so this chapter is the fruit of many years of on-again off-again work. To understand the peculiarities of Ukraine, I read Energy Dependency, Politics and Corruption in the Former Soviet Union by Margarita Balcameda and Simon Pirani’s Ukraine’s Gas Sector. I also depended on advice from Daria Kaleniuk and her colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv.
The lead investigator for Global Witness when it looked into Ukrainian gas was Tom Mayne, who was incredibly helpful with his time and thoughts both for this chapter and the subsequent section about unexplained wealth orders. I’m grateful to the various politicians involved with the British Ukrainian Society who did take the time to talk to me, considering there wasn’t much in it for them. Thanks also to the sources who helped me understand the legal situation in America, the Firtash links to Cambridge and his connections in UK politics.
I’m grateful to Tom Tugendhat MP for inviting me to give evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. He’s one of the good guys when it comes to trying to ease Britain out of its butlering ways. The curious tale of the Faculty Office of the Archbishop of Canterbury began life as an article in Prospect magazine.
I first heard the story of Argyn Khassenov’s private prosecution thanks to a presentation by EMM partner Kate McMahon at a conference. I chatted to her about it afterward, and I’m very grateful to her and her colleagues for taking so much time to talk me through it. David Clarke of the Fraud Advisory Panel helped me understand the issues around prosecuting financial crimes, and Jamas Hodivala was also generous with his time.
The John Barkshire quotes are from the City Lives project. The Tax Justice Network does excellent work investigating and exposing offshore skulduggery, and in particular I’m very grateful to John Christensen for his help. I found Elise Bean’s book Financial Exposure very helpful in looking to understand how US congressional committees work, and I enjoyed talking to her about her work.