Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi. And today we have Oliver

Bolo returning to the podcast to talk about his newest book. Oliver is a journalist. He is one of the

organizers behind the London kleptocracy tour. And for our purposes today, he is the author of Butler to the World,

how Britain helps the world's worst people launder money, commit crimes, and get away with anything.

This book follows on the heels of Moneyland, which was a fascinating and very popular book, and I'm delighted to have Oliver back.

Oliver, thank you for joining me.

That's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Can you start by telling us a little bit about

why you wrote this, how this follows on from or expands on Moneyland? I mean, Moneyland,

for those of you who haven't read it, is about the globalized

system of money laundering. A lot of it derives from work I did in Ukraine, but the lessons for it

are very global about how money slips across borders and evades detection as a result.

So therefore, meaning that the owners of money, and mainly I'm writing about the owners

of illegal money, are able to essentially get away with breaking the rules with impunity.

While I was writing it, and in my subsequent work, I kept coming across this point that I didn't

think I'd made strongly enough because I was trying to write a kind

global history of money laundering, as it were, which is that just Britain has this totally

disproportionately significant role in the illicit financial economy. It's just whatever the scam,

whether it's money laundering or wealth protection or, you know, libel cases brought by oligarchs,

or it doesn't really matter what. Britain is always there. One of my favorite recent examples,

and this is actually since the book came out, was when Alexei Navalny revealed that Vladimir Putin

could well be the owner of this super yacht, the Scheherazade, the largest

yacht of unknown ownership in the world. He published the crew manifest, and all the members

...