In the Money , Issue 1670
Cottrell, artist-turned-critic as he would have it, is better known as the man who served time in a US jail for advising on how to launder money when he was 20 before becoming, ahem, a Reformed character and aide and fundraiser for Nigel Farage.
The authors' central argument is that anti-money-laundering laws and regulations have become self-defeating. The system "does not stop money laundering", they quote one banker saying, "it just enables those of us in the know to charge more". They reckon that 0.05 percent of laundering is stopped.
Targets identified
Handily, they then map some of the biggest industries that can be exploited for money-laundering, which happen to be ones in which Farage and his supporters and backers are deeply embedded.
"Gold is the gold standard in money laundering" is the title of one chapter, homing in on a sector that pays Farage himself around £400,000 a year, as a "brand ambassador" for Direct Bullion arguing for tax concessions for investment in, and thus movement of, gold.
Equally forthright is the start of a chapter on cyber-money: "Some 99.9 percent of all cryptocurrencies are an outright scam."
Whether those that Reform UK's biggest donor, Christopher Harborne, has made fortunes in – including the Tether "stablecoin" he holds a large slug of – are in the other 0.1 percent is not made clear.
Then there is the large matter of "real estate", a versatile money-laundering asset. "Most importantly, once the ill-gotten cash has been transformed into or through real property, the movement of wealth can continue in the hundreds of millions without any outward signs."
Which of course bears no relation to the fortunes that were paid by a host of financially dubious purchasers from the former Soviet region and Africa for apartments in Reform UK treasurer Nick Candy's One Hyde Park Development (see Eye 1598).
Beast of Belize
Candy and other Reform luminaries were at the book's launch in the Raffles hotel on Whitehall last month, courtesy of publisher Biteback, whose owner, Lord (Michael) Ashcroft, might be interested in parts of the book on secret offshore entities.
As Eye 1403 pointed out in 2015, a part of his Belize banking group helped create "limited liability partnerships", owned by Belize shell companies, that filed accounts belying their inactivity around the time that such entities were the favoured channel of dodgy money out of the former Soviet region.
"Are we cheerleaders for crime?" ask Cottrell and Burke-Files. "No. Quite the opposite." Could the same be said for George's friends in Reform UK?
COLUMNISTSIssue 1670
With Bio-Waste Spreader: "In its latest report on the UK farmland market, land agent Savills reports that land prices in Great Britain fell by an average of less than 1 percent in 2025, meaning the price of farmland has still risen by 26 percent since 2020, to £8,250 per acre. Farmland prices remain at three times the level of those in, for example, France, where it's still possible for new entrants to make a start in the industry. Can anything be done to make GB farmland more affordable?…"
With MD: "Baroness Amos, appointed to investigate the nation's maternity services by health secretary Wes Streeting last June, has published her interim report. As with the multitudinous previous maternity reports, it makes an accurate diagnosis (NHS maternity and neonatal units can't safely cope with the demands placed on them) without much hope it will be fixed. As Amos observes: ‘Women are now giving birth at older ages: in 2024, 61 percent of live births were to women aged 30 or older…"
With Dr B Ching: "Ashington to Newcastle trains have been a roaring success since Northern started the service in December 2024, even before the fifth of the six new stations opened last week. Upgrading the Ashington line, for passenger trains to connect deprived communities to jobs and facilities in Newcastle, was delayed by the industry's byzantine development processes (Eye 1518). In 2019 consultants predicted 518,000 passenger trips a year; in fact there were almost 1m in the first year…"
With Remote Controller: "Was it good luck or bad luck for ITV to have a drama about the former Duchess of York transmitting soon after she became the second most notorious living member of that royal house? An overnight rating of 1.9m for the opening episode of The Lady (more than double BBC1's Lord of the Flies on the same Sunday night) suggested bad publicity had boosted interest. But almost half of those had left by the second part…"
With Old Sparky: "A report by the CBI and an energy sector trade association bemoans industrial electricity prices, the UK's being among the very highest in the developed world and the biggest single risk to business and investment, according to companies surveyed. It is ‘essential to secure predictable, cheaper energy prices for businesses', it says. The ‘predictable' bit is easy: energy suppliers offer fixed-price agreements to businesses, as they do to residential customers. ‘Cheaper' will be harder…"
With Lunchtime O'Boulez: "London's Barbican Centre last week announced the sudden departure of its director of arts, Devyani Saltzman, after just 19 months – a tenure of record brevity even by the standard of her predecessor Will Gompertz, who managed two years. In times past, things were fairly stable at the Barbican, with John Tusa presiding for 12 years and then Nicholas Kenyon clocking up 14. But then Barbican staff took to throwing around accusations of ‘institutional racism'…"
Letter from Baku
From Our Own Correspondent: "Our dear president Ilham Aliyev was among the assorted actual and wannabe dictators who sought to polish their reputations at the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump's ‘Board of Peace' in Washington DC in February – a trip that included Aliyev's bodyguards being filmed attacking protesters. But America isn't the only country offering to help Aliyev launder his reputation as a serial oppressor of civil society, and, latterly, an ethnic cleanser…"
Next issue on sale: 19th March 2026
