UK SHAME ON SANCTIONS BUSTERS

The United Kingdom Treasury has opened 52 cases against companies in the UK responsible for breaking sanctions arrangements. These are mostly in relation to oil shipping and insurance for ships carrying Russian oil.
Of the 52 cases 15 have been closed - and not one has been fined or prosecuted despite all of them allegedly having carried out at the minimum, a technical breach.
The remaining 37 cases are still under investigation.
The UK has a far too cosy relationship between government, MP’s and the industry. Lloyds of London is the principal ship insurance market globally - and insurance is provided through firms who are paid large sums - of which profit is exceptionally high, unless a claim is made.
Theoretically those profits should be invested to pay any claims which can run into billions of pounds.
However those firms use what are called ‘Names’. These are individuals - many of them MP’s and wealthy individuals from all walks of business and politics, as well as global investors who are offered the possibility of being a ‘Name’.
These Names sign an agreement that places them as financially responsible for paying any claims in full if there is no money left from invested profits or reinsured assets to pay a claim.
In return they are paid dividends from the profits each year. It’s a very lucrative business.
However it doesn’t always work out.
For example if insurance company X insures a Russian oil tanker carrying crude that runs aground say in the English Channel, it breaks up in a storm and pollutes vast areas in the UK, France and Belgium, then X has to pay for the clean up. It might have £1.5 billion in assets it can liquidate to pay the bill. If the bill is £4 billion, it then turns to its Names to provide the money. The claim isn’t made based on your wealth it’s based on you being responsible in full for your percentage. If you are one of 1000 Names in that firm then you are responsible for 1/1000 of £2.5 billion - so £2.5 million. If you don’t have the cash you have to sell everything you own or raise the money somehow to offset your contribution. Many Names go bankrupt in such circumstances. Yet they’re very happy to take the profits when they’re being paid out.
Becoming a Name is like a right of social passage for top executives and long term MP’s and so on. The House of Lords is riddled with them.
The fact is that nobody in that ‘class’ want to be the first to see another one of their network prosecuted because it could just as easily be them. This is a case where those who make the decision on prosecution are just as likely to be a Name as the person they are expected to prosecute. So of course, it tends not to happen. It’s a long standing and miserable aspect of the British class and fiscal system that spreads its ugly tentacles from the City of London.
That is also its own problem. The City of London ‘the Square Mile’, is a political and legal institution that answers to nobody and has its own unique and very separate police force and administration few are even aware of. In fact in legal terms it’s almost a separate country inside London. Its ability to isolate financial interests is staggering.
This is why nothing ever happens and if anything ever does it’s usually just the minimum to make it appear as if something is being done.
This is the problem with ever getting sanctions and financial penalties imposed on those who breach them. It is the quintessential old boy network but in the modern age, Names can be almost anyone who knows the right people in the right places.
It is a form of corruption, state sanctioned and yet almost never discussed or debated. One of those ‘things’ that has developed over hundreds of years and still gives the UK control over almost 30% of global finance and private wealth management.
The Russians didn’t choose London just because of the shops.