Freemasonry  ''It is known that the four lodges mentioned above held an assembly at the Goose and Gridiron, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, London on St. John the Baptist’s day, 24 June 1717.'' 
N 51° 30.850 W 000° 05.978 ''A blue plaque denotes the location of the Grand Lodge of English Freemasons first meeting. It is located on the north side of St Paul's Churchyard close to the Temple Bar.'' ref

[2011] The Men who Stole the World: An interview with Nicholas Shaxson  NICHOLAS SHAXSON  When talking about the ‘City’ you have to distinguish between two things. The general view of the City is just ‘the financial services industry’, and when people say ‘the City’ that is generally what they mean. But in my book I am much more specific: I’m referring to the City of London Corporation, which is an ancient historical entity. It is on one level simply the municipal authority for the Square Mile, which is around 700 acres of prime land in the centre of London, which is essentially home to the financial services industry. But this entity, the City of London Corporation, is no ordinary municipal authority. It is an authority that has managed to carve itself out of many of the laws and regulations that apply to the rest of the United Kingdom, in a process that has lasted for centuries. It is an island of special privileges. One colourful marker of the discontinuity between the City of London Corporation and the rest of the country is that the Queen, when she crosses into the City, does this strange ceremony where she is met by the Lord Mayor and the City police raise a red rope and the Queen crosses, and there’s the Lord Mayor’s sword, etc. There is this whole colourful ceremony, and it’s treated now as just a ceremonial thing for tourists, but it is a marker of the fact that the City is politically and constitutionally a different entity that has, through the power of finance, been able to carve itself out a separate jurisdiction.
    So you have the creation of these tax havens in their own right, but what they quickly became were ‘feeders’ for the City of London. They would channel money and the business of handling money into the City, encompassing both licit and illicit business – huge capital flight out of Africa was being attracted to these places, for example. The City had this network of jurisdictions scattered around the whole world whose aim was to attract capital and then feed that money and the business of handling money into the City. So while the analogy with a ‘spider’s web’ is a bit sinister sounding it is apt – this network catches business from different parts of the world and then feeds into the centre.

Another example is the voting rights in the City. The City is composed of 25 wards and when ward elections are held for the Common Council, which is the main decision making body, not only do the residents get a vote but the corporations within the City get to vote as well. This is not the workforces of those corporations but the corporate management. So you have Goldman Sachs voting in a British election. It is completely bizarre. There are all sorts of historical reasons behind this but the fact is that the City is a very different constitutional and political entity within the United Kingdom, and in a sense not only is it the centre of this offshore spider web but is also an offshore island in its own right. The City of London has a Lord Mayor but London has a Mayor as well, so this is really a tale of two cities.

The drug trade makes heavy use of the offshore system. The money now involved is so large that you can’t transport it in suitcases anymore. A suitcase can only hold around $1-2 million, and we are now talking about tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. In terms of the overall scale of what is happening offshore there are various different estimates. One is by Raymond Baker who wrote a book calledCapitalism’s Achilles Heel and who now works for Global Financial Integrity in Washington. According to his analysis criminal money – which includes money from the drug trade, as well as various other sources – accounts for roughly a third of the overall picture. Corruption money, the focus of so much attention, amounts to only three percent of the picture. The remaining two-thirds is commercial money – transfer mispricing, tax avoidance and evasion by corporations, and so on. All of these different components use the same facilities and the same corporate and secrecy structures. They are all in it together. So there is a very unhealthy proximity of the criminal and the commercial being incubated offshore.