So we have got a four-bedroom, just under 4,000 square-foot Mews house.

£11.95 million for the freehold.

Shall we take a look inside?

Absolutely. Please come through.

This is beautiful.

This is what you expect of a £12 million house.

I've just spotted the floor!

It's a great way to incorporate the natural light.

And you can see your workout underneath.

Everything in the kitchen is of a high specification.

So, as you would imagine, Miele appliances, you've got wine coolers.

We've got two parking spaces.

I would imagine you could probably get a Range Rover in down here, and then maybe something

fancy like a Porsche 911 above.

Sounds about right.

London. With its prime real estate market, luxury shopping locations and access to high-flying

social circles, the city's status as a hub for the world's uber-wealthy is well established.

It doesn't get more central than this.

We are literally a stone's throw away from Hyde Park, we've got Grosvenor Square.

Some of the world's top restaurants.

Everything here is on your doorstep.

But following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and resultant sanctions on President Putin's

oligarch elite, a spotlight has been firmly cast on the British capital and its complicity

as a store for dirty money.

If you're looking for somewhere safe to stash the proceeds of your nefarious activities,

London's a very attractive place to do it.

It's hard to come up with something more symbolic of the extent of Russian influence in the U.K.

We've got a flat owned by the deputy prime minister of Russia, overlooking the

Ministry of Defense, which he bought from the Queen.

Yep, right across the road from Downing Street.

Now, the British government is seeking to salvage its reputation with a clampdown on corruption.

But will it be successful?

And just how will London fare without its fix of forbidden finance?

If people can't trust Britain, if we lose our status as trusted jurisdiction, that in

the longer term is much more damaging to the U.K. economy.

When Russia mounted its war in Ukraine in February 2022, Britain was one of the first

Western allies to impose sanctions on the country.

As of May, those sanctions have reached over a thousand individuals and businesses seen

to be fueling President Putin's war chest with ill-gotten wealth.

That includes banks with total global assets of £500 billion and oligarchs and their families

with a combined net worth of £150 billion.

But behind London's ban lies a shady relationship with Russian wealth that is anything but secret:

A reputation for which it earned the nicknames Londongrad, the laundromat and Moscow-on-Thames

long before the war.

A December 2020 Home Office report found a “significant volume of Russian, or Russian-linked

illicit finance channeled through the UK economy,” including on things like “high-end UK real estate,

private school fees, luxury vehicles, and sometimes as donations to cultural institutions.”

To understand how we got here, we have to go back to the fall of the British Empire.

As former British colonies gained independence, the U.K. was left with a handful of outposts,

which were awarded special tax-exempt status to reduce their economic dependence.

The Suez Crisi of 1956 and subsequent financial pressures on the pound sterling led

the Bank of England to impose a temporary ban on lending to non-British borrowers.

This threatened a lucrative lifeline of commercial banks in London, and an informal compromise

was soon reached.

Commercial banks in London could still conduct transactions on the condition that it was

between non-British residents and conducted in a foreign currency.

This led to the unintended growth of offshore financial centers in the last remnants of

the former British Empire, and London played a key role in facilitating the unregulated industry.

Those offshore hubs made it easier for non-Britons to discretely move their money to the U.K.

through complex structures such as shell companies, a type of business which operates in name only.

Britain's offshore network of financial centers, places like the British Virgin Islands,

provide an opportunity to create complex networks of what we call shell companies, layered one

over the other, to put distance between you as the owner of an asset and where the money

originally came from.

The rise of Britain's offshore financial network was kept afloat in the 1980s during

a period of increasing financial deregulation.

We have to go back to Margaret Thatcher's time, when she liberalized the financial services

sector, the Big Bang.

Then under both Blair and Brown, the Labour government, we had a continuing deregulation

of the financial services sector, so that created an environment in which it was easy

to use corporate structures for nefarious purposes.

Then, in 2008, Britain's position as a hub for international wealth was cemented with

the introduction of a new controversial investor visa.

Dubbed the 'golden visa,' it granted residency and an eventual path to citizenship to anyone

who invested £2 million or more in the U.K.

Banks took this golden visa as a sign that the government thought you were legit, and

the government hadn't done any anti-money laundering checks.

We call this a blind faith period.

The gates were wide open.

The program was scrapped in February 2022, just ahead of the war, amid pressure over

the U.K.'s links to Russia.

Still, more than 12,000 golden visas were issued in its lifetime, of which 2,581 were

to Russian citizens, including at least eight sanctioned oligarchs.

Much of that investment over the years has found its way here, into London's luxury

property market.

And while many such investments have been legitimate, around $9 billion of questionable

funds have been parked in British properties since 2016.

£1.5 billion of that we have connected to Russians either accused of corruption or with

close ties to the Kremlin.

Tom Stocks is a senior investigator at The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Some of these assets are owned directly, in name, by officials or oligarchs, or perhaps

by a company that they then own.

But that's quite rare.

Most of the time we're talking about assets that are owned by very complex offshore ownership

structures; through companies in British Virgin Islands, or Luxemburg, Liechtenstein, other

offshore jurisdictions.

Using a combination of public records and major data leaks such as the Panama and Pandora Papers,

OCCPR's Russian Asset Tracker has so far identified $17 billion of assets belonging

to sanctioned oligarchs.

That includes metals magnate Alisher Usmanov, industrialist Oleg Deripaska

and Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich.

We've been able to identify so far around $9 billion worth of assets owned by Abramovich.

A big chunk of that's in the U.K. and especially here in London.

A lot of it's in real estate, key commercial investments like Chelsea.

But, also, townhouses, mansions.

It also includes superyachts, jets, helicopters and other flashy assets.

In March 2022, the U.K. government introduced into law a long-awaited Economic Crime Act

intended to crack down on corruption.

Included in it is a Register of Overseas Entities, requiring those behind foreign companies

with U.K. property holdings to reveal their identities.

A spokesperson from the government was not available for interview, but they said in a statement:

We continue to lead the way in our fight against corruption, working closely with the private

sector, international partners and the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories to ensure

there are no safe havens for criminals to hide their dirty money.

But some opponents claim it doesn't go far enough.

Sadly, the legislation is flawed, and I think when we come to the second Economic Crime Bill,

we will already have to amend that.

And it's flawed in two ways.

An oligarch who buys a property through a foreign registered company, let's say in

the BVI [British Virgin Islands], we'll have to know who that beneficial owner is.

But that oligarch could pass it to his children, and then we would no longer be able to know.

Or the oligarch could pass it through a trust, and once you've got it in a trust, again,

the identity of the real beneficial owner of the property, and therefore the owner of

the wealth, will be unknown.

We're going to have to amend that bill when the ink has hardly dried on the paper.

Already, the government has said it is drafting a second Economic Crime Bill to be passed later in 2022.

The follow-on legislation is set to give the government new powers to seize crypto assets

from criminals and make it harder for shell companies to find loopholes.

Still, tackling illicit wealth is an issue that extends well beyond Britain.

The U.K.'s Parliament is now working with its counterparts in the U.S. Congress and

European Parliament to ensure that as London weans itself off Russian riches,

dirty money doesn't find new places to hide.

This international action is equally important, because you want to drive it out of the U.K.,

but you don't want it then to land in another jurisdiction.

The wealth that's put into London comes from not just Russia but from Nigeria,

from Azerbaijan, from Brazil, from other countries.

So, really, tackling oligarchy has to be a global project.

So we shouldn't just have a tunnel vision on Russian wealth in London

but also kleptocratic wealth from all over the world.