One day in 1992, in the middle of London’s housing slump, a businessman from the freshly collapsed Soviet Union walked into a Kensington estate agent’s office. He and his two business partners each bought homes for cash, at prices ranging from £200,000 to £320,000. “This appears to have been the first sale of London property to private buyers from the former USSR in modern British history,” notes the investigative journalist Oliver Bullough in his eye-opening and essential book Moneyland.
Bullough argues that much about how the world works today – from worldwide kleptocracy to declining public services to London’s transformation – can be explained by offshore wealth. His key formula is: “Money flows across borders, but laws do not.” The global rich therefore “move their money, their children, their assets and themselves wherever they wish, picking and choosing which countries’ laws they wish to live by”. He has travelled from Reno, Nevada to Kiev to research the geography of what he calls “Moneyland”.
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