In our era of oligarchs and gangsters, murdered journalists and outgunned tax inspectors, Putin and Trump, how do you write a critical book about money and power in the world that doesn't feel utterly futile? It's a question Oliver Bullough often asks himself. In this volume he lists some of the enterprises that operated in Ukraine during the infamous presidency of Viktor Yanukovych from 2010 to 2014: "his coal mining companies ... which were [for legal purposes] owned in the Caribbean"; a "medicine racket ... run out of Cyprus"; an "illegal arms trade traced back to Scotland"; a "market selling knock-off designer goods ... legally owned in the Seychelles". The sheer complexity of corruption under Yanukovych, Bullough writes, "makes me dizzy, like a maths problem too complicated to understand, a sinkhole opening at my feet". We are only on page nine.
Then there is the problem of overfamiliarity. Tax evasion, illicit financial networks, parasitic elites and many of the other subjects of this ambitious book are not new, Bullough admits: "Wealthy people have always tried to keep their money out of the hands of government." More recently, the global growth in secrecy and criminality made possible by modern capitalism and the end of Soviet communism have become such mainstream topics that this year they were given their own primetime TV drama, BBC1's McMafia, which was loosely based on a successful investigative book by Misha Glenny.
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