The abandonment of the United Kingdom from the European Union will allow its president Boris Johnson to generate new business around dirty money opaque to the treasury, about which the City knows a lot. and it should help to offset the decline that London’s financial power suffers from the loss of banking business and securities markets to other European capitals.
The United Kingdom is no longer subject to the rule of law set by European directives and Johnson has decided to take advantage of the release of that corset. The first action Johnson will take is the opening of eight new free ports, according to announces his Treasury Minister, Rishi Sunak.
With these eight new free ports and the market power accumulated by its dealers for centuries, the British will be able to ‘wash whiter’ than Switzerland the criminal money laundered in works of art, antique jewelery and watches, precious metals or vintage cars, goods that reach fabulous figures in the auctions of Sotheby`s, Christie’s and the growing number of specialized sites on the Internet.
The excuse is that the free ports, hangars with special facilities to adequately preserve all these goods, in ideal conditions, not only of temperature but also of security, allow doing business very easily, among other reasons because their import and export from the aforementioned warehouses do not go through customs tax control.
One can buy a Picasso painting ‘anonymously’ at a Sotheby’s auction for € 50 million in New York or Shanghai, transport it to the new washhouses Johnson intends to build, sell it to someone else without anyone knowing, and The buyer will send it to another British free port or, for example, Geneva, and from there transfer it 3 years later to another auction room, without a trace for the estates. All very uplifting.
These free ports will undoubtedly create quality jobs, those that are dedicated to generating added value to the goods they house. The great objective of the new British elites is to turn the country into a banner of ‘free trade’, a herald of the open market, a world leader of neoliberalism, a country without coercive controls to do ‘business’.
The locations chosen for this new strategy are East Midlands Airport, Liverpool, Plymouth, Solent, Thames, Humber, Teeside and Felixstowe and Harwich. The choice came after evaluating the plans for more than 30 ports and airports. The British government will make the requirements to enter these new free ports more flexible as necessary, in such a way that it can end the competition that comes from the continent, where there are notable laundries in Luxembourg, and less powerful in others, as is the case. from Spain.
