The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, on behalf of the National Economic Crime Centre and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has issued an 'amber alert' about finances emanating from South Sudan. This, and its lacklustre pursuit of unexplained wealth orders, suggests that it is ambivalent about corruption involving 'politically exposed persons.'

Evidence suggests that this might be happening but very slowly, as the NCA has just issued probably only the fifth “unexplained wealth order” in history, even though such orders (along with “interim freezing orders”) came into force in January 2018. Such a glacial pace bespeaks profound lethargy and a reluctance to rock varous diplomatic boats.

A court can make a UWO that pertains to any property of more than £50,000 in value, wherever in the world it is, if it has reasonable cause to believe that someone has an interest in it and reasonable grounds to suspect that he could not have obtained it without using dirty money. He must also be a PEP from (until December this year at the latest) outside the European Economic Area or there must be reasonable grounds to suspect that he is involved in serious crime that has a close connection with a PEP or a serious criminal.

The £80 million property - a mansion - that a court has just placed under the latest UWO belongs to Nurali Aliyev, 35, the grandson of a previous ruler of Kazakhstan named Nursultan Nazarbayev. Aliyev denies all wrongdoing. His father, Rakhat Mukhtaruly Aliyev, was married to the president's daughter, ran the tax police and secret service and was found dead in his prison cell in 2015. He was accused of kidnapping two managers of Nurbank in 2007 whose bodies surfaced in 2011.

The UK only deployed its first UWO in July last year. NCA alerts are only amber or red.