Here’s How Governments Help The Elite Launder Money | Aaron Bastani Meets Oliver Bullough

You've got a drop-down menu of how you want to move value. Like, what's the way you're going to move it today? Are you going to move it by buying some luxury handbags, you know, in Harrods or Bicester Village, shipping them to China? That's one way of doing it. Are you going to buy a load of, you know, Tether or other cryptocurrency and ship it to Cambodia? That's one way of doing it. Or are you going to just use a load of cash, stick it in a shipping container and send that abroad? You can do that too. So the point I'm making is it's incredibly easy to be a criminal. And, you know, there is supposedly a giant global infrastructure to stop money laundering. It is no exaggeration to say that it is completely failing to do its job.

It's really good to be here.

Well, I mean, it's funny you say, you know, you talk about globalization and everything. It is something that we should associate with money laundering. You say this is a giant parallel financial industry, and informal — it's certainly an underground financial industry. The size of it, I mean, these are obviously estimates. You know, we have no reliable tax returns, sadly, from the world's, you know, people traffickers and drug cartels and so on. But the estimate that's normally put on it is that the criminal economy, so therefore money laundering, is between two and five percent of global GDP, which is fortunately a very easy sum to do because global GDP is approximately a hundred trillion US. So we're looking at somewhere between two and five trillion US dollars being laundered globally every year, which is essentially the profits of all acquisitive, all inquisitive crime that is committed everywhere in the world. And what's, I think, money laundering is seen as, like a lot of white-collar crime, is seen as somehow second order. You know, a little bit, oh, it's important, but it's not as important as, you know, having your phone stolen or, God forbid, terrorism, or, you know, the mayhem that is inflicted by the drug cartels in Mexico. But money laundering is the support industry for all of those things in the same way that in the formal economy the financial services industry underpins, you know, trade networks, shops, you know, getting a mortgage. All of those things are reliant on banks and building societies and so on. The criminal economy is completely reliant on money laundering. So essentially what I'm writing about is the support network for the world's worst people. This is what allows terrorism to happen. This is what allows the cartels to happen. This is what allows people trafficking to happen, is because they are able to take their wealth, feed it into this underground financial system, move it around a lot, and then make it look legitimate so they can spend it in the formal economy without anyone realizing that it's criminal wealth. So it is, yeah, it is a hugely important part of the criminal economy. It is as globalized as any other industry. And yet it gets almost no attention, certainly very, very little attention from people who could make a big difference, which are the leaders of our government.

I mean, because if you think about five trillion in terms of victims, the volume of victims. So, I mean, fraud, which is a form of crime that a lot of people in this country are familiar with, is what's called push payment fraud, which is when often older people — my father was targeted towards the end of last year. Older people are often targeted by people who phone them up on the phone or tell them, oh, there's a problem with your computer, or there's a problem with your phone, or there's a problem with your bank account. You just need to move some money to a different bank account to keep it safe while we sort this out. And then the money's gone and there's, you know, very little you can do about it. It's all sort of obfuscated in this very, you know, well-organized fraud structure that costs the UK about a billion pounds a year. Now, the amount of money that is estimated to be laundered through the City of London every year, estimated by the British government's own figures, is hundreds of billions of pounds a year. So you're talking about that push payment fraud, which is a huge problem with a massive number of victims who lose their life savings, is less than one percent of the amount of money that's laundered through this city every year. It's an unimaginable scale of devastation being wreaked on very vulnerable people, not just in this country but globally. And there is this huge, well-organized industry to make sure that the people perpetrating these crimes are able to keep the money that they've stolen and the money they've extorted from other people. And, you know, I mean, if you look at the war in Ukraine, why is Russia able to obtain components for the drones which it's building even though they're supposedly under sanction? Because they can launder money via this money laundering system. It is, you know, devastating all over the world. And yeah, it needs far more attention than it gets, which is why I've written the book.

I think if we go back a little bit further. So, I mean, I think there's probably always been money laundering. I mean, the sort of apocryphal origin of the term money laundering is supposedly from Al Capone in Chicago back during the prohibition years in the 1920s, and they would supposedly buy laundries and put their profits through there and just claim to have done more washes than they'd actually done and legitimize their wealth. That isn't actually the origin of the term money laundering. It's just a nice sort of post-facto rationalization for it. But it really took off in the 1960s with the beginning of globalization when it became easier, far easier, to move money between countries. You can move money to places like Switzerland, to places like the Cayman Islands, Panama, places that would look after your money and not ask too many questions or any questions about where it came from. And then you have this sort of explosion in the 1980s when, you know, you had massive deregulation of the financial system on both sides of the Atlantic. Money could flow freely. Everyone was booming. A lot of people buying drugs, which is, you know, a major source of the revenue for that period. And in those days money laundering was super simple. You took your money to the bank and you paid it in and the bank was like, oh, thanks very much. That's great. And that was it. You were done. There's this incredible — in the Brink's-Mat bullion robbery in 1983, which remains, I think, the third biggest heist in British history. You know, the huge amount of gold had been stolen from a warehouse. All the police in the country desperately looking for gold. You know, where is the gold? You know, trying to find it before it gets smuggled out the country. There was a gold bullion dealer on the outskirts of Bristol that was buying so much gold for cash that they had to have special shipments of ten million pounds from the Bank of England to his branch of Barclays just to provide him with all the cash that he needed. Right? No one in the bank thought, bullion dealer, ten million pounds in cash, some discrepancy. They were just like, oh yeah, give the guy his money. That's how banks operated in those days. There was no conception that they should essentially have a broader responsibility to society than just facilitating business, that maybe they should ask what kind of business it is. So we brought in, globally from the late 1980s and then particularly in the 1990s, really quite tough restrictions on financial institutions about what they could do, and specifically they had to report suspicions that they had, which meant that that original model of just taking your cash to the bank and paying it in, that wasn't really possible anymore. Because of that, because criminals are very entrepreneurial, they learn new ways of moving value around the place. Some of the techniques which have been widely used, what's called the Hawala network, widely used in the Middle East, was essentially repurposed to provide services in South America to move value for the drugs cartels. They couldn't use the banking system anymore. So they moved value in the form of stuff rather than in the form of money. This is now very widely used by Chinese money laundering gangs who've taken off. So although one door closed or sort of was made more shut than it had been, other doors opened as the criminal gangs learned new ways of moving money. And then now, joyously for them, we also have cryptocurrencies, which are an incredibly useful and efficient and very hard to trace way of moving massive amounts of value around the world in, you know, in the click of a finger. And so in a way, to answer your question, laundering money in the way that it was laundered back in the go-go years of Miami Vice in the 1980s is harder than it was. But they have been able to add that technique to other techniques. So in a way it's now easier because there it's like a, you know, you've got a drop-down menu of how you want to move value. Like, what's the way you're going to move it today? Are you going to move it by buying some luxury handbags, you know, in Harrods or Bicester Village, shipping them to China? That's one way of doing it. Are you going to buy a load of, you know, Tether or other cryptocurrency and ship it to Cambodia? That's one way of doing it. Or are you going to just use a load of cash, stick it in a shipping container, and send that abroad? You can do that, too. So, it is, you know, I suppose the point I'm making is it's incredibly easy to be a criminal. And, you know, there is supposedly a giant global infrastructure to stop money laundering. It is no exaggeration to say that it is completely failing to do its job.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it feels a little bit like — so, you know, trying to draw a parallel with treating a disease, it feels a little bit like as doctors who are being asked to treat a disease, they don't know what the symptoms of the disease are. They don't know what causes the disease. They don't know how prevalent it is. They don't know who has it, and they don't know how to treat it. So, and at the same time, if they get it wrong, they get fined. So, it is a — you know, it's probably not something that gets said too often on this podcast, but I do actually genuinely feel very sympathetic for the — with the large banks here. They are spending really an enormous amount of money attempting to comply with the anti-money laundering laws, but without any real idea about whether they're succeeding or not. So, I mean, to put that into perspective, the global cost of compliance with anti-money laundering laws, the amount that the large, mainly the large financial institutions are spending, is about two hundred billion US dollars every year, just slightly more than that. And, you know, what could you do with two hundred billion dollars if you weren't doing this with it? Well, according to the UN estimates, that is enough money to solve world hunger and to provide clean water and sanitation for everyone on Earth and to have fifty billion dollars left over. Right? That's how much money we are spending on fighting and failing to stop money laundering. And it is, I think, a real failure of politics that no one stops and says, is this money being spent wisely? Is this money being spent in the right direction? Are we doing the right things with this? Are we asking the right people to do things? Instead, it is just consistently doing the same thing, the same thing, and expecting different results.

Yeah.

And you're saying it's two hundred billion a year for this business.

Well, quite, that'd be quite nice, wouldn't it?

So I think that one, Ozark, is a lot of fun. And I think that another one which was quite fun, and I don't know if you saw, was Outlaws, Steven Merchant's Bristol-based comedy about a bunch of misfits doing community service who end up, by a series of weird coincidences, involved in a giant money laundering conspiracy, which is also fun. You know, the structures, the use of shell companies, the use of bank accounts owned by shell companies, moving money between multiple bank accounts. All of these things are part of money laundering and they're particularly part of money laundering, often how it's done in Western countries. Another really good one is the John Grisham book, The Firm, which came out, I think, in 1991. It was possibly his first book. They also made a film of it a couple of years later with Tom Cruise in the lead role, which isn't as good as the book, but it's still okay. And that's a very good reflection of what money laundering was like back then. The idea of jets full of cash being flown to the Cayman Islands, being paid into banks and so on. Where all of this slightly falls down in my mind is that the representation of money laundering in those shows is very much tends to be how it's done in Western countries, which are countries with a developed, very large financial system, where, you know, shell companies are readily available and so on. And we have completely neglected to understand money laundering as it's done in the rest of the world, particularly in the Middle East and in China, where the financial system is not so readily accessible, or in China it's tightly controlled by capital controls and so on. So there is much more need for ways of moving value outside the financial system. And because the reason I think that that's super interesting and super important is that essentially the way that they move value, which is via the movement of things rather than via the movement of the kind of cash that you see in Ozark or The Firm or Outlaws, is that that's how we used to do it too before, you know, globalization. In that if you look at, say, the way the Medici used to bank in Renaissance Florence, you could go into the branch in Venice or Rome or Florence and give them a quantity of coins and just say, I would like to be able to collect these coins in London or Bruges, and they would give you a piece of paper and you would go to London or Bruges and you would collect your coins. Now, they didn't themselves ship the coins from Florence to London. That would have been crazy. They had money in London which they could give you. And how they balanced the books between those two different centers is by moving stuff. They would move wool in one direction, silks or spices in the other direction, and hide the money laundering. And actually there were — I mean, what's funny about it is they have the secret books of the Medici which can be read in the Florence archive, and they were providing banking services to sort of cardinals and princes, people who were the kind of kleptocrats of their day. So it was very much a kind of degree of money laundering was going on, is they would hide the transactions in the paperwork around the shipment of trade goods. And this is how the vast majority of the world money launders. It doesn't really involve money at all. And that's one of the reasons why the term money laundering is a little bit annoying, is that, you know, really you're talking about value, and you can move value just as easily in the form of a watch, which you can buy an expensive watch, stick it on your wrist, fly out the country to another country and sell it at the other end. You've moved the value just as successfully, in fact probably rather more successfully than if you moved it via a financial institution. No one is any the wiser. And yet most of, in fact, almost all of the scrutiny that we do as a society to try and stop money laundering is based on bank accounts. We're looking at bank accounts all the time. And it feels a little bit to me like we've built a — like a castle, or we just tried to build a castle to keep our economy safe from criminal money. And part of the wall is very high and well fortified, equipped with all the latest weapons and AI and everything. And meanwhile, everywhere else you can just walk through. There's maybe a grassy mound, you know, which is completely undefended because it's so easy to move money in and out. And so, one of the points I'm trying to make in the book is to try and give this global sense of what money laundering looks like and say it isn't just the view that you get if you read The Firm or watch Ozark or Outlaws or whatever, or other, you know, Western fictionalized versions of money laundering, that globally speaking, this is a far more sophisticated and, you know, tangible in the literal sense form of value moving. It isn't just numbers on a spreadsheet.

So, I mean, Bicester Village — Bicester Village gets it. You know, I feel a little bit bad for Bicester Village in that I do focus on them a bit in the book. The reason Bicester Village is so, you know, easy to understand what I'm about to talk about is because it is a concentrated place where there are lots of luxury good shops all in the same place. So you can see a phenomenon that otherwise is a bit more dispersed all happening all in one place. But particularly for Chinese money laundering gangs, it is very difficult for them to move money between China and other countries because of the restrictions that the Chinese government puts on moving money out of China. You can't move more than fifty thousand dollars in a year out of China. And if you are a wealthy Chinese person, that isn't nearly enough money to sustain what you want to sustain, whether that's sending your kids to university in this country or to go gambling in Vancouver or whatever. So they have created a separate parallel underground financial system that allows this movement of extensive amounts of value in and out of China unhindered via the trade network. And so there is a huge demand in China for luxury goods, particularly luxury goods that are unavailable there or that are cheaper than what are available there. And so they will essentially employ large numbers of Chinese students who are based in European countries to go to luxury good shops, whether that's in Bicester Village or in London or in Paris or wherever, and to buy luxury goods, package them up and send them back to China. Now, where do they get the money from to do that if they can't get money out of China? Well, they have a service with drugs gangs who generate a lot of cash, and that cash is then handed over to collectors. The students pay it into their bank accounts and then go and buy stuff in Bicester Village, where they might just buy it with cash. And then those goods are shipped to China, and then everyone in China who wants luxury goods and isn't otherwise able to get them is happy. But then that raises the question: how do the drug dealers get paid? They've handed over a load of cash to some people and they are therefore looking for something to pay for that cash. And this is where the Chinese trade networks can come in, in that the Chinese are able via contacts in South America to pay that debt with shipments of cocaine from Colombia or Bolivia, and then people in Colombia or Bolivia are being paid in turn from China with shipments of the precursor chemicals or whatever to make that. So you have a giant triangular essentially trade system in which the bit from Britain to China, or from Europe to China more broadly, is being paid in luxury goods. Now those luxury goods, they could be handbags, because handbags are a good concentrated store of luxury. They fit everyone. You don't need to worry about the sizing. Or they could be luxury clothes. They could be wristwatches. It could be jewelry. It could be anything. But these are desirable products. The kind of thing that you would see on social media. The kind of thing that might be difficult to get in China, certainly at a reasonable price. And the value of this, they call it the digu trade between Europe and China, is — I mean, it's a little bit difficult to estimate, but it's definitely in the tens of billions of dollars is going every year. But if you're thinking about tens of billions of dollars going that way, there must also be tens of billions of dollars coming the other way. Something must be paying for it, and that is paying for it is essentially the trade that generates, that produces the cocaine that is then sold to generate the money that is then spent on the trade goods. And the challenge in a way for this, and we saw this in France last year, it was really interesting, is that in France, in order to try and restrict this kind of money laundering, tax residents in France are not allowed to spend more than one thousand euros in cash at any one time. That's the maximum you can spend in cash. But that doesn't apply to people who aren't tax resident. But they had a policy proposed by the finance ministry that they would equalize that. So that was a limit that applied to everyone. If you were in France, you couldn't spend more than a thousand euros in cash. And there was such an outcry from the vendors of luxury goods, which is a very influential lobby in France. They've got some very, very big and powerful luxury goods companies, that they scrapped the policy. They said it's fine. You can set the limit for non-residents at fifteen thousand. So there's such a source of demand for the French-made luxury goods from money launderers that essentially the luxury goods companies were able to put pressure on the French government to prevent them from doing anything about that. And that was a — it's just a really interesting insight. You don't get them very often. Really interesting insight into the kind of impact on the real economy of the way that these funds are being siphoned into it.

So, yeah, I mean, you're obviously looking at Italy, France, the UK. Though interestingly, you see this exactly the same model but with a different outcome. So this is often called the Vancouver model of money laundering because one of the first places this was ever really picked up on was in British Columbia, where you had a lot of this demand was not to buy luxury goods but was to gamble. There was a casino that was very popular with Chinese punters. And so a lot of people wanted to be able to come over from China to Vancouver, which has a very significant Chinese community, to see relatives and friends and so on, and to go and gamble, but they didn't have access to money that they could gamble with because they couldn't get all their money out of China. So they would take delivery of large quantities of cash from Canadian criminal gangs, often drug dealers, which they would then gamble with. And in return, that debt that they would have, because obviously they would lose a lot of the money while gambling because that's how it works, that debt they would then pay by shipping drugs from wherever to the Canadian criminal gangs. And what was really interesting is it took a really long time for the Canadian authorities to figure out what was going on and indeed to figure out whether anyone was committing a crime because this doesn't look like money laundering. Traditionally, money laundering: you have money, you put it into a bank and you take out a check or some form of piece of paper which is equal to the value of the money you've paid in. But with this, what was weird is you had criminals delivering cash to gamblers who would then just lose all the cash. And you're like, but this isn't money laundering. It doesn't look like money laundering because you're not getting anything. You've just lost all this money. So how is that even a crime? But what you need to understand is when you step back and see the system as a whole, there is a circle of value exchange which then includes other people who aren't present at that point who are then delivering the drugs to keep the circuit going around, to keep generating the cash which can then keep being gambled in the casino. And this is the same system that we're seeing with buying luxury goods in Europe. And we've also seen it in gambling in Sydney, in Australia, in Las Vegas, and in other places.

Yeah, I mean, it would be British Columbia, but this became such a giant industry.

Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary.

Well, so certainly a lot of the people I was talking to in Vancouver when I was out there looking into this were — for them, a lot of the problem that they now have with —

Opioid addiction was driven by the fact that it became so necessary to import a lot of drugs to generate the cash which was demanded by the gamblers that you ended up with a flood of product on the market in Vancouver that then created a lot of the addiction that you now see. And I agree, walking through or driving through downtown Vancouver is a horrifying experience. Just the extent of the addiction, which is just there on full display, is really appalling. And a lot of that issue, certainly according to the people I was talking to there who are a lot of people who'd worked in both analyzing and attempting to try and prosecute some of these gangs and what they were up to, a lot of that issue was caused by the fact that there was just so much demand for cash that there became an equal demand for drugs to be supplied.

So it is a very cheap way of laundering money. This sounds like a strange way of describing it, but in the old days when you had money and you gave it to a professional money launderer, their job was to try and put that money in a bank. That's what they were trying to do. And after the bank started to make checks, that became quite difficult. You had to find a corrupt banker. You had to, you know, break up the money into small packages, pay it into lots of banks. It was quite a laborious and expensive process. Now, the way that the Chinese gangs do it, however, is completely different to that in that they have people who want to get rid of cash and they have people who want cash. So, you're just connecting supply and demand. So, they're able essentially to cut what they're charging down to almost nothing. It's an incredibly cheap way of laundering money, which means that the profits for the criminal gangs become much greater. They don't have so much expense of, as it were, legitimizing their wealth anymore, which means that there is more profit in crime.

There is therefore more crime, which is precisely the opposite of what we were supposedly doing in tackling money laundering. The whole point of tackling money laundering is to make it more difficult, therefore more expensive, therefore to make crime less profitable.

It is extraordinary, the numbers, and also extraordinary how little we hear about this, which I will talk about because it's really important. So the reason we have compliance is that a lot of the foundational principles of tackling money laundering were created very, very quickly in the late 1980s when they were creating something called the Financial Action Task Force, and then they were slightly revised after 9/11 to help with tackling terrorist finance, but not really considered. So we had people who didn't really know very much of what they were talking about, working in a real rush, really, you know, 40 years ago, trying to get something done which they didn't really know how to do. And one of the things they created was, and this was actually a British initiative, so yay the UK, was that they felt that it would be a laborious amount of paperwork for the law enforcement agents to have to decide for themselves what transactions were suspicious. So instead they outsourced the process of deciding what transactions in a bank were suspicious to the bankers themselves. They had to, if they have suspicions about a transaction, they have to file what's called a suspicious activity report. And if they don't do that, there are fines for not reporting a suspicious activity.

Now, the problem with that, well, there are many problems with it, but the core problem is that if you are a clean financial institution, but you're very keen not to be fined, you will report anything that you might be suspicious of just to make sure you don't get fined. If you're a dirty financial institution, you won't report anything at all because you'd be blowing the whistle on yourself. So basically what we've done is we've outsourced checks on money laundering to money launderers, and funnily enough they don't tend to report on themselves very much. But there are very significant fines available if you miss acts of money laundering, and particularly if you miss acts of terrorist finance. I mean, nine-figure fines from the US Department of Justice. Banks are very, very keen not to pay them, so in order to make sure that there is no prospect of them paying them, they will do anything at all to avoid being connected to money laundering and particularly terrorist finance.

And that second one, the terrorist finance, is really hard because unlike money laundering, terrorist financing tends to involve very small amounts of money. It's very hard to spot. The crime is committed at the very end of the process rather than at the beginning. So you can't really connect it necessarily to any crime either. So essentially they will debank people for any reason at all, often Muslims. Muslims have, as a rule, distinctive names. There's a reason why Muhammad is supposedly the most popular boy's name in the UK. And so if you have the name of a designated terrorist, they could check whether you're the same person as that or not, or whether you're related or somehow know them. Or they could just cancel your bank account anyway because the chances are that you're not generating them much in revenue. So they just get rid of you and avoid the prospect of that being any kind of possible repercussions for the bank. You have no right to a bank account. So they will find that there is a connection, possible connection, purported connection. Maybe there's just been some article in the Daily Express. Whatever, that's the reason they'll get rid of your bank account. There is no appeal. There's nothing you can do about that. You just have to find a different bank account.

Now, that's incredibly shameful for someone to be told that you're losing your bank account, particularly if you've had a bank account at an institution for 20 years. Suddenly, it's really dislocating. And if you publicize this and say this is terrible that this has happened to me, then other banks definitely won't give you a bank account. So the inclination is just to keep this quiet. It's both shameful and bad for you to publicize this. So, as you say, hundreds of thousands of bank accounts are being closed every year. And yet, you hear almost nothing about it at all except when it happened to Nigel Farage.

Now, Nigel Farage was debanked for political reasons, or certainly there were political reasons taken into account when they decided to close his account at Coutts. And I think that's wrong that they took into account his political views. I don't agree with the guy, but there's no reason not to give him a bank account. Where I feel the problem arose with that story is it was presented as being somehow specific to Nigel Farage, or in the United States where this is talked about as well, as somehow specific to right-wing people active in the crypto industry. It isn't. The overwhelming majority of the people who are debanked are Muslims, often poor Muslims or Muslim charities or charities serving Islamic countries or Muslim beneficiaries. And they are often connected to funding terrorism completely spuriously, you know, subject to really very intrusive checks on everything that they do. Without, and this barely needs saying, it's so obvious, without noticeably having any success in tackling terrorism. You know, the Taliban are back. They have got Afghanistan again. Terrorist groups are active across the Middle East, across Central Africa. You know, all of these efforts we've been making since 9/11 to drive terrorist financing out of the financial system has clearly not succeeded in tackling terrorism, and yet we're still doing it anyway.

And this is what I mean about continuously doing the same thing and the same thing, the same thing, and expecting different results. We keep having this system which is based on bank compliance departments closing accounts, you know, reporting things to the authorities. There's no one in the authorities to read the reports. You're closing accounts of just, you know, ordinary, essentially not very well-off people, and you're therefore achieving nothing at all apart from possibly radicalizing people who you probably don't want to be radicalizing in the first place. And you saw this again in this same pattern. It's absolutely infuriating. It really makes me very cross. Repeat itself after 2022 with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when suddenly there were lots of people of Russian origin living in Britain and other Western countries who had, because they were Russian, business connections with the country where they came from and often with companies that were owned by oligarchs, because most of the Russian economy is owned by oligarchs. That's not an unusual thing to have if you're Russian. And because of those business connections, they were also being debanked.

But meanwhile, the actual oligarchs, they were finding it perfectly fine to get banking services in Dubai, or they were able to get a court order in this country that meant they could have a monthly allowance of £60,000 or whatever to pay their living expenses. Meanwhile, ordinary Russians whose only crime, in inverted commas, was the fact that they had once had business relations with someone before that person was even sanctioned were losing their bank accounts in this country. And the most, for my mind, boneheaded example of this was not in the UK but in Lithuania, where the allies of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had left the country and they tried to set up something called the Free Russia Foundation. And they were told that they couldn't have a bank account unless they changed the name. They couldn't have something called the Free Russia Foundation despite the fact that they were, you know, essentially the exiled operation of the primary opposition group to Vladimir Putin. The fact that they had Russia in the title meant they couldn't have a bank account, which is bewildering to me, but very much indicative of the way the whole system sort of somehow functions.

To my mind, I mean, there are so many really shocking examples of that. To my mind, the really extraordinary one was the Finsbury Park Mosque. Now, everyone who remembers the years around 9/11 will remember that the Finsbury Park Mosque was notorious as a center of radical preaching in the years before 9/11. After 9/11, they brought in the Metropolitan Police and the other authorities to overhaul what they were doing, to change what they were doing, to make sure that they were no longer involved in that anyway. But then because it was mentioned in an article about terrorism, years later it was debanked anyway, even though they had already brought in the authorities and done everything they could to make sure that they were no longer associated with what they previously been associated with. But all it takes is one article in the media. And if you're, you know, not a customer that's going to be generating a lot of fees for the bank, if you're not going to be taking out mortgages, structuring products, having the kind of accounts that you pay for and so on, then they just don't care enough about you to do the checks on where your money comes from or whatever.

This actually was the problem that Nigel Farage had in that he had a bank account at Coutts, which is the bougie bit of NatWest, and he wasn't generating sufficient fees for them to be bothered to go through the potential reputational risk of being associated with him. And that is crazy to me. I mean, you know, the guy is not like them, he's not a terrorist. You know, he should be able to have a bank account. I think that really irked him, didn't it, when that went public, that part of the story actually is not that affluent, you know? It sort of bothered him a bit, you know.

Marc Andreessen and that lot, is that they have become convinced that debanking is something that only happens to people on the right of politics, people on the right of politics who are enthusiastic about cryptocurrency, that they are convinced that this is driven by essentially a corrupt alliance between left-wing liberal elites and the banking industry that doesn't want competition, and that that's why they're being driven out of the financial system. And they have not realized that debanking overwhelmingly affects the poorest people in society, particularly already marginalized and excluded groups, and that they are, you know, they could be powerful allies for poor and excluded people in society who really need some help and need champions, but instead they present this as being like this kind of discreet attack only on them when it isn't. They are just, you know, the visible tip of an iceberg which is so much bigger than just Nigel Farage or Marc Andreessen or whoever. Like you say, in this country, hundreds of thousands of accounts.