Book Review: Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Corrupting the World (2020). Tim Burgiss.

This is an exhaustively researched story of how dirty money from corrupt regimes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere was first stolen by small circles of autocrats and their favored cronies, then traveled out through the international financial system to corrupt and distort the financial watchdogs and overseers in the Western world, particularly in the UK and the United States.  

 

Focused especially on a group of billionaire oligarchs and autocrats in Kazakhstan who were able to buy up state-owned natural resources and processing plants for a small fraction of their value in the twilight days of the Soviet system, it shows clearly the complementary roles of extreme wealth and autocratic power in facilitating and controlling the narrative about these crimes.

 

One noteworthy aspect of this dynamic is the important role of private security and espionage agencies employed by the oligarchs, to create an information environment where any story can be created and believed, based on the ability of the powerful and their agents to selectively present a mix of fact and fiction (about themselves and their critics) to the public, to support their own self-serving narratives. 

 

It is the same demoralizing function that autocrats use within their totalitarian states to limit and control their populations’ understanding of “truth”, but here it is employed effectively in western media markets by private interests, in service of their own personal wealth and corrupt purposes.

 

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump’s story makes a late appearance in the book, for his own real estate and money laundering activities, which often intersected with the interests and activities of the corrupt oligarchs from Eastern Europe and Russia.  It also makes clear the extent to which he too has succeeded in shaping a narrative about himself and his business activities that does not rely on the truth of who he really is, or what he has actually done or failed to do.   

 

A useful history of recent “dirty money” developments and operations, especially those coming out of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  It's all the more relevant to understanding the world of the post-Soviet oligarchs, whose yachts and airplanes are now being seized around the world as a result of Russia's war in Ukraine and the international sanctions campaign against it.  Recommended.