[simonh]

"Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet oligarch money sloshing about".

This keeps getting brought up but it's inconsequential at the scale of the total economy. As I pointed out elsewhere already on this thread, total Russian inward flows to this country accounts for about 1% of foreign investment. Now yes absolutely, foreign investment is a significant factor in the UK economy, about 20%. That makes a big difference, but Russian oligarch funds are not a significant part of that, they're just a politically and socially highly visible one that gets talked about a lot.

The reason London is a centre for laundering money is that it's a massive mainstream finance centre. So yes, you're on the right track, but you're obsessing over a small forest footpath and missing the mainstream economic motorway right next to it.

US FDI into the UK is more than 30x that from Russia. That from the EU is even bigger. This is the stuff that moves the needle.