How Dirty money is quickly anonymised
Award-winning investigative Financial Times journalist Tom Burgis reveals a terrifying global web of corruption by following the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators, and poisoning democracies, spanning Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the Trump White House, all at a terrible human cost.
A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silent and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London-the world’s piggy bank for blood money.
One of the biggest heists in modern history, all that we hold most dear is being stolen under our eyes.
Since the cold war, the world has witnessed the emergence of a new generation of autocrats who as well as establishing a stranglehold on political power at home have busily filled their bank accounts abroad with assets pillaged from their countries, as extreme wealth accumulated at great speed in often appalling ways. Kleptopia is a collection of tales of political and moral corruption, violence, weak regulation, and complicity within the international financial system where the money is quickly anonymised.
Burgis from Basingstoke, build his case around four people – a regulator, an ex-soviet billionaire constructing a private empire, a Canadian lawyer with a strange client, and a Brooklyn Crook protected by the CIA– all part of a complex system of shadowy financial transactions and secrecy that emits across the economic and political worlds. Nigel Wilkins, a compliance officer working at a Swiss Bank, BSI, witnessed triggered suspicions that the bank was handling dirty money. He started gathering evidence of a system of complex relationships- from Asian oligarchs to the heart of global finance, African dictators to Manhattan realtors – that he later handed over to the regulators who did nothing.
The trail picked up again after Burgis, who was on the pursuit of global money-laundering and the privatisation of political power story met with Wilkins. The story dates back to the 1980s with the ascendance of pro-market thinking and the collapse of the Soviet Union which unleashed huge sums of money into the financial system.
Over a period of time, this created dependencies.
“Dirty money is not attributed to political and business villains, but about the systemic addiction to financial stimulants like untraceable money, Tax evasion deprived governments of revenue. Money laundering was the other side of the same coin. Like tax-dodging, it was a subversion of money’s role as a token of reciprocal altruism that allowed large and diverse societies to function. But while tax evasion sucked money out, money laundering pumped money in. Dirty money was just another source of investment into otherwise declining economies“, writes Burgis.
Mind-boggling sums are brought down to earth: the $100m of extra “commission” paid out in one industrial acquisition is “enough money to pay that year’s wages or twelve thousand Russians”. Burgis also explains what happens if such workers dare to demand a few dollars more to live decently. Roza, a Kazakh oil company worker in her fifties is tortured and sentenced to seven year’s prison for reminding her colleagues of their right to share in their country’s natural resources.
Kleptopia reveals demanding the truth and equality costs lives, thanks to the global money web’s defences.
Kleptopia also throws light into the legalised secrecy around the hubs of big money and how integral dirty money is to political power.
Burgis asks the question facing even more people in an increasingly volatile world “ Do you want to love Kleptopia and be brought in the wall? Or would you rather be outside, in the wilderness that we used to call commons, defenceless as the water rises? Choose.”
They are everywhere, the thieves and their people, Masters of secrecy and amassed more money than most countries.
Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis, William Collins £20, 446 pages.