Patrick Radden Keefe

You can have that same sort of fog of ambiguity in a city like London.

Yeah, I wonder.

I mean, I think that, you know, part of this whole thing for me was prompted by the invasion of Ukraine and the way in which suddenly London found itself in kind of rather an awkward situation with a bunch of these Putin cronies who had found such a commodious home in the UK.

And so there were the new sanctions, I think, that...

To me, that marked progress.

I actually think that the rolling back of non-dom status is a big and really positive change.

I think that you've seen gestures in the direction of even just these silly little things, but just transparency in terms of who owns a given property and beneficial ownership of property.

offshore trusts and so forth there's a little bit more transparency there though powerful people can get their names kind of removed from the public registers it's it's really devilish thing to get to the bottom of who owns a property in london even now i think all of those are sort of half steps in the right direction the question that's really interesting is um

There's a moment shortly after the invasion of Ukraine where a bunch of these sanctioned or soon to be sanctioned Russians start putting their elegant properties, their mansions up for sale.

And who swoops in is the Chinese, right?

Of course, yeah.

The next generation of oligarchs kind of comes right in.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And so it's on some level you feel as though there will be, there may be some sense in which a crackdown specifically on the post-Soviet plutocrats is really just going to be an opportunity for the next generation of plutocrats who sweep into town.

That was a pleasure.

Thank you.

He's an object expert.

It was a nightmare.

People hated it.