The Jordan Harbinger Show - 228: Oliver Bullough | Why Thieves and Crooks Rule the World

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Oliver Bullough (@OliverBullough) is a journalist, a regular contributor to The Guardian, and author of Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back. What We Discuss with Oliver Bullough: How corrupt leaders pilfer everything from wildlife reserves, banks, and even national healthcare systems. How this type of graft corrupts society and leads to other crime and unrest -- such as terrorism and flawed elections. How corruption filters down the economic food chain, harming children and those who can't defend themselves. How dark money can be used for a host of unsavory purposes, and why it's nearly impossible to uncover it because of shell corporations, passports for sale, and the fact that dark money knows no borders. What we might do to begin reeling in this lopsided power structure from its offshore roots in a way that benefits the fair-playing majority. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/228 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! SquadCast is remote interview recording software used by professional podcasters that overcomes the quality restrictions of its competitors. Start your free trial by going to SquadCast.com and hear the difference today! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that we can use to impact our own lives and those around us. Today's episode is about money laundering and corruption, but not just any type of corruption. We're talking large-scale kleptocracy. world leaders and businessmen stashing away billions of dollars and laundering them through Western countries like the UK and the United States. The kind of money involved is absolutely staggering from a number's perspective. Today, we'll learn how corrupt leaders pill for everything from national health care systems, banks, and even wildlife reserves.

We'll also discuss how corruption filters down the economic food chain, harming children and those who can't defend themselves. We'll touch on how this type of graft corrupts society. and leads to other crime and unrest, such as terrorism and flawed elections. Dark money can be used for a lot of unsavory purposes, and it's nearly impossible to uncover it because of shell corporations, passports for sale, and the fact that dark money knows no borders. If you liked our earlier episode on money laundering with Joshua Fruth,

you'll like this one as well. This is a really shocking indictment of our banking system, tax structures, and law enforcement. This is one of those conversations where, at the end, I had some creepy Illuminati X-Files music playing in my head, and I think you'll know what I mean once you give this a listen. And by the way, I find great people like this to interview for the show because of my network. And if you want to know how to create your own network, use systems, use tiny habits. I've got a free course for you called 6-minute networking, and that's over at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course in the newsletter. So come join us, and you'll be in great company. All right, here's Oliver Bolo. I want to hear about how this all started, because it seems very interesting, but it also seems like something you stumbled into. Yes, I mean, I'm a Russianist, an expert in the former Soviet Union, and so I spend a lot of time there writing about the many problems that Russia and the other countries have. I mean, I moved there after university, essentially hoping I'd be writing about, you know, the transition to democracy and freedom and all these wonderful things that were going to happen. But instead, I ended up writing about, you know, war and terrorism and abuse of human rights and dictatorship and all the bad things that happened.

So I suppose the moment of kind of my eyes opening for this book, Moneyland, the way it happened was when I started thinking about, what was behind all those bad things. Why, instead of just writing about the bad things, writing about what was the cause of all the bad things. And essentially, it's corruption. It's kleptocracy. It's essentially the abuse of power by the powerful in order to steal everything that's not nailed down

and to launder that money in various tax havens and then to buy luxury goods with it. And that realization came to me in Ukraine. in 2014 when they'd just had a revolution, which was to a large extent caused by anger about corruption and the fact that the country's government and president were stealing everything they could. And I realized, I mean, this wasn't a secret to people who knew these things, but it was a secret to me. I realized that essentially the reason they were able to steal so much stuff was because they were hiding all of their assets behind British companies. And being British, this struck

me is extraordinary. I never occurred to me this was happening. So I went back to Britain and looked into it in Britain and it turned out this wasn't just something Ukrainians were doing that people from all over the world were using British companies, British banks, British lawyers and accountants to essentially launder their stolen money in order to keep it. And that this is a major cause of the misery around the world. And that was the starting point for this particular journey. Yeah. You started off like me. I was an exchange student in 19. in the former East Germany. And I remember being initially very disappointed

that I got placed in this former communist country and I was super upset. And then when I got there, I was like, wait a minute, this is so much more interesting than being in, at the time, West Germany, which was kind of like, it's a nice European country that's a lot like the United States in a lot of ways. And I was at first really jealous of all the kids

that got placed there because they were having more fun initially. And then towards the end, I realized what a unique and amazing experience I had living with a family that had a teenager that grew up in the beginning in a communist country and then was not, right? It was just this really fascinating experience. So it sounds like you were similar. You started off essentially as a cheerleader for the Eastern Block going, all right, now you're going to join the rest of the world. This is going to be great. I'm going to be in the front line of you guys enjoying all these political and economic and social freedoms. This is going to be amazing.

I'm going to watch this country. It's like watching a child that has all the potential in the world but had crappy parents or something like that and is now free in the world. And then suddenly you go, why are you, why did you just join a street gang? What are you doing? Like, why are you doing this to yourself? And I find this fascinating. And you must have been disappointed at some level. Yeah, I mean, I was. I mean, I was, I suppose I was very naive, you know, I didn't really give it any thought. And I just thought, well, you know, it's going to be amazing. they've had a, they've overthrown communism. You know, remember that was the, you know, Francis Fukuyama writing the end of history,

you know, liberal democracy was going to conquer the world. The Western system was the only system and all that. And I mean, it wasn't, I was just naive and kind of ignorant. You know, I went out, I moved to St. Petersburg in Russia and I lived in Central Asia and then I lived in Moscow. And I suppose I just assumed everything would become, you know, Europe would expand, as it were, you know, in the same way that if you went to Prague, it felt increasingly just like being in Austria or you went to, I don't know, Slovenia, it felt like being in Austria. I suppose I

imagined that Russia would just go the same way and Russia would become a European country, but that didn't happen. You know, Russia stayed very Russian and, in fact, became increasingly authoritarian again. So, yeah, initially I was, I was disappointed. I was critical, I suppose, of what was happening. I wrote a lot about what was happening in Chechnya and what was happening with human rights abuses and all that. And the moment of realization to me, the moment that scales fell off my eyes, as it were, was that when I realized that all these problems that were happening were not really something that the Russian government was doing to its people unassisted, that it was very much assisted by Western professionals, by London bankers, by American lawyers, by, you know, Swiss bankers, by all of these people who supposedly represented the good guys,

you know, supposedly represented the liberal democratic countries. And actually, they'd gone over there and were, you know, spreading these kind of toxic financial products and spreading this sort of financial secrecy and allowing people to hide the money that they'd stolen, hide it offshore and then spend it on, you know, luxury yachts from the Netherlands or luxury property in London or New York or all this. And that was the moment of, of realization that gave birth to this book, that in a way, it wasn't the Russians' fault, right? There'd been this unholy alliance between their rulers and our bankers, our financial professionals, and together the kind of the dictatorial elite, the autocratic elite of the former

Soviet Union had got together with the kind of capitalist elite and created this unholy union that had sort of been, you know, created this new form of autocracy that, that, that, kleptocracy they'd call it um which was you know emiserating a large part of the world and that was what i decided that i needed to write about to expose this system the system that i call money land it's like the worst of both worlds and to clarify for people who aren't familiar with the term kleptocracy kleptomania is when you steal a lot so kleptocracy is essentially a system whereby those who steal i mean can you define this it's like a system whereby those who steal and pilfer are the norm or at the top yeah i mean the guy who i mean

it's an old word, but the guy who gave it its new meaning, which was in the 1960s, he called it government of thieves by thieves for thieves. It's when essentially the entire state apparatus is transformed into a system of theft. It no longer serves the people it's set up to serve. It no longer essentially works on behalf of citizens. It works in order to extract money from the economy for the benefit of the people at the top of the state. Yeah, it's like corruption, but much more so. It's when, you know, corruption we think of as meaning, you know, maybe there's the odd official here or there who's crooked, but most people are essentially straight. Yeah, so, kleptocracy is when everything is corrupt. That there's no longer a kind of clean bit of the government to compare the corrupt bit to.

That's what kleptocracy is. It's sort of what you have in Russia, what you have in Nigeria, Malaysia, Venezuela. It's where everything, everything has gone bad. And when everything has gone bad, it sort of reaches a new level. and it's very difficult for us to understand in a way, and it's very difficult to get you a head around because it works in such a totally different way to the way we expect governments to work.

Corruption would be you've got a bicycle in your garage and the chain wheel has a bunch of rust on it, so it's a little bit harder to pedal. And the kleptocracy would be the entire bike is actually made entirely out of rust itself. Yeah, but that presupposes that that suggests that the bicycle doesn't work anymore. The bicycle still works.

It just does something different. It no longer works in a way to transport you where you want to go. He said it transports you where someone else wants you to go so they can steal all your stuff. So it no longer functions in the way it's supposed to function. It just operates in a totally different way. I mean, it superficially resembles a bicycle, but it operates with something completely different. And this is why I came up with this term, Moneyland, because it's actually very difficult to describe this system with the words that we have because it's so alien to our experience.

So essentially the way it is is that if you are rich and unscrupulous, if you are the kind of person who's prepared to steal as much as you want and you want to keep it, then if you retain the services of skilled lawyers and accountants and professionals, and they can structure your wealth in such a way that it essentially isn't in any country. It exists in the cloud. It exists in this place that we call offshore. And I invented a country. to put that money in. I invented Moneyland because it essentially has the attributes of a country. It has its own legal system. It has its own very well-protected, you know, enforcement agencies, which are these lawyers who work on behalf of the world's kleptocrats. So Moneyland is a very well-resourced and very well-protected place. And it's a place that if you're not wealthy, you have no access to. You can't possibly access it. It's like a new kind of country that exists for the kind of nomadic elite, the kleptocratic elite of the world. whether that's a Malaysian prime minister or the president of Venezuela or a regional governor in

Nigeria or a global tax evader in London, whoever it is, if they want it, they have access to this system, this kind of cloud-based system for money called Moneyland, which protects their money and prevents anyone else being able to not just access it, but even to see it, see where it is or what it's doing. Yeah, this is, it's interesting. It's like an invisible island. There's a you can only see it if you have a billion dollars, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like, you know, so I really struggled with where to put it. You know, is it above us or is it below us, right?

It's because it's not here, but so where is it? So I sort of, I decided to use the kind of Alice in Wonderland parallel. You know, she goes down a rabbit hole. She falls down and then she sees there's a sort of magic door that she's, she can't get through because she doesn't have the key, but she can see through the keyhole and she can see, there's this magic garden that she doesn't have access to. You know, that's what I imagine Moneyland is like, you know, you fall down a rabbit hole and you can see through the keyhole, you can see there's

something wonderful, but because you're not a billionaire, you can't open the door. So you can't have access to it yourself. But if you can open the door, if you are a billionaire, then it's amazing. It's a world where the normal rules don't apply. It's a world where you can essentially do whatever you like. You can get away with tax evasion. You can get away with theft. You can get away with murder if you really want to. It's a magical, wonderful world that underlays our entire world of nation-states and totally ignores them. It happens in parallel to the main system that the rest of us obey. You know, we have borders, the super-rich don't. Instead, they have money land. Yeah, I think this starts to become a little bit abstract, so I want to bring it back to a real-life

example, which is this guy, Yanukovych. Tell us about Yanukovych, because this was like, in the beginning of the book, I'm reading it, and I go, oh, please don't just be a book about economics, And then you start talking about Yanukovych and I go, okay, this is where the rubber meets the road for somebody listening to this in their car or at work or at the gym. And they go, wait a minute, this guy did what with how much money? So Yanukovych was the president of Ukraine. Yanukovych had been a politician for a long time. He'd been trying to become president. He'd previously been frustrated. He then became president in 2010. And he really made up for lost time. He threw himself at stealing with a kind of repastatic. and an appetite that no one had had before. He lasted in the post for just over three years when he was overthrown in a revolution and he fled to go to Russia. And he couldn't take all of his stuff with him because he had accumulated an enormous amount of wealth. And he had these palaces on the edge of the capital, on the edge of Kiev, which he left behind and which were

there. And they were kind of guarded by policemen, but the policeman didn't really know who's in charge anymore. And so there was this wonderful few weeks when, if you wanted to, and I did, because I'm this kind of person, you could just turn up and demand entry and they'd let you in. Because if you sound plausible, if you sound like you know what you're talking about, then who's to say that you aren't someone who knows what they're talking about, right? There's been a revolution. No one really knows who's in charge. So I'd explore these places and poke around.

And it was amazing because he had accumulated the most incredible amount of stuff. I mean, his palace, the one nearest to Kiev, was the biggest log cabin in the world. It's six-story high log cabin. and it's just full of, you know, gold leaf and massive chandeliers and insane amounts of furniture. And down by the river, this is on the banks of the river. There's a kind of galleon, a sort of pirate ship where he used to hang out with his friends. There's a golf course. There's a gym.

In the garages, there's a collection of luxury cars and just pile of boxes. And in the boxes, the revolutionaries kind of unpack all these boxes. And in the boxes, there's just treasures. There's a Picasso ceramic, there's a paperweight that used to belong to Stalin. There's a copy of the oldest book ever printed in Ukrainian, a kind of Ukrainian equivalent to the Gutenberg Bible. You know, like amazing amounts of stuff that he'd had nowhere to put, you know, priceless objects that he'd just kind of accumulated in this in this kleptocratic frenzy without

having anywhere to put them. You know, that's, I think when you've got to the point that you are accumulating objects worth millions of dollars and you don't even have anywhere to put them, you've reached a kind of level of incredible greed and rapacity that's almost impossible to understand. And the thing is, you know, this guy, Yanukovych, he was a real nasty piece of work. You know, he had shot protesters. His police force had shot protesters. Snipers had shot down into the crowds that killed, you know, almost 100 people. He'd been really nasty, unpleasant president. He'd put his political rivals in jail. He'd expropriated businesses. You know,

So it was funny being able to explore his palace and see, you know, he see his vulgarity. It was like seeing, you know, someone with their trousers down. It was funny. And it was kind of cathartic and nice. So I was enjoying it. I was laughing about it. I was writing silly articles about it. But then I suppose the moment of clarity came to me and the moment of truth came to me when,

when my friend Anton, who was a revolutionary who I was looking around with, when he told me, he said, listen, you know, you shouldn't, essentially you shouldn't be laughing, he said, you know, because, you know, we didn't know what was happening because all of this theft, all of this, this greed and this kleptocracy was hidden behind British shell companies. The way he said it was that this palace isn't even in Ukraine, it's in England. And that was the moment that I sort of started and realized that this wasn't funny, you know, that this sort of the downfall of this guy and him leaving this stuff behind. It wasn't just an amusing anecdote.

I could put in an article. This was something I needed to investigate. And why, in a way, what was extraordinary was that the location of the shell company that he used to hold all of this, you know, this grotesque wealth was on Harley Street. And Harley Street, if you've ever been to London, is one of the most famous addresses in the capital. It doesn't just mean it isn't just the name of a street. Rather in the way that Wall Street means finance in the U.S., Harley Street is the place where all the best doctors in Britain have their offices. Right. I knew I'd heard of that for some reason.

It means, you know, top-end plastic surgeons. It means, like, you know, the best in private health care. That's what Harley Street means. So Saville Row his suits and Harley Street is like the doctor version of that. Exactly. The top end of the top end, you know, and the fact that he had put his shell companies there, all his palaces on Harley Street. It was just this, it was like a really sick joke. You know, he'd essentially used the prestige of this street, this, you know, a prestige which was built up by doctors. over generations, he'd used it as a cheap front in order to hide the fact that he was a grotesque thief. And that was the starting point for this investigation that became this book. And what's interesting is that having laid out this sort of pattern that what he did, you know, this one man had stolen all this money and had hidden it via Harley Street and had spent it on trash, you know, on these, you know, trashy, you know, gold chandeliers and all this stuff, this log cabin and the golf course and all that, is that essentially, as soon as I found one person doing it, I looked

and everyone was doing it too. You know, if you look at what Paul Manafort did, remember Paul Manafort, he took all this money out of Ukraine, and he spent it on a house in the Hamptons and a brownstone in Brooklyn and on ostrich skin jackets and top end hi-fi and expensive rugs, he had a shell company in London too. It wasn't on Harley Street, but it wasn't that from that far away. You know, he did exactly the same thing. If you look at, you know, the daughter of, you know, the daughter of the president of Angola does the same thing. You know, if you look at, I don't know, the Malaysian, you know, this guy, the Malaysian kleptocrats who stole all this money and funded the Wolf of Wall Street with it, you know,

the Hollywood film. Wait, wait, wait, hang on. So corrupt officials in Malaysia stole money, hit it, and then used it to make the Wolf of Wall Street, which is a film about somebody ripping people off with penny stocks? Yeah, it's too good, isn't it? I mean, this is. That's insane. I can't believe it.

I mean, what's kind of entertaining about it? that example is that it's actually a good movie. I mean, normally these people, loads of these guys kind of pretend to be pop stars, you know, they spend their money on pretending to be pop stars because they want the glamour, they want something of that. And normally what they produce is just rubbish, you know, they can't sing. It's an unusual case that the Malaysian kleptocracy scandal in that they actually made a good film, because often they make films, but the films are rubbish. But that's actually quite a, quite a, you know, a good example of something, you know, of a good film. But essentially, yeah, they're stealing a load of money. They're splashing it on bling. And they're laundering their money via London, by New York, via LA, via Miami. And that's the system that I stumbled upon just in this palace in Kiev, you know, with all this sort of trash lying around. That essentially, you know, it was my gateway. It was what gave me the key to open the door into Moneyland and to discover this system and what's happening. And that's, yeah, that's what I then spent the next.

four or five years investigating. I can see why it would initially be funny, right? Because you're imagining some policeman whose job, who's 25 or 29, whose job it is to stand outside this palace and the sun and the cold and the rain all day. And now he has a Maserati in a garage at a dacha somewhere and in the trunk is Stalin's paperweight, right, after this thing. But then you look at, like, you look at each of these cars and this, this art that's sitting there in, like, the 13th bathroom in the basement or something.

and you go, you know, this painting or this original whatever or this custom wooden desk represents 3,000 children who didn't get a polio vaccine in Ukraine because this A-hole took the money. That's exactly it. I mean, because that was at the same time I was working on, you know, other investigations about kind of where the money had come from, you know, and particularly healthcare corruption is particularly disturbing and sick because you've got, you know, are people deliberately inflating the price of medicine? You've got people demanding bribes before they can take, you know, we'll start a course of treatment. You know, I spent time with mothers who had brought their children to Kiev to try and get them treatment for cancer. You know, these are children with cancer, you know, some of the most vulnerable people in the world and the most heart-rending stories. And they had these stories about, you know, paying bribes just to get their child seen by a specialist, right? Not to get not to start the course of treatment, but just to get through the door. And they, and they, they were quite slow to tell me these stories. And, and, and I couldn't, you know, it took me a little bit of coaxing to get the

stories out, but it turned out that they weren't ashamed to tell me these stories or, or in a way, scared to tell me the stories. The reason that they were kind of slow to tell me the stories, is because they thought the stories were so normal that I couldn't possibly be interested. It didn't occur to me to them that this would be unusual to me, that there would be of places in the world where doctors didn't behave this way. And that was what was so extraordinary is, you know, they were talking about, you know, you'd have to pay, these are people with nothing. And Ukraine is a poor country. People in Ukraine don't live very well. But, you know, doctors who demand $100 before they'd even see a child, you know, to check, you know, whether the reason the

child was sickening is because it had cancer. And that's just to begin with. Then you have to bring the child to Kiev. You have to see another specialist. You have to get the medicines. You have to pay extra to get the medicines. You have to get the operation. You have to be extra for the operation, then you need the course of treatment after the operation. And every single stage of this process, which should be a caring and treatment process, that was seen as a profit center for the doctors involved, you know, and for the medical administrators involved. And that was the money, all that money which had been extracted from these desperate people, you know, the most desperate parents in the world, you know, people would do anything to try and keep their child alive if their

child has got cancer. And these cynical, corrupt doctors and medical professionals who had seen this as an opportunity to extract money. And that money was essentially what was, you know, a small example of the money that was being then spent on, yeah, Maseratis and spent on Picasso ceramics, spent on stuff that wasn't even being put on display, but was just sitting in a garage somewhere. You know, and that was what was so despicable about it. Because, so it was the fact that, you know, the theft had become, it lost all, there were no limits to it. You know, they were just stealing because they could and spending, because they could. And it's just gluttony. And yeah, I became incredibly angry, obviously,

because, you know, I knew these people, these were, you know, friends of mine who were, who were really struggling to make ends meet and having their lives capsized by these, you know, ailments and by cancer, by all this, you know, and then we're desperately trying to get treatment. And meanwhile, the people who, who were at the top of the tree, the people who were taking all these kickbacks and earning all this money, they weren't even spending the money on anything fun. You know, they weren't making the Wolf of Wall Street. Nothing good came with this.

They were just spending it on trash. And so that was, yeah, I became very angry. I mean, it's, and, you know, was that, I suppose that anger is what motivated me to go out and to try and expose what they were up to and expose the people who were helping them. Ukraine had lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion just in health care system corruption. So I just want, I wanted to give an illustration of scale so people don't think, oh, yeah, there's a hospital in Kiev where the doctors take bribes.

This was like a massive, massive problem. They had a massive HIV epidemic. There was watered down polio vaccine that resulted in children getting polio. And in exchange, Yanukovych or whoever got a new car that he drove never or once home from the dealership. And some doctors got paid and patted their salaries, which had probably also been pilfered by hospital officials. So it's just, it's trickled down corruption in a way. So it's almost, it's easy to blame the doctors. and they're definitely at fault, I would assume you argue the same thing.

However, if their choices not get paid and not feed their family or see the people who are able to slip them the equivalent of US 100 first to see their patient, it's a little more understandable, not excusable by any stretch, but I get where their heads at because if they're not able to make ends meet, it's like, well, who do you decide who to see all of the things being equal? I mean, that's what's so clever about the people who create these kleptocratic systems is because if you are a policeman or a doctor or any state official or anyone in a position of state employment or power, you might go into the job with the best of intentions, right? You might go into the job because you want to fight crime or you want to help secure diseases, but you literally cannot survive on the salary you're being paid. You know, no one can survive. If no one can raise a family on, you know, $40, $50 a month, it's just not possible. So you have to take a bribe, right?

You absolutely have to. So every single state employee is taking bribes just in order to survive, right? You know, and then all of that money that should be being paid to them as salaries, the reason why their salaries so low, that money is all extracted at the top in one big lump sum by the minister and the deputy minister and the president. You know, so that's where the money goes. It's stolen at the top and it's filled up at the bottom. bottom. But then if you think about the consequences, you know, because the consequences,

they are, I mean, obviously the consequences of a child getting polio or, or a cancer going untreated, you know, this is, that is serious and consequential enough. But then beyond that, and that's what's alarming, you mentioned HIV. You know, HIV is an eminently treatable condition, right? If you have the right drugs, it's fine. I mean, it isn't even, it's something you live with, you don't die with, you don't die of anymore, right? But if you don't have the drugs, it's contagious, it spreads, and it's life-threatening. So you've got people who have a virus that is eminently treatable, that's something that is now a problem but not a killer anymore. But in Ukraine it is because the money is being stolen.

And in a way, even more serious than that. If you look at drugs that diseases that we've thought of in the West for long as being cured and solved like tuberculosis, you know, we have drugs. to treat tuberculosis. But those drugs only work if you give them in the right quantities. So doctors, corrupt doctors were watering down the amount of tuberculosis medicine that was being given. And that means not only did those drugs not work anymore, but the tuberculosis learned how to resist them and became drug resistant. So you now have super strains of tuberculosis, which can't be treated anymore. So this corruption not only prevented people being cured, but allowed the disease to learn how to resist the drugs. So now there are strains of tuberculosis,

been incubated, which we can't treat anymore. And that's a direct result of corruption. That tuberculosis, it won't stay in Ukraine or in Russia or in the countries where it's arisen. It will spread across borders. And so essentially, as a result of this greed in these countries, we will all eventually pay the price of that when tuberculosis returns and becomes the killer that it used to be before the eventual of anti-tB drugs. And so this is the problem with this corruption, is it's not just making you know, people's lives miserable in one particular place, it has consequences that spread around the world, you know, looking at it in a broader sense, if you go somewhere like Afghanistan, the generals who commanded the international forces in Afghanistan, when they talk about the biggest

threat that they faced in fighting the Taliban, they said the biggest threat was not, you know, the Taliban necessarily, it wasn't the drug traffickers. The biggest problem was corruption, because corruption undermined absolutely everything they were trying to do. It undermined aid, it undermined attempts to build roads. It undermined attempts to engage hearts and minds of the local community. Everyone was angered by corruption. And that is what spread terrorism, and that terrorism is causing problems all around that region and all around the world.

So, you know, it is, corruption is about much, much more than just people paying bribes. It's a whole system that is undermining liberal democracy and undermining the values that, you know, we claim to hold dear. And what's particularly depressing and upsetting and hypocritical about this is that this corruption is being enabled and being essentially spread around the world by Westerners. You know, the Western bankers, the Western accountants, the Western lawyers who are creating the shell companies, opening the bank accounts, accepting this money into our economies, they are essentially providing a reason why the corruption happens. Because if you can't keep something, then you don't steal it in the first place. The only reason that someone like Yanukovych stole as much as he stole was because he could be confident that he could keep most of it. And the reason he could be confident he could keep most of it

was because he had, you know, excellent bankers in Switzerland. He had excellent lawyers in London. He had, you know, lawyers in the Caribbean, people who could structure his assets in such a way that no one would ever find them. So yes, you know, some of them got found in the garage in Kiev. But that was just a fraction of his overall wealth. Most of his wealth was financial. He's out there in the financial system somewhere, and we have absolutely no way of finding it. So, you know, this system that's undermining everything that we nominally in the West hold dear is actually being created and fed by us in the West. And that's why it's so alarming and what I wanted to expose in Moneyland. It's an interesting point you make about corruption in Afghanistan. We did an episode

earlier in the show a year or so ago on money laundering, and we got an email shortly after that from somebody who was working in Afghanistan, who was a military officer. officer and he said that the corruption was so bad that their fuel was getting all the fuel that was going to help the rebels was getting stolen and then sold and then that money was getting fuel funneled back to impart the rebels but also in part to the Taliban and then shipments were getting so so it was just a whole thing and he even said he suspected that his own base commander potentially had been somehow involved in this and he eventually thought screw it i might this might end up getting me killed or discharged but i'm going to say something so he

He went to his higher ups and he said, where the hell is our fuel going? And they said, okay, so since you're in charge of the fuel, we got to sit you down and sort of bring you into this. And he originally thought his commanding officers were corrupt. And then he, as it was explained to him, they basically said, look, we can't bribe people. We can't play the corruption game because of regulations and the appearance of things. But they said, if we want, let's say whatever rebel group to play well with us, we literally have to let them steal stuff from us.

because that's kind of the table stakes. So corruption is like this. It's like an infection. So it will literally get into everything that it touches because you can't have, it's like Legos. The Legos only fit together if everybody's got the same shape bricks, right? So you can't have a corrupt system really adjacent to a non-corrupt system without it corrupting that system in order to just function together.

You can't really say, well, hey, look, we don't do the corruption thing, but you do whatever you need to. It just doesn't work. I mean, that's right. I mean, I used to have, you know, friends in Russia who used to, I mean, they said it's sort of as a joke that's say, oh, it's so annoying when I go to the UK or I go to the US, you know, if I get pulled over for speeding by a traffic cop, you know, I can't just bribe them and leave, you know, whereas here in Russia, it's so great. If I get pulled over, I just, you know, pass over $10 and that's it, you know, problem solved. You know, and they're just joking, really, that, you know, it's not something they're particularly

meant because because the, you know, a system where you can bribe a traffic cop, you know, $10 in order to turn, to, to let you off, is the same system where you can bribe a judge to, to, to allow you to steal at someone else's company or the same system where, you know, where you can, you have to pay a bribe to get your, you know, your tax rebate or whatever. So it's, it isn't, you know, corruption, it doesn't just stop it in one small place, you know, it isn't just in a situation that benefits you personally when you're in a tricky situation. It's, it corrupts everything. It, ruins everything and it undermines the whole point and the legitimacy of a government. With, you know, genuinely astonishing consequences in terms of how demoralized people become and how,

you know, destitute people become. You cannot build an economy or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, political system without trust, you know, trust is the absolute, you know, the, the, the, the, the fundamental building block of capitalism and of democracy. And corruption undermines trust. That's what it does. It's what it's for. And so essentially, it undermines everything that makes our societies what they are, which is why it's so important that we fight against it.

It is, I was just talking about this yesterday. It is interesting how corruption erodes trust, and you can't build a functional economy without trust. Because you have to be able to say, in the United States, if I start a new company, I know that if I take 50 grand and I walk into a bank, then I put that 50 grand in there, and then I want to wire some of it to another party. I can prove that they got it.

The bank will keep my money for me. These are just basic things that we would never think about. And when I lived in Ukraine a long, long time ago, a very long time ago, I think it was 2003 or 2002. I stayed there for several months. I remember this other guy who had been there for a while. He was a missionary or something,

and he told me he had 20 or 30 grand in a coffee can, or several coffee cans at home because they had tried previously, his church had previously tried wiring money to a Ukrainian bank, which is the only, or a Russian bank in Ukraine. And it just, it never made it. And the U.S. bank said, no, here's the delivery confirmation. And then he'd walk into the bank and the manager would go, yeah, we don't have any record of that wire at all.

And of course, what happened is somebody went, oh, wow, a bank wire for 30 grand. I'm just going to take this and then pretend we never got it. And that just, that's it. That's what happened. And that was the end of it. Yeah, I mean, and obviously, I mean, I had similar experiences in hospitals, you know, doctors who are friends of mine, doctors, you know, who I'm pretty sure were good people, but they needed money to, you know, to repair their machines, to service their machines and so on. And they would open their draw their cupboards and show me, you know, these piles of banknotes, you know, like foot high piles of banknotes that they'd accumulated because that's what they needed to buy the medical equipment they needed. They couldn't do anything electronically. And you can't run a modern economy that way. You know, that's this. This is absolutely crazy. I mean, leaving aside the fact that it's very vulnerable because someone

could just break in and steal it. So, yeah, it is fundamentally, you know, the trust, this lack of trust is corrosive of the way, you know, any economy functions. But what's ironic about this and kind of extraordinary is that the people at the top of these systems, you know, the people like Vladimir Putin, but then all the other sort of smaller versions of him, you know, the people who rule in Venezuela or in Nigeria or Malaysia or Azerbaijan or Azerbaijan or whatever, you know, they know as well as anyone else does that their system is crooked that they can't trust anyone. So they export their money and they stick it in the West, you know, in the U.S. or the UK in France or Switzerland or wherever. And so they, you know, they spend all their time.

If you listen to Putin, he spends all his time sort of railing against the West about how we're, you know, corrupt and how we are the source of weakness and the decline of decline of civilization and all this. But, you know, that's what he says politically. But if you follow the money, you see, he doesn't think that at all. You know, he thinks the West is just great because we're his bankers. We're the people who keep his money safe for him because he knows he can trust his bankers in Switzerland or in London, whereas he wouldn't be able to trust bankers in Moscow in the same way. And this is, it's this sort of where the two systems are interlocked that you end up with these really curious side effects, you know, where a corrupt system locks onto a non-corrupt

system, you know, you end up with this, yeah, this very weird consequences, you know, with the fact that money can be stolen from a crooked country and then kept safe in a clean country. And, you know, that mismatch can be leveraged by people in power for, you know, for all sorts of perverse consequences. And that, yeah, it's what the book's about. Yeah, it stifles commerce because, of course, if I can't take my money to the bank, then I don't want to start a legal business because there's no point. I don't have any legal protection anyway. I don't have any banking protection. So I just keep things in cash.

I don't pay taxes on that because why would I do that? It's already in cash. I'm already taking the risk of keeping it under my bed. So there's no point in reporting it because it's just going to get stolen. So it just becomes this massive inefficiency. And the market becomes capitalist no matter what, right? If you've got this hospital that supposedly has socialist health care but is highly corrupt, then the doctors decide to take bribes.

So it becomes a capitalist-ish system. It's just massively, massively inefficient because everything is obscured by design. Yeah, I mean, it's insanely inefficient. I mean, because essentially you socialize all the costs, right? The cost of maintaining the hospital. You know, the people earning the profits, the doctors, they're not going to pay to maintain the hospital. It's a state hospital. The state can pay to maintain that, right? You know, the traffic policemen who are taking the roads. They're just going to keep the money. So all of the profits are just kept by the people who are taking them. And then all the costs are dumped on the state. But the state doesn't have any money anymore because all the taxes have been stolen. So all the infrastructure falls apart. So you end up with all the roads falling apart and the bridges and the railway lines and the wages are low and everything. It's, yeah, it's the absolute worst of both worlds. You end up with this, you know, with the worst form of sort of state run institutions combined with the worst form of rapacious capitalism. And yeah, it's just nothing to say for it. It's everything about it is bad. So normally, even in communities that are, let's say,

being extorted by the mafia, right? They're better off in a way because the mafia doesn't want crime. They want things safe, they want things productive, so they can essentially maybe extort more and more money and they live there so they don't want it to turn into a crazy implosion. But in today's world, the borderless rich that we're talking about who are moving their money to London, New York, et cetera, they're not living or working in their homelands. They're stealing from their people and they're far away. So they don't care what happens back in Nigeria and they don't care what happens back in Siberia or some city in Russia or. or Eastern Europe or Ukraine. They're living in Manhattan. They're living in London.

They don't care at all about the community that they're destroying. So in that way, it's not a tale as old as time with the extortion and the organized crime. This is a different animal. Yeah, I mean, in any closed system, right, the difference between a mafia and a government is pretty academic, right? You're extorting taxes in one way or another, and that and they're, you know, and those taxes are spent on services of some kind, you know, on protection, on, you know, You know what the mafia does all the sort of nonsense of helping children and graduate and all that.

So essentially, a mafia and the government are just different stages of the same thing. In a closed system, they both work in a relatively efficient way. Yeah, the problem happens when the system isn't closed anymore, when it becomes possible to essentially rule over a patch of territory without having to keep your money in that patch of territory. That means that your assets, the assets of the powerful, don't have to obey the same rules as the assets of the week. So you can just extort as much as you like from weak people and send that money somewhere else. And this is what the globalized financial system has done, that money is essentially international, right? It's borderless. It can go anywhere.

You can send your money from California to London to Hong Kong and back to California again in the space of 10 minutes. You know, that's all very straightforward. But if you're a policeman in California and you're trying to follow the process of that money, you have to get assistance from a policeman in London, that'll take you, I don't know, a week, a month, whatever. And then you have to get assistance from policemen in Hong Kong. That'll take you another a month or whatever. And only then do you discover that the money's just come all the way back home again. So the money has gone all the way around the world in 10 minutes, but the legal requests that follow it will take, you know, a couple of months. And this is, you know, that's essentially

means that the bad guys who are looking to move their money and to stay one step ahead of the law, they're always got an advantage, right? They're always going to be ahead of us because it's so much easier and quicker to act illegally than it is to act legally. And it makes it incredibly difficult for law enforcement professionals. And this isn't law enforcement professionals anywhere have the same problems. You know, I've spoken to people at the FBI, people at, you know, other, you know, major US investigative agencies who are, you know, the most powerful investigative agencies in the world and, you know, the rest of the world looks on, you know, what the FBI can do with a kind of degree of awe because it's so powerful. But even the FBI, right, is incapable of acting against

this stuff. You know, there was an amazing case, actually quite a quite close to where you are there. And there was a Ukrainian politician who bought himself a mansion in Marin County, just north of San Francisco in the late 1990s because he'd stolen a lot of money in Ukraine and he wanted a nice place to live, you know, a nice place to retire to. He got arrested when he turned up in the States. He was prosecuted for corruption. He was jailed. And that was so he was arrested almost exactly 20 years ago and prosecuted for corruption and jailed and he is now out of jail. And yet 20 years on, even the US Department of Justice has not been able to confiscate his assets because he managed to hide his assets so well offshore. He hid them in Antigua. He hit them in the Chabell Islands

between England and France. You know, that that is the power of Moneyland that he was able to who, yes, he himself got caught and he himself got jailed, but even the Department of Justice was not able to get the assets off a guy that they had managed to jail. It just shows, you know, once you've put your assets in Moneyland, once you've hidden them behind all these shell companies and offshore bank accounts and so on, you know, those assets are almost impossible to recover, even for the Department of Justice. Yeah, I can see why, because, of course, he's in jail and his lawyer comes to visit him

once a month or whatever, or he just makes a phone call and says, wire $10 million to whatever that law firm, what was it, Fonseca or whatever, that law firm that had all the dark money and create another shell company because I heard that there's a legal request pending in Nevis about my shell company that is three levels up holding this house. So just make another layer and then transfer the deed to that one and then do it again in three months. So every time the legal paperwork gets processed, you know, three, six months later, he's already put an additional layer or two between himself, the crime, and that particular asset. And if you have enough money and that money's growing at 6 to 10% a year, you can literally do this forever.

Yeah, I mean, you can, but what's alarming about this is this isn't just law firms like Mossack Fonseca in Panama or, you know, law firms in the Caribbean. You know, there's there was an investigation by Global Witness, which is an anti-corruption NGO. and they went with a secret camera to 10 different lawyers in New York City, you know, really distinguished lawyers in New York City and presented. They kind of claimed to be acting on behalf of an African politician who'd stolen a load of money and wanted to hide it and spend it on U.S. real estate. And only one of these lawyers declined to help them. All the others said, yeah, this is how you do it.

You need a shell company, shell company A and shell company B, which owns shell company is C and D. And they were all very straightforward and very clear about it. So the game is really. rigged, right? This is the point is that if you're very rich, the laws just don't apply to you. And that's the reason why so much gets stolen. You know, the amount that's, you know, global financial integrity, which is a think tank based in Washington, D.C., they estimate that the amount that's stolen every year from the world's poorest countries and stashed in the world's richest

countries is one trillion U.S. dollars every year, one trillion. And, you know, just a, I mean, a trillion is one of these crazy numbers. It's very difficult to know. know how big that is. But if you settle down to count a trillion dollar bills, if you had a pile of a trillion dollar bills and you settled down to count them and you didn't stop until you'd finished, you didn't stop to go to sleep or to eat or anything, it would take you more than 30,000 years. That is how much a trillion dollars is. And that's how much is being stolen every year from the world's poorest countries. And so much of that money ends up being spent on real estate in Malibu or in Vancouver or in New York or in Miami or in London or in the south of France. And

You wonder why it's so hard to afford property in Manhattan or in L.A., in the nice bits of L.A. or whatever. The reason is that there's so much money that's inflating the prices because all this stolen money is looking for somewhere to go. Yeah, two to five cents per dollar earned worldwide is illegal. So that's a huge amount. In your book, you wrote that over a billion pounds a month enter just the United Kingdom illegally. So 12 billion pounds a year entering just the UK. and the UK is just a small car. I mean, the U.S. is, of course, in there as well,

and Germany and France and all these other places. It's just absolutely staggering. And what we're talking about rich people, how rich is rich? Is this like the 0.001% or something, right? This isn't just like people who earn $5 million a year. We're talking about staggeringly rich. I mean, all of these structures and tools, which they use to hide their money,

I mean, you could do it, I could do it. We could all do it if we wanted to, but we couldn't afford to. The point is that it's only worth using these tricks and employing these lawyers if you're rich. So yeah, we're talking, you know, $100 million and upwards, right? That's when it starts really making sense. Right, and it only makes sense to do that if you earn it illegally, right? If you sell your company for $800 million, that's on the book somewhere, the sale is. But only if you obtain the money illicitly, does it make sense to then hide it? Yeah, I mean, you know, but elicently, there are many different kinds of illicit. I mean, if you're engaged in industrial-scale tax evasion, right, you're dodging taxes illegally,

it's worth engaging in this if you're doing that as well. So anything that's essentially when you're trying to hide your money from the government, right, for whatever reason, but essentially you might have dodged taxes on it or you might have stolen it or whatever. And yeah, in that case, yeah, it's worth you doing this. because it means that you can disguise the origins of the money. And once you've disguised the origins of the money, you can pretend it isn't yours anymore.

And that means that you can spend it on all sorts of wonderful stuff. You can spend it on super yachts. You can spend it on real estate. You can spend it on fine art. You can spend it on ostrich skin jackets or high-fi equipment, whatever. It's amazing. The world is your oyster. The rich are essentially borderless.

They move their money around. The rest of us, of course, have borders. The money moves freely. The rest of us have to stay. put. And I know, tell us about these tours that you give in London. This is, this is what really got me interested in the book because I went, wait a minute, that's a thing. I just was in London. I'm so sad that I didn't get to go on one of these. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, we haven't done one for a little while just because the kind of engine of the tours, the guy who's actually organized enough to book the bus is my friend

Roman, and he's currently living in elsewhere in Europe. So we haven't had one for a little while. But, but yeah, basically the idea of the kleptocracy tours, they're modeled on them. I'm sure you get them, You get them everywhere, right? But we have these, you know, like you have these tours in Hollywood. You know, you go on a bus. Yeah, Starments. Yeah, exactly. And someone will point out, you know, where, I don't know,

Buster Keaton used to have his shoes shined or where Scarlettie has a latte. You know, all that stuff. And it's the same principle. It's just that we don't show you where stars go or whatever. We show you where crooks live. So, yeah, I mean, you know, it's a very target-rich environment. So we often, we change, we mix it up in terms of who you get to. to see, and we don't want to make people stay in the bus for too long, so we tend to keep

to a pretty tight area. But, yeah, we've got the, you know, the Russian deputy prime minister. We like, that's a favorite. There's a Ukrainian oligarch who, Dmitri Fiatash, who's currently sought by the FBI. There's, you know, an Egyptian son of the former Egyptian president, the son of the former dictator of Libya, you know, Nigerian regional governors, the daughter of the president of Angola, you know, Russian oligarchs, all sorts. I mean, you know, it's all, I mean, the Malaysian, the guy who made the Wolf of Wall Street, you know, he's there too. We've got it all going on. And so, yeah, the idea is essentially to try and alert London as to what's happening all around them, to what's happening in plain sight.

You know, this isn't a, it's so obvious and it's so grotesque that it's happening and it's terrible that people aren't aware of it. So yeah, the idea of the collectocracy tour is to try and essentially, you know, stand there with a megaphone and just say, look at what's happening. This is crazy. You know, we think we're a law-abiding center of democracy, but look, what's actually happening here and what's actually happening here is some of the world's worst people are investing this insane amount of money on these incredible, blingy objects. There was a, there's a woman from Azerbaijan who's been arrested recently. I heard about this. She went to Herod's, right? And she had spent so much money that people

went, what the hell is happening? Yeah, I mean, she spent, you know, tens of thousands of, I mean, tens of thousands of dollars in the Disney princess boutique in Harrod's. alone, right? Leaving aside all the handbags and the bling and the jewelry, I mean, she'd spent millions of dollars just in Harrodite. I mean, she was in fact so egregious in what she was doing that even the UK authorities noticed. And you've really got to be pretty, you know, pretty crass because, you know, most things, you know, you can get away with most things in this city. If someone goes to Barneys in Manhattan and spends a million dollars, the salespeople have a field day and maybe they text each other, but it doesn't make the national or

international news. And London has Saudi princes coming in and dropping millions, especially at stores like Herod's, which is this massive famous department store. So if you go in there and you live in London and you've spent 30 million or whatever dollars at Herod's and you're attracting international coverage, you are really just buying up the whole place. Yeah, I mean, you're a serious high roller. So Britain is an island. We have a massive coastline. We have an awful lot of fishing boats, right? Harrod's, the one shot. has a turnover every year significantly higher than the entire British fishing fleet. Yeah, this is a crazy, crazy, crazy, wealthy shop for crazy, crazy, wealthy people. But it should be said,

this isn't just a, you know, a UK story. I had a great chapter in the book about this reality TV show say yes to the dress, which you may have watched or may not have been. I've heard of that. Yeah, you should watch it. It's fun. But it's basically about a boutique in Manhattan where, you know, they sell wedding dresses to people of all sorts who go in and have, you know, arguments and all that. Yeah, people like people do when they're buying wedding dresses. And it makes the great TV. But, you know, there was a, yeah, there was an episode when they featured the daughter of an Angolan cabinet minister who went in and spent more than $200,000 on wedding dresses. And no one in the show thought to ask where her money came from. You know, no one in the show thought, hang on a second, you know, Angola's got what an 80% child poverty rate. Surely the daughter of a cabinet minister maybe shouldn't be spending

this kind of stuff on some frankly really ugly wedding dresses. But no, it was, they just took the money. And in fact, they, you know, they were very happy about it. They were like, no one has ever spent this much money before. This is brilliant. And, you know, and that's, it's become so normal, right, for these people to spend that kind of money that this was exposed not by a, you know, some kind of hidden camera, journalistic sting. This is exposed in a reality television show. You know, that's crazy. You know, it's the kind of story I would love to get by, you know, Sutterfusion, by working contacts and stuff. And they just gave it away in reality TV. That's how normalized it's become for these, you know, very, very, very wealthy and unscrupulous

people to spend crazy amounts of money. Right. And they just thought, like, we don't have to hide this. Nobody can do anything because what are they going to do? Say, you stole this money from Angola. Oh, well, what are you going to do about it? Is essentially what they're saying. Yeah, I mean, you know, and it didn't hurt the guy's career any. the father of the lady who did this on television, because, you know, the next year he became vice president. So there you go. You know, he was promoted. So, yeah, it's a pretty depressing state of affairs, really, that, you know, all this money, which is, you know, being extracted, should we say, from some of the world's most vulnerable people is being spent on, you know,

wedding dresses and, you know, and jewelry and the Disney princess boutique and all this kind of, you know, just ugly, vulgar things and not on health care and roads and police services and, you know, and honest judiciary and so on and all the stuff that people really need. I was in London recently, like I mentioned, and I was hanging out with my friend who's, they're a Russian couple and they live in a really nice, really nice place. They're Canadian now, but they live in a really nice place, and they run like a hair extension business.

You know, they do really well. And I said, hey, you know, this is a pretty affluent area. You ever run into anybody well known around here? Because this is South Kensington. It's very, very posh. And he said, yeah, but not really who you would think. And he said, my neighbor's a billionaire. And I said, oh, that's interesting.

Did you ever run into him? He's like, not really, but we did run into it was like his son-in-law at a taco place. And I said, oh, that's interesting. Who is it? And he goes, you probably seen him on the news. And it was this guy, Van der Zwan, who probably you've heard of. And he had just gotten out of prison. And he wanted some tacos.

And he went downstairs. And he ran into my friend. And he said, oh, yeah, you know, we should get together or something. And they were like, yeah, sure. you know, fellow Russians, and I guess they googled him because they were pretty, they were like, this is something just not adding up. And they were like, oh, got it. Crazy illicit funds. You know, this guy's really touching it. I mean, he was involved enough to actually go to prison. So I think they opted out of hanging out next weekend.

You have to really screw up if you're wealthy and get sent to prison. I mean, most of them, if you're that rich, you can buy a sufficient degree of protection that you're always going to get away with it. You can buy visas. You can buy passports. You know, you can buy different about a community. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit. My friend Neil Strauss wrote this book called Emergency. And one of the things in this book was he invested in an apartment in St. Kitts and Nevis or something like that. It was overpriced. He can't sell it. He told me it was one of the worst investments. He doesn't even want to think about it. But essentially in exchange for this really overpriced condo, he got a passport from that place. And that'll be great when the zombie

apocalypse hits or something and he needs to move to an island and not have his visa expire. and get deported. But this is becoming more and more popular. And apparently, if you're wealthy enough, you can actually get a passport that has diplomatic immunity. And that's kind of where the whole getting away with murder thing starts to be a very tangible thing. Because a diplomatic community, a passport with diplomatic immunity, you can do a lot of things. And if the host country gets sick of you, they literally have to send you home. They can't even imprison you at that point, right? Yeah, so I mean, there's quite a lot of countries now sell passports. The trade was, yeah, was begun by St. Kitts, who started out, I mean, there are a few American U.S. citizens who buy them, particularly U.S. citizens who don't want to fill in tax returns, you know, you just renounce your U.S. citizenship and you don't have to do it anymore. You know, so, but mostly that, you know, the main clientele are Chinese people, Russians, people from the Middle East who just want a better passport. The St. Kitts Passports is quite a good one. It lets you travel quite widely. It's kind of like a

super visa, right? You're buying yourself a Super Visa. You don't even have to go to St. Kitts. You can just buy yourself a passport, and then you can travel widely and you don't have to worry about getting a visa anymore. And this now, it's kind of spreading around the world as a concept. You've got, you come now European countries like Malta and Cyprus, Moldova sell passports, lots of places in the Caribbean. You know, it's becoming increasingly mainstream. And then a lot of countries will sell visas. You know, the US has a very popular program called the EB-5 visa program, which is mainly caters to Chinese people who buy, it sells 10,000 visas a year. Canada's program was so popular, they had to close it.

They couldn't deal with the volume. The UK has a program and so on. But, you know, so they've been going on for a while. And that's, you know, these are very useful and kind of mainstream ways now for wealthy people from wherever to access the rest of the world in a way that their fellow citizens can't. But yeah, I mean, the next level is a diplomatic community. Now, you can buy a diplomatic passport. And that essentially, yeah, I mean, it means if you have a diplomatic post,

if you're an accredited diplomat. And in the book, I talk about a Saudi billionaire called Wally Del Jafali, who did this in order to try and avoid paying a divorce settlement to his wife in London. You know, you buy an ambassadorship or diplomatic post. And yeah, then you are immune. You can get away with anything, you know, because a diplomat can't be prosecuted. they can just be expelled. And that is a scary prospect. You know, there are a lot of countries in the world that are happy to take money from pretty much anywhere. So, you know, you can be the,

in this case, he was the St. Lucian ambassador to the International Maritime Organization, but you could be the anything ambassadors to just about anywhere. And that would give you diplomatic community. And that means, yeah, you get away with murder, get away with anything. And, you know, that's when Moneyland starts getting very, very alarming. You start getting a whole class of people who could theoretically just be immune to any kind of recompense for anything they do. And of course, countries can revoke that, but it's a process that takes quite some doing. And at that point, you have moved your assets and you're gone, I would imagine. You know, this divorce settlement, he's, by the time the two-year or more court case goes through

and his diplomatic immunity is revoked, he's sold his property, has moved his money out of UK banks, and now he's got to, his ex-wife has to collect her divorce settlement from the Saudi treasury, which isn't going to happen, and a bunch of other shell companies, which they can't find. Yeah, exactly. Good luck with that, or he'll come to some kind of arrangement with, you know, I don't know, Russia or with China or whatever. I mean, you know, there's enough people out there who are for sale for this to happen. So yeah, it's a essentially money lands a system that allows, you know, any kind of bad actor to stay ahead of the game. They can always stay ahead of the competition because, you know, the law enforcement authorities, you know, they have

to jump through all these hoops to get anything done. But the wealthy and the unscrupulous, they don't have to. They can just go ahead and just move their assets, move themselves, move their children, you know, move them anywhere they like. It's a very alarming system. And I don't think it's adequately understood yet. And I think if we understood it, we'd actually start doing something about it as a matter of some urgency. When I used to work on Wall Street, I remember I was doing some private equity stuff. And I, that's where I learned of the existence of, I, I was in New York, so of course when I saw Jersey, I remember asking my office mate, does this mean New Jersey?

And he's like, no, Jersey is an island off the coast of the UK. And this is a British guy. So I said, oh, that explains the whole New Jersey thing. And he's like, yeah, dude, you didn't know about this, Guernsey and Jersey, and then Nevis. And I thought, oh, okay, because all of these huge $12 billion, $6 billion funds, whatever, they were all entities in Jersey and Guernsey and Nevis. And it's funny because I went on a cruise, and I stopped at St. Kitts and Nevis, and I walked around expecting this metropolis of banking and everything's like a one-story, two-story building.

And there's these mailbox companies that are whole buildings, and it's just mailboxes. And I go, oh, I get it. There's two people working here that work three hours a day, and their job is to open up envelopes and then leave them here for somebody to come later, or they remail it, or they scan it and put it online. I mean, there's just no actual commerce really going on in these places. Maybe Gersian Jersey and Jersey are different, but Nevis certainly was not this, I expected a little Manhattan, a little Wall Street, and I was sorely disappointed. I mean, it's kind of lovely in its own way, right? I mean, and interestingly, it's where Alexander Hamilton was born improbably.

But yeah, I agree, a lot of these places, whether it's the British Virgin Islands or, you know, and Kitson-Nevis, or, you know, there's just nothing there. All they are essentially, they act as a kind of checkpoint, you know, to prevent the good guys being able to catch the bad guys. You know, if you're the bad guy, you go straight through. If you're the good guy, you've got to go through a whole legal proceedings in order to try and figure out where the bad guys have gone. That's what they're for. They're making money out of facilitating bad behavior. And, you know, it's the problem is that there are so many of these jurisdictions, that if you shut down one, it doesn't really make much difference.

In fact, it just makes it more profitable for all the other ones because they get all the business that's gone elsewhere. And it's a real problem because essentially the world has to act together to do something about this. But if one jurisdiction doesn't act, then it gets all the business, so it doesn't want to. It's a real prisoner's dilemma situation. So, yeah, places like Nevis, they don't have many options for making a living.

So for them, you know, facilitating kleptocracy, yeah, it's just a money, money owner for them. They do quite well out of it. And yeah, it's a real problem. And how do you put pressure on them to do something about it? It's, it's, it's, the world has not yet figured out a way. Yeah, of course. So if they change the, if we forced the sea change like we did in Switzerland. Tell us a little bit about this. Switzerland originally started off being kind of the mecca for this, right? Because rich people from France and Italy could drive there in an afternoon and park their money and not pay taxes. And I know that during the Obama administration, we kind of cracked that antiquated nut and said, look, you can't do business in the United States if you're going to obscure your client information from the U.S. government,

from the IRS. And that kind of took Switzerland, which is a developed and probably less corrupt organization that has a lot of international routes and businesses. And it made it impossible for them to be as profitable. So they had to change. But St. Kitts, Nevis, Guernsey, they don't, they're not really as worried about this because their primary slash only industry is this. I mean, the interesting thing about Switzerland. Yeah, Switzerland was kind of the motherload of this where the money went. You know, it was like the best place to be secretive. And yeah, after the financial crisis, thanks to a guy called Bradley Birkenfeld, an American banker who blew the whistle. And he exposed what UBS, the big Swiss bank, was up to. The Obama administration got very

serious about Switzerland. And they, yeah, they essentially cracked open Switzerland. And Switzerland, you know, it's still a big financial center, but it's not what it was. It's had, it's lost a lot of this kind of the dirty, dark money has vanished. And it's had to scurry around the world looking for somewhere to go. I mean, a lot of it has gone to Singapore, a lot of it's gone to Dubai. A lot of it's gone, you know, out to Hong Kong. But what's particularly interesting, and the way that the Obama administration did this is essentially the way they prevented Switzerland from acting the way it had or in fact preventing anywhere from doing what it did, is that if you are a bank and you have an account for an American citizen, you have to tell

the US Treasury, otherwise you face, you know, serious consequences. But there is no requirement on American financial institutions to tell other countries about this information. So if you are now a Chinese kleptocrat or a Russian kleptocrat, kind of the safest place to put your money now is not Switzerland. It's in the US. So the US is a sort of strange, perverse consequence of this attack on Switzerland has become the new Switzerland. Just last month, I was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

South Dakota's financial services industry is quite big. the amount of money in trust in South Dakota has gone up since 2009 when Switzerland was destroyed from 40 billion US dollars to almost 300 billion, just in what 10 years. You know, that's an increase of what more than 400 percent. And the same, you can see the same in Nevada, in Wyoming and Alaska, in the big trust jurisdictions in the U.S. there's all this money that's coming in from overseas, is now going into trust in these U.S. states because that's where it's now safest. And that's the thing about Moneyland is it's endlessly mutable. You know, if you make it no longer comfortable for money to be in Switzerland, that money will find somewhere else where it's

comfortable, whether that's South Dakota, whether that's, you know, the Caribbean, whether that's Singapore, it will find somewhere else to go. There's always somewhere where it's going to be treated well. And that's why it's so hard to do something about this, because unless you can somehow persuade all countries to raise their standards simultaneously, then that money is always going to find a loophole to hide in. Does this affect drug money in Florida, or is it just about oligarchs parking their money in London, New York, South Dakota, Nevada? Yeah, of course, drug money in Florida too. I mean, you're essentially all money which wants to hide is, is able to go in the same loopholes. It doesn't really matter where it comes from. From the money's perspective, it doesn't matter. They're all dollars

or euros or pounds. So yeah, the drug money in Florida is pouring into South South Florida, but particularly what's interesting is also kleptocratic cash is going into Florida. If you look at the biggest source of foreign investment into South Florida real estate over pretty much the entire last decade every year, it's been Venezuela. And yet, because of the financial crisis in Venezuela, you can't take dollars out of Venezuela. You know, it's illegal. So somehow someone is taking dollars out of Venezuela and spending it on real estate, spending them on real estate in Miami, Miami-Dade. You know, who is that going to be?

Well, obviously, that's going to be the government. The only people who can give themselves permission to take out dollars, they're going to be the Venezuela's own government. So you've got, you know, sort of kleptocrats put their money into Florida, you know, into drugs, funglers, put their money in Florida. You know, you've got, you know, Chinese billionaires put in their money in South Dakota. Obviously, other states, Delaware is a perennial favorite. You've got New York real estate, real estate in Virginia.

It's, you know, everywhere. It's really all over. The U.S. is very big right now for kleptocrats. It's kind of the place to be. The oligarch story in your book is really, really vague. And I assume you wrote that deliberately vague because you're worried about the fact that these people can pretty much get you anywhere. Is that the case? Yeah, the UK has very strict laws against defamation. It's kind of the opposite of what you have. In the U.S., you have the right to free speech. And in the UK, we kind of have,

essentially if someone sues a journalist, there's more of a presumption of guilt than a presumption of innocence. So it's very difficult to write about anyone if there hasn't been a kind of court proceedings against them or something really dramatic and obvious like that. So yeah, I spent a long time investigating an oligarch and I really wish I could tell you the story because it's a super fun story. Yeah, I mean, for reasons it would be particularly interesting to you actually. But the, I can't because I would, you know, when I tried to publish the story, it was, I was told by the lawyers very, very strongly that I couldn't write it. If I did, I would leave myself very vulnerable to prosecution. It's actually happened to me twice. I made a documentary

about a Ukrainian oligarch as well that I couldn't show, I couldn't show that documentary because of the legal risk as well. It's very frustrating. So yeah, I mean, that's what was so annoying about the oligarch story, the one I couldn't even mention at all, is because it was kind of the perfect Moneyland story. You saw this, someone who's stolen a lot of money and that's stolen it's in kind of an amusing, quite colorful way, if you can do that. And then that hidden the money, that laundered the money offshore by quite a lot of the same usual places. And then their children were spending the money in incredibly high profile and obvious ways, you know, including in places that would be familiar to everyone. So it was very frustrating not to be able to tell the story because I really

felt it would have got a lot of traction and made a big difference. But no, such as the reach of oligarchs and such as the might of London's libel lawyers, that I, yeah, I wasn't able to tell it. Yeah, maybe one day, but it's pretty frustrating. What were some of the ways in which these people hypothetically might have been spending this money? I'm curious. Is it just like a teenager that bought a brand new boat or, you know, my dad got me a plane for my 17th birthday? I mean, what are we talking about here? Yeah, there's a, there's a bit of that. But, yeah, It was a lot more imaginative than that. I'm not going to go into what it was because it becomes kind of easy to figure out what I'm talking about.

But it's, yeah, it was a lot more imaginative than that. And it was a lot more kind of in plain sight, you know, because the thing is if you, if you, if you buy a plane, you kind of hide the ownership in the Arl of Man or or in some tax haven and you can't figure it out. I mean, this stuff was, was very happy. It was very egregious. It was very obvious. And, you know, that was what was so frustrating about it was because the kids were just, you know, enjoying the money and splashing. it around like, you know, like, you know, it was going out of fashion. And, and, and, uh, and yet the dad was, you know, their connection with the, with the dad had not been, had not been established by anyone.

And had that connection been established, it would have, yeah, it would have been a pretty, pretty big scandal. Yeah, I can, I can imagine. So you essentially looked up this oligarchs kids on Instagram and went, oh yeah, that checks out. There's just, yeah, yeah, I found them, I found them on, uh, on Instagram. Actually, initially I found them on Facebook. And, and then from there, that led me to Instagram. And then, And the stuff people give away on Instagram is kind of crazy. You know, you can find where people are. You can see what they're doing.

You can see who they're hanging out with. You can see what they own. You can see the businesses they invest in. It's kind of extraordinary what people give away in terms of information. You know, and it's still there. I mean, occasionally I still, you know, look up these people and have a look. And they still haven't hidden any bit away. It's still all there.

You can see it all. You know, occasionally people suggest, you know, why don't you incorporate yourself, you know, offshore somewhere in like the Caribbean? And then you could write the story and they wouldn't be able to sue you because they wouldn't be able to get past the shell companies. So, well, sadly, these guys are just come and kill me instead. Right, yeah. They would not worry about the legal ramifications of just running you over with an SUV instead. Yeah, exactly.

I think, I mean, they did. One of them did get in touch, actually. And I invited me to go to a meeting with him in Milan. And I was like, no, I'm not going to Italy. Sorry, not going to happen. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks, but no, thanks.

Tell you what, you come to London and I'll meet you here, but no, I'm not going to, not going to Italy. I think that that's not going to happen. That's, yeah. No, my friends from the sanitation company want to just talk to you about some import-export business. No thanks. Yeah, they're totally straight up guys. Could you meet them in, you know, in the dark somewhere next to a handy box of cement? Yeah, I mean, it's all pretty.

Yeah. Do you think he was even serious or was that just a veiled threat? Like, hey, I'll fly you out to Milan because I can get you anywhere in the world and I have friends that will kill you. Or is it, or do you think he actually wanted to meet? I don't know, genuinely. I mean, it's possible that he was genuine and kind of a nice guy and just thought they'd been a misunderstanding. But I think it's more likely he wanted to kill me.

Yeah, that's probably wise. Wow, that's scary. If you can't even write about this because you'll get murdered slash sued, if you're lucky, you'll get sued, what, how does that bode for solving this problem? I mean, we really, unfortunately, the people who've been able to solve widespread corruption in countries in the past tend to be. extremely authoritarian leaders. You look at guys like Duterte and they're like, oh, we have a drug problem.

Let's just murder all the drug dealers and then I'll control the drug flow or whatever. They're not really solving corruption either. They're just bringing it in-house, right? I mean, it's the same with Putin. Yeah, Putin drove out a few oligarchs, but only so he could expropriate their assets and keep them for himself. So, you know, I think it's a question, you know, it needs to be solved incrementally a bit at a time.

And, you know, and what we need most of all is transparency. We need to know who owns what. And once we can shine light on what's happening, it'll be much, much, much harder for these people to hide what they've stolen. And that's what we need to do. That's, you know, yeah, we need to put more money into enforcement. We need to get better at enforcement. But the number one, you know, the thing to do, first of all, is to know who owns what.

And once we have that, you know, then it'll be harder to hide what you've stolen. You know, people will still steal. People will always steal. But they won't necessarily be able to keep it anymore. And that's key. That's what we really need to do. Thank you so much. This is really interesting. The book was fascinating. There's a lot of examples of corruption and how it works and how money laundering works. And we've done shows on money laundering, which I thought were really interesting. And there's just a ton of anecdotes in this book that I

thought was, and maybe it's just me kind of having been in Wall Street and in understanding a little bit of enjoying some of the financial stories here. But it's not a technical book. So I do recommend it for people who are interested in corruption and things like that. although I could be somewhat unique in my fascination with corruption and Eastern European oligarchs. I think a lot of people are going, what the hell was that? Get back to the other topics on the show. But I appreciate this a lot. It's very unique. And thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Such an interesting show, Jason. We almost went long as we always do. But man, it's a little.

It's not a little. It's really gross. Because once you get a certain amount of money, you just the diminishing returns I mean who cares who needs a 200,000 dollar wedding dress and then how do you sleep at night knowing that there are kids with cancer that can't get drugs because you literally stole from them or your dad did. I mean, you just have to be a sociopath, your whole family. There's no other explanation for it. It's infuriating. I mean, I'm just thinking of these poor kids, you know, no education, no immunizations, no nothing because these idiots decided to just take everything. And it's like, man, and the fact that you can't find it, the people who actually help them facilitate this like theft on such a grand scale need to be taken out back and shot behind the woodshed along with the people that perpetrate it. Exactly.

It just doesn't even make any sense to me. I've never been in this position, obviously. But I would like to think that if I'm the leader of a country, would I enrich myself? Of course, I would want to be successful. But wouldn't you want everyone? I don't know, maybe this is healthy or unhealthy narcissism. I would want everyone to go, wow, look at all the changes he made to the country. Let's build a statue of this guy.

Not like, wow, he had a lot of cars. Yeah, exactly. You know, I don't want to come out of it with a big bank account. I want to come out of it with a legacy where my people loved me, where I did great things for the country that I could be proud of, not, you know, just this gaudy Instagram photo of all my cars. Yeah. Nobody gets immortalized because they built a big house.

Yeah. Nobody gets immortalized because they had their own yacht with a helipat on it. I mean, nobody cares about that. Well, Melda Marcos got immortalized because of all our shoes, I guess. Right, that's true. That's true. You got me on that one. I wouldn't say it's the good kind of legacy, I think.

But at the same time, you know, you see these guys doing this and getting away with it. And you go, well, of course, the incentive to do this is through the roof. And it is cultural. It has to do with the fact that there's a scarcity mindset around communism and things like that. but of course we can't just label it as a communist phenomenon. I mean, if you've looked at those Panama papers, there are plenty of people from all walks of life in every country in the world that have been stashing away money.

And I don't know. I think at some point it just becomes an addiction. And I don't think that justifies it at all. I mean, this guy in Ukraine, who we started off with in the conversation, I mean, he had people, he had students murdered by snipers because he wanted to stay in power. It's just ludicrous to me. I mean, take your ball. Take your two billion or ten billion balls.

and go home. Yeah, seriously. Buy an island and F off. You know, like, screw off, man. You're rich. You've already screwed everyone over. Go home. I don't know.

I just, I found it disgusting. And I love that Oliver's doing this kind of work. It's scary to me that somebody has so much power that even Vice, who doesn't care about anybody and will literally like shit talk Kim Jong-un didn't release the documentary because they're worried about the fallout from this. I mean, if you can scare away a major media company, and vice is that. And vice is always, vice would love a good fight, right? And still they wouldn't pick one with this oligarch because they don't want to get murdered.

Yeah, there's a big difference between fighting in the court and fighting in the street at 3 a.m. when you come home from the pub and getting shot in front of your kids. So I think, honestly, I think they made the right decision because, as we mentioned, sociopaths, and they have a lot of money and they have a lot of muscle. So I would err on the side of caution for my people if I was that media company. And I think they did the right thing there. It sucks for us because we don't get to see it. But I think that they really did the right thing by holding it back.

I know. I know. It seems like the kind of thing that should get leaked, right? Where's WikiLeaks when there's something like this? Oh, wait. It's anti-Russia. So never mind. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's not go down that road. Yeah, of course. And it's not even anti-Russia. It's anti-Russian oligarchs. The people in these, it's easy to forget. it's the people in these countries that suffer the most, right? When some guy bought an expensive house down the street, it's the kids in Ukraine, the kids in Russia

that are suffering the most at the hands of these guys. So when I say anti-Russia, it's not really that. It's anti-Oligarch, which is a completely different thing. In every way, we should feel bad for the people that live in these countries and suffer at the hands of these demagogues and dictators. So a great big thank you to Oliver Bolo. The book title is Moneyland. Links to that will be in the show notes.

and we're teaching you how to connect with great people, manage relationships using systems, tiny habits over at our course six-minute networking, which is free. That's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, and I know you want to do it, but you'll do it later, right? You cannot kick the can down the road on this. You can't make up for lost time when it comes to relationships, when it comes to networking. I know you might think you don't need it. You think you're already good at it, I'm sure, right? Well, the people that can benefit the most from this are the people that are already good at this and need the system.

So I love the excuses I get. Oh, I don't really need this. I'm a teacher. Cool. Let me know when you get fired. Oh, wait. You're totally S-O-L when that happens. I see the dumbest excuses for not digging the well.

And then I get an email three months later. So you were right, and now I need a job. Any ideas? Yeah, start now. Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is right now. The drills take a few minutes per day. It's crucial. Ignore it at your own peril.

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