THE TRUTH WAS BARRY SIMMONDS had spent his life setting up conduits for his clients dirty money, and dirty it was, the fruit of crime and corruption. He’d built a cast iron circuit of conduits, managed from Belize, into which dirty money flowed, was washed whiter than white via a cascade of Caribbean banks, channelled into real estate, sold to investors, and the proceeds wired to London via the major banks and legitimately reinvested in prime property.
It wasn’t his money, he was in a manner of speaking a jobber, but now he was tired and wanted out, the trouble was after his partner Gordon Young retired to England, he’d got in too deep besides over the years his clientele had changed, at the outset they were British tax dodgers of various ilks, then thanks to Wallace, Russians, middlemen acting on behalf of a coterie of government officials, corrupt politicians, crooked businessmen and their helpers.
At the other end of the circuit with the connivance of British politicians and bankers, the City of London rolled out a red carpet to welcome a clique of thieving oligarchs fat from their feast on the carcase of the Soviet Union.
They appeared in all disguises, from oligarchs who sponsored English league football clubs with the money looted from state owned enterprises, stolen from the people of the USSR, to art loving billionaires with links to organized crime, who by stealth insinuated their way into British society, buying politicians, their parties, respected institutions and even the governing bodies of venerable universities.
In spite of Theresa May telling the House of Commons, ‘There is no place for these people, or their money, in our country...those who seek to do us harm, my message is simple: you are not welcome here,’ Russians and former Soviet citizens continued to flock to London, stash their money in British banks and invest in businesses by devious routes dreamt up by lawyers like Barry Simmonds.
Simmo knew too much, but how was he to get out? Like the proverbial physician he never took to time to care for himself, Medice, cura te ipsum. Essentially honest, but there was a streak of naivety or was it the kind of fatality that affected those who overstayed their welcome in Belize?
Sir Patrick Kennedy was a top A-List banker, one of those people who enjoyed privileges beyond those of transient politicians, diplomats and ambassadors, he enjoyed the kind of privileges enjoyed by many heads of states much larger than Belize, a country he could have bought up lock stock and barrel, if he was crazy enough to do so. Tens, even hundreds of thousands depended directly on his decisions, millions indirectly.
The wind turned when Britain’s political classes finally woke up to the realisation that the City of London had become a convenient money laundering hub and prime property a vehicle to conceal the gains derived from crime and corruption. Liberalism was an admirable quality, but when it left the door open to kleptocrats and ruthless oligarchs in the guise of investors and philanthropists, agents of the Kremlin's authoritarian methods, it was not long before clear sighted men launched a cry of alarm alarm. With so much Russian money in the City, leaders awoke to the realisation that the Kremlin’s men were in a position of force to influence the country's political, cultural and educational institutions.
Simmo didn’t work with those members of the British establishment, who filled their pockets preening and kowtowing to rich and powerful Russians close to the Kremlin, quaffing their vodka and caviar at cocktail parties in their extravagant homes in Knightsbridge or receptions at the Russian Embassy in Kensington Gardens.
His work was with a different tier, those that oiled and greased the machine of the Russian oligarchy, the agents, doers and bag carriers, who gleaned the crumb’s that fell from the tables of their rich masters.
Belize was an offshore backwater, where for anything from 700 dollars a law firm like Simmonds & Young would set a company and a bank account in an hour for any unsavoury would be oligarch.
In a sense Simmo had, indirectly, become a de facto agent of the Russian oligarchy, not that any of the real oligarchs had ever heard of him.
His business with Wallace had made him careless, it was easy money, too easy, causing him to point better, more demanding, well-heeled clients towards a more successful colleague amongst the army of willing lawyers, solicitors and estate agents in the City of London or one of the UK’s more reputable offshore financial tax havens.