It was a privilege to make a small contribution to this six-page special report in Private Eye magazine, exposing the UK firms without which the malignant post-Soviet oligarchy would have been unable to gain the power it has today. Featured are lawyers, bankers, accountants, public relations and real estate agents — all eminently respectable, even, for some, admirable people — yet enablers who have for years been feeding at the same trough of blood money from the collapsing communist empire.
In the words of Richard Brooks, who was the author of the report, these “pukka professionals” are now exposed. Read it all here on the website of Private Eye magazine.
For me it was all the more wonderful to take part in this story because although I’ve been writing in Private Eye since 2013, it was the first time I had a byline — Private Eye doesn’t usually do bylines.