Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

by Oliver Bullough

"If you want to know why international crooks and their eminently respectable financial advisors walk tall and only the little people pay taxes, this is the ideal book for you. Every politician and moneyman on the planet should read it, but they won't because it's actually about them." —John le Carré, author of A Legacy of Spies

An investigative journalist's deep dive into the corrupt workings of the world's kleptocrats.

From ruined towns on the edge of Siberia, to Bond-villain lairs in London and Manhattan, something has gone wrong. Kleptocracies, governments run by corrupt leaders that prosper at the expense of their people, are on the rise.

Once upon a time, if an official stole money, there wasn't much he could do with it. He could buy himself a new car or build himself a nice house or give it to his friends and family, but that was about it. If he kept stealing, the money would just pile up in his house until he had no rooms left to put it in, or it was eaten by mice.

And then some bankers had a bright idea.

Join the investigative journalist Oliver Bullough on a journey into Moneyland — the secret country of the lawless, stateless superrich.

Learn how the institutions of Europe and the United States have become money-laundering operations, attacking the foundations of many of the world's most stable countries. Meet the kleptocrats. Meet their awful children. And find out how heroic activists around the world are fighting back.

This is the story of wealth and power in the 21st century. It isn't too late to change it.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Finance, Business, History, Crime

297 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 6, 2018

About the author

I moved to Russia in 1999, after growing up in mid-Wales and studying at Oxford University. I had no particular plan, beyond a desire to learn Russian, but got a job at a local magazine and realised I liked finding things out and writing about them.

The next year I moved to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, then joined Reuters news agency, which sent me to Moscow. The first major story I reported on was the Moscow theatre siege of 2002, when a group of Chechens seized a theatre in the capital.

It both horrified and fascinated me, and I resolved to find out as much as I could about Chechnya and the North Caucasus, to try to understand the roots of the conflict that had burst so unexpectedly into my life. I travelled extensively in the mountains that form Russia’s southern border, falling in love with the scenery, the food and above all the warm and welcoming people.

When I left Russia in 2006, I was exhausted by it, however. I had seen too much misery and never wanted to write about Chechnya again. But I had promised to give a talk to a society in London. After the talk, I was asked if I would ever write a book about what I had seen. I wrote down a few thoughts, took them to a friend who knew about books, and she introduced me to a publisher.

I travelled in a dozen countries to meet all the people I needed for the stories I wanted to tell, and wrote them down in Let Our Fame Be Great. Penguin published it in the UK in 2010. It won the Oxfam Emerging Writer Prize and was short-listed for the Orwell Prize, with prize judge James Naughtie calling it “an extraordinary book... a wonderful part-travelogue, part-history”. Basic Books published it in the United States, where the Overseas Press Club awarded it the Cornelius Ryan Award for “best nonfiction book on international affairs”.

After it came out, though, a number of Russian friends objected that I had made the Russians into the villains. I don’t think I did, but their complaints chewed away at me a little. Perhaps some readers had been left feeling all Russians were complicit in the crimes of their leaders. The Russians after all suffered as much as anyone at the hands of the government in Moscow.

That provoked me into writing my second book, The Last Man in Russia, which describes the struggle of a Russian to live in freedom and the efforts of Soviet officials to stop him. The life story of Father Dmitry, the Orthodox priest I chose as my central figure, seems to me to mirror the life of his whole nation, which is beset by depression and alcoholism.

Travelling to meet the people I wanted to talk to and to see the places I wanted to describe took me to the far north of Russia, to rotting gulag towns; to the west of Russia, to half-abandoned villages; and to the Ural Mountains, where the communists locked up their doughtiest opponents; and to Moscow itself, that great fat spider in the centre of its web.

I would like to write more books one day but, at the moment, I’m concentrating on my day job as Caucasus Editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. I also write freelance articles and worry about the Welsh rugby team.

http://www.oliverbullough.com/biograp...

Reviews

[Maru Kun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is quite outstanding and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I say this from the perspective of a qualified accountant who spent thirty odd years working in financial services dealing with the nuts and bolts of the issues this book discusses.

Here are some of its strengths:

It does a great job of filling a gap in the picture of how inequality is growing and undermining civil society. There are books that address the economic side of this process such as Capital in the Twenty-First Century and The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy; other books address its historical implications such as The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century while others address the political system that brought us to where we are such as Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.

However, there are few books that throw light on the real inner workings of the system – how and why do wealthy people hide their assets, how the disconnect between money crossing borders while law stays at home allows them to do so, how a race to the bottom between competing jurisdictions ratchets up the opportunities to hide and protect illicitly obtained wealth and how ultimately democracy is eroded until all we have left is kleptocracy and plutonomy.

The book is brilliantly researched. Bullough went to key locations discussed in the book, such as Nevis (an utterly unapologetic extreme tax haven whose whole law and constitution was designed by sneaky US lawyers), and interviewed key people, such the Prime Minister there – who is complaining bitterly about how the US is turning itself into a tax haven for the rest of the world and hence undermining his nice littler earner. Bullough also interviews Bradley Birkenfeld, who the US government give a forty month prison term plus a reward of 104 million dollars for his part in describing the systematic help UBS gave to wealthy Americans who wanted to evade tax, including his smuggling diamonds into the US in a toothpaste tube. There are a lot more.

Above all the book is simply very entertaining. The cast of freaks, criminals, kleptocrats, plutocrats, kakistocrats and the rest together with the utterly-out-of-touch-with-common-reality of their greed is truly amazing.

I have rarely reached for Google so often in order to read an original indictment, see some yacht or gated community or just see what the insane man or woman I happened to be reading about looked like. Rich loonies like Trump, Wilber Ross, Sheldon Adelson and the rest aren't just an American phenomenon - its gone worldwide!

And as a bonus for the truly pessimistic like myself, the book does everything to confirm our worst fears about how democracy will be undermined at an increasing pace if this continues. The book's title promises how to take back ruling the world from the crooks, but sorry to say this is where it delivers the least.

To take a current example, after reading this book I am increasingly convinced that a significant driver of the extreme right support for Brexit is to help change the UK ever more into a 'Moneyland' of rule bending and system cheating. Before I thought this was a minor Brexit side issue.

The process is already well advanced, with a significant part of new house construction in London being for the sole purpose of providing wealthy foreigners with a safe asset out of the grip of their local taxman, law enforcement or wife. This talk of ‘Singapore in Europe’ is a euphemism for ‘Nevis in Europe’ as frankly the UK has nothing in common with Singapore but would easily be able to pick up the bad habits of its colonies and dependencies – Cayman, Jersey, the Isle of Man and so on.

Overall an enormously impressive book, and no wonder it has won so many accolades. And a damn sight more entertaining than anything by Piketty I am sure as well.

*********************************************
As I get round to it I will try and find links to the various congressional reports, indictments, criminal proceedings and so forth that have contributed to the book. Most of them will be a good read in themselves:

A link to the hearings before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services on Russian Money Laundering of 21, 22 September 1999 that gets a mention and may be worth a later look.

Great FT article on a fraud referenced in the book as well: The ship tycoon, the con men and a €100m scam

[D. St. Germain · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back, Oliver Bullough sets out to illuminate the means and methods First World tax dodgers and Third World kleptocrats use to hide their businesses and wealth from the rest of us.

Moneyland is a place, he argues, where those with assets can buy passports wherever they like, and apply the laws where they are most advantageous to their businesses. It is a virtual space with “American privacy, Panamanian shell companies, Jersey trusts, Liechtenstein foundations.” The wealthy can jurisdiction-shop for any country that meets their needs at the moment - and if a country changes the laws, the Moneylanders, as he calls them, can simply move their money to a country with better laws or persuade a country to change theirs. Beyond that, this global infrastructure allows Moneylanders to be shielded from journalists and prevents stolen wealth from being recovered by those to whom the wealth belonged.

Small countries with not a lot of comparative advantages within our global economic system have found their market niche by facilitating business anonymity; think Jersey, Monaco, the Bahamas, Nevis, and the Original Moneyland, Switzerland. Bullough makes a fantastic example out of Nevis, an island of 11,000 people in the Caribbean where American lawyers crafted an entire set of banking and privacy laws (initially based on Delaware law) to register and protect businesses and hide their assets. Some examples of Nevis-connected shady-doings: it's served as the hiding place for Viktor Yanukovich, the former president of Ukraine (for whom Paul Manafort worked); implicated a corruption scandal involving the former president of Taiwan; the home of money stolen from Russia by corrupt policemen; a crypt for members of the ruling family of Azerbaijan, whose gold mining companies and mobile phone companies were registered in Nevis; the resting place for money from Britain’s biggest ever tax fraud, an operation run through Nevis; a hidy-hole for the British trader who caused the “Flash Crash” of the stock market in 2010; as well as harbor for a number of people in the US convicted of securities fraud, day-trading scams, and pay-day lending schemes. It has also been the location where a number of high-net-worth men have obscured their assets to prevent their soon-to-be-ex-wives from getting their hands on any money in divorce settlements.

The unholy alliance between the wealthy who don’t want to pay taxes in advanced economies and those who rob their governments dry in developing countries poses a serious threat to societies everywhere. As Bullough notes, an estimated 20 billion to 1 trillion dollars per year that is stolen in developing countries is stashed away in Moneyland, rendering developing country governments unable to provide basic services and raise general living standards - leaving poor countries poorer despite any revenues they may accrue. In developed countries a declining tax base means deteriorating infrastructure and underfunded public services in education, health, and other essential services. The result, he writes, is “that whole countries are unable to tax their wealthiest residents, meaning that only those least able to afford it are forced to support the government” - and angry populists are on the rise.

Moneyland is a problem that stems from a broken global system, where capital is free to flow between borders with no regulation while people are not. But the existence of Moneyland is not a conspiracy, Bullough notes, which is what makes it all the more nefarious and difficult to crush - it is instead the work of “well-paid, imaginative and highly-intelligent people” responding in a predictable way to the global loopholes that allow money to flow and citizenship to be shopped around in this way. And without a concerted global effort to close loopholes internationally, which will require finding other productive sources of incomes for the small countries for which this trade makes up the bulk of their GDP, it will be difficult to snuff out. As he writes, “if you squash one ant, or arrest one crooked lawyer, the activities of the rest will continue unaffected. It is the whole system that must be changed, and this is hard."

This book is great for all of the examples of the truly outrageous criminal activity obscured by the offshoring money and hiding of wealth. But it also makes a strong case for reigning in the less criminal but still-very-damaging effects of this shadow system, used by the world's largest corporations and top earners, that prevent the countries that made their success possible from benefiting from that success. As Bulloughs illuminates, Moneyland operates for the benefit of the rich and at the expense of us all.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This nonfiction writing is so thorough that after I borrowed it from the library, I purchased the hard copy for my permanent collection. 10 of 10 stars

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moneyland is a global community of the extremely wealthy and their agents who move and hide money and assets around the world to evade laws, taxes, creditors, spouses, and prying eyes. They use many different mechanisms: Open a secret bank accounts in Cyprus or Nevis, money launder through real estate in London or New York, purchase your real estate or yacht and hide your assets with a labyrinth of shell companies from the Seychelles or Estonia, establish a trust that allows you to use your money while not technically owning it, hide your travels with a new passport say from Malta or become a new legal resident in a Caribbean island. There are many more countries that do all of these things. With enough money you no longer have to worry about the laws of your home country or its taxes. You don’t need to explain where your money came from or how you got it.

There are different types of people in Moneyland. Some are simple tax avoiders. Others may be planning a divorce. But some of the biggest are criminals, many of whom may appear to be prominent upstanding citizens such as former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was before his conviction. Some of the richest steal directly from the treasuries of their home countries, particularly common in former republics of the Soviet Union and former colonies in Africa and South America. Moneylanders even have their own language with terms like “’fiscal friction,’ ‘succession planning,’ ‘tax neutrality,’ ‘commissions,’ and ‘facilitation payments.’” This language is frequently spoken by the army of lawyers and accountants who specialize in securing Moneyland and servicing its constituents.

Bullough gives us an economist’s estimate that about ten trillion dollars in currency and assets was in hiding in Moneyland in 2014, a figure that grows each year. That’s about ten percent of the world economy. Another economist figured it was over twenty trillion dollars. While rich western countries are the source of most of the money, it is just several percent of their overall wealth. Funds diverted to Moneyland are thirty percent of all African wealth and over fifty percent of Russian wealth and closer to sixty percent of the wealth of the Gulf States. In authoritarian countries and countries with weak institutions the road to Moneyland is easily traversed. It doesn’t take much to rob a country you run.

Bullough uses the small Caribbean island of Nevis as an example of how Moneyland operates. Nevis has 11,000 people, 18,000 corporate structures, strict privacy laws and doesn’t honor foreign agreements. There are no accounting or reporting requirements and minimal record keeping. Only an agent not an owner of the corporation has to be recorded. Bullough gives us examples of many countries that choose to profit from Moneyland in one form or another, some to a greater degree like Nevis and some to a lesser degree such as the state of Nevada. In Nevada you can create a trust that lasts centuries run by a shell company with foreign advisors making it a foreign trust blocking US laws, a perfect way for an American citizen to protect assets in his own country. You can name yourself as beneficiary and your creditors or spouse can never get your assets. This is one of many defenses engineered by the Moneyland army of lawyers and accountants. Bullough interviews one Nevada company formation agent who will create a shell company for $249 and for $150 more include a “Nevada Nominee Officer” so that your name will not show in the records. A “Deluxe Privacy Incorporation Pack” which adds on a company bank account comes in at $949 complete. Delaware and other states also allow agents to offer opaque company packages, many of which are used to hide illegal money. But the states collect fees from the transactions so the practice persists.

It’s also easy to set up a shell company in the UK even though you may want to also layer in shell companies from other countries to create a truly inscrutable puzzle. Bullough outlines a setup put together by Formations House, a company formation agent and an expert crafter of such structures with a prestigious Harley Street address in London. Bullough gives an example from 2004, “Formations House created three companies…The second company owned the other two, while itself being owned by the first company. The third company was secretary of the other two, while its own secretary was the first company. The second company was the director of the other two, while its own director was the first company…the three companies managed to abide by every requirement of the law. These three companies then became directors, secretaries, and shareholders of other structures, which in turn owned others…with their elegant circular ownership structure…they all owned, controlled and managed each other.” The UK in 2008 passed a law that required that at least one real person as a director. Bullough went to find one, Edwina Coales, whose address he got. The residents at the address said Edwina had passed away five years ago. Over the years she had been director of over 1500 companies created by Formations House. When investigators tracked down a company director in a similar set up in New Zealand they found her working at an Auckland Burger King. She said she was paid twenty NZ dollars for each company she agreed to be a director of. The ownership of Formations House itself is such a tangle of ownerships that it is not possible to unravel it.

Many companies specialize in securing foreign passports and residency for clients. One is Henley & Partners which claims to be the “Global Leader in Residence and Citizenship Planning.” Particularly if you live in Russia, Venezuela or other countries where your money can always be confiscated, you need a second home and the ability to get there. Fortunately for those in such places this is easily done in Moneyland. Many countries sell their passports and residency to foreigners or as Henley puts it “citizenship by investment.” Malta for example has raised billions from such “investors”. Some such as Cyprus and St. Kitts are developing luxurious communities specifically designed to please “investors” and Antigua is a beautiful place for your mega yacht. Even the U. S. sells residency under the EB-5 visa program. Invest $500,000 in qualified U. S. properties and you get a green card which bestows permanent residency and the right to work in the U. S. Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and his company have made huge profits selling their projects to rich Chinese citizens wanting a second home. The EB-5 program is also very popular with wealthy Russians, Pakistanis and Malaysians, not to mention of course criminals of all origins who need to launder money.

Even better than passports and residency is diplomatic immunity. Bullough tells the story of Walid al-Juffali, a Saudi billionaire married to supermodel Christina Estrada who lived in London. Facing a very expensive divorce, al-Juffali donated a large sum to St. Lucia and in return was appointed ambassador to the UN’s International Maritime Organization. With diplomatic immunity he could ignore court proceedings in Britain. The position was a sinecure and al-Juffali never did any work with the IMO. Estrada had resources and brought a stiff challenge in court to his diplomatic credentials. Interestingly the British government not wanting to upset the diplomatic applecart sided with al-Juffali who settled with Estrada for a paltry £75 million. They had been married for twelve years and had a daughter. Estrada in her fifties wanted a divorce because he took a second wife (legal in Saudi Arabia) without telling her. The new model was half Estrada’s age. Al-Juffali didn’t but with diplomatic immunity one can commit any crime and get away with it.

Moneyland works hard to maintain its secrecy. Reporters and journalists who try to expose its members are often met with defamation suits which even if not ultimately winnable will exhaust most people’s resources well before the case and its appeals are finished. Magazines and publishers are reluctant to publish articles or books that name names of those who hide their wealth in Moneyland. Cambridge University Press refused to publish Professor Karen Dawisha’s excellent book Putin’s Kleptocracy even though it had already published seven of her books. She found that no publisher in the UK would publish her book for fear of being sued by Putin. She finally found one, Simon & Shuster in the U.S. I read Putin’s Kleptocracy a couple of years ago and highly recommend it. You will find Putin has been a constituent of Moneyland for a very long time, money laundering from his days as a KGB agent in East Germany. Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector with detailed knowledge of the FSB, was poisoned in the UK, Bullough asserts, to stop him from revealing one of Putin’s many money trails.

Estimates of how much money is funneled to Moneyland each year vary widely. Bullough believes the criminal money (stealing, embezzlement, drug dealing, etc.) is at least one trillion dollars a year. The flight money (avoiding taxes, regulation, creditor, spouses, etc.) would add very significantly to that. No one really knows. Facilitators don’t ask questions about the money’s source so criminal money and flight money get mixed together making finding the criminal money more difficult. When criminal money has been found, what to do with it is not always clear. The largest amounts are taken directly from corrupt nations. If you return it to Russia, Angola or similar countries it just will get taken again. It won’t help the people of the country.

Bullough details the corruption in several countries where those in authority siphon off huge sums that disappear into Moneyland. In Ukraine corruption is endemic as it is in other former Soviet Republics. Top level officials in the Gulf States deposit their oil wealth in Moneyland. Former African colonies such as Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Angola that have rich oil and mineral resources, have that wealth taken by a few at the top who send it to Moneyland. This keeps the vast majority of the population poor. Bullough notes that people who live in Western democracies don’t realize that it is unusual not to be subject to widespread corruption.

Moneylanders tend to congregate in the same communities whether its 15 Central Park West in New York, Indian Creek in Miami, One Hyde Park in London, or one of many similar ultra-high end properties. Their access to global living with multiple passports and residences makes them global residents. They identify more with other Moneylanders than the people of their native countries. This helps explain why someone like Trump finds it easy to cozy up with the likes of Putin, Bolsonaro, and Duterte rather than more principled leaders. They are all constituents of Moneyand and share the same values. What I find really scary is the vast amount of hidden money that knows no borders or laws at the disposal of Moneylanders to advance their interests. How much is financing more crime. How much is at play in the US election. How much was used to influence Brexit. And the money in Moneyland keeps growing as do the agents and schemes that feed it.

[Left Coast Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in 2018, when this book was written, the forty-five richest people on the planet owned as much as the least wealthy 3.5 billion, or to write that out, 45 > 3,500,000,000 people. If anything, it's gotten even more lopsided since then.

You might think those forty-five people -- Wait a minute. Let's expand that. In the United States, the top 10% of wealthy people own 87% of everything. So you might think those ten percent, which amounts to about 33 million people, would relax a little; go to the Bahamas or Vail and unwind. But no. Apparently, they spend a great deal of effort figuring out how to exploit the laws of one country to break the laws in another, so they can rake in even more money. Sadly, they seem to think of themselves as freedom fighters while living in nice places and exploiting the economics of poor places, to their own enrichment and their neighbors' detriment.

In this book, you'll learn some details of how this situation came to be, but you won't learn much about how to stop this, because apparently nobody has any idea. Bankers are rewarded for setting up shop in those jurisdictions that most encourage money laundering, and they are entirely within the law (since the "sniff test" is not actually legally binding) and governments don't have enough money and resources to track these criminals down anyway, largely because their richest citizens and corporations aren't paying any taxes.

Bullough writes well and passionately and tries to make this interesting

In 2016, a Japanese newspaper reported that top Chinese officials were extracting eggs from their wives, fertilizing them, then having them implanted in women in Japan. The loophole here is that Japanese law does not regulate surrogacy, and lists the surrogate as the mother on the child's birth certificate, thus making the child eligible for Japanese citizenship. A corrupt official can therefore transfer his wealth to an apparently unrelated Japanese child....it works like defection, but without any of the downsides.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much the most sparkly fact he came up with. There's just not enough here to justify 275 pages.

[Bruce Beckham · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a ‘how to’ manual for would-be kleptocrats and budding tax avoiders. At an early stage, you get the feeling there will be no happy ending. This is essentially because you know that the world’s super-rich continue to plunder their compatriots and abuse their power. They have their yachts, penthouses and private jets strategically scattered about the globe. Chapter upon chapter explains how they do it, aided and abetted by ‘law abiding’ accountants and financiers, and ‘law abiding’ nations such as the UK and the USA. It appears to be a state of affairs that is both out of and beyond control. Intriguing, perhaps, but depressing reading for the ordinary person who pays their taxes and just gets by, and not a great advert for unbridled capitalism.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

As one of the little people, you will find that the rules are more ruthlessly applied to anything that you try and do. If you are fortunate enough to be able to pay in a large cheque to your bank then there are all sorts of hoops that you have to jump through to prove that you are not money laundering. However, if you are much richer then banks will be falling over themselves to ensure that they are going to be custodians of your money and they are discreet in their questioning as to where the money has actually come from, or if it is even yours.

When the money disappears into this global finance system, the chances of the original owner of it being able to ever get it back again is almost nil. It is laundered and then becomes available for the multibillionaire as a tax-free asset to spend on another yacht or a house on a tropical island that their newly bought private jet can whisk them to.

Whilst corruption has been a problem that we have had for millennia, we are now at a point where it is difficult to tell apart the good guys from the bad guys as the grey area is now the entire banking system.

In this book, Bullough tries to shine a light into this dark pit he is calling Moneyland. But the people that make up the global super-rich really do not want other people looking in to see what they are doing and knowing the ways that they hide their money from tax officials governments and in the case of many politicians, from the people that they are supposed to be serving.

I will not say any more than that, because, I want you to find this book and read it yourself. I am amazed that he has managed to find out as much as he has to write the stories in this book. Mostly because the people that have got the money by fair means and foul really really do not want you to know what methods they use to hide it way. He makes some tentative suggestions of how we can fix it, but those with money can often wriggle out of any imposition of rules because of their great wealth. I hope it will make you angry too, as reading this made me feel helpless that we are at a point now where we cannot do anything.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bullough has spent much time in researching this book and it did not disappoint. He chronicled the rise of Moneyland where some stole, hid and then spent money, outside the jurisdiction of all countries.

1. Bretton Woods: system in place to control hot money
2. Eurodollar: American dollars deposited in London which is not under the control of any jurisdiction.
3. Eurobond: Warburg & Fraser issued them in Schiphol Airport in Holland, interest paid in Luxembourg, but listed in London. Borrower was assigned to Italian Autostrade. This became mobile liquid tax-free wealth. Jews, Nazis, Belgian dentists, South American dictators, Russian politicians bought them.
4. Soon countries had to fight the outflow of money by lowering taxes and loosening regulation. That is, they became off shore havens.
5. Zucman the French economist estimated that 7 trillion is hiding in Moneyland, with another 2 trillion in assists registered in Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Bahamas, Jersey and Luxembourg.
6. Address leasing companies: Formation House rents out its address at the prestigious medical 29 Harley Street for company registration for a monthly fee, including one for the disgraced Ukrainian politician Yanukovich used to own assets.
7. Surrogacy: in 2016 the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reporter that some Chinese powerful people had their embryos implanted in Japanese women so that they can transfer their wealth to their children who were otherwise unrelated to them.
8. Bankers in Switzerland, UK and America are ready to accept whatever money from whatever source without asking questions. Lawyers are ready to defend them, even if the money is stolen from the people.
9. People in power and their relatives are corrupt and control the courts, the police and military. Thus they will never be charged as long as they are in power. Usually they are charged once they have lost it, such as many times in Asia.
10. Corruption drains money from natural resources, overseas aid and the people. In some countries the whole system is corrupt.
11. Passports can be sold for the very rich, such as the Caribbean and Cyprus.
12. Diplomatic status can be assigned to anyone by cash-strapped governments so that they can enjoy diplomatic immunity.
13. British lawyers use the powerful libel laws to silence any journalists who dare to write about their activities
14. Returning money: even if money is returned it usually quickly disappear again.
15. Spending the money: Real estate in New York and London, pieces of art.

The Fight back
1. Banks to alert suspicious money flow to authorities early.
2. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. This gives the US government to collect taxes from American overseas accounts. Banks that flout the law will be cut off from the US market and fined.
3. Common Reporting Standard where countries agreeing to swap information about assets in each others’ banks. Money stored in tax havens had dropped dramatically since then. However this only applies to residents in the CRS group, namely rich countries. However US is excluded, so while US can ask for information through FATCA, other countries cannot ask for information in America.

Evolution
1. With FATCA and CRS, America has become the largest tax haven with perpetual trusts in Nevada, Delaware, South Dakota and Wyoming.
2. A foreign owner of a trust in America is an American trust, so not subjected to CRS and it is safe from foreign government audits. In America it is a foreign trust so the $5 million limit for locals does not apply

What to do now?
1. Provide secrecy to those who genuinely needs them. The author however did not specify how.
2. Countries such as Denmark and UK which insists on companies specifying the name of its beneficiaries. Britain has also forced its overseas territories to list the owners of companies. But not all countries will comply.
3. Force small countries to disclose financial information.

An excellent book revealing Moneyland; unfortunately I think it will be almost impossible to stop the rich from paying international experts to find loopholes.

[Ian Beardsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've ever felt that there is one set of laws for the wealthiest 1% and another set for the rest of us, your hunch is correct, and Bullough shows us how this came to pass and how it works. In short, it comes down to a simple fact in our era of globalization: money is international while laws are not. The top 1% don't follow the normal rules of the country in which they nominally reside. They especially don't like paying taxes on large fortunes. Instead they have, with the help of highly paid lawyers and financial wizards, constructed a utopia called Moneyland, where their money is safely out of sight and untouchable. This is especially useful if they came by their wealth questionably, which seems to be quite common amongst the highest of the elite.

Bullough provides countless examples to show how corrupt officials, especially in Eurasian and South American countries, use money laundering schemes, off-shore accounts, and other legal loopholes to store their ill-gotten gains out of reach of the populations they scammed. I found it interesting that many of the examples centered around Russia and the Ukraine. Even though the book was written before the outbreak of the 2022 war, these examples are telling. The pre-2014 president of Ukraine was a kleptocrat of the Moscow-model, with all sorts of kick-back money filling both his domestic and London-based coffers. Isn't it interesting how when the Ukrainian people rose up against this guy in 2014, kicked him out, and began various anti-corruption campaigns, Russia suddenly felt "threatened".

Although western democracies are less corrupt and have some laws, which at least pay lip-service to trying to stop this fraud, they often find the benefits of aiding and abetting these practices too lucrative to shun. For example, the US and Canada both have laws where the wealthy can pay an "investment fee" to buy their way into a more convenient passport and citizenship through special visa programs. The deregulated banking industry, doesn't hesitate to turn a blind eye when developing laws to create trusts in which assets can go undeclared and untaxed for generations.

Perhaps a very simple example where we all seem to be okay with helping plutocrats, and one which we in Vancouver see played out every day, Bullough summarizes as:

...it may be true that few Brits or Americans [or Canadians] can afford a house in large sections of their own cities, but that doesn't matter because real estate agents and lawyers and accountants make a good living assisting the people who can.

I do find it odd how average people seem to have a sense of this happening around them but seem apathetic that they can change anything about it. Moneyland is a serious effect, eroding not only the purchasing power of the middle-class, and it is a threat to democracy and the rule of law itself.

So what do we need to do? We need to know who owns what; we need to put crooks in jail; we need to support any politicians prepared to build the coalitions required to do this patient, taxing, technical and unglamorous work. Only by doing this can we truly take back control of our economies and our societies, and halt the wholesale looting of the world that threatens us all.

[P N J van Welzen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Less is more

This book lacks structure. It seems more like a rambling essay and hops from one example to the next and then returns to an earlier one without an obvious reason. It also contains quite a bit of irrelevant material. The author should have focused on a smaller number of examples (for example Ukraine) . This would have made the (important) message more powerful and serious. The book and message are now more anecdotal.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between the relatively melodramatic title of this book and the fact that the author begins with mad leaps from Paul Manafort in the Ukraine to Malaysia and on to the emirates, one might suppose this book would be a bit sensational and superficial. The length would suggest a shallow stone-skipping over some deep subject matter, but the deftness with which the author covers a very tough topic is surprising, and makes for a lively read. Yes, Moneyland has preferred lenses, stemming from the years the author spent in Russia and Ukraine. Another author might have tried to cover global unaccountable offshore money flows through a focus on the 1MDB bank scandal in Malaysia, and come up with a different sort of limiting lenses, but an initial overview of wildly crooked money manipulation can be made with particular sorts of lenses on. One might also say that a very careful writer with a heavy background in finance and economics, along the lines of a Thomas Pikkety, might have made a more detailed dissection of anonymous flows from nameless billionaires. (Jane Mayer went part of the way with her Dark Money book.) But if a technical writer provided a more complete skeleton, would the book be as fun to read?

This book provides the tiniest of glimpses into the levels of fraud promoted by international players like Manafort's buddies in the former Yanukovich regime in the Ukraine, and like Jared Kushner's buddies among the emirates. But this is not intended to focus on Trump's friends or the friends of Brexit -- it is intended to analyze the criminal nature of most people on the planet whose net worth is in the tens of billions of dollars or more. These are not the 1 percent, but the 0.01 percent, the people who truly run the planet. Bullough is not being precious or self-aggrandizing when he says that the number one rule of Moneyland is that you cannot write in detail about Moneyland. Because of the power of the legal teams of billionaires, these individuals live under a condition not unlike Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: We can know some aspects of some inviduals' wealth, we can know the location of the individual on the planet, but we are unlikely to know both at once, or any significant percentage of the actions and assets of the denizens of Moneyland.

Bullough points out an interesting anomaly when discussing the history of the Bretton Woods consensus, an anomaly similar to Winston Churchill's famous saying "Democracy is the worst possible political system imaginable in the world - except for every other one." There undoubtedly was an elitist aspect to the international rules built during Bretton Woods, a "global elite" aspect that caused leftist activists to protest IMF, WTO, and World Bank meetings in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and caused right-wing activists to holler "End the Fed!" Yet the expansion of globalization of a very crooked variety in the 20 years since shows activists on both ends of the political spectrum to be careful what they wish for. When the global policy elite breaks down, it is not replaced by anything better, but by secretive, unaccountable kleptocracies.

Bullough has plenty of stories of "parked assets" ranging from yachts to wedding dresses, of unfathomable value, yet he only later comes around to the realization that any form of parked asset, particularly if it is dodged from taxation, becomes every bit as criminal as money laundering. He makes a distinction early in the book between "naughty money" (wasteful, dissolute assets) and "evil money" (unaccounted money used in drugs, laundering, human trafficking, etc.), and slowly brings the reader around to the understanding that the "evil money" of billionaires corrupts the "naughty money," and that no other end-state is possible, because at the end of the day, capitalism at this level of accumulation is racketeering by its very nature and is criminal in every form. Globalized capitalism breeds crime of a massive variety because globalized capitalism is a criminal racket. Journalists cannot be too specific in talking about this trend, because they are prevented from tying specific Ukrainians, South Americans, Russians, etc. on various sanctions lists to specific criminal networks created through endless layers of shell corporations. But occasionally, the U.S. Justice Department (even under Trump) uses plain language when it charges a supposedly upstanding corporation or invidivual under RICO statutes. This is entirely appropriate, because the capitalism of the 0.01% is a racketeering-influenced corrupt organization in its very nature.

Bullough shows us the familiar tax havens of the past - Nevis, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, the Isle of Man - and then shows how new structures in London, New York, Miami, Vancouver, and other cities have made these regions the new tax havens. We see empty luxury apartment buildings in London and Miami, priced at several hundred million dollars per apartment, because real estate itself has become a "parked asset," as has art or any other luxury commodity. Some would say that the ultra-rich simply need expensive baubles to play with, but these are assets designed to hide money from those who would try to even out economic inequities in the world, whether a host nation wanting to get taxable resources back, or some future supra-national government that says people should simply not be that rich, no matter where they live. The furor with which some of the billionaires respond brings to mind the foamy-mouthed mania with which some gun advocates shout "Molon labe!" at anyone who wished to limit their gun ownership.

Bullough has done us a service by sketching only the briefest of descriptions of Moneyland, and one hopes it will be filled out in detail in more technical books to come. In the meantime, this book is a rollicking read as well as an eye-opening one. Bullough tries to close the book with a call to action, though it's hard to stay optimistic when looking at the way citizens have been hoodwinked worldwide in the rise of populism. Because people hate "elites" like the IMF and EU more than they hate billionaires, and because billionaires will always frame the terms of debate so the little people fail to see how much they're being had, the rich will continue to get richer and control every aspect of resources until the mere fact of how much they control becomes hidden among the hidden fungible assets. Then we will have only books like Moneyland to describe myths about the mysterious financial backwaters we thought we knew.

[David Wineberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

The world is far more corrupt than anyone imagines. The ruling classes feel entitled to steal tax money at will, stash it in overseas accounts, and spend it like it was legitimate through shell companies and trusts. The “country” that enables this is one Oliver Bullough calls Moneyland. It has no borders, no government, and no taxes, but gets it power and support from all of those. Its citizens are welcomed worldwide, no questions asked. The richer they are, the wider the doors swing open.

It used to be that local officials were limited in their greed, because there was only so much they could spend locally. But thanks to globalization and the internet, they can buy condos and buildings, yachts and whole companies right from their laptops, and no one will know. Bullough says “It’s the financial equivalent of never feeling full, no matter how much you eat.” The result is a hollowing out of major cities all over the world, as “corporate” buyers snap up apartments and townhouses, which remain empty. They are simply laundering money for some unnamed “investor”. Meanwhile, their real countries are impoverished as money disappears from them.

They create companies by the boatload. Tens of thousands are created and have their head offices in a townhouse on Harley Street in London, for example. They are sold on the internet for $250-$1000 apiece. Attached to a bank account, they can receive bribes and kickbacks, and purchase condos and yachts. The companies are owned by other companies, which are owned by other companies. Eventually, a real person is named, with no apparent connection to the real owner. (Vladimir Putin’s shell company is in the name of a cellist who was a friend and neighbor of his growing up. It reportedly has a billion dollars in it. Not bad for a cellist.)

The poster child Bullough explores is Ukraine, where “Corruption had so hollowed out the state that it had all but ceased to exist except as means of illegal enrichment.” From the president on down, everyone seems to be on the take, having budgets diverted to their own accounts, or getting kickbacks direct deposited when they pay outrageous prices for equipment or services. Hospitals have no supplies because management has diverted all funds. Doctors get paid $200 a month and must beg patients for money, even though healthcare is guaranteed free. The police are not there to serve and protect, but to be avoided. The courts toe the line of the ruling class. If a company won’t pay bribes, it will find itself unable to operate, and suing will not help.

This is the way of the world, where all the aid money from foreign sources disappears before it reaches anyone in need. Politicians sport $300,000 watches while most of the population has no access to clean water. Their countries are money machines for the ruling classes, and no one else matters. Bullough quotes US Marine Corps General John Allen on his time in Afghanistan: “They (Taliban) are an annoyance compared to the scope and magnitude of corruption with which you must contend.”

It is so entrenched that Bullough cites a local Ukrainian politician: “The choice isn’t between taking a bribe and being honest: it’s between taking a bribe or your children being killed. Of course, you take the bribe.” It consumes even the most naïve and fair. The result is 52% of Russian wealth is held offshore, 57% of Gulf wealth and 30% of African wealth. That doesn’t leave much for the 99%. Or the country.

While the internet has enabled the thieves to open accounts, companies and trusts, countries have enabled them to protect themselves by selling them passports. St. Lucia in the Caribbean alone has issued nearly 13,000. The US sells green cards to anyone willing to invest at least $400,000 in a house or condo. It has issued tens of thousands of these cards.

A new fashion has been added to the sale of passports. Now, thieves can also purchase diplomatic immunity through any kind of ambassadorship. It could be to a country, or just a committee of the UN. It’s a get out of jail free card that dreams are made of.

As corrupt as so many countries are, it seems to pale beside the western countries like the USA and the UK, which provide endless pools of lawyers, bankers and advisors to enable the corruption. Citibank comes up repeatedly as glorying in the fat fees it obtains for laundering millions for corrupt African politicians. If you need your stash structured and hidden, if you need to attack an enemy or defend yourself against government calls for information, it’s the USA that will rush to your side. States like Nevada and Delaware are famous in the rest of the world for their Swiss-like protection of fraudulently-obtained wealth. The hypocrisy of the US whining about tax havens while providing the biggest haven of all is just too clear. While it fines Swiss bank UBS, it lauds the American financial sector on its impressive growth, laundering stolen money by the billions.

One thing missing from Moneyland is the attitudes of the corrupt. Because the revenue stream is endless, money means absolutely nothing to them. Overpaying for cars, parties, or wedding gowns is all trivial. Tipping with hundred dollar bills too. The money is so plentiful it actually has no meaning in their world.

What makes Moneyland so strong is that Bullough has done all his own, original research, onsite. He digs, pesters and perseveres. If a lead goes nowhere, he finds a different angle, on his own. Not once, for example, does he refer to the Panama Papers, which exposed the phony corporate shell business two years ago. The scandal is so deep, he has been able to fill yet another hard-hitting book with its virus.

David Wineberg

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's a situation where my enjoyment of the book doesn't match the quality of the material. The subject (hidden assets) is inherently secretive and complicated because wealthy people have great incentive to hide their assets and the means to succeed. The author does a very good job of describing the methods and the perpetrators and also happens to tell his stories in funny and honest ways. He seems to be a dreamer and I think that's very good.

The problem for me is that the book lacks connection and is a bit repetitive in places. Of course there's no place called Moneyland so any book about the ways wealthy people conceal assets is going to be a bit of patchwork if the author tries to encapsulate too much. And that's where I struggled. I admired the effort but thought the author stretched himself in trying to create a coherent underworld of systems. We seize opportunities where we find or create them and that's the way it will always be. This book isn't about a particular thing or event that has existed (the creation of the Affordable Care Act or D-Day for instance) but it felt like the author tried to hard to make it read like one.

To be sure, the quality of the material is very good and the anecdotes are very relevant to readers in 2020 and slightly beyond (check out the items I've highlighted) and if you're interested in the material more than how it's put together then this is a potentially great book. My 3 star rating reflects my general enjoyment of the reading experience rather than the quality of the material and the effort it took gather.

[Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف · Rating 4 out of 5]

Standing Up To Moneyland

Best bit of advise I can give about this book: read The New Poverty alongside it. It documents in journalistic fashion what modern poverty looks like in the UK right now. I'm pretty desensitised to the reality of the world, but this book made me feel seriously unnerved, and when you read this book alongside it, I can guarantee your blood will boil higher than you ever thought possible.

[Andrew]

I've had the misfortune to have, through my work, and to a lesser extent, my penchant for hanging out in proximity to higher-flying circles, to have been in close contact with too many members of the 1 percent. And guess what, most of them are just as awful as you imagine, coked up sociopaths who don't even have the rough charm of less well-off ski-slope denizens.

So Bullough attempts to disentangle how the worst people finance their awfulness.

It's fairly well-organized, if a bit dense, which seems inevitable – I'm remembering having similar issues with Tom Burgis' Kleptopia, a similar romp. However, this is better laid-out and seems less like a schizopost. It sill would probably be better with a little breathing room. That being said, he tries his best not to be a doomer despite his conclusions, and yet the doomerism is palpable. How could it not be? If the system is rigged this efficiently, what hope do we have? I think we know the answer to that. Unfortunately.

[Abubakar Mehdi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply informative and interesting read on the rich and their devious machinations to protect their wealth from taxation, or any public scrutiny for that matter. It is quite obvious, in the age of Panama Papers and Pandora Papers, that the rich have a way of finding loopholes, and the global elite has an elaborate system in place to ensure that their financial interests are well protected. What is truly sad, is not just that governments don’t do enough to stop this, as they are clearly allied to the rich in almost all instances, but that there is wider disinterest as to how these operations continue to affect the common people.

A very well researched book with a lot of interesting anecdotes.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels."
- Network (1976)

The above is an excerpt from an excellent movie, and this is an excellent book. Moneyland details the system where capital flows across borders but laws do not. Allegiances are no longer national; allegiances lie where the rule of law can be most readily avoided.

Offshore is the term used throughout for referring to activity which is legally outside while physically present. Bullough traces the emergence of offshore to the post WWII period. Offshore activity developed in response to the Bretton Woods system established in 1944 (system allowing exchange of 35 USD : 1 ounce of gold) and the associated International Monetary Fund (IMF). Bretton Woods was created to prevent the perennial destabilisaiton of currencies and economies in pursuit of profit, which were agreed to have played a role in the advent of WWII. The United States was promising to keep everyone supplied with enough dollars to fund international trade, as well as to maintain sufficient gold reserves for those dollars to be inherently valuable. The other countries made commitments, too. If they wished to change the value of their currency by a significant amount, they promised that they would only do so with the approval of the IMF. This would stop dictators manipulating currencies to ruin their neighbours and stoke conflict. Money could move overseas, but only in the form of long-term investments, not to speculate short term against currencies or bonds.

Bullough relates the plot of Goldfinger as a perfect analogy for describing the emergence of offshore activity. The villain Auric Goldfinger’s cunning scheme is to own pawnbrokers all over Britain, buy up gold jewellery and trinkets from ordinary Brits in need of a bit of cash, then melt them down into plates, attach the plates to his Rolls-Royce, drive them to Switzerland, reprocess them and fly them to India. By doing so, Goldfinger will not only undermine the British currency and economy, but also earn profits he could use to fund communists and other miscreants. What would now be considered rudimentary cross currency arbitrage was then a crime worthy of a Bond villain, which reflects how philosophically different international finance is to mid last century. The Goldfinger analogy leads perfectly into the emergence of Eurodollars, which refers to any currency deposited in a foreign bank, though its origins are in USD deposited in London banks. Eurodollars capitalised on the concept of capital flowing across borders, but laws not; USD could be traded freely in the UK without costs and controls imposed by US regulators who were upholding Bretton Woods. Shortly after the growth of Eurodollars, Siegmund Warburg conceived the idea of Eurobonds. One such Eurobond was a bond issued by the London Stock Exchange in a Dutch airport to avoid British income tax, with interest paid in Switzerland, while nominally acting as an Italian motorway company to avoid further tax. The Bretton Woods system was abandoned in 1971.

Bullough contrasts the offshore system with an economic system run by Mafia. Under a Mafia economy, the incentives of the Mafia and businesses are aligned - businesses succeeding leads to profits for the business and more payments to the Mafia. However, the offshore system has large associated agency costs. Profits from businesses no longer benefit the Mafia and businesses in parallel as both parties can 'cheat', which results in a prisoner's dilemma. Businesses cheat by creating corporate structures to avoid their geography's jurisdiction (e.g. Apple HQ in Ireland to avoid higher US tax rates), while a dictator can steal his nation's money and purchase property in London or New York. Previously, stealing money from your nation as a dictator would limit what was produced and could be purchased, however capital can flow so readily out of a physical location now, rendering this issue null and void.

The extension of the simple concept of present but legally absent has snowballed over time. Bullough explains the modern methods employed to avoid tax, buy passports and gain diplomatic immunity in other countries. A key component of this is how multinational law practices help clients create offshore limited liability companies. Bullough focuses on the Caribbean island of Nevis, which has more companies registered than people. Nevis is the quintessential image of a tax haven. However, one of the revelations of Moneyland I found was the description of new tax havens in Delaware and Nevada where individuals can set up offshore companies with ease, as well as the Harley Street operation in London.

Bullough presents a laundry list of ideas to promote transparency, but the book falls short of a solution to addressing the offshore problem. A central challenge highlighted is distinguishing the money which is truly illicit with dishonest, but more benign, 'naughty money'; such as a start up creating a company through the Harley Street address to appear more reputable. The success of Moneyland is in its highlighting of the hypocrisy of the offshore system which has developed. UN corruption indexes deal harshly with geographies where illicit income is generated, such as Angola - but why not London or New York where the money is spent? Communities of ex-Soviet oligarchs, scions of Middle Eastern political dynasties and Nigerian regional governors steal abroad and are welcomed with open arms into 'non-corrupt' geographies. We have reached the geopolitical state of 'no nations, multinational dominion of dollars' decried in Network (1976).

[Oh dear · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 - I did have some issues with this (the book promises solutions but never provides any) but on the whole it’s a good summary of modern tax avoidance methods.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Moneyland” refers to a virtual country “of the lawless, stateless superrich.” A system in which state actors and/or mob (Putin, Mogilevich) steals money from poor, corrupt countries (Russia, Ukraine), hides it offshore in a shell company (Caribbean, Cyprus) where laws are lax, launders it through people like Donald Trump and institutions like Deutsche Bank, then spends it in fun, swanky places safe under the rule of law like London and NYC. So, the downtrodden are indirectly supporting the wealthiest thieves in the world. This system is entrenched and nearly impossible to correct. The current Ukrainian government still can’t get back what Yanukovich looted even with the receipts he left behind when he fled to Russia. Seems like corrupt family dynasties will last forever on this money. I also imagine through mishap and miscommunication a percentage of dirty assets will go unclaimed in perpetuity like lost treasure. Enablers in the West, such as lawyers, lobbyists (Paul Manafort) and politicians (Devin Nunes), perpetuate it. I realized rather late in life that we are not in good hands. The bad guys are gaming the system and winning. With the installation of Trump in the White House it’s impossible to comfort myself. I’ve been enjoying “Succession” on HBO. I assume the characters are fictionalized amalgamations based on real-life moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. Murdoch’s fiendish grip on my nation through Fox News and his political connections is insane.

“The laws of Moneyland are whichever laws anywhere are most suited to those wealthy enough to afford them at any moment in time.”

“The creation of the long, nested chains of corporate structures across multiple jurisdictions is an extremely effective way of hiding both the origins of assets and their ownership.”

“Corruption has become so widespread that whole countries are unable to tax their wealthiest residents, meaning that only those least able to afford it are forced to support the government. This undermines democratic legitimacy and angers the people who live under these governments, often—as we have seen most recently in Brazil—provoking them to vote for politicians who have little sympathy for democracy themselves.”

“[L]aw enforcement stop[s] at national borders, but money [does] not.”

“If someone can take control of a country’s legal system, can use that control to make a fortune, can smuggle that fortune to somewhere where highly paid lawyers are skilled at enforcing the rights of defendants to a fair trial, and can control what evidence might emerge at that trial through his domination of the original country, then how can that person ever be prosecuted?”

“Corruption is a force multiplier for the West’s enemies, and yet the West continues to accept dirty money into its economies by the billions.”

“All around the world, highly intelligent people are earning fees by seeking new and innovative ways to make dirty property clean, hunting out the loopholes that allow their clients’ stuff to slip down the tunnel and into the virtual world.”

“It is lawyers and accountants who guard the tunnel into Moneyland, and they can unlock its doors, and usher anyone able to pay the entrance fee past its gilded threshold.”

“For reasons of national security, public health and public order we should all care about Moneyland.” This mass corruption leads to disenchantment with democracy (such as election meddling and Brexit funding which delights Putin and his ilk) and destabilization (terrorism, epidemics that poor countries are unable to prevent or stem for lack of resources.)

“Without whistleblowers, prosecutions are all but impossible.” Unfortunately, Alexander Litvinenko blew the whistle unprotected in London and he ended up with polonium tea. And his assassins were able to return to Russia for protection where rule of law is lacking, protected forever.

Access to famous people provides some cover to these international criminals: Jeffry Epstein with Prince Andrew, Robert Maxwell with various British and Israeli officials and luminaries, Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump with Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, even Hunter Biden with Mykola Zlochevsky ….

[Lloyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moneyland is about ultra-wealth management and how the financial infrastructure for naughty money is the same vehicle for dirty money. It’s an incredible documentary related to one of the most talked about issues of the current decades, wealth inequality. The thesis of the book is money is not constrained by borders, but the monetary laws are. But the laws didn’t have to be so constrained after WWII, don’t have to be now, and should not be.

Thankfully, there are sections of the book where our better selves seem to prevail, but most of the book is depressing with the plutocrats continuing to hoard their wealth.

Another topic that was interesting to me was the systematic abuse of entrepreneurial USA immigration visas and meddling by politicians.

Although, there was a time when the worse offending jurisdictions were outside the US, the US was able to again have the purest capitalism at the end of the 2000s global financial crisis. The end of the book puts responsibility back on USA with asymmetrical flow of financial information out of the country and the USA being the home of multi-generational trusts.

This would likely have been a five star book, if it included some treatment of cryptocurrency. I double checked that the book was indeed published in 2018 not three or more years ago. I would also have liked to read about left empty real estate in places like Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The author is an inspired teacher making this complex topic fun and interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

—

Years ago I stopped reading the BBC for any Russian Dictator Putin news. This book by way explains why the BBC is overly differential to the wealthy and politically connected. The British libel laws have an extreme chilling effect on British journalism. As described by the author this has resulted in him being unable to find a publisher for some of his stories about the wealthy and their dirty money. They could drain the media’s bank accounts with extremely expensive litigation.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

My stepbrother picked this up after hearing the author interviewed on public radio. I imagine it was a good interview as the text is peppered with outrageous anecdotes and stories about the super rich and those entities which serve them.

The background to this study is the increasing wealth of a global upper class at the expense of everyone else, a tendency dating back decades and exacerbated by the breakup of the Soviet Union. The overarching story is of how the rules of different jurisdictions can be exploited to the benefit of those able to pay for the legal help necessary to conceal income, savings, ownership and purchases--all in order to avoid taxation and accountability. The story involves such contemporary players as Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, Hunter Biden (Joe's son), Nigel Ferage, Vladimir Putin and hosts of Second World oligarchs and Third World despots and their families. Although funny at times because of the over the top excesses of some of these criminals, the whole of it is very, very depressing.

As noted in the concluding chapter, matters are only expected to get worse under the Republicans in the USA and the Tories in the UK.

[Sean Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Moneyland, author Oliver Bullough explores one major theme, 'Laws have borders, money does not.' Through thorough investigation, Bullough tracks the ways the wealthy shifts, hides, and protects their wealth.

It doesn't matter if they gained their riches honestly or criminally, pliable governments and corrupt institutions help shield these individuals and their assets for a cut a the profits. The methods recorded in this book are numerous, but all take advantage of the legal loopholes between countries, and if one doesn't exist, donations or bribes are paid to amenable politicians to introduce loopholes.

If you are interested in the tricks and schemes the rich use to insulate themselves from the laws and taxes that the less affluent are subject to, Moneyland is an excellent read.

[Vanya Prodanova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Чак ми се иска да не бях подхванала тази книга. Нещата, които сподели авторът, ме накараха да се чувствам малка и незначителна и то във възможно най-негативния начин. Направо ме депресира и накара да се чудя накъде съм се юрнала да се опитвам да създам по-добър живот за себе си, хаха, каква фантазьорка съм само. :Р

Като се замислиш, не са се променили нещата от времената на кралските особи, просто сега са различни тези, които имат парите, но все така са малък процент. Авторът споделя за всичките начини, по които богатите крият парите си. Някои неща бяха забавни, други откровено депресиращи, трети - направо плашещи. Стараеше се да обяснява лесно и разбираемо с щипка хумор, но беше прав, че цялата машинация, схеми и система за пране на пари може да ти докара сериозен световъртеж, докато се опитваш да я разбереш.

Решението, което предлага да се спре тази порочна практика на богатите да си крият парите и да стават по-богати, ами, откровено няма как да стане. Къде някой може да види двама души да са на едно мнение? Какво остава за милиарди и милиарди хора, които си гледат собствения интерес? А и наистина ли всеки от нас искрено би искал да направи добро за някой, който чисто и просто е идиот отвъд рамките на възможното? Аз не бих, а и много от т.н. религиозни личности, сигурно ще са по-ненавити и от мен да помогнат на ближния си.

Та, книгата откровено подпали с нова сила така установенето ми мнение, че хората сме най-противните създания на тази планета. :)

[Lewis LaborMen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for anyone interested in the how's and why's of the global economic elite hiding their ill gotten wealth at the quite literal expense of everyone else. To call them tax dodgers is too generous. As the author outlines, a good chunk of this money is wealth directly stolen either from public coffers or generated via any number of different criminal activities.


This book covers everything from the relatively well known off shore island tax havens(from tropical St. Kits and Nevis to the City of London in jolly old tax shelter U.K). To less known techniques like the 3 card Monty corporate shell game to hide wealth ownership. To the outright bizarre of Chinese state apparatchik's using women with Japanese citizenship as broodmares to create literal human wealth shelters outside the reach of the Chinese state.

The book doesn't have a solution for the rampant problems it exposes(outside literal revolution by the proletariat of course). If anything the situation has only gotten more expanded and entrenched since the book's publishing date. The book does have a few "wins" as seen in Ukraine. The book is a lighthouse shining into a dark ocean the rich would definitely prefer to keep dark.

[Isaac Gill · Rating 1 out of 5]

Even if you ignore the numerous factual errors - what a ridiculous book this is. Mildly entertaining read and the author is talented but he seems to be exclusively intent on using his talent to rile people who don't know any better and have them think offshore financial structures, shell companies and the like are the source of all the ills in the world - utterly idiotic premise. After 200 or so pages of bombastic nonsense the author does talk about CRS and FATCA - which are obviously massive strides (along with Magnitsky sanctions). Author is clearly -- from what can be inferred from his writing in this book -- an SJW who strongly feels all wealth is immoral and seems to be coming from a place where people with money = bad people.

For example (from the book) "Nevada does not appear to publish data on the amount of assets held by its trust companies, but its rival South Dakota does. In 2006, before the UBS storm hit, the state’s trustees held an already impressive $32.8 billion—that’s around $42 million per head for every South Dakotan. By 2015, that total had reached $175.1 billion; and then rose by almost a third in just the next twelve months. In 2016, the state’s recorded total was $226 billion, which was $261 million for every resident of this prairie tax haven." - this is simply inaccurate. South Dakota as of now has a population of 884,659 (2019) as per United States Census Bureau. So USD $226000000000 ÷ 884659 = USD $255,465.66. Author confuses $255 thousand with $261 million. There are many other whoppers that are similar. I wish the author would've been objective and sensible as he's clearly got talent to write but his SJW sensibilities just has overridden any balance. Do not read this nonsense book.

The author wants multilateral rules to prevent illicit money flows. But fails to see that these same arrangements can be abused by rogue regimes such as Russia and China to abuse people who may be innocent. Nazi Germany abused Interpol to recapture Jews who'd escaped Germany so they could be brought back to Germany (to presumably meet their fate). The author seems to think that legislators have some ability to be infallible and make laws that work 100% without any failure - utterly idiotic, thoughtless and incredibly reductive.

Money laundering risks of real estate held in places with strong property right protection laws (and beliefs) like America is a risk - but if a criminal decides to hold assets on US soil that puts them at mercy of US laws. Just look at all the 1MDB assets that were held in America that were mostly traced and seized.

For anyone interested in the many positive uses of shell companies, read up on the history of Japense people in America (the Alien Land Law) who were denied owning land in California and how they used shell corporations they formed and straw-buyers to overcome grossly unjust law that forbade them from being able to buy their own homes and live in peace. Everything is not black/white in the way author makes it out to be.

Viva la human ingenuity! Down with demagogue ideologues (like the author) who wish to centralize more and more power.

[Jeff Kaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oliver Bullough has written a thoroughly entertaining account of the global phenomenon: how the very rich ensure that their wealth is protected by its non-statism.

In effect, money in the 21st century confounds the ability of individual nations to identify it let alone tax it. From suitcases packed with cash, the digital age means that the touch of a computer keyboard button transforms an account into a tax-free one by internationalising it.

This has had terrible consequences for the 'developing' world where those with access to wealth (often if not usually corruptly gained) remove that wealth overseas for safe-keeping.

The developed world has gained expertise in hiding that money and utilising for the benefit of those that wish it to be hidden - in property (as in London), jewellery, education, personality white-washing, football clubs, bank accounts earning interest or any number of other opportunities presented.

The developed world has been especially slow in preventing this. London has been developed upon it and now the USA (especially in states such as Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming) is central to this and may be the world's greatest culprit.

Oliver has pursued a huge range of examples and writes excellently, vividly and with great skill on them all.

That Moneyland is now exposed is a good thing but the response to it is less known. Organisations like Transparency International, made up of distinct, national chapters, have limited ability to understand or implement the global campaigning that is needed. Worse, it has no USA operation at the time it is most needed. Elsewhere, the NGO's lack a 'cover all' capability, focusing on individual aspects of the system. Law officers and tax authorities have neither the skills equivalent to the Moneyland 'enablers' nor the resources to counter them.

This has left whistle-blowers (Paradise and Panama Papers for example often through organisations like the Guardian Newspapers and ICIJ) to assert themselves through computer leaks that expose the underbelly of global, financial secrecy. It should not be so, of course.

The task for those that believe in a 'non-corrupt' world is to develop global organisations that can challenge governments (like those of the USA) to change their mentality towards global good. While Trump and similar copy-cat populists exists, that is a major challenge, but time will tell.

Moneylands is a well-written, informative, excellently-researched and important book. Very much recommended.

[Popup-ch · Rating 5 out of 5]

What happens with corrupt money? Where does it come from and where does it go?

Most corruption works in three stages: steal - hide - spend. This book focuses on the middle stage, and shows how the 'offshore' finance industry has grown out of the fledgling 'euro-dollar' bond market in the 1950's into an enormous business with trillions of dollars sloshing around more-or-less shady tax havens, such as Nevis, Jersey and Delaware.

While the ostensible purpose of many offshore schemes is to hide slightly shady savings from the tax man (or an inquisitive spouse), it is today dominated by decidedly dodgy dealings where disagreeable despots deposit dollars, in order to keep it away from the prying eyes of tax payers and other more legitimate benefactors.

[Pantelis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book itself is an excellent feat of journalism, uncovering a lot of the mechanisms through which the corrupt steal-hide-spend their money. However, there did not seem to be a development or progression in his argument, but instead it was just an ever-growing list of anecdotes. The stories themselves can be interesting but for me personally it got boring reading the same sort of story over again in a new country by a new thief. In short the book feels like more an exposé than a book. So if you’re into that, go for it.

[Conrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. Oliver Bullough dismantles the complicated and deliberately confusing world that is called Moneyland, not by zooming in on the technicalities (the 'how') but exposing the consequences the existence of Moneyland has on us all. From Ukrainian hospitals to Say Yes to the Dress, it is a riveting read, and Oliver is a master of telling stories. I haven't learnt how these complex schemes work, but Oliver has achieved something far greater by shedding his light on the stories of Moneyland.

[Matthew Paniati · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book provides an excellent overview of the business of illicit international capital flows, and the corrosive effects this is having on world democracies. The author has a very clear POV and perhaps overstates how important these issues are on a macroeconomic level. He also tends to paint with a broad stroke in describing the people who are "offshoring" their money. However, his in-depth research and knowledge of the intricacies of the system provides for a compelling read and persuasive argument.