Many readers of this blog will recall that on 10 March 2022 the City of London council passed a special motion in support of Ukraine. Our local authority also lit up its HQ, the Guildhall, in the colours of the Ukrainian flag as a PR stunt. As we noted back in March 2022:
“The Corporation has been repeatedly challenged by Councillor Marianne Fredericks to take real action for Ukraine’s benefit by using its influence in the financial City to impose the most rigorous sanctions possible on Russia. The Chair of Policy’s (at the time Catherine McGuinness) response has been to repeat the same opaque soundbite that ‘in terms of sanctions, I and others have been liaising with the government, the regulators and the financial sector on the implementation of additional measures’. That could mean anything, and certainly doesn’t respond to the challenge made.”
A report in the New Statesman last weekend underlines that over the past two years the City has not moved on from easy PR gestures to meaningful support for Ukraine, which would entail exerting its influence in the financial city. Here is a little of what the New Statesman exposed:
On Leadenhall Street in the City of London, between a steakhouse and an optician, a small office building is home to the International Group of P&I Clubs, an association of specialist maritime insurance companies that collectively underwrite 90 per cent of the world’s ocean-going cargo. The business of transporting millions of tonnes of crude oil by sea is fraught with risk, and specialised protection and indemnity (“P&I”) insurance is required. The “clubs” that provide it are mutual associations that share risk among shipowners and operators.
Data shared exclusively with the New Statesman reveals that since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, UK-based P&I clubs have insured more than €120bn in Russian oil and oil products.
The analysis, drawn by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) from publicly available data sets, shows that the UK has become the world’s biggest insurer of shipborne Russian oil, and that the Russian oil trade “remains highly reliant on vessels insured in the UK”, which have transported a third of Russia’s ocean-going energy exports (by volume) since sanctions were imposed at the end of 2022….
This is what matters, more than the Ukrainian flags that have adorned Downing Street, City Hall, offices in the City of London and the social media accounts of the companies that work in them: we have committed politically and financially to resisting Putin, but we have failed to look properly at our own businesses, and to ask which of them is helping him continue his war.
Revealed: How The City of London Keeps Putin’s Oil Flowing. The Russian war machine is being helped by British companies by Will Dunn, New Statesman, 20 January 2024. See the full piece from the New Statesman here.
RECLAIM EC1 