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

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We pride ourselves on values of fair play and the rule of law, but few countries do more to frustrate global anti- corruption efforts.

It is the City of London together with the legal and accountancy professions using their skills to help the super-rich hide their wealth offshore, evade tax and avoid having to account to anyone except themselves. And, fundamentally, over the last eighty years, that secret side of Britain has had a far more significant impact on the world than its avowed public policies.The unmatched financial and legal infrastructure that had allowed the UK to conquer a quarter of the world was quietly repurposed to do the bidding of individuals from dubious regimes that it had sometimes fostered, and others who had seized control of their nation’s resources and needed a place to hide what they creamed off. 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. In other words, how Britain, including its overseas territories, has become a ‘butler to the world’ and how successive governments have been good on rhetoric but poor on action when it comes to tackling global financial corruption. 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.

Bullough seems to run out of steam, and a particularly punishingly long chapter took me ages to get through. Oliver Bullough is the author of the financial expose Moneyland , a Sunday Times bestseller, and two celebrated books about the former Soviet Union: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great . Urgent and essential reading…Bullough has drilled down to the root of the malaise that's rotting the UK system.Sometimes, the closeness leads the two countries into terrible mistakes, as with the Iraq War; sometimes, as with defeating the Nazis or filming This Is Spinal Tap, the exchange leads to something magnificent. In his Sunday Times-bestselling expose, Oliver Bullough reveals how the UK took up its position at the elbow of the worst people on Earth: the oligarchs, kleptocrats and gangsters.

G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves does for Bertie Wooster – the author presents a series of case studies showing how Britain has facilitated the use of tax havens, complex financial structures and tax loopholes to allow shady individuals to squirrel money away. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but personally I would have preferred a more evaluative or analytical approach. There's a certain amount of 'gotcha' journalism, but it's never quite as cringe inducing as it can be.They used crafty expertise to create the small print of shell companies and financial instruments that allowed multimillionaires and global corporations to avoid doing the thing they liked least – pay taxes. This can be kept secret because it is a feature of these companies that there are no obligations to make public the identity of directors and shareholders and little or no reporting obligations.