Half of the world’s offshore wealth sits in British-linked secrecy jurisdictions facilitating global money laundering. Iran’s elite launder oil money through shell companies owning luxury UK properties while ordinary Iranians suffer economic collapse.
Operation Economic Fury, led by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, targets precisely this system of offshore shadow banks, crypto, tax havens and shell companies funding terror and corruption.
This struggle is not a battle between left and right in politics. It is a fundamental conflict between national sovereignty building real wealth for a nation’s citizens and global piracy enabled by offshore secrecy jurisdictions.
The City of London Financial Engine: The decades-long offshore financial system centred largely around the City of London and British-linked tax havens, has systematically siphoned wealth from resource-rich but economically struggling nations.
The true culprit is a globalist shadow banking and laundering network that profits by extracting resources from countries like Iran, Venezuela, and many African and Latin American states without reinvesting in their development.
This offshore “casino” moves trillions of dollars annually through secrecy jurisdictions, supporting corrupt regimes, terrorists, and criminal networks by laundering money and profiting from the resulting chaos. It explains how the British Empire’s collapse birthed this new imperial financial model, with the City of London as its hub, manipulating global money flows through tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, argues Promethean Action.
“To put it provocatively, a second British empire is at the very core of global financial markets today,” says Ronen Palan, Professor of International Political Economy at City University London, in a 2012 interview with New Left Project.
The City of London Financial Engine: London’s historical control over global maritime trade insurance is now challenged directly by the U.S. Development Finance Corporation replacing Lloyd’s. It marks a new tone from a strengthened America under “America First”, which does not want to play third fiddle anymore, as explained by Bessant in April, 2026. The U.S. quest for world energy dominance under the leadership of President Trump is very evident.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leads the U.S. Treasury’s Operation Economic Fury, a focused campaign to dismantle precisely this shadow system specifically targeting Iran’s and Venezuela’s illicit financial networks through sanctions, black market crackdowns, and disrupting currency speculation. Scott Bessent’s targeted sanctions and crackdown on the shadow banking system represent a strategic pivot by the U.S. to attack the financial lifeblood of regimes like Iran and Venezuela. This approach undermines their war machines and corrupt networks without waging traditional military conflict.
For over a century, the City of London’s financial hegemony – the British empire’s financial weapon – has strategically utilized, for example, the Strait of Hormuz as a pivotal point of leverage to regulate global energy flows, arguably deliberately causing regional instability. By keeping the Middle East as a region in constant conflict, playing one group against another, the regional nations have remained weak and easily exploited, characterized by internal strife.
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The City of London Financial Engine: Many have profited. For example, Lloyd’s of City of London, a leading insurance market, has greatly benefitted from the instability by offering insurance for shipping through the Hormuz. The steady tensions with Iran have led to increases in premiums, benefiting the UK’s financial interests.
A key moment was the recent currency intervention to support Japan’s yen, signalling a shift toward a new global financial order prioritizing stable exchange rates, national industrial revitalization, and fair trade, reminiscent of the original Bretton Woods framework.
Ronen Palan, Professor of International Political Economy at City University London, co-author of Tax Havens: How Globalisation Really Works, explains in a 2012 interview with New Left Project how the British tax haven empire came about: “the strong interlink between the rise of the City of London and the rise of the British empire. Usually, large financial centres emerged in the world’s large trading centres. In 1850 Britain was the largest manufacturing centre—about 50% of all global manufacturing was produced in the UK—and so, not surprisingly, it was serviced by the largest financial centre. So the City of London was at the core of the British economy and the British empire. … The City’s power and success during the twentieth century had been in servicing not only the ‘formal’ British empire, but also the ‘informal’ empire: areas, for example in Latin and Central America, which were under the informal tutelage of Britain without being formally part of the empire….in the City of London there emerged all sorts of middle- and small-sized commercial institutions that were really specialists on different countries: they had specialists on Nicaragua, on Peru, on Colombia, on Ghana, and so on. This was the bedrock of the City’s success: highly specialised knowledge of various areas in the world….With the decline of the British empire after WWII this specialised knowledge was still required, and so the commercial institutions in the City continued to be the main vehicle for investment in what were then called ‘developing’ countries (i.e. decolonising countries).”
So, after the British Empire’s decline, the City of London reinvented itself as the core of a vast offshore network, largely controlling global finance through tax havens like the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands. The City of London used its old banking ties to build a new global money system. It created the Euro-dollar market in the 1950s, which let banks hold U.S. dollars outside the United States. By so doing, local rules and taxes were avoided.
“The Euromarket (The term refers to a financial market in which banking institutions and corporate entities engage in the borrowing and lending of monetary funds denominated in foreign currencies, yet conducted outside the geographical boundaries of their respective issuing nations) was essentially an informal agreement between the Bank of England and the commercial banks in the City of London that any transaction through London between two non-residents and in a foreign currency—at the time, mainly dollars—would not be subject to British regulations. The agreement arose out of the run on the pound of 1956-7 and a subsequent desire to avoid harmful effects on the British balance of payments. Rumours at the time suggested that the currency crisis was partly engineered by U.S., which was unhappy about the British and French invasion of Egypt to reverse Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. In response to the run on the pound, the Treasury raised interest rates from 5 to 7% and imposed a moratorium on lending to non-British borrowers. The two policies aimed to strengthen the pound. The moratorium cut many commercial banks, which specialised in lending to ex-colonies or the ‘informal empire’, off from their business. It appears that they reached an agreement with the Bank of England—through the services of George Bolton, former CEO of BOLSA (the Bank of London and South America, which was acquired in 1971 by Lloyds Bank) and at the time the deputy director at the Bank of England—that they could continue lending as long as they interacted in dollars (or any other non-sterling currency) and intermediated between non-British clients. Such transactions—in foreign currency, between non-British clients—would not affect the British balance of payments,” Palan says.
The City of London Financial Engine: “But the agreement seems to have yielded an unintended consequence: such transactions were ‘deemed’ by the Bank not to be taking place in London. This liberated them from the regulatory regime not only of the UK, but also of any other country. This was the origin of ‘offshore‘. Effectively it created a new market. That wasn’t the intended impact: indeed, some eminent bankers felt sure it was only a temporary market that was likely to decline and disappear fairly quickly. But sure enough, once British banking institutions began to understand that by organising banking transactions in such a way they could sidestep key regulations, like capital / reserve requirements, they quickly realised that they had here an opportunity. And from that point, in the early 1960s, the market grew rapidly.”
Britain lost its military empire, but it kept a giant financial empire. This novel “imperial engine” facilitates the extraction of wealth by managing global money flows and legal loopholes, reflecting a shift from territorial to financial empire.
The global offshore system doesn’t discriminate by nationality or legality—it launders corporate profits, dictator’s oil revenues, cartel and terror funds alike. This “shadow banking syndicate” effectively institutionalizes corruption and poverty in resource-rich nations by exporting their wealth rather than allowing it to circulate domestically.
Professor Ronen Palan points out: “There is no doubt that successive British governments understood the importance of the City of London and wanted it to remain the global financial centre….The Euromarket punched a hole in the whole Bretton Woods system. Bretton Woods was based on financial regulations and restrictions on capital movements: that was the whole basis of the Bretton Woods agreement. But now you had a whole market with no regulations, a market that was truly global because it existed nowhere. It had no boundaries. It’s a bit like the World Wide Web: initially it was everywhere and nowhere. It simply created a new space. That space attracted a lot of funds and basically undermined the entire system of national regulation that was the basis of Bretton Woods. The Europmarket grew enormously during and after the 1973 oil crisis. Today basically the entire wholesale global financial market is effectively an expansion of the Euromarket: it’s effectively offshore. It was for a long time completely unregulated, until it became subject to ‘voluntary’ regulation: Basel I and Basel II. These are sets of voluntary agreements agreed at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in which banks agreed to abide by certain rules of capital requirements and so on.”
(The Bretton Woods system FROM 1944-1971 was predicated on the principle of currency convertibility, whereby participating countries guaranteed the convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars. In turn, the dollar was convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks. In 1971, the United States discontinued the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, thereby effectively concluding the Bretton Woods system and establishing the dollar as a fiat currency.
The City of London Financial Engine: Fiat money, also known as fiat currency, is a type of government-issued currency. It is created by a central bank and authorized by government regulation to be legal tender. It is not backed by gold or silver, nor by any other tangible asset or commodity. Following the termination of the Bretton Woods system, the majority of the world’s major currencies have adopted a fiat money system.)
The offshore Euromarket has been demonstrated to facilitate tax evasion and enable the circumvention of national regulations. These factors contributed to the financial crisis that transpired in 2007–2008.
Professor Palan explains: “People talk about financial deregulation as one of the causes of the (2007-08) crisis, but in fact financial deregulation followed rather than constituted deregulated financial markets. Governments essentially found themselves in a position whereby so much of international finance was already operating through this non-regulated parallel market, that they had no choice but to try and deregulate their own domestic markets in order to compete. They rationalised this ideologically—we call it neoliberalism—but the main cause was that there was already a non-regulated global financial market sucking in most of the funds in any case.”
Britain has therefore been able to sustain its leading position in global finance. “On the face of it London is the largest international financial centre, followed by New York. But this data tends to treat British jurisdictions like Jersey, Guernsey, the Cayman Islands, and so on as entirely separate, independent territories. They are not: they are part of the British state. And if you add them all together, you find that at the moment roughly one-third of all international deposits and investments are going through these jurisdictions, which are remnants of the British empire and which remain part of the British state. And if you add ex-colonies whose independence was relatively recent, like Singapore, then you reach a figure of 40%. This compared to roughly 10% going through the US,” says Palan.
“The City of London is the core of a whole network of other financial centres which are linked to it, particularly places like Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and also Switzerland and Luxemburg. This second view is more useful if you want to understand how international finance operates. In many cases financial transactions are being decided and agreed upon in London, but are being registered for various reasons (mainly tax-related) in, say, the Cayman Islands. As a result the Cayman Islands appears statistically as the fourth largest financial centre in the world, about the size of Frankfurt and much larger than Tokyo. But it’s only a paper centre: most of the activities attributed to it in fact take place in London…. Britain is very good at not advertising its position. It’s a great coup for the British state that the Cayman Islands etc. are presented in the data as independent states. Because if other states were to notice how much funds are effectively going through the British state they’d be a lot more cautious. My view is that the British state plays a much more central role in international regulation than is attributed to it. But the British government has a continuing interest in playing down this role,” Palan explains.
So, back to Iran. Iran’s elite have been laundering oil money through shell companies owning luxury UK properties while ordinary Iranians suffer economic collapse, says Promethean Action.
One example is that of Ali Ansari, who owns a dozen mansions on “Billionaires’ Row” in London (London’s “Billionaires’ Row” is located in The Bishops Avenue, within the districts of Hampstead and East Finchley (N2), in close proximity to Kensington Palace Gardens in W8. This address features properties that are valued at an astonishing £65 million and above) through offshore shell companies, illustrates how elite figures funnel illicit funds into tangible assets abroad, sheltering riches while local populations endure brutal austerity, high inflation, and social unrest.
Scott Bessent’s targeted sanctions and crackdown on the shadow banking system represent a strategic pivot by the U.S. to attack the financial lifeblood of regimes like Iran and Venezuela. This approach undermines their war machines and corrupt networks without waging traditional military conflict.
With daily currency trading volumes far eclipsing actual global trade ($9.5 trillion vs. real goods exchange), currency speculation extracts value from nations by creating volatility that destabilizes investment. The 1992 shift from fixed to floating exchange rates following the end of Bretton Woods fuelled this financial casino.
The original Bretton Woods system aimed to stabilize currencies to encourage long-term investment and industrial development. Recent U.S. interventions supporting Japan’s yen indicate a revived effort to reinstate these principles, prioritizing real economic growth over speculative profits.
The ongoing battle is one between the American system which focuses on production, national sovereignty, and stable development and the British global offshore empire, where the billionaire class profits from exploitation, instability, and global financial opacity.
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