Najib Razak grew testy. The questions from the prosecutor were an insult to his station. Najib was the son of the country’s second prime minister, the nephew of the third, and had held the post himself from 2009 to 2018, when Malaysians ejected him in the face of overwhelming evidence that, as one of them put it, ‘The country is rotting.’ About $4.5 billion of their money had been siphoned from a state development fund called 1MDB. So reckoned the American prosecutors who had taken an interest in the case because some of the loot ended up in the US. There it had, among other endeavours, financed the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, the tale of an epic swindler who ended up rich and content. Jho Low, the gaudy moneyman who had slipped millions to one of Donald Trump’s fundraisers, was wanted in the US as the suspected mastermind of the looting. The Americans had described how Najib – identified as ‘Malaysian Official 1’ – made off with $700 million. And yet now, on January 22, 2020, as Najib sat before a Malaysian court and the prosecutor pressed him about how the money had come to be in his personal accounts, he retorted: ‘I am not so stupid to do something like this, you know.’ If justice was closing in on Najib, it was merely the only sort that is permitted in kleptocracies: selective justice. His vanquisher in Malaysia’s May 2018 election, Mahathir Mohamad, was the very man who had groomed him for high office and whose own previous term as prime minister had itself been grievously corrupt. Justice in kleptocracies still carries her sword, but her scales are tipped and she has removed her blindfold.
In 2016, an enterprising hacker extracted the confidential files of a Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca. Those files, the Panama Papers, revealed that 140 political leaders held money in front companies. From Australia to Argentina, Iceland to Rwanda, presidents, prime ministers and their advisers and confidants, intelligence chiefs, generals, ministers, legislators and central bankers had chosen to store their money not among their compatriots but within the global financial secrecy system. It was as though monetising public office was no longer an aberration but the purpose of seeking that office.
At least there was recourse to the ballot box. Those exposed by the Panama Papers, other leaks or the efforts of unbought journalists, unbent coppers and unbunged judges could be swept away by the people they had vowed to serve, just as Najib was. Voters and parliaments have in recent years brought down governments and replaced rulers following major corruption scandals in Austria, Brazil, Israel, Poland, South Africa, South Korea and many other countries. Like Najib, those deposed thoroughly deserved their fate and the criminal prosecution that often followed. Like Najib, many of them would also be correct were they to argue that they have been the fall guys, sacrifices necessary for kleptocracies to maintain the illusion that they function to serve any interest other than those of whoever captures power.
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Najib and his fellow looters could not have bled all that cash away without some bankers. Goldman Sachs abetted the pillaging of 1MDB. Other ‘wealth managers’ helped, too. One, Yeo Jiawei, was a young hotshot operating out of the entrepôt of clandestine finance at the toe of Malaysia, Singapore. He copped four and a half years. A few days before he was sentenced in July 2017, the bank that had employed him had ceased to exist. It had been called BSI.
Like so many of the billions upon billions of dollars its bankers had shifted over 144 years, BSI itself vanished. First it had been caught helping Americans dodge taxes, then helping Malaysians drain the treasury. BSI’s hands were too red even for the Swiss financial regulators to ignore. They approved its acquisition by another Swiss bank, EFG, on the condition that BSI be subsumed and its name discarded. But by then nine years had passed since Nigel Wilkins, former Head of compliance at the London office of BSI, who later joined staff of the City of London regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, alerted the City authorities to what BSI’s bankers were up to. There had been plenty of time for the most secretive money to slip away: to Switzerland, Monaco, the Bahamas, always primed to move again if sunlight edged too near.
It rained on Basingstoke cemetery the day of Nigel’s funeral. The service was secular. For Nigel, this world was all that there was. Back at his flat, the clippings of his youthful hair were still displayed on a shelf. The thumbed, cracked Hardys still occupied the bookcase, near the red box files containing a thousand pages of the secrets Nigel had extracted from BSI.
BSI was not a bank. It was a facilitator for a transnational kleptocracy, operating a short walk from the Bank of England. In the stacks of correspondence, contracts and client lists, they would have read the names BSI’s bankers had gone to such lengths to hide so that money might be detached from its past.
Nigel’s files were a palimpsest: front company upon front company upon front company. But beneath, still just discernible, was the outline of a treasure map. Had anyone wanted to read it, it would have pointed them towards the stashes where power is hidden, disguised as money.
Nigel had understood that the kleptocrats of the world were uniting. In his notebook, he pictured one node of their network, BSI’s home town in Italian-speaking Switzerland: ‘Lugano. The cathedral on the hill – not a very busy confessional.’ This was, he wrote, where the Russian and Italian mafia meet. But the kleptocrats were meeting everywhere.
As they hoarded secrecy, the kleptocrats set about harvesting privacy. Covid-19 came as a gift. It was the perfect pretext to assume sweeping powers, expand surveillance states and empty public treasuries with even less scrutiny than usual.
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They formed five new families, these international kleptocrats: the Nats, the Brits, the Sprooks, the Petros and the Party.
The Nats, they declare themselves the saviours of besieged nations while overseeing the plunder of those nations. Drain the swamp, they cry, as they luxuriate in it. They have taken hold in central Europe, eastern Europe and Russia, with imitators on every continent: Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Erdoğan in Turkey, Netanyahu in Israel, Maduro in Venezuela, Trump in Washington. Left and Right: these are just their costumes.
The Brits, they continue their long fade from imperial power to global network of financial secrecy connected to the City of London and servicing new, private empires. Their new populist rulers take money and inspiration from the Ur of Kleptopia, post-Soviet Moscow. Nigel Farage salutes Putin. Boris Johnson enjoys the amity – and his party the seven-figure munificence – of Alexander Temerko, whose self-professed connections to the Kremlin’s security agencies go back decades and on the wall of whose London office hang the British prime minister’s autographed ping-pong bats.
The Sprooks – spooks and crooks in indistinguishable union – have a Moscow base too. The Petros, they have a mechanism for setting the price they charge for the oil they steal from the countries they have invaded from within: they call it Opec. The Party, they are insatiable. Money, land, technology, its leaders in Beijing want it all; no resistance will be tolerated, certainly not from Hong Kongers quaintly attached to antiquated notions of freedom.
The Party, the Nats, the Brits, the Petros and the Sprooks are like the clans of the Cosa Nostra that came before them. On the surface they are rivals. But ultimately they are engaged in a common endeavour: to seize power through fear and the force of money, and then to privatise that power. As has been said of the British Establishment, they are a committee that never needs to meet. They have their Others, against which to unite populations whose interests they can make no credible claim to represent. Uighurs do nicely, or Mexicans, Muslims, refugees, Jews.
Perhaps what drives them all is fear: the fear that soon there will not be enough to go round, that on a simmering planet the time is approaching for those who have gathered all they can unto themselves to cut free from the many, from the others. There’s only one side to be on if you wish to avoid destruction: theirs. You are with the Kleptopians or you are against them.
Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins UK from the book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World