A Q&A with geostrategist and Pentagon guru Edward Luttwak By David Samuels Being an enfant terrible at the age of 79 is not a task that can be undertaken lightly. Most men are simple conformists from childhood on. For those with more adventuresome temperaments, a flurry of rebellion in their teens or 20s is usually…
Read more
How much is a trillion ? eyesonsuriname Amsterdam, April 21 2022– Surging oil, gas and power prices together with the European Union (EU)’s goals of becoming less dependent on Russian supplies and post-Covid-19 pandemic inflation will catapult global energy spending this year to $2.1 trillion, Rystad Energy research shows. A concern in energy markets is…
Read more
Imperial March I vividly remember seeing the outside of the Kremlin in Red Square, Moscow, when I went to visit the U.S.S.R. in 1979 with my mother. Of course at that time, no civilians were allowed to see the inside of the Kremlin. But now, seeing what the inside of the Kremlin looks like, I…
Read more
Lessons from London Part VIII Oliver Bullough / The Guardian Amsterdam, March 8th — Their salvation came from an unlikely quarter: the Soviet Union, which didn’t want to keep its dollar reserves in US banks. Instead, it kept them in London, where British banks began lending them to each other in an entirely unregulated market…
Read more
High Tech Future Part VII Oliver Bullough Amsterdam, March 7th 2022 — Take Andrey Borodin, the owner of that £140m house in Henley-on-Thames. He arrived in Britain in 2011, pursued by Russian charges of having defrauded his own bank. Borodin insisted the charges were politically motivated, and gained asylum here. Had prosecutors brought charges in the…
Read more
Extremely Hard but not Impossible Part VI Oliver Bulloiugh / The Guardian Amsterdam, March 6th –Why was Britain the only country that declined to act on the information Browder provided? His conclusion was that too many influential people – lawyers, bankers, accountants, property developers – were dependent on dirty Russian money for their livelihoods. “If…
Read more
Destroying a country Part V Oliver Bullough / The Guardian Amsterdam, March 5th 2022– One reason the Russian super-rich come to Britain, Guselnikov said, was for education. His own children attended private schools, although they now have British passports, so they were not counted among the 2,806 Russian children attending schools surveyed by the Independent Schools…
Read more
Forensic Accounting Lessons for Paramaribo Deel IV Oliver Bullough / The Guardian Amsterdam, 4 maart 2022 In early 1993, rich Russians were enough of a novelty for the Independent to report that three of them had bought flats in Kensington – at prices between £200,000 and £320,000 – under the headline “Property – a haven…
Read more
Follow the Money Is Paramaribo following the lead of London ? Part II Oliver Bullough / The Guardian Amsterdam, 1 maart 2022–It is a vast question, worthy of a book in itself, and one that even the National Crime Agency would struggle to answer, let alone me. Then came her second question: “What assets has…
Read more
Recent Comments