“I have a big problem with surveillance these days,” Tom Burgis says, questioning the sound of interference on his smartphone. “I’m always suspicious,” he continues. “I’ve been watched meeting contacts in London, it’s getting pretty outrageous now.” Since 2006, Burgis has been an investigative reporter for the Financial Times, most recently helping land a scoop exposing yet another Tory ‘cash for access’ scandal. It’s therefore no surprise that he’s a watched a man, a predicament that is unlikely to change given his piercing account of global corruption in his second book, Kleptopia (2020).
Beginning shortly before the 2008 financial crash, Burgis uses narrative nonfiction to tell the tale of how governments, mobsters and financial institutions the world over have conspired to launder money, avoid tax, hide wealth, commit crime and enrich themselves. Along the way, he introduces us to a cast of bankers, state officials, mafiosos and underworld figures, whose stories he collected through interviews. A follow up to The Looting Machine (2015), which examined the ill-effects of globalisation in Africa, his latest makes clear that while the West might think itself immune to kleptocracy – the rule of those who govern for the benefit of themselves – the rot has already set in.
SLEEK: How did you become an investigative journalist?
TOM BURGIS: I grew up in Manchester and moved to London as a student wanting to be a poet. When I graduated, I worked back in Manchester in warehouses and bars. Eventually, I saved enough money for a ticket to Ecuador with notebooks and copies of Jack Kerouac. I ended up staying in Santiago in Chile, getting a job at The Santiago Times, which was a very small, very brilliant English language newspaper. To begin with, they didn’t pay me, but I got to live in the shed behind the office.
Then, to cut a long story short, I went home for personal reasons, but I’d become fascinated by globalisation, as Latin America had been a laboratory for the big economic policies that created it. So I was running around the world covering the anti-globalisation movement, and then I wound up getting sent to Africa by the Financial Times. And that’s really when I started to see that … it’s all about corruption. A lot of the horrors of Africa, from terrible living standards to appalling violence, can be linked to corruption, which is not an African phenomenon, but one imported by the global economy. So I wrote a book about that, The Looting Machine.
S: What was Kleptopia’s starting point?
TB: I was giving a talk on corruption in Paddington. There was a guy at the back who put his hand up and said, “I know a thing or two about corruption, I used to work for a Swiss bank here in London and there was plenty of it there.” His name was Nigel Wilkins, and he told me he used to work around the corner from the Bank of England. Nigel suspected very fishy things were going on, and started taking copies of documents. He tried to raise the alarm with the British authorities, who reacted in a terrifyingly anti-democratic way. Eventually, he was forced out of the City, banished, humiliated, and nothing came of his efforts, which were intended to expose serious attempts to disguise money flowing from kleptocracies through an office right in the City of London. But Nigel kept those files and gave them to me, and that became a kind of ‘treasure map’ for me to follow at the beginning of Kleptopia. And as I went on my wanderings in Zimbabwe, Kongo, Russia, Kazakhstan, Washington and London, I started to see what Nigel had found was this enormous system of turning illegitimate loot into legitimate-looking power. And that was the beginning of Kleptopia.
S: Politicians are famously prone to greed and self-interest. But what is kleptocracy and how is it different from simple corruption?
TB: The point in which corruption tips over into kleptocracy is when corruption becomes the system. Today, in fact, if you were to randomly pick a country in the world, it is more than likely going to be a kleptocracy, but we impose upon that a narrative that makes us feel better about the global economy feeding on these places. It’s the vocabulary of liberal economics, of rational people making decisions and using enlightened self-interest to apportion resources within an economy. But in most parts of the world, that’s a pantomime, and billions of people live under kleptocracy, yet we rarely discuss it, and that’s why I write these books.
One of the most insidious forms of kleptocracy is when it latches on to consensual power. Kleptocracy is violent because there is no consensual relationship between ruler and ruled. And because it’s based on looting, when that loot runs out, that’s when it lashes out. For me, this is why you are seeing American politics, British politics and so on become so unstable, lurching in violent directions, as these kleptocratic norms – along with the loot – are leaking into the Western political system. This is the great worry, that democracy is being hijacked.
S: Nigel is just one of Kleptopia’s many interesting characters. Who else left an impression?
TB: I had a pretty extraordinary day interviewing ‘Mikhas’, Sergei Mikhailov, a man alleged to be the former head of the mafia in Moscow. He denies this, but is very clearly identified in FBI reports from the time. [After the fall of the Soviet Union], the Russian economy fused with Western global finance to create the ‘Hiroshima moment’ of kleptocracy. Mikhas is alleged to have been involved in some of this, as it also involved ‘fusing’ with the Russian mafia. So off I went to Moscow to a perfectly normal looking office and sat down with this gigantic barrel of a man – he used to be a wrestler – with a bowl haircut and shoulders that made you think, “How did he get through that door?”
S: In Kleptopia, you call the pre-2008 cash world the “old world”. How does kleptocracy relate to the one we live in today?
TB: I’d say until about 2008, the narrative of the end of the Cold War broadly persisted, which was that, on balance, capitalism spreads wellbeing and that people should get out of its way. Then that narrative collapsed after the 2008 crash, which is when we realised that enormous parts of the capitalist system were fraudulent and were being used in a corrupt way to benefit the elites at the expense of society at large. At the same time, we were in an advanced phase of the imperialist decline, and the rise of kleptocratic powers, by which I mean the oil states, networks combining organised crime and espionage, ‘the Brits’ (i.e. the husk of the former British empire, large parts of which is essentially a huge financial secrecy industry at the service of kleptocrats), Russia and the Chinese communist party.
These new polls of power surged after the 2008 crash, partly because of the West’s weakened financial systems, but also because of the collapse in the narrative about capitalism, and with it, this weakening in faith in democracy. Now, in the UK for instance, we have a government like Boris Johnson’s, which is openly being described as corrupt. Those of us who live in the West are very naive to think that corruption is somehow inherent to places far away and that we are immune to it. Like the coronavirus, we’ve discovered that’s not the case.
S: The Looting Machine was a book of journalism, whereas Kleptopia is written as narrative non-fiction. Why?
TB: Two reasons. I think that it’s vital to identify the [people] that benefit from corruption – just as we identify the victims of it – and to name them and tell their stories. To some extent, that is an antidote to the deception that kleptocracy uses by burying itself in financial complexity. The second reason is that, this kind of writing about corruption can be uncomfortably hard to read. Kleptopia isn’t necessarily an easy read, but I’ve tried to make it about characters not companies. At the moment, narrative nonfiction is having a golden age through the works of Michael Lewis [The Big Short (2015)] and Lisa Taddeo [Three Women (2019)], so it’s quite nice to throw yourself into that, and my next book will be the same.
S: What will it be about?
TB: I’ve been working on what happens when kleptocracy meets democracy, so a lot of the Tory cash for access stuff came out of it. The next book will be on that. I’ve been a bit busy with a new baby, but I’m starting to crack on.
The German edition published by Westend is available hier.