Under the Tories, authorities are soft on fraudsters and oligarchs

 At least, that is how it seems. It is unlikely that ministers tell the various Departmental heads to go easy on cronies and people the Conservative party depends on for donations. I do not believe the Civil Service has yet been totally corrupted. More likely is that the investigators involved are starved of resources by Treasury ministers in this "cost of living crisis". 

Anyway, the result is that a pitiful amount (back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest <1%) has been recovered from non-performing contracts signed, usually by-passing Civil Service procedural checks, in the height of the Covid epidemic. A few of these failures to deliver may not have been deliberately fraudulent, but too many clearly were. The cost of dubious equipment supply contracts is conservatively estimated at over £3bn and at least a similar amount has been lost to fraudsters obtaining "bounce-back" and other business support loans. By the end of last year, only £18m has been recovered in respect of the PPE contracts. 

Private Eye magazine issue 1590 told a similar story about sanctions on Putin's cronies.

Almost a year on from the Ukraine invasion, are the oligarchs who found sanctuary in Britain for a couple of decades feeling the sanctions squeeze as much as the government would have everyone believe?

Latest figures from the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), set up after Russia's Crimea annexation, last month prompted Simon Fell, chair of an all-party parliamentary group of MPs on fair banking, to describe the performance as "not good enough".

So far there have been no fines for breaches of sanctions imposed since the Ukraine invasion last February, although reported breaches had hit 236 by November. Enforcement measures do take time, but recent history is not encouraging. 

In the year to March 2022, the OFSI imposed just two fines, totalling £86,000 [...] In the previous year, there were no fines for breaches.#