I'm glad I discovered Oliver as a guest on a favourite podcast as his coverage of this eye opening topic is comprehensive and the writing entertaining. The City, London’s financial hub, “must be protected at all costs”, no matter how many millions of lives are shattered elsewhere around the world. Exploring the way in which Britain services oligarchs, builds tax havens and launders money, Oliver Bullough presents a startling, if sometimes overdramatic, picture of current policy on economic crime. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

Oliver Bullough unsparingly reveals the devastating facts behind Britain's dirty financial secrets and moral guilt while directly challenging the UK to clean up its act.

Prawda jest taka, że grupka uprzywilejowanych Anglików ma nas w garści, a organy ścigania zwalczające korupcję mają niedostatek zasobów - to walka z wiatrakami. In it, he shows how both British government and finance have altered or ignored laws, welcomed criminals and exported crime to other countries, all in the name of income. There have been cases where members of Parliament have (naively) thought they could introduce bills to regulate this known and obvious criminal activity.

The next year I moved to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, then joined Reuters news agency, which sent me to Moscow. It took even Bullough a while, though, to nail the exact bent-double relationship that many among the elite of this country’s lawmakers and bankers and lawyers and accountants have adopted toward this global kleptocracy. But every chapter steps it up a notch or ten, as the UK and its former colonies engage in a race to the bottom of morality. The country continually finds ways to accept and launder dirty money, offer thieves not just citizenship, but honors, and racks up gigantic financial gains while aiding them to become established, if not sainted.Bullough compares it to light: it can be a wave or a particle, depending on whatever works at the moment. Butler to the World reveals how the UK took up its position at the elbow of the worst people on Earth: the oligarchs, kleptocrats and gangsters. Kamerdyner pracuje nie tylko dla przestępców, ale dla każdego, kto jest wystarczająco bogaty, by móc skorzystać z jego usług. A similar thing happened in the 2000's with Climate Change literature and hopefully this will spark wider discussions on Britain's abhorrent record of servicing financial crime.

There are some good points I wasn’t aware of or wasn’t clear on, but the writing is gossipy and meanders. As he observes, ‘The banker to the world transformed into a pauper; the global currency limping from one crisis to the next’. Impressively detailed…Lucid explanations of complex financial matters and a simmering sense of outrage distinguish this timely investigation into how Britain sacrificed its principles for pounds. Eventually, in response to his interlocutor’s bafflement, he blurted: “We’re not a policeman, like you guys, we’re a butler, the butler to the world… If someone is rich, whether they are Chinese or Russian or whatever, and they need something done, or something hidden, or something bought, then Britain sorts that out for them… – that’s what a butler does.Andrew, however, was discovering that the pleasant surprise sadly does not work in the opposite direction. The author is clearly an expert on his subject but I confess that some of the detail in a few of the case studies, especially those involving arcane financial products and obscure company structures, went rather over my head. So now when I look at a map of the world, I’ll be saying to myself offshore bank haven, gambling hot spot, and so forth.