Andy Burnham Should Clean Up Britain’s Dirty Money Problem

September has been a defining month for Reform UK and perhaps an awakening call as to how Britain’s financial services infrastructure does not just launder money for kleptocrats abroad, but builds the pathways that channel dodgy money into its own politics. Days after Channel 4 News and Verbatim filmed Nigel Farage’s chief of staff coaching a fake foreign donor on how to funnel cash into the party through a UK-based “son,” Reform accepted the two largest political donations in British history: £36 million each from British crypto billionaires, both until recently based overseas. The scandal and the windfall are the same story told twice: a party caught scheming to disguise foreign money - now simply handing the foreign-adjacent money in plain sight, because Britain’s laws are loose enough and no disguise is needed. This isn't a Reform problem. It's a London problem - a system built to be the world’s easiest place to move money nobody wants to explain, and a Labour government that promised to shut it down, only to watch £72 million pass through the gap in under 48 hours.

The Reform's scandals are not alone. For years Londoners walked past the opulent mansion in Primrose Hill, or the row of apartments on New Oxford Street, never imagining that the buildings above them could be linked to torture, slavery and fraud in Southeast Asia. But they were just two of multiple properties reportedly owned by a Cambodian crime group overseeing a sprawling transnational scam empire which used trafficked workers from the Global South to defraud victims of billions. In October, the companies - incorporated in the British Virgin Islands - were sanctioned by the UK and US governments.

The Burnham government has a valuable opportunity to rid Britain of dirty money. The Cambodian scam group was only one of an endless string of criminal gangs, oligarchs and dictators who have found refuge in London’s opaque financial structures to hide ill-gotten gains from the public eye. The Reform’s case also shows how foreign elites use an array of local professionals able to exploit loopholes to influence British politics, to buy property anonymously and hide untaxed wealth in the UK, inflating housing costs and depriving the country’s struggling public services of revenue. These illicit financial flows fuel instability abroad and inequality at home, and Burnham has a chance to act quickly and build on his predecessor’s efforts.

In November 2024, then Foreign Secretary David Lammy, reflecting a pre-election promise to combat kleptocracy, declared that ”the golden age of money laundering is over.” Three notorious kleptocrats were hit with asset freezes and travel bans, £15m was pledged to the City of London Police anti-corruption unit, and a new campaign to crack down on domestic and international illicit finance was heralded. For campaigners against dirty money, it was a long-awaited moment of leadership on an issue that threatens societies and undermines democracy worldwide.

Since then, progress has stalled. Last summer the UK was due to host the Illicit Finance Summit - a convening of anti-corruption experts from government, civil society and the private sector - until the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) announced it will no longer take place. The cancellation is regrettable, but a fresh UK government can now productively use the intervening period to bring together a strong alliance of partners aimed at delivering meaningful, concerted action on one of the gravest threats to global stability and equality. The upcoming presidency of the G20 provides further opportunity for the British government to lean on the available support from the inter-agency working groups and the civil society both in the UK and the Global South.