Why our elites need the war
Pizza boxes. The first thing he noticed were those torn, greasy, half-open pizza boxes on the worn carpet of the fifth-floor corridor of the Chelsea Cloisters apartment building on Sloane Avenue, where the chauffeur of the Seico Car Service had brought him from Heathrow in just under an hour, where he checked in and threw his suitcase onto the bed only to climb straight back into the car, so that he could cut his first film from London that same afternoon at the studio on Great Chapel Street. Petra and the colleagues back at the home desk had put together a few amusing travel items in a package labelled “Great Britain Requests the Pleasure”, there was hearty laughter at the farewell, everyone delighted for the freshly minted correspondent, and at the bureau in Soho he was received with a friendly smile: “This one doesn’t simply telephone,” the bureau chief said breezily, “he writes me a letter. I liked that!” It was 1 July 2003, the city sweating in a ferocious heatwave, Prime Minister Tony Blair caught in the vortex of his gravest crisis, a crisis about doctored intelligence dossiers with which Downing Street had justified the invasion of Iraq alongside the USA in breach of international law, and in the treadmill of daily news coverage the question of who might have thoughtlessly tossed the picked-clean pizza boxes into the corridor simply sank without trace.
At first he thought no further either about the numerous long-legged young women in short skirts who gathered in the foyer of Chelsea Cloisters at nightfall, slipped past the porter one after another onto Sloane Avenue and climbed into the sports coupés, in order — as he assumed — to take a quick spin around the block. Their broken English and the scraps of Russian or Ukrainian marked them out as Ukrainian tourists, for whom the Cloisters had evidently proved an insider tip.
Days later he noticed the Lamborghini dealer by South Kensington tube station, who only ever carried the latest models, in yellow, red, black, as convertible or sports coupé, and it slowly dawned on him that there had to be buyers for these luxury cars around Hyde Park. There was an unbelievable amount of money in the city. The financial industry kept creating new, nested securities, collateralised debt obligations, often with junk real estate behind them, credit default swaps, which were supposed to insure against a credit default but were really wagers; bankers created money out of nothing and looked forward to fresh profits. Soon after the war against Iraq, provoked by Washington and London, the oil from the desert sand would flush money onto the mills of the loan sharks in the banking district, because new mineral resources are the basis for leveraged derivatives business and for new loans, which promised new premiums and new interest income.
Anyone carrying less than 50,000 pounds sterling a month in base salary, bonuses and premiums out of the glass towers of the banking district counted as a welfare case. The money vanished into tax havens, luxury property, luxury cars — and into the pockets of the girls who climbed into the passenger seat.[^1] They were the ones who, their work done, sometimes ordered something from the pizza service late at night and threw the cardboard exhaustedly outside the door of the room.
These were the scenes he could watch in the evenings when he sat outside the “Hour Glass” on Brompton Road and drank another pint or two to come down from the jittery frenzy of the daily film and news business. Prime Minister Tony Blair was the permanent theme, the “dodgy dossiers” with which he had tried, using rotten tricks and lies about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to drag the country into a war that was — plainly recognisable — a war for Iraqi oil, which in turn was to become the basis of new speculative business and commodity futures contracts, new loans and new investments. Not only the government scientist David Kelly,[^2] whom the BBC exposed as the source of the information about the government’s deception operation, had to die for the profits of the financial industry, but also the people of Iraq.[^3] But the bankers fetched their convertibles from the underground car park, grabbed a companion or disappeared into the nightclub across the road.
The credit bubble grew ever larger, until Iraq sank into civil war and chaos and the bubble finally burst in 2008. The City of London was — and is — a state within a state. Ever since Maggie Thatcher abolished industry in order to break the working class, money in the Kingdom has been made above all in the financial industry.[^4] How the financial crisis built up and where its causes lay — on this the correspondents’ bureau reported virtually nothing; it concerned itself above all with the summer of the century,[^5] the “Lady Diana Fan Club” from Veitshöchheim in Lower Franconia[^6] and, of course, Tony Blair’s permanent crisis.[^7] If any time was left over, barbecues went up on the roof terrace in the mild evening air, as at the public viewing of the football World Cup in the summer of 2006, when the beer flowed in torrents. On the way home from Soho he could admire the Piccadilly branch of the diamond dealer De Beers, a reminder of the actual balance of power.
Stacked up in the bookshops lay Monica Ali’s novel “Brick Lane”: Nazneen is 19 years old when she leaves her small village in Bangladesh to be married in London to a man unknown to her and considerably older. Uneducated but clever, she grasps very quickly that this man’s great dreams of prosperity and social advancement will never be fulfilled. Her own small dreams, by contrast, do come true: she learns English from her daughters, she finds work in a clothing factory and a spirited friend in Razia. When her husband decides to return to Bangladesh, and her lover Karim wants to pin her more and more to the ideal image of a Muslim woman, she frees herself from them both and chooses a life in England.[^8]
In this novel London found its way to itself: the city as promise. Whoever came here out of the jungle of religious simplicity and cultural backwardness could carve a path to freedom under his or her own steam. London as a colourful, cosmopolitan and tolerant capital — that was how it liked to see itself. Scene of the action: Brick Lane, the street in which many poor immigrants from Bangladesh learned what it means to be British.
Ten years later he would meet a state secretary from Schleswig-Holstein who had worked at exactly that time in risk management at Deutsche Bank in London, came to Kiel via the Greens and from 2012 to 2017 served there as a political appointee, first in the finance ministry, then in the state chancellery: “I lived on Brick Lane, I know what that means.” He replied: “I know Brick Lane. When I was there in 2003, what I mainly saw were yuppies!” The mood froze instantly: “Kindly ask precise questions!” A bourgeois child who wanted to give himself the image of a man who had come up the hard way. In 2024 he moved to the Klimaneutralität foundation. There he continued to implement the “climate change” programme driven forward by the Rockefeller Foundation, with which it opens up new markets for finance capital.[^9]
By the time Monica Ali published “Brick Lane”, the street had long since begun to become a hotspot for tourists and higher earners. One Friday evening he drank two pints outside Nelly Dean’s pub on Dean Street and set off eastwards. On that summer evening he could see how Brick Lane had become the alibi for a financial district that essentially wrote its own laws. In this extralegal zone, bankers and law firms made sure that Ukrainian oligarchs could make their money disappear into special purpose vehicles and tax havens, while the banksters and their entourage spent their bonuses on Brick Lane in the evening. The street signs still hung in Bengali, but the smell of curry was fading. The street between Bethnal Green in the north and Whitechapel in the south was beginning to be colonised by the financial district.
One night in August he was racing, tipsy, through the left-hand traffic of the empty city in a friend’s car, on the way back from a party, and at the wheel M. recounted: “I was once with a Russian woman here in London who ran a call-girl ring with women from Russia and Ukraine. She made serious money with it. She was simply looking for a man — not one to keep her; she was looking for one who would take her out to expensive restaurants and accompany her to the opera. One who would dive with her into the flair of a cultivated, bourgeois life. She literally picked me up, and we were very happy together. We were planning a holiday in Spain. The evening before we left I got completely wrecked; the next morning the alarm tore me out of my sleep, I was in catastrophic shape, hastily gathered a few things together, threw them in the case, and at Heathrow she smelled at once that I had been drinking heavily and was nowhere near sober. In the queue at the counter I realised I had forgotten money, credit cards, everything. She paid for everything for fourteen days, didn’t say another word to me, and after the return flight we parted without a goodbye. That was my story with the Russian boss of a call-girl ring.” He answered drily, half in earnest, half in jest: “You idiot!”
The “Trafficking in Persons” report of the US State Department counted up to 800,000 victims of human trafficking worldwide in 2011 and notes tersely that the number of Ukrainian women forced into prostitution had “risen further” in 2010, the trade running in an organised and routine way through networks.[^10] In 2003 the Home Office estimated the number of sex workers who had entered the country at around 4,000; in 2010 their number was put at 2,600.[^11] Through Odessa alone, thousands of women are funnelled into the Europe-wide sex business; some are forced, some lured with promises of office or modelling jobs, some see no other way to survive and desperately seek to leave the city. About half of them come from Odessa Oblast, where traffickers roam the villages and wrap girls around their fingers with stories of career opportunities and riches. From Odessa the human trafficking is managed in a tight hierarchy of pimps, madams and a cross-border mafia, shielded by corrupt police officers. The report also mentions the involvement of members of government — a profitable business.[^12] After the beginning of the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022, many women were driven into flight — and into the sex business beyond Ukraine.[^13]
The mass appearance of Ukrainian part-time prostitutes on tourist visas mirrors the impoverishment of their homeland, a process connected with its increasing integration into Western economic circuits, in which Malta plays an important role. For it is there that Ukrainian oligarchs found special purpose vehicles and holdings in order to withdraw the fortunes plundered during the privatisation of the economy from the reach of their own government in Kyiv.
In London the vagabond capital of Ukrainian oligarchs found an attractive anchorage. This was ensured by the administrative position of the City of London, which for centuries has had its own administration, the City of London Corporation, and its own mayor, the Lord Mayor of London, as well as its own police force, and thus removed itself from the grasp of the government in Westminster.[^14] The Lord Mayor is therefore “head of the most powerful financial lobby in the world”, and his administration uses wealth and status to push forward the deregulation of the financial industry, not only in London but across the whole world. Here landed the profits from the colonies of the British Empire, here the wars of kings were financed, here the bypasses were invented for circumventing state currency controls. As early as the 1950s, British banking houses accepted deposits in US dollars — trading in foreign currencies was officially not permitted at the time — and offered higher interest rates than the US authorities allowed. This barely regulated so-called Eurodollar market grew rapidly; by 1980 deposits had reached a level of 500 billion USD, and by 1990 almost 90 per cent of all international loans were being granted through it. At the same time the London banks cultivated close connections to the remnants of the Empire: the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Channel Islands — and Malta. Malta thus becomes the marshalling yard into the City of London: Ukrainian assets migrate into Western tax havens, which in turn encourage capital flight. Here lies the origin of the City’s offshore strategy: attract money and at the same time make it vanish from the taxman. The Square Mile of the City remains to this day a magnet for tax-flight money from all over the world.[^15] This is not about sustainable investment, but about quick profits.
This casino economy was given its breakthrough by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after her election in 1979. Currency controls were lifted, the pound rose, exports became more expensive and a fifth of industrial jobs were lost, while the financial sector ballooned. In 2024, 400,000 bankers, brokers and insurance employees swarmed here on working days, producing eight per cent of British economic output.^16 Financial geniuses invented credit derivatives, securitised assets and concluded all kinds of futures transactions in order to make still more money out of money.
The high wages and bonuses pulled other sectors into the boom — such as property, gastronomy and call-girl rings — but at the same time deepened the gulf between rich and poor in the city. The City has, moreover, a very particular form of democracy. For the resident banks are allowed to vote too, and indeed according to their number of employees; many staff bring many votes, so the corporations always have the majority, the elected representatives become lobbyists of the financial industry and big money gets a smoothly polished façade democracy.[^17]
Another decisive step followed in October 1986: the British parliament passed a law known as the “Big Bang”, a liberating blow for big money that cleared away further controls and lured US bankers into the City. In the 1990s the collapse of the Eastern bloc freed the capitalists in the West from a possible alternative; the oligarchs’ privatisation loot brought former public wealth into private hands and flushed fresh billions into the City. The Eastern European transformation winners hauled it in. The money came from their raids in their countries of origin, where the population was impoverished and had to foot the bill.
This corresponded with the EU’s business model: simply to bribe corrupt oligarchs and national elites, above all in Ukraine and Moldova, with economic power, in order then to “turn” the countries and draw them into the financial circuits of the Western capital market,[^18] whereby British banks also played a role in the theft of billions in state funds.[^19] Lax British legislation makes it easy to launder billions of stolen money and channel it into the EU. Since then it has been guaranteed that fresh capital for investment keeps flowing in, and that through the resources of the target countries — oil, gas, rare earths, black-earth soils, steelworks, pipelines, ports — new collateral for new loans is available. But this comes at the expense of the population in the EU’s neighbouring states. For their public wealth was privatised at knock-down prices; instead of being invested, the capital was withdrawn from the reach of their own state, the enterprises rotted or were closed down altogether, wages were often not paid, many workers lost their jobs. They experienced the process of absolute immiseration described by Karl Marx — and afterwards the dismal result had only to be blamed on communist mismanagement.
Families in eastern Ukraine were going hungry, and while the champagne corks were popping in the London financial district in the millennium years, whole regions were deindustrialised and the workers impoverished. “All wars are bankers’ wars,” said the financial analyst Alex Krainer.[^20] The daughters of those workers in Ukraine were the ones who lived with me in Chelsea Cloisters on Sloane Avenue, who populated the clubs and the chi-chi bars, and who at nightfall climbed into the gleaming Lamborghini convertibles the bankers kept in the underground garage and brought out only in the evening, to do a few laps around the block and to pick up some blonde or other who barely understood English but did her job rather well.
And so evening after evening they stood in their short skirts in the lobby of Chelsea Cloisters. Women who, on a tourist visa for one month, earned together what they needed in Ukraine to keep their lover in Kyiv afloat, to support their parents in Dnipro and to pay for their grandparents’ visits to the doctor. All of them people who had once pinned their hopes on the EU, and whom, after the coup on the Maidan in 2014, Galician Banderites could easily persuade that the Russians were to blame for everything — the ones in Moscow, or the “vatniki”, the subhumans in eastern Ukraine, who were best shot or driven out.
Naturally the tourist visas did not fall from the sky for his fellow residents on Sloane Avenue. At the British consulate in Kyiv the applications were submitted perfectly and professionally. The processing was tightly organised. People were needed who spoke good English, who knew the application procedure precisely, who were perhaps already familiar with the consular officials, people who could advance the fee. The girls had to cover all of this, or they could work it off afterwards — at a surcharge, of course.[^21]
The idea of equality and fairness landed for the time being on the rubbish heap of history; the bankers counted as magicians and the government read the City’s every wish from its eyes.[^22] This was true also and above all of Tony Blair and New Labour; all the major parties in Westminster received donations from financial firms and individuals from the City, and of the 20 most generous Tory donors in the period from 2010 to 2015, eight earned their money in the banking district.[^23] At least as important was the revolving-door effect between the ministries and the financial firms; leading politicians signed up after leaving politics for highly paid jobs in financial companies. After Tony Blair stepped down as Prime Minister he took a part-time post as an adviser to the investment bank J.P. Morgan, whose annual remuneration was estimated at between 500,000 and 2.5 million pounds.^24 In the City the mood was that of a party: take while there is something to take.
In the decade before the crisis the financial sector grew twice as fast as the rest of the British economy, by an average of six per cent a year. With its accumulation of commercial banks, investment funds, securities dealers, insurers and reinsurers in the City, London had won back from Wall Street its reputation as the world’s leading financial centre.[^25] No one — not even the government in Westminster — was willing to face the negative consequences of an oversized financial sector: the overvaluation of the pound benefits the City of London, because it is aimed at attracting rich investors from offshore territories, and they will not come if the pound loses value. But the strong exchange rate destroys the competitiveness of industry on international markets, leads to insolvencies and job losses as well as to a trade deficit, and so Britain has to attract money in order to balance the current account.[^26] Everyone believed that the fragmentation and worldwide dispersal of credit risks made the system safer — because they wanted to believe it.
[^1]: “He wanted to do well and to be see as doing well; and he did very much want his million-pound bonus. He wanted a million pounds because he had never earned it before and he felt it was his due and it was a proof of his masculine worth. But he also wanted it bcause he needed the money. The figure of £ 1,000,000 had started as a vague, semi-comic aspiration and had become an actual necessity, something he needed to pay the bills and set his finances on the square. His basic pay of £ 150,000 was nice as what Arabella called ‘frock money’, but it did not pay even for his two mortgages. The house in Pepys Road was double-fronted and had cost £ 2,500,000, which at the time had felt like the top of the market, even though prices had risen a great deal since then...” Lanchester, John: Capital. London 2012, p. 19
[^2]: Baab, Patrik: British weapons expert David Kelly missing. Nachtmagazin, 18.07.2003 Baab, Patrik: After the death of David Kelly. Tagesthemen, 19.07.2003 Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Blair returns from Asia tour. Tagesthemen, 23.07.2003 Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: The BBC under pressure. Zapp, 27.07.2003 Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Before Tony Blair’s press conference. ARD-Morgenmagazin, 28.07.2003 Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Tony Blair press conference. Tagesschau 14:00, 30.07.2003 Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Tony Blair press conference. ARD-Mittagsmagazin, 30.07.2003 Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Blair appears self-assured. Tagesschau 17:00, 30.07.2003
[^3]: David Kelly allegedly died by suicide, but according to Norman Baker this is implausible. The traditional judicial inquest was replaced by the Hutton Commission, whose report is unsatisfactory. What is clear, by contrast, is that Kelly was placed under massive pressure by Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell: “I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this could not be suicide. The medical evidence does not support it and David Kelly’s state of mind and personality suggests otherwise. It was not an accident so I am left with the conclusion that this is murder.” Baker, Norman: Interview: David Kelly’s death is “unfinished business”. The New Statesman, 04.12.2013, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/12/norman-baker-interview-david-kellys-death-unfinished-business Baker, Norman: The Strange Death of David Kelly. London 2007
[^4]: Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 17–47
[^5]: Baab, Patrik: London suffers under the heatwave. ARD-Brennpunkt, 06.08.2003
[^6]: Baab, Patrik: The German Diana fan club visits Margaret Tylor’s Royal House. Brisant, 04.08.2003 and ARD-Nachtmagazin of 04.08.2003
[^7]: Baab, Patrik: Lord Hutton begins the questioning. ARD-Morgenmagazin, 11.08.2003 Baab, Patrik: BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan testifies before investigating judge Brian Hutton. Live, ARD-Morgenmagazin, 12.08.2003 Baab, Patrik: Lord Hutton questions Andrew Gilligan, BBC. Tagesschau 15:00, 12.08.2003
[^8]: “Over the last decade and a half she had gleaned vocabulary here and there. The television, the brief exchanges at the few non-Bengali shops she entered, the dentist, the doctor, teachers at the girl’s schools. But it was the girls who taught her. Without lessons, textbooks or Razia’s ‘key phrases’. Their method was simple: they demanden to be understood.” Ali, Monica: Brick Lane. Cambridge 2003, p. 194
[^9]: “The deindustrialisation of the West, which began in the 1980s, had long been in ideological preparation — in Great Britain since the 1860s to 1880s. In the 1950s and 1960s the environmental movement was added. The environmental movement of the 1960s was organised by the Rockefeller Foundation and paved the way for the later deindustrialisation.” Fursov, Andrei: The present world crisis: its social nature. The International Schiller Institute, 30.05.2013, https://schillerinstitute.com/de/media/andrej-fursow-die-gegenwartige-weltkrise-ihre-soziale-natur/ Watch on YouTube The Rockefeller Foundation: Making opportunity universal and sustainable through Climate and Resilience. Mobilizing capital and driving investment at scale into solutions that can reduce emissions dramatically and protect the most vulnerable from climate impacts. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/what-we-do/climate-resilience/ The Rockefeller Foundation: Addressing Climate Change. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/fellowships-convenings/bellagio-center/convenings/addressing-climate-change/
[^10]: Townsend, Mark: Sex trafficking trade forces women from Odessa to massage parlours in Britain. The Guardian, 02.07.2011, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/jul/02/odessa-ukraine-sex-trafficking-investigation
[^11]: 2,600 prostitutes were ‘trafficked into UK’. BBC News of 18.08.2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11012084
[^12]: Townsend, Mark: Sex trafficking trade forces women from Odessa to massage parlours in Britain. The Guardian, 02.07.2011, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/jul/02/odessa-ukraine-sex-trafficking-investigation
[^13]: Richey, Valiant: As Ukrainian refugees fall prey to sex-traffickers, Scotland has a duty to tackle demand for prostitutes. The Scotsman, 04.06.2022, https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/as-ukrainian-refugees-fall-prey-to-sex-traffickers-scotland-has-a-duty-to-tackle-demand-for-prostitutes-valiant-richey-osce-3718538 Henn, Jessica: Ukraine’s Ticking Time Bomb: Women, War and HIV. MS. Magazine of 16.03.2022, https://msmagazine.com/2022/03/16/ukraine-women-war-hiv-sex-work-prostitution/
[^14]: Shaxson, Nicholas: Treasure Islands. Tax Havens and the Man Who Stole the World. London 2011, pp. 244–279 Stäuber, Peter: Die Macht der Quadratmeile. Die Wochenzeitung, 15.03.2012, https://www.woz.ch/1211/finanzplatz-city-of-london/die-macht-der-quadratmeile
[^15]: Stäuber, Peter: Die Macht der Quadratmeile. Die Wochenzeitung, 15.03.2012, https://www.woz.ch/1211/finanzplatz-city-of-london/die-macht-der-quadratmeile
[^17]: Stäuber, Peter: Die Macht der Quadratmeile. Die Wochenzeitung, 15.03.2012, https://www.woz.ch/1211/finanzplatz-city-of-london/die-macht-der-quadratmeile
[^18]: “The ‘Eastern Partnership’ programme was conceived as part of the EU’s neighbourhood policy. It was intended to enable both sides to build advantageous relations between the European Union and the former Soviet republics (https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/neigbourhood/eastern_partnership_en). Billions of euros were made available for the EU’s eastern policy — and still are (https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/lexika/das-europalexikon/177178/oestliche-partnerschaft). An unbiased assessment of a decade of EU eastern policy is, however, sobering. The reasons for this failure were not entirely within Brussels’ control. A substantial share of the responsibility lies with staff of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and with the heads of the EU missions in the six Eastern Partnership countries. Misjudgements, unclear competences and dubious connections to corrupt oligarchs led to the failure of the expensive programme and of the entire EU eastern policy, both in Eastern Europe and in the Caucasus. One of the central figures in this development, driven forward under the leadership of Baroness Ashton, Štefan Füle, Federica Mogherini and now Josep Borrell, was the diplomat Dirk Schübel. In 2006 Schübel was appointed deputy head of the EU’s diplomatic mission in Ukraine. He worked only two years in Kyiv, but during that time he managed to forge close connections to the Ukrainian oligarchs. Schübel evidently also played a decisive part in enabling many well-heeled Ukrainians to enter Europe with their criminally acquired money. (Belnovosti/Белновости: “Восточное партнерство для восточного немца: лица европейской дипломатии”, in: Белновости, 09.06.2021, online at https://www.belnovosti.by/politika/vostochnoe-partnersto-dlya-vostochnogo-nemca-lica-evropeyskoy-diplomatii.) In Moldova, Schübel steered the mafia regime consistently towards Brussels despite the protests of the local population. (Keno Verseck: Machtwechsel in der Republik Moldau, Das große Aufräumen nach dem Milliardenraub, in: Der Spiegel, 31.08.2019, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/republik-moldau-das-grosse-aufraeumen-nach-dem-milliardenraub-a-1284189-amp.html. Matthias Williams: Powerful tycoon sees Moldova sticking to EU path regardless of election outcome, in: Reuters, 11.11.2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-moldova-election-tycoon-idUKKBN13617A?edition-redirect=uk. Belnovosti/Белновости: “Восточное партнерство для восточного немца: лица европейской дипломатии”, in: Белновости, 09.06.2021, https://www.belnovosti.by/politika/vostochnoe-partnersto-dlya-vostochnogo-nemca-lica-evropeyskoy-diplomatii) The provisional high point of the Moldovan scandals was the theft of one billion USD from the country’s state budget by local officials and oligarchs, who for years had been presented in the EU delegation’s reporting as reformers, adherents of the market economy, of democracy and of European values. British banks evidently also took part in this theft (Whewell, Tim: The great Moldovan bank robbery, BBC News, 18.05.2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33166383). The EU’s eastern policy, formulated by notorious revanchists in the spirit of the Cold War, achieved almost exactly the results that were to be expected from the outset: it divided the continent into two camps and left little freedom of action to all those who sought a middle way. Dirk Schübel and his colleagues from the EEAS are not to blame for that. But the attempt simply to buy up corrupt national elites and entire countries with economic power failed and left behind about the worst conceivable image of Western Europe in these countries, which could only see their national dignity injured by these machinations. The damage to the EU is immense. (Belnovosti/Белновости: “Восточное партнерство для восточного немца: лица европейской дипломатии”, in: Белновости, 09.06.2021, https://www.belnovosti.by/politika/vostochnoe-partnersto-dlya-vostochnogo-nemca-lica-evropeyskoy-diplomatii)
[^19]: “It’s a mystery that’s thrown Europe’s poorest nation into deep crisis - $1bn has vanished from three of Moldova’s leading banks, much of it passing through UK companies... loans worth $1bn were transferred in just two days to a series of UK- and Hongkong-registered companies - companies whose ultimate owners are unknown... The five Moldovan firms, including Caritas Group SRL, that allegedly received the loans are said to have transferred the money immediately to five UK- and Hongkong-registered firms. But they all bank in Latvia, and most seem to be owned in turn by companies in offshore tax havens. And in a final layer of obfuscation, they now owe all the money not to Banca Sociala, but to another UK-registered entity, Fortuna United LP, that’s said to have bought the entire combined loan. Look up Fortuna United LP, and you’ll find it’s registered - along with 421 other active firms, at a flat in a run-down part of Edinburgh. It’s a limited partnership formed of two companies in the Seychelles about which no further information is available. UK limited partnerships, unlike limited companies, are not required to file publicly-available annual returns or accounts. The only public information they must supply is their registered address and the names of partners - but these need not to be individuals, and need not to be based in the UK. The number of limited partnerships registered in the UK has risen sharply, from 17,239 in 2009-2010, to 27,853 in the last financial year, 2013-14. Vasile Sarco of Moldova’s Office for Prevention of Money-laundering says the purpose of using UK-registered companies is to hide the beneficiaries of the funds. He’s investigating not only the disappearance of the $1bn from the three banks, but also earlier $20bn operation which laundered dirty money from Russia through Moldova into the EU.” Whewell, Tim: The great Moldovan bank robbery, BBC News, 18.05.2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33166383 Stern, David: Moldova crisis, An elite power grab? BBC News, 27.01.2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35410818
[^20]: Krainer, Alex: After Iran War: A New Global Economy. Glenn Diesen, 10.04.2026
[^21]: Ralph Bosshard notes, in connection with criminal networks: “The trail also leads to a curious company in Great Britain that simultaneously sells ladies’ underwear and offers financial services.” Bosshard, Ralph: Krieg, Korruption und Flüchtlinge: Die ukrainischen Geheimdienste und die Mafia. Globalbridge, 26.03.2026, https://globalbridge.ch/krieg-korruption-und-fluechtlinge-die-ukrainischen-geheimdienste-und-die-mafia/ Bosshard, Ralph: Interview on Gegen den Strom (Patrik Baab)
[^22]: Lanchester, John: Warum jeder jedem etwas schuldet aber keiner jemals etwas zurückzahlt: Die bizarre Geschichte der Finanzen. Stuttgart 2013, pp. 32f.
[^23]: Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 38f.
[^25]: Finance capital, according to Andrei Fursov, achieved worldwide dominance by transforming the monetary system from an instrument for supporting the real economy into its ruler, with the British system becoming the model for worldwide financial control. This process is characterised by the decoupling of the financial sector from production, the control of money creation by the financial industry and thus its decoupling from real values, the transformation of the old industrial elites into speculation-oriented financial elites, and the leading role of the British financial world and hence of the City of London. Андрей Фурсов (https://sponsr.ru/aenigmate/): Как финансиалисты прокладывали себе путь к мировому господству и смогут ли удержаться на вершине (Fursov, Andrei: How the financial elites paved their way to world domination and whether they can stay on top), Sponsr, 24.04.2024, https://sponsr.ru/aenigmate/64435/Kak_finansialisty_prokladyvali_sebe_put_k_mirovomu_gospodstvu_i_smogut_li_uderjatsya_na_vershine_Andrei_Fursov/
[^26]: Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 37f.