Chris Cook

I’m fairly confused why they agreed to stand in this weird line behind him if the intention wasn’t a Last Supper adjacent photo op.

It’s one of those irregular verbs: I embrace a blockchain-based alternative payments system, you engage in money-laundering.

(this is a smaller deal than it sounds: these posts are really 'lead TV/radio reporter for topic x', and these ones have only existed since 2014)

my meta-take on all this as a veteran of these arguments is that the key reason England has done so much better is the *attention* on improvement in schools since Baker, rather than anything in particular, and it has seeped into the water.

A big new story from us: a big new leak means that we can put numbers on the scale of A7 -- the Kremlin's huge money-laundering machine. $6.9bn laundered through the international banking system via SWIFT, with $1.1bn sent to StanChart alone. www.ft.com/content/3848...

Our next on A7: how subtle were the front companies? Not very. Banks could see they were reusing the same addresses, had linked online infrastructure and clearly observed Russian holidays. But they were getting better. www.ft.com/content/372d...

A big new story from us: a big new leak means that we can put numbers on the scale of A7 -- the Kremlin's huge money-laundering machine. $6.9bn laundered through the international banking system via SWIFT, with $1.1bn sent to StanChart alone. www.ft.com/content/3848...

The minutes from A7’s meetings are extremely detailed, and feature this exchange between Donald (the British guy) and Ilan Shor (not just sanctioned, but also an international fugitive) www.ft.com/content/b3c4...

A big new story from us: a big new leak means that we can put numbers on the scale of A7 -- the Kremlin's huge money-laundering machine. $6.9bn laundered through the international banking system via SWIFT, with $1.1bn sent to StanChart alone. www.ft.com/content/3848...

This is a big deal for two big reasons - first, it helps answer some of the question of what Rosneft was doing with its foreign earnings, and second, it tells us how A7 was able to keep getting its hands on hard currency.

The US Treasury has just wheeled out a load of sanctions on A7 and its agents

A big new story from us: a big new leak means that we can put numbers on the scale of A7 -- the Kremlin's huge money-laundering machine. $6.9bn laundered through the international banking system via SWIFT, with $1.1bn sent to StanChart alone. www.ft.com/content/3848...

The leak we have runs up to August 2025. The OSC did a brilliant report on a (smaller) leak covering the same time period, which also has a great title. www.opensourcecentre.org/research/the...

A big new story from us: a big new leak means that we can put numbers on the scale of A7 -- the Kremlin's huge money-laundering machine. $6.9bn laundered through the international banking system via SWIFT, with $1.1bn sent to StanChart alone. www.ft.com/content/3848...

I think some of the stuff about cryptoassets being used for political donations is a bit muddled: a) there’s no reason a payment in crypto is hard to handle. You can easily make systems that only accept payments *after* a KYC process.

Not straightforward, this: you could ban the sale of crypto assets by registered entities, but - in the one case we’ve got in the UK - the sale was arranged by a third party who then gave the money to a renowned pint-sized agitator.

I think some of the stuff about cryptoassets being used for political donations is a bit muddled: a) there’s no reason a payment in crypto is hard to handle. You can easily make systems that only accept payments *after* a KYC process.

Conversely: (b) we have already seen memecoins used to fund anti-democratic movements in the UK, and it’s not clear to me that a sale of a memecoin would count as a “donation” that requires registration rather than proceeds of the commercial activity of the party. So I could issue a billion…