Watch: How did Roman Abramovich's advisors help hide his wealth?
I keep thinking about how ordinary the machinery of hiding a fortune must look. Deloitte is the kind of name you see on a thousand boring annual reports, and that's exactly what makes this story so strange. The BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have shown how a Russian billionaire's wealth was made to disappear with the help of a firm that most people associate with routine audits.
The story matters because it connects to a bigger weirdness: the financial system runs on trust in paperwork, and that trust can be bent to make billions of pounds effectively invisible. We like to imagine the truly mysterious forces in the universe are quantum fields or black holes, but the ability to erase a fortune from public view is just as baffling. I'd want to know how much of this was deliberate design versus standard practice, because that line feels blurry.
Where I land is somewhere between fascination and unease. The investigation is unsettling because it shows the super-rich have access to a kind of invisibility cloak, stitched together by accountants and lawyers, and it works because we agreed to let it work.