Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel sounded fed up when he snapped “you have to stop” at journalists questioning him about his club’s owner Roman Abramovich, accused in Parliament of links to corruption and Vladimir Putin’s Russian state.
But the public’s fed up too with all the rotten money that’s been swilling into our capital for years and it’s frankly not good enough to pretend that football can brush aside claims by Labour MP Chris Bryant that Abramovich has bankrolled one of our biggest clubs on the back of a suspect fortune.
The urgency of the issue was emphasised when Mr Bryant told parliamentarians that Abramovich is now selling his Kensington Palace Gardens mansion and Chelsea penthouse in a hurry to avoid being hit by sanctions.
We don’t know the truth of the allegations against Abramovich, who’s consistently denied wrongdoing, but it’s a scandal nonetheless that it’s taken a barbaric war to persuade the Government to promise action against corrupt wealth.
When Priti Patel said this week that “time is up for Putin’s cronies hiding dirty money in the UK”, the obvious riposte was to ask why it was ever allowed in and permitted to stay here? That applies not just to Russian plunder but to the criminally obtained billions that have poured in from all over the world into London.
It’s embarrassing, for example, that Alisher Usmanov, Arsenal’s former backer now linked to Everton, and the billionaire Mikhail Fridman, the owner of a £65 million Hampstead home, have been placed under EU sanctions for being close to Putin’s regime while we’ve done nothing so far but let them in. Fridman protested his innocence yesterday and claimed he has no influence on Putin. But if his money’s tainted, as the EU alleges, we don’t want it or him anyway.
The same applies to the other oligarchs living here whose names were read out in Parliament yesterday by MP Margaret Hodge for “robbing assets from the Russian people”. Reforms promised this week to reveal the real owners of shell companies should change things for the better. But much more is needed, including proper funding for the National Crime Agency and a spotlight on the grasping lawyers ready to dispense with any sniff test when using whatever legal device they can find to protect their corrupt clients.
The Tory MP Bob Seely gave a welcome sign of this happening yesterday in the Commons when he denounced “amoral” lawyers who he accused of helping “Putin’s henchmen” to help “kleptocrats, criminals and oligarchs intimidating a free media” trying to expose them.
He used parliamentary privilege to name the barrister Hugh Tomlinson QC and solicitors Geraldine Proudler, from the CMS law firm in London, John Kelly at Harbottle and Lewis, and Nigel Tait at Carter-Ruck, telling MPs that they were “perhaps really lovely people, but perhaps their amorality will really begin to bite their reputations in a way that will be uncomfortable”.
The time to clean up is long overdue.
