SEDOV AND HIS POWERFUL FRIENDS had great plans. Their idea was to build a safe haven in London for the day when Putin's Russia paid the price for its leader's dreams of grandeur, a fate that eventually befell all authoritarian states.
Though they were not very imaginative they were observant, carefully watching the very rich, fellow countrymen and other property tycoons who had invested big in London.
It was amazing how the British upper classes were naïve, corrupt was perhaps a better word, like the Czar, dancing whilst the revolutionaries plotted against him.
Sedov was a student of history, Russian history, and had no desire to end up in Lubyanka, once described as the tallest building in Moscow, since Siberia could be seen from its basement.
A reference to ambitious men like Sedov was the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who it was reported owned around eight billion dollars of real estate in London's Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Kensington districts.
Properties owned by a web of shell companies in offshore havens set up by anonymous lawyers, much better paid than the sadly unlamented Simmo, because Khalifa could count on the complicity of the British establishment, as for Sedov and his friends they were newcomers, still feeling their way around the City and its Caribbean laundromat.
Khalifa had been behind some of London’s most obscene London property deals, paying wild prices with unlimited petrodollars for ultra prime properties, many of which had stood empty for years.
Encouraged by Boris Johnson, who as Mayor of London had flown to Kuala Lumpur in 2014 to promote London’s Battersea power station redevelopment, London had been transformed into the Wild West of the global property market.
At the time of Johnson’s visit, Malaysia’s ruling prime minister was Najib Razak, now in prison after the scandal surrounding the country’s state development fund 1MDB from which billions of dollars had been embezzled, charged with corruption on a huge scale. He had been found blatantly guilty of diverting billions of dollars out of Malaysian public funds into his own and his associates’ pockets.
Nearly two billion dollars were invested by Malaysian sovereign funds in the huge Battersea Power Station luxury development.
Razak’s trial uncovered a trail of corruption that repeatedly led to the City of London, a central hub in the movement of dirty money, which enjoyed the complaisance of British politicians and members of the British Establishment.