Report find UK is enabling sanctions evasion in the Stans

The UK is enabling money laundering and sanctions evasion in Russia’s former Central Asian satellite states, and thereby helping Putin fund his war in Ukraine, according to a British parliamentary report. Corrupt elites in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are being allowed to “wash the profits of their drugs trades in the offices of the City of London,” the report by the cross-party House of Commons foreign affairs committee says. More broadly, it says the UK’s failure to prosecute white-collar crime by pro-Russian kleptocrats in the “Stans” constitutes a “real and significant threat” to the British and European sanctions regime imposed after last year’s invasion. The UK’s official presence in the region is minimal compared with the City’s outsize role in moving money round the world. Law enforcement is minimal and cultural engagement is on a shoestring: the BBC World Service has a single correspondent in Uzbekistan, a country of 36 million struggling to shed the legacy of the worst post-Soviet dictator apart from Putin himself. So much for Global Britain.