RUSSIA'S LAUNDROMAT, PART 3: PUTIN'S BUTLER?

True Spies Episode 121, Russia’s Laundromat Part 3: Putin’s Butler‍

NARRATOR: Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you’ll hear the true stories behind the world’s greatest espionage operations. You’ll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I’m Vanessa Kirby, and this is True Spies: Russia’s Laundromat. Part 3: Putin’s Butler. 

In the past two episodes of True Spies, you’ve heard from Russian investigators getting to the heart of the West’s dirty money problem. Stolen fortunes, typically funneled through intricate networks of banks, accountants, and lawyers, sheltered in offshore accounts and businesses. Very often, used to purchase lavish real estate in some of the most expensive cities in the world. Oligarchs and kleptocrats, people who steal from the very constituents they’re meant to serve, are snatching up homes in London, Switzerland, and in the south of France, using money extracted from the motherland. It’s an open secret - even if no one seems to do much about it. But on occasion, stolen money is used to buy some unconventional things. And when news broke that a wealthy Ukrainian had purchased a London Tube station, that’s when this week’s True Spy set to work.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: It's not just a little pokey Tube station. It's a real sizable property. This Tube station used to be a Ministry of Defense office, and it has a big - what would have been - a garage for military vehicles. And that's, to my mind, the most clear-cut demonstration of how in Britain, basically, everything is for sale. Membership of the establishment is for sale. Medals are for sale. Tube stations are for sale. It's pretty remarkable.

NARRATOR: This is a story about all that money can buy. It’s about more than greed, more than nepotism, more than secrecy. It’s a story about signing a cheque for the right to control history and how the West offers its pen.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: There was hope in the early ‘90s. There was a lot of hope that the countries of the former Soviet Union could have been different. They could have developed in a different direction and become free and prosperous. And they didn't. And so a lot of the work I do is essentially to try and work out who's to blame for that. Why did that promise get betrayed? My name is Oliver Bullough. I'm a journalist and an author, and I'm from the UK.

NARRATOR: Unlike Roman Borisovich and Olesya Shmagun, Oliver Bullough is not a native to Russia. He moved there in 1999, just in time to see Putin assume the office of the presidency for the first time. But Russia has held Oliver’s attention since he was a boy. 

OLIVER BULLOUGH: I think it's a combination of things that always attracted me to Eastern Europe. Partly, I think that during my formative years as a child at school and then, going on up into my time at university, Eastern Europe was where history was happening. The Berlin Wall came down when I was maybe 11 or 12. And then, the Soviet Union collapsed. And it just felt like the most exciting place to be, where history was being unlocked. And also, I think quite seriously, I was very influenced by Tintin.

NARRATOR: Yes, you heard right, Tintin the fearless reporter at the center of the Belgian comic-book series.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He was always going to these fictional Eastern European countries, Borduria and Syldavia, and having these wacky, wonderful adventures. And it just seemed so much fun. I grew up on a farm in Mid Wales, which was lovely but quite quiet by the standards of what seemed to be happening in Eastern Europe. And I just wanted a bit of that in my life.

NARRATOR: Of course, the real-life work of a journalist in Eastern Europe, particularly today, can be a little less cheerful than the cartoons make it look. Particularly when you’re a journalist focused on corruption. Oliver says that for a long time, he didn’t realize just how deeply the problem was embedded in the countries he was interested in. 

OLIVER BULLOUGH: I was an idiot. A lot of people are when they're young but I was a particularly good idiot. I was embarrassingly late to realizing the true nature of corruption in the former Soviet Union. I mean, in my defense, I think a lot of people didn't realize. Very few people were talking about it. There is this persistent idea of corruption that you get, particularly in Transparency International's work, that it's something which you can judge a country by - how corrupt it is. They have a map, the Corruption Perception Index, where each country has a different color, showing how corrupt it is. And I think that's how a lot of people think of corruption.

NARRATOR: As Roman and Olesya have said, what people think of as ‘Eastern European’ corruption doesn’t remain within national borders.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: It was really only after 2014 when the revolution in Ukraine happened and I started systematically looking at corruption and how it worked. And, to be fair, it was easier then because obviously the government had fallen so there was a lot more information around - but I started looking at how corruption worked and I realized that that idea that Ukrainian corruption is a Ukrainian phenomenon or Russian corruption is a Russian phenomenon, it's just totally false. You cannot understand it that way because the money doesn't stay within any one country. And in order to understand how corruption and mismanagement works - and so essentially in order to try and understand who's to blame for the fact that these countries have not developed prosperous and democratically - you need to look at more than one country and you need to look at people in multiple roles and multiple jurisdictions. So that's what I started doing.

NARRATOR: Oliver has built a career reporting on financial crime, oligarchy, and thievery. And over years of investigating the Eastern European corruption, a pattern began to emerge, implicating one country in particular.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: Again and again and again, the UK featured. It wasn't the only place where the money ended up. It wasn't the only place that moved the money. It wasn't the only place that provided the lawyers that helped hide the money. But it was always there in a way that no other country was.

NARRATOR: Oliver’s latest book encapsulates this neatly in one evocative metaphor. Britain, he says, is the butler to people like ‘Boris’, the fictional character in Part 1 of this series, or to Sergei Roldugin, the very real concert cellist featured in Part 2. Whatever a kleptocrat needs, Oliver says, the UK is happy to serve it on a silver platter.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: That is under-recognised in the UK. It's under-discussed. It's under-recognized. If these countries are going to have any chance of breaking free of this predatory political elite who've colonized them, then at the very least, foreigners need to start helping the ‘good guys’ instead of helping the ‘bad guys’. And in order to do that, we need to make sure we try and knock the UK out of the business. I mean, let's face it, it's not going to happen. But maybe it could happen a tiny bit.

NARRATOR: But you might be wondering: What about that Tube station? The story of how an oligarch came to acquire a London Underground station begins with a surprisingly optimistic moment in history, in 2004 and 2005, during the Orange Revolution. Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych had ‘won’ Ukraine’s presidential election. But the results were widely believed to have been manipulated. When the country’s Supreme Court ordered another round of voting, the votes were counted fairly, and Yanukovych’s opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, was declared the clear winner. It was a triumph of democracy for a country that had struggled to get on its feet since the fall of the Soviet Union.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: I was there in the streets, partying with the Ukrainians who were standing up to this rigged election. It was really, a fabulously hopeful advance of democracy in a general picture across the former Soviet Union, which was the opposite.

NARRATOR: As Putin’s preferred candidate for Ukraine, Yanukovych had represented Russian interference in Ukrainian political life - something that the majority of Ukrainians wanted to break away from. The Orange Revolution sent a message to Russia: Hands off Ukraine. But the victory was short-lived. Putin’s government did not appreciate being put in its place.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: The promise of that revolution was very much snuffed out by the gas trade. The gas trade was always Russia's lead that they could tug on to make the Ukrainians fall back in line. They doubled the gas price at the end of 2005. And the Ukrainians had tried to to refuse to pay and and the gas had been cut off and they'd been forced to back down. And it destroyed the Orange Coalition. And it really felt like the gas trade had become this geopolitical tool being used by Putin.

NARRATOR: Ukraine was in a vulnerable position. When the Soviet Union fell, it had been left in dire financial straits.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: The Ukrainian economy, obviously, having been part of the Soviet economy, is very tightly integrated with the gas system that comes out of Russia and Turkmenistan. All the heavy industry and domestic heating and everything is powered by gas. So when Ukraine became independent in 1991, it didn't really have any gas of its own or very little. And so it became highly dependent on imports of gas from Russia and Central Asia. And they became in control of those imports, control of the pipelines through which gas flows into and through Ukraine became, the main prize of Ukrainian politics. It was a big corrupting factor.

NARRATOR: Russia made money from exporting gas through pipelines, which went through Ukraine en route to Europe. And Ukraine realized it could turn a bit of extra profit by stealing some of that gas along the way. Russia couldn’t cut the country off because then it would be cutting its own ties to its customers in the West. When Vladimir Putin took office as Russia’s president in 2000, he claimed he was determined to crack down on thievery. But not because he wanted to end the corruption entirely, just bend it to his will. 

OLIVER BULLOUGH: When Putin became president, he transformed that from just being straightforwardly corrupting in a financial sense to being a tool of political control and a way of trying to dominate Ukrainian politics, to recreate Russian influence over Ukraine. 

NARRATOR: Putin wanted to install a system that would serve his interests within Ukraine, Oliver says. That would allow him to profit from the money being siphoned out of the pipelines. And it would also give him the power to manipulate Ukraine’s political leadership, which had become accustomed to the money they stole from the gas trade.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: And obviously, he needed a local partner to do that. And that's when we had these intermediary companies being used to trade gas with Ukraine. 

NARRATOR: One such intermediary company was installed between Russia and Ukraine, in 2004, a company known as RUE. It was half-owned by Gazprom, and the other owner…well, no one could say for sure exactly who that was. Today, we know exactly who it was.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: That intermediary was Dmitry Firtash.

NARRATOR: Dmitry Firtash, a 39-year-old Ukrainian businessman whose name almost nobody knew.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: I first read about Mr. Firtash in...it would have been 2006 when Global Witness, the campaigning organization, wrote a report about him. Or, rather, they wrote a report about the gas trade between Ukraine, Russia, and Turkmenistan, attempting to get to the bottom of who was behind all these intermediary companies that dominated the trade. 

NARRATOR: Dmitry Firtash was born in western Ukraine in 1965 and came of age just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. Apparently, he found a way to take advantage of the tenuous political and economic situation in his native country.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He's initially an unknown individual but he outed himself shortly after that Global Witness report was published. He outed himself in a series of interviews with the international press, with The Wall Street Journal and the FT because essentially the pressure around this gas contract had become so intense.

NARRATOR: Global Witness had questioned why, exactly, it was so unclear who owned RUE. After all, someone who controls the supply of gas between Russia and Ukraine is a powerful person indeed. So, who was Firtash, exactly? Global Witness didn’t even have a photograph for him - they used an image with a question mark in its place. But even with all the sketchy details, one could safely assume he was very, very rich. It was later reported that he resold gas that Gazprom sold to him at an artificially low price, allowing him to pocket $3bn. Plus, he had billions more in bank loans and had businesses across various sectors in the Ukrainian economy, all of which belonged to a company called Group DF, based in the British Virgin Islands. What could he possibly do with all of that wealth?

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He needed somewhere to spend it. And that's when he decided to essentially build a second home in the UK.

NARRATOR: Right, this old song and dance. But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill Russian-oligarch-buys-fancy-flat story. For one thing, Firtash is Ukrainian. And as Oliver’s said, dirty money doesn’t stay within clearly defined borders. In this case, the line between Firtash’s interests, and Ukraine’s, and Russia’s, would become dangerously blurred.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: If you think about what he had done, he had made a huge fortune for himself. But he had also partnered with Russia, with Putin - who by this stage, it was clear, was no friend of democracy - to essentially bring a democratically elected pro-Western government into line in Ukraine. That's what Firtash is. That's where his profit was. So what he was doing was very much against what you might term ‘Western interests’ and very much in the Kremlin's interests.

NARRATOR: So here’s a wealthy Ukrainian businessman working in the interests of the Kremlin, ready to sink his fortune into the United Kingdom. The UK, being the butler that it is, laid out the welcome mat.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He had allies in the UK. There were a couple of lobbyists, one of them a Ukrainian who'd relocated to the UK after the Orange Revolution. Another one was a member of the House of Lords, a former spy, actually, called Lord Asquith. And the two of them had built up a lobbying organization, a fairly niche boutique lobbying organization. And he essentially arrived and followed a pathway that is open to very wealthy foreigners who come to the UK whereby they can essentially follow a series of steps that allow them to integrate into British society.

NARRATOR: On the off chance that you’re an oligarch hoping to get established in England, worry not. It’s not a lengthy pathway - or at least, it wasn’t until recently. Firtash was able to ingratiate himself in British society with just two simple steps. Step One: Establish a foundation.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He created a society, the British Ukrainian Society, to increase mutual understanding and friendship and all the kind of ‘yada yada’ stuff which, these kinds of societies do. But really what it allowed him to do was to rub shoulders with members - particularly of the House of Lords and the House of Commons - to essentially create a network of friends in high places.

NARRATOR: Step Two: Give money to well-respected institutions.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: Cambridge University didn't have a Ukrainian Studies department and he provided the money to allow it to create one. It wasn't that much money, considering how rich he was. It's about a total of £5m, which I think is about, what, $6m or $7m. But he created this department and, obviously, the university was very grateful as it is very grateful to anyone who gives it substantial amounts of money. And so he was welcomed onto its Guild of Benefactors by none other than the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband.

NARRATOR: There’s a photo from that event, showing Firtash decked out in the crimson gown of the Guild of Benefactors. Prince Philip looks him straight in the eye with an expression of gratitude. Firtash, for his part, looks positively gleeful.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: So within four years of arriving in the country, he had built this network of friends in the House of Lords and House of Commons. And he'd also got integrated to one of the country's most prestigious universities to such an extent that he'd been given a medal by the Queen's husband.

NARRATOR: Remember, this is a guy who was the subject of an international report just five years prior. Global Witness had called for Ukraine to investigate Firtash and his company to see how they gained access to the Ukrainian gas market and to find out if they were really working in the best interests of the country. But Kyiv is a long way from London.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He'd risen so far and so fast he bought himself a mansion in West London, just across the road from Harrods, the big shop. It's luxurious, newly built. It's not entirely clear how much he paid for it, but one property publication estimated he paid £60m. And I've never seen anything to suggest that that's not the case. And then his integration continued. He opened trading on the London Stock Exchange. He created a festival called Days of Ukraine, including various events inside the House of Commons. He met the Speaker of the House of Commons, which is one of the most significant political figures in the UK.

NARRATOR: And then, in late 2013, tension began to mount in Ukraine.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: The Euromaidan protests had led to a lot of bloodshed. And then the president fled and Russia sent troops into annexed Crimea and later into the east of the country. 

NARRATOR: Britain, being a global superpower, would need to act strategically. And you’ll never guess who its leadership looked to for help.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: Firtash was invited into the British Foreign Office, the Foreign Ministry here in the UK, to give advice on how to deal with Putin. And his advice apparently was that this was all the Americans' fault and that Putin should be treated very gently. So that's kind of astonishing as well. He’s gone from being an unknown business ally of Gazprom, Putin's gas company, to advising a G7 member on how to deal with Putin.

NARRATOR: Isn’t it amazing what money can buy? In case you were thinking Firtash had traded in his Ukrainian influence to move among the British establishment, he had done no such thing. He still retained an outsized amount of power in his own country.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He owns a bank. He owns a TV station. He has other business interests. Yeah, he funded Yanukovych - I mean, Yanukovych had lost the Orange Revolution. He was the man who lost the Orange Revolution. He then came back in 2010 and was elected president. Firtash helps to fund his campaign. He doesn’t relocate lock, stock, and barrel to the UK. He just uses it as a kind of second home, as a place where he can enjoy his wealth. So yeah, he's very much living these two lives at the time in a way that is kind of extraordinary to look at now - no one in the UK really was troubled by this.

NARRATOR: Here’s a man who’s gobbled up power and property in two different countries - who’s given western authorities every reason to be suspicious of where his money came from and what he’s doing with it abroad - and he’s advising a Nato country on how to deal with a Russian invasion in Ukraine. He’d bought the trust and attention of the British establishment. And yet, Oliver says, that wasn’t even his most notable purchase.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: The real culmination of his UK integration strategy came just a couple of days later when he closed the deal to buy a Tube station from the British government. As far as I know, he's the only private individual to own a Tube station. It's a disused Tube station, but it still has the platforms in the shafts and, the ticket hall, it still looks like a Tube station. So, he bought that from the Ministry of Defense, who wanted rid of it, for £53m.

NARRATOR: Let’s recap Dmitry Firtash’s purchases to date. He’s got a foundation, the British Ukrainian Society, ostensibly fostering ties between the UK and Ukraine. He’s got a Ukrainian Studies department at Cambridge, one of the most revered universities in the world. He’s got a £60m mansion in West London - no big deal. He’s got British parliamentarians lapping up his dangerous political advice. And he’s got the disused Brompton Road Tube station, which he bought from the government itself. Fair to say that Firtash was, by that point, fully integrated. And if you’re asking: Why would anyone need a Tube station? Fair enough. It is a bit of a head-scratcher. And that’s precisely why our modern Tintin jumped on the story.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: My approach to investigative investigations that I do - or stories I want to write - is that there is a huge quantity of corruption out there, far more corruption than I can possibly investigate. And the vast majority of it is in the form of stories that are so complicated, it's going to be impossible to interest an editor in them. So I always need to have a detail, a kind of funny snippet that will catch the reader's attention and make it a story that nominally isn't about corruption, but it's actually nominally about something else. So the fact that he bought a Tube station just makes him jump out from among oligarchs, right? He's not just any oligarch. He's the oligarch who bought the Tube station.

NARRATOR: In light of the changing climate in Ukraine, a man like Firtash deserved careful scrutiny. Once Firtash purchased the Tube station, Oliver seized the opportunity to investigate.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: And then, it was a question, I suppose, also of, after the revolution in Ukraine, just tracking down who owned what. There was a sudden discussion about confiscating assets and returning them to the Ukrainian government. And it just became interesting to look into what was around. 

NARRATOR: But what does ‘looking into’ it really mean?

OLIVER BULLOUGH: I mean, it's embarrassingly simple, to be honest. A lot of oligarchs hide their assets behind layers and layers and layers of trusts and foundations and partnerships and companies and all the various offshore paraphernalia.

NARRATOR: You’ll remember that from Episode 2 of this series, with Panama Papers investigator Olesya Shmagun.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: In order to find Mr. Firtash’s mansion, which, as far as I know, I was the first person to realize was his, I mean, literally all I did was type his name into the phone book - 192.com, which is a phone book here in the UK. And I didn't find him, but I did find Lada Firtash, his wife. So I was, “Oh, well, there you go. He's just got the house in her name.” I mean, I knew he had a place somewhere in London. I just didn't know where it was.

NARRATOR: Sometimes investigative journalism is all about asking simple questions and making the most of simple answers.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: At the time I was living in London and so I just took the Tube across town. It's almost investigative journalism, very easy. And I walked to the address and had a look. And it was a basement flat on Brompton Square, really quite pokey and dark. And it seemed improbable that this could possibly be the London residence of one of the wealthiest oligarchs in Ukraine.

NARRATOR: The address of this flat was certainly posh - just a stone’s throw from Harrods, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Hyde Park. But the home itself seemed, to Oliver, remarkably unassuming.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: But this was a basement flat. You went down metal rungs, a series of stairs, and there was a door and a couple of windows very much overshadowed by the street. I mean, you wouldn't get any sunlight except, on a very unusual, cloudless summer's day, like in the height of summer. So it seemed weird that an oligarch would live there. And it struck me that maybe there was a different Lada Firtash, maybe there were two of them.

NARRATOR: What would you do in Oliver’s shoes? Call it a day? Cut your losses and go home? Well - you wouldn’t be much of an investigative journalist, then. Besides, you’ve already made the trip.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: Having gone all that way, I mean, I'd literally spent 25 minutes on the Tube. I was damned if it was going to be a wasted journey. I thought, “Well, maybe he's got some stuff hidden behind a shell company around here, too.” And so I thought, “Well, I'll just wander around and see if there's anything that looks more likely to be an oligarch's house.” 

NARRATOR: So Oliver poked around the neighborhood. Nothing. Houses worth maybe £2m or £3m, but nothing fit for a Ukrainian gas magnate.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: And then I walked back onto Brompton Road and around the corner past the old Tube station. I mean, you can tell it's a Tube station because it's got that kind of burgundy glazed tile that Tube stations have on the outside.

NARRATOR: And then, just down the road, there it was.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: There was this huge, white-brick, very modern, very stark mansion, which had clearly been built in the last three or four years. It had two giant bronze elephant sculptures outside the front door, and it had multiple balconies running up. It's a real piece of work. And you're like, “Oh, okay, that's an oligarch's house.” As it turned out, as I later looked it up on the planning deeds on the local authority website, you could only see half of it. It goes down into the ground as much as it goes up. It's got two basements, a swimming pool in the second basement. And I was like, “Oh, I see. Now you're talking. This is an oligarch's property.”

NARRATOR: But if this was Firtash’s real home, what was that other flat Oliver had seen earlier?

OLIVER BULLOUGH: You can stand up on a railing and kind of peer over the neighboring garage which is next to it and see to the back of the other side of the street. So actually I was sitting to the back of the house that held that basement flat that was registered in Lada Firtash's name. And then I could see that the back of that house was done in the same colored bricks, a very unusual white brick you don't see in London. So it was clear that actually, that basement flat that had first alerted me to the presence of the Firtashs was essentially a back door out of this, that they'd built a house that punched all the way through the block. And then it was right next door to the Tube station. And suddenly like, “Oh, that's why he wanted to buy the Tube station, because, the Tube station is adjoining his house.”

NARRATOR: It was the embodiment of unthinkable wealth. Unthinkable because of its magnitude - the sheer scope of Firtash’s purchasing power is hard to fathom. And ‘unthinkable’ because who was paying any mind? Britain had willingly traded real estate and influence for vast quantities of questionable cash without considering the consequences. Without thinking through exactly whom they were enabling. As a result, Putin’s Ukrainian point man in Britain was left unchecked. Even in 2014, after Russia had crossed into Ukrainian territory, a harbinger of a greater crisis to come.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: This issue of people of questionable political ties and questionable fortunes coming to the UK and using that money to buy access and friends was a live issue that people were debating. But it seems to be a thing that's only debated after the fact, after the particular regime has collapsed. It's only then that people get worried about it. No one ever seems to be worried about it proactively. And then the issue was, of course, that in 2014, the Americans unsealed an arrest warrant for Dmitry Firtash.

NARRATOR: The 12th of March, 2014. Vienna, Austria. Authorities arrested Dmitry Firtash on charges resulting from an FBI investigation in the state of Illinois, relating to an international corruption conspiracy.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: They had indicted him before a Grand Jury on charges of corruption related to the titanium trade in India. And because Boeing was - I think it was - at the time, headquartered in Chicago, the Illinois FBI had been investigating.

NARRATOR: Firtash was held in custody until he posted a bond of €125m, a price he could afford to pay. It was at this point Oliver realized why Firtash outed himself back in 2006. It wasn’t because he was being investigated by the British campaigning organization Global Witness but because he was being investigated by the American domestic intelligence service. And the American press had caught wind of it.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: American investigators were very concerned about the gas deal, were very concerned about his business ties. He has consistently had to deny connections to a notorious Russian mobster called Semion Mogilevich, who is wanted by the FBI. 

NARRATOR: Semion Mogilevich is not the very worst of the Russian mob bosses, but he is the Most Wanted. He was living in Hungary, a country that was willing to cooperate with the US in hunting him down. Local officials turned over thousands of pages of documents implicating him in money laundering crimes. US investigators were now apprised of his links to Russia’s suspicious gas shipments to Ukraine. And that, of course, linked him to Firtash. 

OLIVER BULLOUGH: There does appear to have been some acquaintanceship between Mr. Firtash and Mogilevich back in the 1990s or early 2000, and he had to consistently deny ever having been in business with him. And so, I think probably why he outed himself was to try and bring a bit of daylight into his business dealings because these rumors about Mogilevich were beginning to look worrying to his business ambitions. So that's actually why he exposed himself to the FT and The Wall Street Journal and so on.

NARRATOR: Firtash has denied having any business dealings with the mobster. Still, after years of investigation, the Americans had gathered enough evidence to make an arrest, which Austrian police officers carried out on their behalf. Firtash posted the €125m bail, but that wasn’t the end of the story. We don’t yet know the end of the story. The Ukrainian businessman has lived under house arrest in Austria for eight years now, fighting extradition to the US. Meanwhile, back in the UK, Oliver has been making the most of Firtash’s wealth, ever since he found his London mansion.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: What happened next really is that I was then talking to my friend Roman Borisovich, who I think you've been talking to as well.

NARRATOR: Roman Borisovich, the anti-corruption campaigner you met in Part 1 of this series.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: And Roman had put together this idea for the Kleptocracy Tours. I think he and a friend came up with it and they wanted residences to highlight.

NARRATOR: Roman and his campaigning group, ClampK, were organizing tours around London so that sightseers could ogle at the homes of oligarchs and thieves. And who better to partner with than one of the UK’s best-known investigators of corruption?

OLIVER BULLOUGH: So I said to Roman, “Let's do the Tube station.” He was, “Oh, yeah, brilliant.” So in his very enthusiastic, Roman-ish way. 

NARRATOR: That’s how Oliver and Roman began taking groups of people to Firtash’s private home, to take in its scale from the outside, and to hear the truth about the kleptocrat who owns it. 

OLIVER BULLOUGH: And it was just brilliant because every time we turned up, whoever was in the house - and it wasn't Firtash because he was in Vienna but whether it was his wife or his butler, or whatever, I don't know - would call the police and the police would turn up and tell us to move on. And then we'd point out that we were in a public place and had a perfect right to do what we liked. And we'd have a bit of back and forth, so they kept coming up with new reasons to call the police because obviously the police got quite wise to the fact that we were just fairly harmless people and not doing any harm. And it eventually got to the point when they’d just say, “Look, here's a phone number. If you're going to do this, can you just give us a call so we know to ignore it?”

NARRATOR: It’s a great bit of fun. But don’t forget the grim reality beneath it because for all the work Roman does to clamp down on kleptocracy, and for all the books and articles Oliver writes to call attention to the problem, there’s no undoing the damage Firtash has done or what he represents.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: He still hasn't been convicted of any crimes. And so they haven't convicted him of a crime and maybe they never will. But his role in the development of Ukraine has been objectively to help Vladimir Putin over the years to maintain his influence over Ukraine and to stymie political forces trying to help the country develop in a different direction. that's undeniable.

NARRATOR: The time when history could be written in service of peace and prosperity in post-Soviet Europe has passed, Oliver says. Things could have gone differently for Ukraine in 2022, just as they could have gone differently back in the ‘90s. Things are changing in the UK. They’re changing in America. And yet, as Olesya says, it all comes a day late, and many billions of dollars short.

OLESYA SHMAGUN: This corrupted money not only undermines European democracy, but from a Russian point of view, of course, it looks like hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, because they are always talking about corrupt Russian politicians. But on the other hand, they are actually enabling this corruption to happen and only now that something terrible happened they started to really try to stop this. So finally European democracy started to do what we were talking about for many years. But it seems it's a little bit too late.

NARRATOR: For his part, Roman Borisovich sees hope on the horizon.

ROMAN BORISOVICH: Hopefully the time is coming, and I think it's coming now when this information is finally going to be useful. My colleagues, especially my colleagues at the Russian Anti-Corruption Foundation, they were trained for the last decade to bring the corruption cases out of Russia, And I feel that only recently that has started happening. The information that they're contributing is being taken seriously. After the 24th of February, obviously the situation has changed completely. And I think that there is a genuine interest now. 

NARRATOR: Western countries are waking up to their own role in this war. But if things continue as they are, Oliver says, we’ll only get more of the same.

OLIVER BULLOUGH: One point that I think the Dmitry Firtash episode illustrates very clearly is that in the last three months or so - since Putin invaded Ukraine - there has been a huge amount of attention on Russian oligarchs in particular. And I always try and say, well, it's not just Russian oligarchs, it's oligarchs from all places. Actually, the people are the same. The way they obtain their money is the same. And so I suppose what I keep trying to warn people about is the fact that it's totally conceivable that if China invaded Taiwan you'd end up in an identical situation with Chinese oligarchs, and thinking, “Oh, wow, we should never have let their money in in the first place.” You wait for a foreign policy crisis. You wait for Libya to be in turmoil, and then you decide you shouldn't have accepted money from Gadhafi’s son, or you wait for Ukraine to be in turmoil and decide you shouldn't have accepted money from Dmitry Firtash. We're complicit in the fact that they're stealing so much money and, therefore, we're complicit in the immiseration of the lives of millions upon millions of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people. And we should get out of that game now.

NARRATOR: You can learn more about Britain’s role in international corruption and money laundering in Oliver’s book Butler to the World. I’m Vanessa Kirby. Join us next time, as we meet a ragtag group of civilian spies who uncovered the horrific secrets of the Third Reich. Or, if you’re a subscriber to *Spyscape Plus* on Apple Podcasts, there’s no need to wait: you can listen to it right now.