Kleptopia: how dirty money is conquering the world
by Tom Burgis
Harper Collins, £9.99

THIS is a very vividly written account of by far the largest financial crime on record. Burgis is an investigations correspondent at the Financial Times. He shows that corruption is not in the system; it is the system. Capitalism and criminality are indivisibly one.

After the destruction of the Soviet Union, those who seized power privatised (aka, stole) its huge natural assets. Kazakhstan’s ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev seized control of the country’s vast haul of commodities by creating the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC).
 
Burgis explains: “ENRC was a dual corporation … there was ENRC plc, a corporation with shares traded on the London market, bound by laws and regulations, producing accounts, making presentations to investors about its exciting prospects, and enjoying the protection of the law. Then there was its doppelganger. Its purpose was not to dig ore from the earth, but … to shift money from the open books of a public corporation to the closed ledgers of the financial secrecy system.” 

In Russia, “there were two crowds you needed if you were going to retain your influence through the coming transformation: the spooks and the crooks. … Gorbachev gave orders that the Party work out how to turn power into money before the former ran out. ‘The top priority’ … [KGB head Vladimir] Kryuchkov decreeing, ‘should be developing the KGB banking and business empire.’” No wonder the West’s leaders love Gorbachev, though the Russian people do not.