Butler to the World begins with an American academic paying a visit to Oliver Bullough. Leading up to the publication of Moneyland, and even more since, Bullough has been writing about financial corruption, and particularly the ways that advanced, rule-of-law democracies have been helping corrupt rich people around the world keep and protect their ill-gotten gains. Andrew, as Bullough says the academic was named, “wanted to hear about Chinese-owned assets in London and what the British government was doing to ensure their owners had earned their wealth legally.” (p. 1)

What followed was initially an exercise in frustration that turned into understanding followed by an insight on Bullough’s part, one that sets the tone for the book.

Andrew had come well prepared for the meeting and had a checklist to work through … Which law enforcement agency was doing the most to tackle the threat of Chinese money laundering? Who was the best person to talk to at that agency? Which prosecutors had brought the best cases? … Which politicians were most alert to the question, and how did they organise themselves?
Because of the shared language, Americans and Brits often think their countries are more similar than they actually are, which is something I am as guilty of as anyone. When I do research in the United States, I am consistently amazed by the willingness of officials to sit down with me and talk through their work. I call them without an introduction, and yet time and again they trust me to keep specific details of our discussions off the record. Court documents are easy to obtain, and prosecutors willing to talk about them. Politicians meanwhile seem to have a genuine belief in the importance of communicating their work to a wider public, which means they’re happy to talk to writers like me. …
Andrew, however, was discovering that the pleasant surprise sadly does not work in the opposite direction. I think he had been hoping that I would share a few contacts … It’s possible that he was concerned I would refuse to open my address book to him, but it seemed not to have occurred to him that I would have no address book to open; that essentially the people he was looking for would not exist.
There was no concerted law enforcement effort against Chinese money laundering, I told him, so there was no investigator who could talk to him about it. There have been essentially no prosecutions so none for him to look into, and there is almost no research into where the money has been going, how it’s been getting there, or indeed how much of it there is.
He kept coming at the questions from different angles, almost as if he thought that he just needed to find the right password to unlock the door hiding Britain’s enforcement mechanism. Where was the equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s International Corruption Squad … What about Homeland Security Investigations; did Britain have something like them? … Which parliamentary commissions were probing this? Surely, someone was? As he talked, I began to see the situation through his eyes, which gave me a perspective I’d never had before.
The problem was that he could keep trying different passwords until the rocks rotted away, but it wouldn’t help: there was no cave of treasures for him to open. … Andrew had come to London to discover how Britain was fighting illicit finance, but he was discovering that this was not happening at all. Quite the reverse, in fact. (pp. 1–3)

Continue reading