Butler to the World Quotes

“Boiled down to its essentials, finance always does the same thing: it takes money from people who have it but don’t need it, and gives it to people who need it and don’t have it, and earns a fee for its trouble. Governments try to regulate this process, to direct the funding toward the causes they care about, and financial institutions try to avoid those rules so they can direct the funding toward the causes that will pay the largest fees. That is financial innovation, which is simply an artificial way of exploiting artificial rules governing the artificial thing we call money, and normally involves finding mismatches between regulations in different countries. It’s clever, but it adds nothing to the sum of human achievement.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The Book the Oligarchs Don't Want You to Read - How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything

“As a result of the reductions in public expenditure, Butler Britain is providing a two-tier justice system. Wealthy individuals or companies can buy justice in a way that ordinary people cannot.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“According to Horrocks, who still has contacts with police officers and sees what they’re prepared to investigate when he takes his clients’ cases to them, the authorities only get involved in a case if it will earn them good press coverage. ‘If there’s a celebrity involved, Simon Cowell or whatever-her-name-is Ecclestone, the police are all over it,’ he said, ‘but if old Mrs Smith gets defrauded on a phone scam, and every penny to her name has gone, which might be only a few thousand quid but which has destroyed her life, no one looks at that.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“Criminal wealth is reinvested, which makes criminals richer and more potent adversaries, while companies in the City poach law enforcement officers to work in their compliance departments. It’s like expecting the army to fight a war against an adversary that gets stronger all the time, while its service men and women are continually lured away to work as private security contractors or, worse still, as mercenaries for their former adversaries. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to start wondering if there isn’t something going on, because this is a system that is not working at all.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“The annual cost of organised crime to people in Britain itself is estimated at £37 billion, with fraud costing another £193 billion – that’s almost £4,000 for every adult in the country.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“When dictators want somewhere to hide their money, they turn to Britain. When oligarchs want someone to launder their reputation, they come to Britain.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“The country that invented pubs quite obviously cannot be all bad.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“Almost all private prosecutions are brought by large companies or wealthy individuals for a crime against their property, just as they were in the eighteenth century.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“In short, private prosecutors get to take a one-way punt at public expense, while their opponents not only have to fund their own defence but face the prospect of losing everything if convicted.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“We do not have statistics on the number of private prosecutions being brought, although judges and lawyers alike agree that the number is rising fast. We can, however, see how much money is being spent out of legal-aid funds to compensate private prosecutors for the expenses they have incurred, and it is soaring. In 2014–15 the total came to just £360,000. By 2019–20 it had risen to £12.3 million. At that rate of increase it won’t be long before expenditure on private prosecutions wipes out the entire saving made by the cuts to police and court budgets after 2010.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“We can, however, see how much money is being spent out of legal-aid funds to compensate private prosecutors for the expenses they have incurred, and it is soaring.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“Britain’s entire system for regulating money laundering is therefore reliant on money launderers blowing the whistle on criminals, with no prospect of any personal benefit from doing so, and in full knowledge of the fact they’ll face retribution if the criminals find out. Unsurprisingly, therefore, not many whistles get blown.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“By the most conservative estimate, hundreds of billions of pounds of criminal money flow through the City of London every year, most of it stolen from vulnerable people in some of the world’s poorest countries.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“In 2020 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published a report on Russian influence in the UK. The report failed to gain as much attention as it deserved thanks in part to Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissing it as an attempt to delegitimise the Brexit referendum. This was a shame because it was a thoughtful analysis of the kind of blind spot that has led Britain to accept money directly from Russian oligarchs, as well as from Russia-allied businessmen like Firtash, without looking into where it comes from.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“If an oligarch is not prosecuted, Britain doesn’t investigate; if the oligarch is prosecuted, Britain doesn’t investigate either. The fact that a government minister fails to acknowledge this ‘Heads they win, tails we lose’ injustice helps explain why Britain has consistently failed to interrogate the origin of suspect wealth.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“The British government’s focus had been on making as much money as possible, and it had actually subcontracted its checks on the origin of that money to Firtash’s own lawyers while ignoring anything that stood in the way of closing the sale.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“On 12 March 2014 Austrian police officers arrested Dmitry Firtash in Vienna at the FBI’s request. It was exactly a fortnight after the final approval of his purchase of the Brompton Road Tube station from the British government. Rarely if ever have the contrasting approaches of the US and Butler Britain towards fortunes of questionable origin been displayed in starker contrast.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“Faced with the choice between protecting Europe’s poorest country or saving the City an amount so small it wouldn’t even be a rounding error on a fund’s balance sheet, Butler Britain backed the wealthy and the powerful over the poor and weak, again.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“In 2019 the leading medical journal the Lancet referred to this as ‘the utter evil of an industry that does indeed prey on those facing social peril and financial precarity’. Evil is not a word that medical journals throw around lightly.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“It was hard, the authors said, to put a cost on the damage that gambling causes, but politicians needed to recognise that there was a trade-off. If you allowed gambling in order to raise revenue, you were causing damage to people’s lives by doing so and ultimately undermining society. Unlike insurance or other productive financial services, this is a zero sum industry: bookies’ profits are simply gamblers’ losses, and there is no broader societal benefit.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“In 2017 a Scottish member of Parliament suggested in the House of Commons that a special levy should be imposed on the gambling industry to raise money to help addicts, without apparently knowing that such a levy was already made possible by the 2005 Gambling Act. It was just never actually set up.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“which estimates that 650 suicides a year are linked to gambling addiction.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“Official studies suggest that somewhere between 250,000 and 460,000 people are – to use the term favoured by the UK government – ‘problem gamblers”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“Within a decade, the machines were earning bookies almost £2 billion a year in profits. On average, that’s a loss of almost £100 from each family in Britain, and the money was coming overwhelmingly from those families least able to afford to lose it.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“FOBTs? Money hoovers. They literally suck up any cash that is lying about the place. I think of us as like a massive cleaner,’ said one senior manager at a British bookmaker interviewed anonymously by Rebecca Cassidy. ‘In we go to a neighbourhood. Any spare cash, mate? In this slot here! That’s it, just shove it all in there. Oh, and enjoy a free cup of coffee while you’re at it, you fucking mug.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“There is a saying that if you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression, and that is how many Europeans responded to the changes sweeping across Africa and Asia.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“This is the consequence of the decision that the Bank of England made in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis, a decision which allowed Britain’s merchant banks to free wealth from democratic controls, and we’re all living with it.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“The levers of financial power in post-war Britain were controlled by the same people as before the war: the privately educated children of privately educated fathers, which gave them an extremely limited ability to understand the world.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals

“The truth is different: the empire was about profit, and about eradicating anything that stood in the way of that profit.”
― Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World: The book the oligarchs don’t want you to read - how Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals