HE IS the TikTok dictator, the hardman who makes online Westerners smirk. The accidentally hilarious Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, president of Turkmenistan, has become a bit of an internet cult.

People in largely wealthy, mostly safe nations like our own log on to social media to snigger at videos clipped from his tightly controlled and gobsmackingly sycophantic state TV news.

We can watch “Berdi” being applauded by loyal citizens as he cycles down a pristine, empty dual carriageway, or unveiling a gold statue of his favourite dog, or rapping with his grandson. And we laugh.

One correspondent at BBC Monitoring – the best and most neglected part of the UK’s public broadcaster – regularly tweets doctored photos of the great leader from the Turkmen press. Mr Berdimuhamedov’s 63-year-old neck, the reporter always points out, is flawlessly smooth and firm in newspaper pictures. Cue, understandably, a sea of laughing-crying emojis.

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Oh, Berdi is funny, of course he is. At least when he and his family are not robbing you. When you are not hungry because your country’s wealth is being squandered.

Tyranny, it’s ridiculous. So is the way we often speak about it. There are politicians who talk about our country as a one-party state.

That’s Scotland, which isn’t even a state and which has a multi-party legislature, elected under a proportionate representation system literally designed to prevent unfair parliamentary majorities.

There are also online activists who equate our free press and our public broadcasting to what is seen in places like Turkmenistan.

These people: they are shallow; they are trite; and they are wrong, sickeningly so.

There is an irony about the jokes about Berdi and the hyperbolic Twitter-grade rhetoric about one-party-state Scotland. It is that Mr Berdimuhamedovs’s corrupt autocracy is being enabled right here in the UK.

Last week, the Sarajevo-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project or OCCRP – an international investigative journalism project – revealed some of the wealth of members of Mr Berdimuhamedov’s family and where it came from. The Scottish topline: our cottage industry providing shell firms was a big part of the story.

It’s a complicated tale, so please bear with me.

People in Turkmenistan are hungry. The Central Asian state after the collapse of the Soviet Union depended on Russia buying its gas. In 2016, Russia stopped doing so. The result? Hyperinflation that made food unaffordable.

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Mr Berdimuhamedov in 2016 signed a decree giving contracts to seven “foreign companies” to import staples like sugar, chicken and sunflower oil to be distributed to the public. The OCCRP this week revealed that two of these importers were Scottish limited partnerships or SLPs – a now notorious form of shell firm long exposed in this newspaper – and another was a English limited liability partnership.

The shell firms, we can discover thanks to new UK transparency rules introduced after a campaign by The Herald, were controlled by Mr Berdimukamedov’s nephew, Hajymyrat Rejepov, or his associates.

Mr Rejepov – who recently used Russian social media site Vkontakte to show off a seven-figure collection of luxury watches – did not comment when approached by OCCRP.

One of the SLPs named was Staunchest Holdings, registered at a Mailboxes Etc in Church Street, Inverness. It had a monopoly on the import of frozen buffalo meat in to Turkmenistan and had a multi-million-pound state procurement contract under Mr Berdimukamedov’s food decree. The business, which was dissolved two months ago, officially listed a friend of Mr Rejepov as its person of significant control or beneficial owner.

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There are virtual offices or PO Box addresses all over Scotland where hundreds of often opaquely owned shell companies are registered. Over the years The Herald has named many of them. Often the owners of the addresses have no idea who really controls the entities which they host. This business, like the related business of creating shell firms is entirely legal, but barely regulated.

Autocrats and kleptocrats need such facilities to survive. A concerted effort in the UK and some other jurisdictions – often UK overseas territories – would make life very hard for Mr Berdimuhamedov and his ilk. Tens of billions have been flushed out of the former Soviet Union alone in the last three decades via British shell firms, especially Scottish ones. Despots and oligarchs also use British PR firms and British lawyers to make them look good. It is not just their money they are laundering, but their reputations too.

This is usually considered a British Government problem. The Conservatives at Westminster have introduced some cautiously welcomed reforms and promise more. Critics accuse them of being half-hearted.

But surely it is an ethical issue, not just a political one? Nobody is forcing Scottish people to create and host dodgy firms. Nobody is forcing Scottish lawyers or company formation agents to enable global criminality and oppression. But that is what they are doing, even if they don’t know it.

Politicians and the lobbies for white collar professions cannot pretend they do not know this. Because this enabling of corruption and crime is happening right on our high streets. The stink is right under our noses – even if we do not smell it.

There have never been free and fair elections in Turkmenistan. The country ranks close to the bottom of most league tables for democracy, transparency or press freedom.

We had democratic elections last month. It was an opportunity for a whole range of small parties or independent candidates, some eccentric, some on one fringe or another, to try and have their say.

These small outfits tend not have permanent HQs. So they use mail boxes. Often the very same ones as the suppliers of shell firms.

Alex Salmond’s Alba party shares its virtual office HQ, in Edinburgh, with SLPs. So does George Galloway’s All4Unity, whose official base opposite Ayr bus station is familiar to anyone who keeps up with opaque corporate strictures north of the border. The once proud now tiny Social Democratic Party is based at a mailbox in central Glasgow which entirely legally hosts SLPs linked to endless scandals.

This is a meaningless coincidence, of course. These parties have no links to the shell companies. But it made me laugh even more than one of those classic Berdi propaganda videos.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.