LAST week Vladimir Ashurkov, a former executive at Russia’s Alfa Bank, stood at the front of a tour bus full of journalists and academics threading its way through London’s Whitehall district, lecturing into a microphone as he pointed out an £11m ($ 16m) apartment belonging to a senior Russian official. Mr Ashurkov is a close ally of Alexei Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption campaigner and opposition politician, and the event was one of a series of “kleptocracy tours” organised by émigré activists to publicise how corrupt regimes launder their fortunes in London’s property market.
Mr Ashurkov fled Moscow in 2014 after prosecutors, in the midst of a crackdown on Mr Navalny, targeted him in an investigation that he says was politically motivated. He was granted asylum in Britain, where he joins a growing community of exiles who have left or been pushed out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The first Russian to inquire about political asylum in Britain may have been Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who wrote to Queen Elizabeth I in 1570 asking whether she would take him in if things got too hairy in Moscow. (Elizabeth replied that he could come if he…
The Economist: Europe
