Hi there, my name's Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, following the Ukraine

invasion, what are we to make of the influence of billions of dollars invested by kleptocrats in

Western capitals? One journalist's challenging view. The kleptocrats of the world are uniting, and in Ukraine they use tanks and missiles.

In Zimbabwe, in Kazakhstan, they use torture, and in the West they use money.

What the global economy is yielding is kind of interconnected ruling classes who are

increasingly disconnected from the ordinary people in whose name they are supposed to be able to rule.

That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC.

The UK is ill-equipped to assess the risk of corruption from transnational kleptocracy.

Those were the words of one leading UK think tank last year,

and there have been other similar assessments and measures planned in government to tackle so-called

dirty money. But some reckon it's taken the latest crisis, the invasion of Ukraine,

for the British government to really expedite moves to address this threat.

The new register will require anonymous foreign owners to reveal their real identity

to ensure that criminals can no longer hold property behind secretive chains of shell companies.

By legislating now, we will send a clear warning to those

who have or who are thinking about using the UK property market to launder ill-gotten gains,

particularly those linked to the Putin regime. That's the UK's business secretary, Quasi Quarteng, speaking

in Parliament earlier this week. The Economic Crimes Bill is designed to address how seemingly

easy it's become to hide money laundered from foreign sanctioned governments. I've been speaking

to the writer and investigative journalist Tom Burgess about this.

He's written a recent book, Kleptopia. It's attracted both praise and legal heat, about which more in a moment.

But we began by discussing the legislation itself

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