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December 8 - December 24, 2018
Mathematics dictates, declared Rajatnaram, that if a crooked politician is to keep getting richer, he must steal ever more, which will anger his subjects. That means he must buy the support of more and more officials, which will require more money, which will necessitate more theft, and provoke yet more public anger.
In a dishonest system, it is not only futile to attempt to improve things by acting honestly, but almost certainly counterproductive: you will be punished for it, since you are threatening the business interests of your colleagues.
In the dry language of economists, money invested in schools and healthcare and roads and safety has a higher multiplier effect – you get a better return for the economy from every dollar you spend – than taking it offshore and spending it on ostrich-leather shoes. Better governed countries have a higher standard of living, better health, longer life expectancy, improved educational outcomes, and better performing economies.
In essence what this meant was that the ex-colonies gained a dual form of government: kinship-based structures on the one hand, and a European-style state structure on the other. The post-independence rulers were able to use whichever form of government benefited them at any particular time, whether to enrich themselves or to punish their enemies, and to switch back and forth between them as often as they wanted.
They have had the enthusiastic collaboration of Western professionals (and officials: bribes paid abroad were tax-deductible in many Western countries until the early years of this millennium).
Africanists who calibrate such things rate Macias as worse than Uganda’s Idi Amin, worse than the Central African Republic’s Emperor Bokassa’).
His lawyer Michael Berger created shell companies to allow Teodorin to conceal his identity when buying a Maserati ($137,000), a Ferrari ($332,000), another Ferrari ($280,000), a Lamborghini ($288,000), another Lamborghini ($330,000), and making out a cheque to cash for $3.3 million.
The point is that Westerners have not only been passive observers of corruption in developing countries, but active enablers of it.
The 1996 file on Omar Bongo, president of Gabon from 1967 to 2009, was even more straightforward: ‘Source of Wealth: self-made as a result of position. Country is an oil producer.’
The Bongo family had accounts with Citibank in Bahrain, Jersey, London, Luxembourg, New York, Paris and Switzerland, sometimes managed in the name of a Bahamian shell company.
While Teodorin Obiang was spending incredible sums on fast cars, fast women and flash property, the population of his country was stuck in persistent poverty, with the eleventh highest HIV rate in the world, as well as high rates of dengue fever, malaria and malnutrition.
If you can persuade all state employees to work for you (by underpaying them, and thus forcing them to take bribes), then you effectively outsource your own bribe demands and take them hostage at the same time; anyone who speaks out is as guilty as you are, because they’re on the take, too.
‘When analyzed in the light of rent-seeking dictatorship, “corruption” is systemic rather than coincidental.’
Kalin is the chairman of Henley & Partners, which calls itself – with good reason – the ‘Global Leader in Residence and Citizenship Planning’.
One of his clients was Kenneth Rijock. Rijock had served in the US army in Vietnam. In the late 1970s he got into laundering money for drug smugglers, just when the cocaine boom meant there was plenty of money to launder. It’s a story he told in his 2012 memoir The Laundry Man,
Billy Herbert eventually over-reached himself. According to the FBI, Herbert helped launder money via Anguillan shell companies for a gang of Boston marijuana smugglers, who then used the proceeds to buy weapons for the IRA to use in its campaign against the United Kingdom.
combined UK–US police operation busted Herbert’s Anguilla office in 1986 (this same operation eventually jailed Rijock, too), and the Boston smugglers were arrested a few months later.
In 2005, St Kitts sold six passports; in 2006, it sold 19; in 2007, it sold 75; in 2008, it sold 202; in 2009, it sold 229; in 2010, it sold 664; in 2011, it sold 1,098; in 2012, it sold 1,758; in 2013 it sold 2,014. Sales began to flatten out at that level, with 2,329 sold in 2014; and 2,296 in 2015.
Roger Ver, whose success in the world of cryptocurrencies has earned him the nickname ‘Bitcoin Jesus’, was happy to sit down and chat with me about his decision to swap his American passport for a Kittitian one.
He has made a fortune out of his website bitcoin.com, and reckons he’s 10 to 15 per cent more productive now he doesn’t have to fill in a US tax return.
That’s the power of Moneyland; it allows its wealthy citizens to slough off the ingrained injustices their fellow citizens have to carry around with them, and enjoy a life of freedom and ease.
Jho Low, a Malaysian being pursued by the US government for $540 million supposedly defrauded from the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, has a St Kitts passport.
St Kitts passport holder defrauded McGill University Health Centre out of $22.5 million in what Canadian police call the country’s biggest ever case of corruption (he died before being brought to trial).
Passports have become a commodity. In fact, buying a passport is almost a bit boring these days. There is a far more interesting product on the market.
Kazakh oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov’s wife was reported in 2013 to have been living in Italy with a Central African Republic diplomatic passport; former Nigerian oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke possessed Dominican diplomatic credentials at her arrest in London in October 2015; Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua had a diplomatic passport from Antigua and Barbuda, when he was abducted in Hong
Kong in January 2017.
Find the children, and you find the money.
the nature of Moneyland prevents the exposure of the nature of Moneyland.
parliament changed the laws around defamation in 2013. Before that, billionaires like Russian Boris Berezovsky (who sued Forbes magazine in 1997 in a British court, even though only 2,000 copies of its 785,000 worldwide distribution had been sold in the UK), and Saudi citizen Maan al-Sanea, had used the UK to settle defamation cases despite having only a minimal connection to the country.
The reason that Putin has not been convicted for any of the crimes that Dawisha describes is that the Russian legal system is corrupt and politically controlled, not that Putin is honest.
Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?,
That was a direct response to Khalid Bin Mahfouz, a Saudi businessman who sued or threatened to sue thirty-six times in British courts when journalists accused him of funding terrorists, notably against the American author Rachel Ehrenfeld (some twenty-three copies of her 2003 book Funding Evil had been sold in the UK, so a British court accepted jurisdiction).
Private investigatory agencies also rely on the media for information when asked to check someone’s background – for example, if that person has applied for a passport in a place like Malta – so this system of soft censorship hampers their work as well.
Perhaps a minor royal will agree to head some appropriately named organisation. There are a lot of minor royals out there, and many of them are surprisingly short of cash.
This kind of up-scale philanthropy then opens the door to parties full of the real A-listers: senior members of the royal family, cabinet ministers.
Browder is a wealthy US-born British citizen who moved to Russia in the mid-1990s,
he was an energetic fund manager famous for three things: always having time for journalists; accusing Russian companies of entrenched corruption; and defending the record of President Putin.
(‘I naively thought that Putin was acting in the national interest and was genuinely trying to clean up Russia,’ is the way Browder explained it in his 2015 memoir, Red Notice.)
Analysts from Deutsche Bank made the discovery when they looked at British investment figures, and realised that the E&O number was consistently positive over time.
Published in 2015, the report – entitled ‘Dark Matter’, because no one can resist astronomy metaphors when confronted by a problem this big – looked at Britain, New Zealand and Sweden, and picked up huge movements of money that had avoided official detection.
Switzerland returned $800 million to Nigeria, which had been stolen by Sani Abacha and his family; and $600 million to the Philippines, after the collapse of the Marcos regime.
Zlochevsky owned his businesses via Cyprus, a favoured haven for assets unobtrusively controlled by high-ranking officials in the Yanukovich administration.
The scientists tested a second sample, and the initial finding was confirmed: he had been poisoned with polonium-210. He was the first confirmed victim of deliberate alpha radiation poisoning in history.
The alpha particles it emits are like atomic artillery: they smash into everything around them with lethal force, destroying cells, shredding DNA, extinguishing bodily functions. It is a tribute to Litvinenko’s physical fitness that he held out against it for so long.
Sergei Skripal, a former Russian agent convicted of spying for the UK who had lived in Britain since being exchanged in a 2010 spy swap, was poisoned with a Soviet-developed nerve agent in Salisbury in March 2018, along with his daughter who was visiting him from Russia.
‘Naulila’s spent more than any other bride in Kleinfeld history, walking away with a total of nine original Pnina Tornai dresses, a surprise skirt, customisation, accessories, a total of over $200,000.’
The average resident of the country survived for just forty-two years; 82.5 per cent of the population lived in poverty; a quarter of children died before the age of five; child malnutrition was at its highest rate in twenty-five years.
‘Where is this country going? Some can boast such wealth, while others live on rice and fish. God has given the country to the wrong people’; ‘a country where 90 percent of the people has neither water nor power, does not know what they’ll eat the next day, litter, cesspools, sufferings. And a few people live inhumanly without worrying about the welfare of the people!!!’
There is now so much money washing around looking for something fun to be spent on, that it has created a whole new field of economic study, which one bank analyst calls ‘plutonomy’.
House of Outrageous Fortune,
