117: Patrick Alley | Blood Diamonds, Kleptocrats, Very Bad People & The Investigations Of Global Witness

🎙️: https://atlasgeographica.com/patrick-alley/

Patrick Alley is a cofounder of an organisation called Global Witness which weeds out abuses of corruption, the environment and human rights across the world. Patrick recently wrote a book documenting these experiences and it all starts with the illegal timber trade in South-East Asia funding the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and making possible all the horror and violence of the Cambodian communists. 

In this chat Patrick Alley mentions…

• Founders Story Of Global Witness
• Illegal Timber Trading
• Very Bad People
• Economics Of Global Witness
• + Much More As Well…

Links To Patrick Alley

• Global Witness
• Very Bad People

Episodes Of The Curious Worldview Podcast Mentioned.

• Martin Schibbye – Sweden’s Greatest Investigative Journalist
• Bradley Hope – 1MDB & Project Brazen.
• Jim Henry – Offshore Finance Investigative Journalist
• Nicholas Shaxson – The World Of Offshore Finance
• Oliver Bullough – Moneyland & Endless Kleptocracy

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• 00:00 – Introduction.
• 01:36 – Global Witness Founding Story Bringing Down Cambodian Communists.
• 12:42 – Why Is There Corruption?
• 15:50 – Illegal Timber Trading & Deforestation.
• 22:36 – Financial Secrecy & Offshore Finance.
• 26:42 – What Made Global Witness So Good At Investigations.
• 35:46 – Benny Steinmetz, Dan Gertler, Imelda Marcos.
• 56:13 – Blood Diamonds.
• 1:05:53 – What Is The Key To Generating Media Interest?
• 1:11:29 – Economics Of Global Witness & George Soros.
• 1:21:58 – Is The World Getting Better? Which Issue Is Most Cancerous?
• 1:25:56 – Serendipity In Patrick Alley’s Life.
• 1:27:06 – Country Patrick Is Bullish On.
• 1:28:56 – Conversation Between Any Two People Of History.

🍻☕: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ryanhogg

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Patrick Alley is an absolute legend. He's a co-founder of an organization called Global Witness, which weeds out abuses of corruption, the environment, and human rights all across the world. Patrick recently wrote a book documenting these experiences called Very Bad People, which all starts with the illegal timber trade in Southeast Asia that funded the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and made possible all the horror and violence of the Cambodian communists. Patrick then got a taste for the thrill, the risk, and the reward of the investigative work and moved on to Blood Diamonds in Angola, Kleptocrats in Ukraine, Deforestation in Papua New Guinea, and truly that is just the tip of the global witness spear which digs so deeply into the corruption and filth of the underground economy and the underground world. In this podcast, Patrick covers the founding story of Global Witness, why illegal timber trading is particularly significant to him, a close look at and calling out of some of very, very bad people, the economics of global witness, the role of serendipity in Patrick's life, and some of the questions that you've come to expect. Now, this podcast took me over five hours to put together, but will only take you five seconds to review, so I ask you all to please pump that good juice into the various algorithms. Leave positive vibes in Spotify, Apple, and all of the rest. And that is all from me. I would love to and could say a lot more about how inspiring Patrick is and how inspiring Global Witness is, and how much I'm projecting onto how of an amazing an organization it is. But instead, I will just continue with the podcast. So here is Patrick Alley. So the origin story of Global Witness is so inspiring to me because it feels even accessible to someone like me. You know, y you didn't have any special connections, no particularly amazing special talents, no significant access to money, contacts, and network. It was just pure drive and ambition. So can you explain what your life was like up until the moment when you and a mates uh colluded in a London pub to create Global Witness?

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Yeah, sure. Well, I mean I I uh I left school, I didn't go to university, um and I got a job in the construction industry, which was a job I I hated from the the first moment as a kind of middle manager and a a firm that supplied construction equipment. And um I did it because you know I I ended up with uh a girlfriend and a mortgage and um got stuck. Um and that that was during the the 1980s, and I started getting a really growing sense of environmental concern, environmental awareness, largely um prompted by Greenpeace, you know, looking at what they were doing, uh getting putting the dinghy between the whaling ship and the whale and that kind of thing. I just thought you know, it was a no-brainer for me that whaling and that kind of environmental abuse was wrong, and what they were doing was immensely courageous, and I I volunteered, you know, raising funds for them and that kind of thing, and getting increasingly disenchanted with what I was doing. Um and then what with one thing and another, the the relationship broke up, I think through mutual boredom. Um and we sold a house and I had um you know a little bit of money and went travelling, um backpacking on the Asian route, um in the hope that I would discover myself, which I'm I'm not sure that I did, um, but I I knew that what I didn't want to do, and I I came back to the UK um for a month, and I thought I'd go off again after that. Um I had enough money for about two years of doing that kind of lifestyle. Um and then I read this article in the Sunday Times magazine in the UK, uh, which described the investigations into the wildlife trade by an outfit called the Environmental Investigation Agency, and I was inspired by what what they were doing, and I volunteered. I just rocked up on their their doorstep in this rather shabby office in Islington, which was then a a pretty uh down at hill part of London, um, and you know, was immediately put to sitting on the floor because there were no desks and and stuffing envelopes to send to potential funders. Um but I loved it. I thought I'm home. This is this is where I want to be, uh, this kind of fields. Um and it was there that I met uh Shaman Gooch and Simon Taylor, um, who I was to go on to found Global Witness with a a couple of years after that.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

And uh put it on the timeline for us as well. How old were you when you went on this trip to discover yourself, and then how old were you when Global Witness was birthed?

SPEAKER_01 4:40

I was thirty-one when I went on that trip, rather a si superannuated backpacker. Um and I was about thirty-four when we conceived of the idea of global witness, and about thirty-five or so when we finally got some money to do something. And could you sorry, Simon Simon Shaman was slightly younger than me.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Okay. But could you comment on as well something that for me I romanticized onto heavily was uh the fact that you you guys weren't, you know, politicians, you weren't uh didn't have access to exceptional amounts of wealth, uh networks, contacts, yet nonetheless you still managed to create something amazing.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Yeah, I mean it it looking back in hindsight, it's it's it's strange to think that such a dysfunctional bunch of people could have done, maybe. Um, you know, we we when I met Simon and Charmin, we got on really well. We were were all driven by a passion for for the environment at that time and a real anger. There was a real sense of anger about what was going on and a frustration that you know we couldn't do more. Um but the idea that that was the birth of global witness was was um around what was happening at that time in Cambodia. Um and in the early 1990s, Cambodia was very big news. Uh, the United Nations were mounting their biggest ever peacekeeping operation up to that time, um, 21,000 UN peacekeeping troops on the ground in Cambodia to bring an end to a decades-long civil war, which was then being fought between the the Khmer Rouge rebel group um and the newly elected Cambodian government. And we read these press articles which said that the Khmer Rouge were trading timber from Cambodia's rainforests with timber companies in Thailand, and we've we thought, well, what's that about? Um, and presumably the Khmer Rouge are are earning money from that, um, which was one thing that piqued our interest because we the our interest in that area was compl purely coincidental. We you know we each had this individual interest in it. Um and we also um thought that actually I've I'm I need to go back a bit, sorry.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

So, yeah, go on, go on, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so when I met Simon and Shamion um back in the early 90s, uh we found out that completely by coincidence we were interested in what was going on in Cambodia at that time and and what was going on in Cambodia at that time uh was very big news indeed. The United Nations were mounting their biggest ever peacekeeping operation up until that time with 21,000 troops on the ground to help bring an end to a really brutal civil war that had been going on between the Khmerou rebel group, responsible for the biggest genocide since World War II, um, and the newly elected Cambodian government. And we asked ourselves a couple of questions and we started looking at this stuff because we read press articles which suggested, with very little information, that the Khmerouge were trading timber with Thailand, and we thought, well, presumably they're doing that to fund their war. Um and we thought another question was is that a human rights issue or is that an environmental issue? And at that time, that nexus simply didn't exist. You had you know groups like Greenpeace looking at environment, groups like Amnesty or Human Rights Watch looking at human rights. No one looked at that nexus. Um and well we thought, well that that's really interesting, because this is obviously this is that nexus, uh, that the timber has been cut out of a rainforest and it's funding a conflict if indeed the trade is true. We thought, why doesn't somebody look at that? Why doesn't someone go there and get information about it? And if it is true, then maybe you could advocate with governments to close that border, um, and then the Khmerish doesn't have any money, and then the war ends. Um that was the idea. Um but as you said, you know, we were not the obvious candidates to do that because we had no experience um of investigating, we had no experience of the timber trade, we had no experience of the region um or of campaigning, and we didn't have any money. Um apart from that, it all looked very rosy, but uh what a nice combination, yeah. But we we we were cross, um and we thought let's make it happen.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

And the insight that you drew there, um in that first project or uh campaign, I'm not sure how you internally label all your different um pieces of activism, but was identifying the key insight that the illegal source of money is actually probably the most strong route to cut away, rather than attacking, you know, the politics or the ideology of these um sort of bad people and bad ideas. Um and it's sort of consistent throughout a lot of the things you've done. Could you comment on that? How specifically with the Khmer Rouge cutting away their illegal supply um cutting away their illegal sort of supply of money was actually more damaging than, say, any political or ideological battle might have been.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah, I I think it's one of those things, and and you know, we're not geniuses, but in a way it's not rocket science either. That you know, wars cost money, and probably one of the quickest ways to stop them, short of you know, uh sending in the army, and we didn't have one of those, um, is to is to take the money out of it. Um you see a modern equivalent with people trying to sanction uh Putin uh over Ukraine. Um and I I guess the the two things we thought regarding that was okay, yeah, we need to take the money out of it, but in order to be able to do that, we need to know exactly what's going on. Because if we want to try and convince any decision maker, any policy maker, then we need the information. Um and we just thought that was the natural route. And the other thing to say is that you know, Global Witness has since been described as one of the pioneers of the global anti-corruption movement, but when we started, we hadn't even heard of the word virtually, we didn't really know about corruption, and it was one particular deal that we came across looking at Cambodia, not the first thing we exposed, um, which uh was a series of letters from the Cambodian prime ministers. There were two Cambodian prime ministers at the time in a in a an amazing uh UN, only possible with the UN, but anyway. Um and they had written to the Thai defence minister, a guy called General Chavelet, and said we want to export a million cubic metres of timber, which is an awful lot of trees, uh, which is uh in Khmer Rouge controlled territory, uh i.e. the the government's battlefield enemy, um, to Thailand, and it specified who would get what, and and Cambodia would receive $35 million for that, and the Khmer Rouge would receive $90 million US for that. And we thought, so the Cambodian leadership is collaborating with its battlefield enemy to raise funds to fight each other, or you know, to use for their their personal gain. Um and in fact it wasn't even Cambodia's gain because it turned out that money was totally off budget. Well, had that money materialised, we managed to to nix that deal. But um it was this discovery of the the cancer of corruption um that could do that. I mean, how could something that egregious take place? And it's since then the found we we found of course that it happens quite a lot, but to us it was a real shock at the time.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Yeah. And uh why does it happen? Sorry? Why does it happen?

SPEAKER_01 12:47

The corruption?

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Well, maybe that's too simple of a question, but you sort of are hinting at the ulterior motives and the bad alignment of incentives.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Yeah, well, I think you know the the the short answer to that is greed. Um I think what we've seen since the beginning of global witness is something that's come to be called the resource curse. And I'm just talking about one specific area of corruption, obviously corruption takes place in virtually every field of life. But in the case of the resource curse, you have resource-rich countries like Cambodia or Myanmar or Democratic Republic of Congo or many others, uh, in Latin America as well, where the you know the countries are fantastically wealthy in terms of natural resources, but the populations can be really, really poor, um, often ruled by authoritarian regimes, quite often in conflicts, and and very often deeply corrupt. And what happens is that companies will go in and say, okay, we want a slice of you know, this resource, it could be timber, it could be iron ore, it could be any any kind of natural resource, will pay off top politicians and officials to get you know illegal access or you know, to bypass the legal procedures to get access to those resources. And what you've then got is this unholy alliance whereby the the politicians and officials who took the money and now they now owe their allegiance to the companies that paid them, um, not to the citizens they should be serving. Um and the companies they love it because they're they're getting you know a really cheap deal, they're avoiding all sorts of permissions, they have to go through tax, they have to pay all that kind of thing. And and it's and it's that, it's just this hook that that brings people in, and of course the people who suffer are the people who live in those countries um because of the the poverty that ensues, because they're not big they're not benefiting from the country's resources. It's why the regimes are authoritarian, because if you are making a packet as even if you're a a democratically elected person, as Hun Sen was as one of the prime ministers in Cambodia uh in the early 90s, if you start getting really, really rich, you want to protect that, you want to protect that system, and you end up very often creating a dictatorship out of a democracy, precisely because of the money you're making. Um I think you see the same with Putin. Um so it's a really um what's the word? It's just it is absolutely the root of a lot of the the geopolitical problems we have in the world today, um, the authoritarian regimes and the poverty that that people are suffering because their resources are being diverted.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

Yeah. And that theme of uh resource deprivation is obviously consistent through a lot of the different um projects that you tackle. I was really interested to learn about the the timber trade from you, um, because that is also a consistent theme. Um can you explain like the nuances of the world's timber trades? Um, just break it down, because presumably this is totally unknown for most of the people listening.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Yeah, um to be fair, m my knowledge is is more confined to to the trade in tropical timber. Um and that com you know, obviously it's highly desirable, extremely expensive, very durable, very beautiful, um, and and in high demand. Um and what you find is that you know, if we if we take Central Africa, Congo Basin as as an example, uh, that the the timber industry will go into those countries as they did in Cambodia, as they have done in Myanmar and the Amazon, um, to get hold of forest concessions, to be allocated, you know, X thousand or hundred thousands of hectares of forest uh for them to exploit. And and one of the things that you know is a personal passion of mine is this issue of sustainable forest management, which is this kind of buzz expression that people use. But in the tropics, and I talked to scientists about this, I'd argue that there is no such thing as sustainable forest management. What's economically sustainable is not ecologically sustainable. Um, and if you're carving chunks out of the forest, you're you're dividing it up, you're building corridors through it, you're building roads, and these are not roads that are going to you know doing a public service, like going to some village or town and allowing people to trade. These are roads into the forest. Once those are there, then you get um the bushmeat hunters, you get the wildcat miners um who go in there and start you know mining for gold or whatever using terrible chemicals. And it's kind of the precursor to the destruction of forests, one of the things that sort of brought the Amazon to the brink now.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Yeah, uh, so it starts with deforestation and then all the other dirty industries seep in off that infrastructure they lay down.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Very often that's what's happening. Um and but to fight that battle, especially in the days when we started fighting it, you get, you know, the UN, the Food and Agriculture Organization talking about, oh well, you know, the local people need to benefit from these resources, which is a fair argument, but they're not benefiting from those resources other than a few poorly skilled and low-paid jobs, um, because the money is just high tailing it out of their country. Um and the forests are being destroyed, and and very often, I mean not very often, always, you know, people regard, you know, forests are often as as you know, places full of animals and plants and nothing else, but people live in forests, people depend on those forests, they have always depended upon them. Um cut the forest and you take away people's livelihoods and culture. Um and so it's it's a complete no-brainer awful situation. Um yeah, so and that's something we've we've pursued in in many countries and trying to highlight that, and now some of those messages are are more widely accepted. Um, but deforestation, you know, it's a bat we we we win a few of the battles, but we're not winning the war on that. Deforestation is getting worse. And and of course, the Wales forests, particularly the tropical rainforests, are critical in mitigating the climate crisis um for their role um in as as uh CO2 sinks. Um and so that you know our ability to tackle climate change is dependent in part on the forest. Without the tropical rainforest, we've lost that battle.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

And what's the state of the forests now internationally, but wherever you feel competent enough to comment on?

SPEAKER_01 19:37

Well, I think you know, the the three largest tropical rainforests are the Amazon, those of Papua New Guinea, and those of the Congo Basin. Um in some other countries like Sarawak, the rainforest is 95% gone. Absolutely, as a result of the same.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Where is that?

SPEAKER_01 19:55

Malaysia, it's a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. Um the Congo Basin, some countries are badly degraded already, but in in the Democratic Republic of Congo itself, there are still vast swathes of pristine forest, but they're now trying to explore for oil and gas in those forests on peat lands, which is a from a climate perspective, about the worst thing you could possibly do. And I think one of the most alarming ones is the Amazon, where um a Brazilian academic called Carlos Nobre um produced a a very well-regarded study which showed that when the Amazon gets to the point where it's lost forty percent of its original area, it will pass a tipping point and turn into dry savannah. It won't be rainforest at all. And we're about five or six years from that point, apparently. Um and it's not just the forest and everything it does, but the Amazon emits trillions of litres of moisture every day uh into the atmosphere, and those streams of moisture um absolutely play a major role in the whole of the climate dynamics in uh Latin America. So if the Amazon goes, you're gonna see multiple impacts, uh, increasing droughts, etc., across that continent. Um and we're just frighteningly close to it. It's it's hard to imagine, you know, that the Amazon might not exist as a forest, but it's a real possibility.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

It's kind of crazy, isn't it, that one country has so much sort of geographical power over the state of the entire world. You know, how Brazil, who I think has something like seventy percent of the Amazon within its borders, their domestic deforestation policy has a direct impact of me, some guy sitting in Stockholm. Uh it's quite interesting to see how it's all so so interrelated.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Oh, ab absolutely. And we also, well, if you're a meat eater, uh a beef eater particularly, have an impact on it because sixty percent of Amazonian deforestation is due to cattle ranching. Um so that's you know a another of these interconnected things that needs to be tackled. And one of the things we're doing at Global Witness, for example, is looking at those banks that finance the cattle industry in Brazil. Um because without doing that, that's a battle that can't be won. You need to take the money out of the equation, which sort of goes back to one of your first questions.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

Yeah. Alright, well, you've spoken about money hightailing it out of there. Um you opened up with talking about corruption. You've just uh brilliantly led me into the role of banks in all of this. Um the premise of um me reaching out to you was talking about financial secrecy offshore finance. So across all of your activism, um, all of your different campaigns, projects, can you speak about the role that financial secrecy and offshore finance plays?

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Yeah, um certainly. Um well I think that again, like when we began and we didn't we hadn't thought about corruption, it we were a few years into looking at corruption when rather belatedly it occurred to us that every corrupt deal needs a bank. Um and for that reason we started looking at the banking sector. Um, and then it occurred to us, having looked at that for a little while, well, every corrupt deal always uses some secretly owned company um registered in the tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions of well, it could be the UK or US, which were high up on that list, but also in the Caribbean, Marshall Islands, wherever it might be. Um, and they're at the root of virtually every problem we've ever looked at. Um, and so for example, uh rather presciently, although we didn't know it at the time in 2006, we we were looking at a um uh uh a gas pipeline, one of the major gas pipelines running from Turkmenistan to Russia through Ukraine, um, and we came across this company which owned or you know had the rights to the Ukraine pipeline, and this company was unknown, um had no experience in the gas industry. I thought, what what's its purpose? And its only purpose could have been for the person who owned it to cream off the money from that gas. Um, but who was he? Um of course you couldn't find out, although we did, you know, but one of the things we specialise in doing is finding out he's a guy called Dmitry Fertash. Um we've also looked at the the laundering of corrupt money into real estate in London, for example, and and one case we looked at, we we we called it Mystery on Baker Street, um, was where the the former secret police chief of Kazakhstan, uh who's the son-in-law of the dictatorial president, um had was connected to a property empire worth about £150 million in in London, including Baker Street, uh which is where had he really lived, Sherlock Holmes would have lived. Um and we thought, well, let's see if we can prove that it is him at the centre of this, and there's just this labyrinth of companies owned by another labyrinth of companies, owned by another labyrinth of companies. And with you know, computer power these days, you can it's still hard and something that quite often impossible to get through that. In those days, you know, it was um much more arduous, uh and and we you know we we literally had to sort of search company databases in different countries and look for similarities. If you don't know who owns a company, how do you know it's linked to another company in the network? And so you have to look at okay, when was it registered? Where was it registered? Does it have a nominee director? Do they share nominee directors with other companies? Um, does the company secretary, you know, do they share a company secretary with other companies? And that way you can get an idea that a group of companies may well be connected. Um also how quickly how long did they exist? And so very often in these networks, these companies will be set up to do a particular thing. Um and so they might set up in you know November 2006 and shut down two years later. Um they'll have been dormant companies, but through which, you know, in some cases we've documented, you know, seven hundred million dollars has flowed, um, and then they go dark, and that's the you know, so by the time anyone can get to them, they've gone. It's their getaway car, basically, that that that system.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

Something that stood out to me throughout the book, and obviously what you just said there is the difficulty of investigation. So I how are you guys so infective uh infective, effective at the investigation? Is it the are you just persuasive at whistle with whistleblowers, or do you have like excellent data scientists? Um because you know, digging into the just bottomless pits of waste that is shell company within shell company within asset owned by random person, um, is almost insurmountable, it feels like, without whistleblowers. So how do you manage all of it?

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Yeah, that's a really good question. Um whistleblowers are brilliant, but you don't know who they are until they've blown the whistle. Um so it's you might be looking at something and you desperately want a whistleblower, but you know, how can you get it? But sometimes a whistleblower will come to us um with information, and sometimes we'll say, Well, there's nothing we can do with that because it's a subject we're not working on, or or something like that, or we don't have the resources at the time. But other times you'll say, Hey, yeah, this is really fantastic. And and I can remember a particular example of a guy coming to us who was a partner at Ernst and Young um in Dubai, and had been asked to lead an audit of a gold refiner, um, and what he found was completely damning, with you know, literally billions of dollars worth of cash purchases of gold, um, which is a an absolute red flag for money laundering, and and he uh raised this with his bosses in Ernst Young, both there and in London, who shut him up or tried to. So he came to us and blew that whistle, and we were able to to write a report on it. So if you've got that, then obviously you're a long way ahead. But without a whistleblower, um you just have to start trawling. Um and it may be that one piece of paperwork falls into your hands. You know, one example I can remember is you know, the international banking system uses uses a system called SWIFT, which documents all of the payments um in and out of various banks. And we managed to get a um a Swift document from a particular bank that had been leaked to us. And uh with the basis that they said you know, hundreds of millions of dollars had been laundered by this person, um, but we don't we don't know for sure, and we don't know where it's going. And so that was one of those cases that I mentioned earlier where you had to go through there are literally thousands of names um to work out the commonalities between them and and and and in the end got there. Um, yeah, so it's really, really difficult. Also, I think it's worth putting into context that when we began in the 90s, there were globally around 1,500 websites, and there are now about one and a half billion. So, um in terms of computer power, I I'm I'm illustrating the way that we have spanned, you know, from a time of virtually zero computer power to phenomenal computer power. And so you know, we've taken advantage of that, of course, and have a really good data investigations team who do scrape databases who can process an awful lot of information. Right. And on this issue of um secretly owned companies, for example, um, you know, one of our campaign aims was to get the UK to um produce a public registry of of all companies. Um, you know, actually who owns them, obviously we have Companies House, but who owns those companies? And and we we ran you know data scrapes on Companies House and would come up with you know like one guy who's a director of 9,000 companies, some accountant in the Midlands. You think, does he do that? That's a big job. Um or or people who um you know are are under age of four when they when they set up a company, or in one case someone who had been dead for two years before he set up a company. Um, you know, so with data you can do an awful lot of stuff that we couldn't do before.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Yeah. So you you do hire data scientists who explicitly do that type of work?

SPEAKER_01 30:55

Yes, we do. Um, and it's you know one of the wisest investments we've ever made, I think. Um, and that's to look, you know, back in the day at those sort of um corruption-related activities, we're also deploying them to great effect on our work in uh Ukraine, trying to track um you know, shipments of Russian oil or tracking uh oil that is being uh refined and ending up fueling the bombers that are bombing Ukraine that are connected to the French oil company total. I mean, is that that team is sort of doing all of that kind of work? Um which is yeah, it's just invaluable to what we do, couldn't do without.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Could you give a few more examples of um discoveries you've made that pertain to offshore finance and financial secrecy?

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Give us a mo, I'll think of something. Um and there is there are so many. Um yeah, well there was there's there was one where I I sort of touched on it just now, but I could go into slightly more detail on the the the SWIFT document. And what was happening was um uh there was a bank called the Asia Universal Bank um in Kyrgyzstan, and when the People's Revolution was happening in Kyrgyzstan, um hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, flowed out of that country. Um and the president and the president's son, the Bakieevs, fled. Uh and and Maxim Bakhiev, the son, uh arrived in the UK, uh, which is I can lead on to that story in a minute. Um, but we had this Swift document which had been leaked to us, um, and we managed to trace this network of companies. We brought it down to not that many companies, um, all of whom had been set up um you know by the same nominee directors with the same company secretaries over a short period of time, uh, through which, you know, in each case, around you know, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars had had passed through and was gone. You know, we we we did the investigation, we did the expose, but the the money was was long gone by then. But Maxim Bakiev arrived in the UK having fled his country um and applied for political asylum. I should say that these people were part of a dictatorship. And we th we had you know we wrote to the authorities and said he shouldn't be here, but in the end we heard that it was possible he had bought a house, a mansion in um south of London, close to London. And we thought, how are we going to find that? And uh one of our investigators is a genius guy called Tom Main, Russian speaker. He was trawling through you know publicly available property registers, you know, like a state agents type registers, and you can sort of on right move, I think it is in UK, you can sort of do a search for properties over a million and a half pounds and whatever, but you had to pay you like three quid for every search you did. Um that was actually with the the land registry in the UK. Um, and you you're you're basically going at random, you're not going to get anywhere. Um, but then by coincidence, a contact of his in the US came across an American court case against this same guy, Bakiev, and it had the first half of a postcode. Um it was KT20, I think it was, but we needed the other three uh letters and numerals. Um but by hook and by crook we got them and managed to to find this, you know, Posh house in a commuter suburb of Banstead in Surrey. Um and then it was a question, this is this is one of the things I really love, um, of you know, how did okay, so you've you've got the house, but it it was owned by a company, um, not by Bakiev. So you think, okay, but is it him? Is it his company? And again, you're in the same problem trying to to find out who owns it. But in the end, Tom did this just beautiful simple thing of couriering um an envelope to him. Envelope with nothing in it, um, and it was signed for, and it was signed for Bakiev. Um, and so the guy had signed it, we we we got the story. So that was kind of a combination of that, you know, super sleuthing of the the the databases with just a simple trick.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

Yeah. Well, I'm sure you'll get a chance to um refer more to great examples of offshore finance financial secrecy because it is really the infrastructure that enables this sort of criminal networks and organization and financing of all of the very bad people of which the book is titled. So I'd love for you to go into um some of the particularly bad fellas that you've come across.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

Okay. Um well actually the question before I answer the question, so you've read the book. So how about the the case of Benny Steinmetz and his iron ore mine in Guinea? Is that would that fall into the category of that question?

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Definitely, and as well Dan Gertler and his role in the Congo, um, and as well the Angolan warlord who just fleeced every dime ever. I can't remember his name off the top of my head. Um but that Angolan one. I I think it was Angolan. Um, you know, particularly flagrant um example. Or maybe it was the Guinea actually.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

Oh, yeah, yeah, guinea. Guinea, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Anyway, but um Benny Simets for sure, Dan Gertler and that uh um that guinea one uh are great examples, but as well, whichever ones you want to lean into, you know.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Yeah, sure. Um yeah, well I I I think one of the things to sort of begin answering that question with is to highlight and emphasize that corruption is a truly globalized problem. It's often thought of as you know some corrupt dictator in a hot tropical country somewhere. But what corruption requires is someone to pay the bribe, and very often that's gonna be a Western company um or a Chinese company, big companies. Um and then this whole system of laundering that money um and you know into real estate, into bank accounts, into luxury goods in the UK, in Europe, uh in the US, wherever it happens to be. And there's this whole what you know I called in the book this pinstripe army of accountants and and PR people and um lawyers particularly who try and sue us all the time, um sort of enabling this whole thing to go on. Um and so we we try and explore you know all ends of that, and so uh and the thing that one was must also emphasize is the enormous cost to these countries. And so if we look at this example in the Democratic Republic of Congo, um there's a a mining magnet called Dan Girdler, Israeli guy, um, and very close friends with the former president now of of the Congo, Joseph Kabila. And the Congo is a country enormously rich in minerals, um, and and now interestingly, particularly rich in minerals essential for the for the energy transition to renewables. Um but back then what what happened was that the the country sold its six key mine sites to a series of supposedly unconnected companies. Um and again, you know, as with other examples, you couldn't tell who owned them, um, you know, who was the who was the beneficial owner, as they call it, who's actually going to make them money out of this. Um and so we couldn't find that out, but what we could find out was that they were linked, and and we did that you know the the trail of looking at where they were set up, when they were set up, the you know, any common officials between them. And so these six mine sites were sold to this series of companies at way below uh commercial value, um, and then within a very short space of time, and we're looking at sort of weeks or months, was sold on again to one of the world's biggest commodity companies, Glencore, um, at near enough their commercial value. And the cost to DRC uh between those what they were sold for and then resold for was about one and a half billion dollars. And you've got one of the poorest countries in the world um losing that kind of money uh over its key assets, and you think, well, how on earth does that work? Um, and that's why we sort of do that kind of work, to expose what we can, and to expose in that case Girltler's role in that. And of course, this brings forward also one of the the great risks that we face is that these people are very well off and very often very litigious. Um and Girtler certainly falls into that category and you know came after us. Um, but we we are you know very particular about getting our facts straight about following best journalistic practice in terms of pushing cases to people before we publish and hopefully fend off these cases. Um but so that that happened at one particular time, and then more recently via a couple of very brave whistleblowers who worked for a bank in Kinshasa, uh the branch of a Cameroonian bank called uh Afraland First Bank, um blew the whistle, and they blew the whistle to a French whistleblowing outfit and to us. Um and what had happened um with the initial problems that Gertler had or the the the these corrupt deals was he ended up getting sanctioned by the US um for um his connections with a hedge fund and bribery um in in the Congo. Um and those sanctions included an inability to use US dollars in his business. And in the mining business, you can't exist if you're you know if you're banned from using US dollars. And so what the whistleblowers uncovered was essentially a money laundering operation through the bank allowing him to convert US dollars to euros um and thereby benefiting from them and continuing their business. Yeah. Um and so we produced a report and blew that story. Um the whistleblowers were tried, luckily in absentia, because they had had the the very good wisdom to get out of DRC and they went to Paris, were sentenced to death by a Congolese court after they did that. Um and that shows the power of corruption. Like DRC, I think I'm right in saying doesn't actually have the death penalty, um or or if they do that that they haven't used it for a very long time, but they imposed it over that deal, and you know, you have to ask yourself the questions why. Um but anyway, that that that information's out there. Um do you want to talk about the the Steinmetz case as well?

SPEAKER_00 42:33

Yeah, but let's do a little bit more on Dan Gertler, um, because his name came up when I did a podcast with uh Oliver Bullo, um, and he is just sort of this archetypal um villain of the offshore world, of the dirty mining world, of the sleazy money world. Um and if you go to his website, it basically touts him as this guy who prevented a civil war in the Congo and he's a hero and he saved lives, and um it's just it's dripping in so much slime. Um i it's it's it's kind of unbelievable that he still operates um and is, you know, a friend of Israel and uh a friend of the Congo and X, Y, and Z when there is uh a lot of evidence that he's in fact um, you know, quite a nasty fella. Um so yeah, I mean, if there's a comment you want to add on to that before we move on to the Guinea example, but um for me at least, Dan Gertler stands out as a particularly brutal name.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

Yeah, I I think one of the things that's common between people like Dan Gertler or Benny Steinmetz and and their ilk is if you Google them, you will find loads of information about their private foundation and and their philanthropy and how they look after kids, uh or or whatever it is. You know, they produce this this very glorious image, and and if I don't know if you've seen The the TV series The Night Manager, um where this this evil arms trafficking tycoon called Richard Roper, the whole programme begins with him talking about his foundation and how he's helping people. Um, it's absolutely part of the playbook. Um you need to have that public persona which is saying you're a great guy, the people love you, you're bringing wealth to the country, because they have to disguise what they're doing. Um but it only goes, you know, in many cases, skin deep. Um, but it is it's purely camouflage. Um and the thing that disgusts me about it is the cynicism of it. Like they're they're doing it very often the worst thing they could be doing, um, and and want to come out of it looking like heroes. And it also speaks to one of the weaknesses I perceive in people like that is that they actually want to be regarded as legitimate, credible, respectable members of society, and they really, really hate it when an organization like ours um or a journalist or whatever blows that image.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

They hate it. They resent you more for the way you damage their image than they do the millions of dollars that you cost them.

SPEAKER_01 45:14

Well, it's probably an equal one, isn't it? I'm not sure. Um, but it's uh it's an interesting insight. Um that's yeah, that they really hate it. W which which speaks in part to some of our MO as an organization that we've always made it personal if we can.

SPEAKER_00 45:29

Nice. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

It's not just a company did a bad thing, this person did a bad thing. But also Because they actually Sorry, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:36

Sorry, sorry, I shouldn't have interrupted you, I'm really sorry. But I was just gonna say um also the the narrative of making it personal makes it uh more compelling from a consumer point of view, um therefore more memorable and more likely to pay attention. You know, there's a big difference between your book being called Very Bad Companies and Very Bad People.

SPEAKER_01 45:57

Yeah, exactly. I I think you know all good storytelling, I think, is about people that you can relate to. You may not like them, but you can relate to them one way or another. You can either love them or hate them. Um so I think it's a really important way of telling a story, but for us it's it's also more than that, is we actually really do want to annoy these people, not gratuitously, but we want them to look like the corrupt people that they are. We want them to be embarrassed um when they are in company. We want them not to get invited to posh events, you know. It they there has to be a cost. If you can't get them in prison, and sadly that's a rarity, then at least you can you know besmirch their life somewhat.

SPEAKER_00 46:41

Yeah. I like it. Um so maybe move on to Benny Steinmetz.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

Yeah, so um well Benny Steinmetz, um another Israeli mining tycoon, um, with his own private foundation and um expensive London lawyers, um he managed to acquire um the world's largest untapped reserves of iron ore in the Republic of Guinea in Africa, um for which he paid nothing at all. Um and it was called the the Deal of the Century, it was reported by journalists The Deal of the Century, this fantastically rich deposit of iron ore. Um uh but there's a uh a Sudanese um tycoon, Mo Ibrahim, uh who's a uh strong campaigner against corruption, and he said to the press, he said, Well, the people who did this deal are either criminals or stupid or both. Um and we were one of our key investigators, um Dan Malinkurte, you know, was intrigued by this deal. Why on earth would a country give such a valuable resource away for nothing? I think the only thing that Steinmetz had to pay or had to commit to paying was $160 million to develop the the deposit, um the iron ore deposit. Anyway, so we started looking at that and various other journalists um were also looking into that deal, um and we managed to get this paper trail which showed that um a c a secretly owned company again um had paid the fourth wife of Guinea's president, Lassander Conte, um around seven million dollars. Um and in return they got this deal, um this mine site, and it had been part of a Rio Tinto deposit, um which had been seized from Rio Tinto. Um and so we published that information. Um and what also happened very shortly afterwards that Steinmetz sold 51% of this uh business to the Brazilian iron ore mining giant, which is called Valle, um, for two and a half billion dollars. And so for no investment at all, he coined two and a half billion dollars within a very short space of time and hadn't even begun mining anything. Um uh and so we started looking at the interplay of of all of these companies, and and the key to it really was who owned the companies that Steinmetz used. So, for example, Mamadi Churre, who was the the the fourth wife of the president of Guinea, had a a company, and that received either money or shares um from various Steinmetz-related companies, which de facto uh made her a uh a stakeholder in this iron ore deposit and and therefore potentially extremely rich. Um, so really what we needed to do was to unearth the ownership of the companies who did those deals with her. One of them was called Pentler Holdings, for example. Um, and again, that was just you know, Sherlock Holmes type detective work of trawling through those databases, getting the odd bit of information, cross-checking, you know, um what the company address was. Did it share an address with any other company that was also in our sites? Did it share common personnel? Um, and indeed it turned out to be those things that some of the key characters in this company were also key characters, known characters in in some of Steinmetz's companies. And so you could start making that case. And then we were helped immensely by the fact that the FBI uh arrested Mamadi Touré, she had a house in Florida, um, shortly after she had been had a meeting with this guy called Frederick Salin, who's a a French guy who used to work for Steinmanz, and he was the fixer, he was the guy who brokered the bribes. Um but rather stupidly they had got her to sign contracts for all of those bribes, and so there was a documentary trail. Um and Frederick Salin method.

SPEAKER_00 51:15

Contracts on bribes. Yeah, yeah, an odd thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 51:22

Um and so Frederick Salon went to Florida and met her in a short space of time, several times, to try and get her to give over those documents and just or destroy them. Um, but by this time she'd been arrested by the FBI and was a cooperating witness and was wired for sound. And so one particular meeting, and I I document this in the book, um, it's just like reading the transcript of the FBI wire was just a scream. I really remember it because it that became you know part of the public domain where they they prosecuted Frederick Saler. He got sentenced to two years in the end. But you know, in the process of all of that, this stuff was in the public domain, and it just had this kind of increasingly frantic series of conversations when he's saying, You've got to hand over the papers. That the the boss has told me I've got to get the papers, they've got to be destroyed, and she's asking questions, and and you know, he he's he's basically admitting uh what happened. Um and and then he sort of get gets diverted by the the waitress asking, you know, what kind of sandwich do they want, and and it's just this very funny chain of events. But anyway, um when he left the last of those meetings at which was at Jacksonville Airport in Florida, he was picked up by the FBI and served two years. Um and since then um you know the a whole load of really messy legal battles took place uh with Steinmetz or his company, Benny Steinmetz Group Resources, I should say, um, seeking arbitration around this deal and losing those battles um uh and being branded as uh the the deal as having been obtained corruptly. And then um a couple of years ago, uh Steinmetz himself was sentenced to five years um in jail by a Swiss court, um which he appealed. The appeal was earlier this year, um, and we're waiting to see what the the answers to that one are are gonna be. But um one of the things I'd say, which is the the depressing side of our work, is it's very, very rare to get people of that uh ilk um in jail. And I think that if that happened more, we'd be seeing a lot less of corruption.

SPEAKER_00 53:39

Right. Although it is interesting, I love your quote uh that you say at the beginning of the book that if you think you have a small if you think you're too small to have an impact, uh try going to bed with a mosquito in the room. So although, you know, maybe uh you might not get the um the people serving time in jail, um even just damaging the reputation, like you said before. I mean that can just so they don't get invited to the nice parties anymore. So people don't want to be seen in public with them. Like uh that that that I mean that feels like at least a win.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

Um I I I think that's a win and and I also think that you know, like in the case of Steinmetz, you know, the when the corruption, it wasn't just us, um, you know, various journalists like Tom Burgess and the Financial Times and others were were reporting on on that case. Um, you know, he did he lost the deposit. Um you know, he it cost him a lot of money. He's he's filed for uh administration. Um you know, he he's personally, I'm sure, still very well off, but his business ventures are certainly dented. Um and the US sanctions against Dan Gertler obviously cost his business a lot of money as well as his reputation. So you know, yes, you can you can actually inflict some pretty good damage, um, but you know, these people are criminals and they they should be facing those penalties.

SPEAKER_00 55:08

Such is the filth of the underground economy and the financial uh secrecy is that, you know, he might file for bankruptcy or whatever, but he will never ever go wanting. Um, you know, Imelda Marcos is still fabulously wealthy uh twenty, thirty years after her husband totally um you know I don't want to say raped, it's the wrong word, but just just evacuated the public money into some sort of private Swiss account, um and so many other examples. Um I would like to ask you one more specific story from the book, and then we leave it there, so there is still enough on the table um for people to go and consume it because um you know, it just is it is it is amazing. You basically document your history with um Global Witness and the amazing projects you've been involved in, and we've spoken about Benny Steinmetz, that gets a whole chapter. I'd love to also speak with you about another one which uh I found um, you know, just amazing. Um and that was your work in Angola, uh, which actually preceded DiCaprio's Blood Diamond, uh, which probably was the you know, the huge media event that put everyone onto the idea that diamonds in fact might come at uh you know, they might have a pretty filthy supply chain. But anyway, that's just a long, very random preamble to ask you about your work in Angola.

SPEAKER_01 56:28

Yeah, um well th we began working in Angola, it was the the second thing we ever did. We had been working in Cambodia, our first work in Cambodia was in 1994. Um we had a few early successes, and and our former boss at the Environmental Investigation Agency, a guy called Alan Thornton, came to us um and he had been doing some work in Angola around the ivory issue, and had stumbled across the fact that that the at that time Angola was in the midst of a civil war, um, and one side of that war was a right-wing rebel group called UNITA, run by a guy called Jonas Savimbi, and they were at war with the Marxist MPLA government of of Angola, and he had heard that UNITA were trading diamonds and funding their war that way. Um, and so for us it was he said, Why don't you do something on that? And at first we said, no, we can't. We're like four people by that time, you know. We're already doing Cambodia. Um, you know, how can we possibly do that? Don't have any money or whatever. But he gave us some seed money, and I'm talking like, you know, single-figure thousands, um, to to at least do an expiration. Um and we we went, as we always do with our work to, you know, I didn't go, but my colleague Shamion took charge of that, um, went to Angola to see what she could find. Um, and she talked to diplomats, journalists, whatever, in what she described as a kind of Starze-like state at that time in Angola. It's very, you know, you're always being monitored by government intelligence agents and whatever. Um, but trying to find out what what the story was. Um, and people confirmed they said, yeah, there is a problem with diamonds, um, not widely known. Um, there's also another problem, which is the camp the Angolan government is funding itself with oil revenues, it's a big offshore oil producer. Um, and most of that money is disappearing down a uh a hole as well. Um, so you'd have to cover both issues, otherwise you'll be seen as being past the sands. We thought this works getting a bit complicated. But anyway, we thought we'd do diamonds first, and we learned very quickly that the kind of investigations we did, as I said, with very amateur people with no experience in the timber trade, could get away with in Cambodia. We could not do that with diamonds. Um, the first time we met a diamond dealer, he sort of bunged a tray of diamonds in front of us, handed us a pair of what I would call tweezers. We picked the diamond up and he went, You're not diamond dealers. Um we had we just simply didn't know what we were talking about. And it was very obvious in a closed industry um where a lot of the the deals are uh are done you know by by word of mouth, um, and there's no way of penetrating it in the same way. And of course you can uh smuggle millions of dollars of diamonds in your pocket. You can't do that with rainforest timber. Um and so we thought, how are we gonna do this? Uh and what we ended up settling on was made a little bit easy for us because 80% of the world's rough diamonds at that time were bought by the De Beers Diamond Cartel, one company. Um, and we thought, okay, well, if anyone's gonna know, they're gonna know. And and they were telling us, well, actually, you can't tell where diamonds come from, and we thought it doesn't really wash. Um, and we talked to various geologists who said you could tell where diamonds come from down to the mine that they come from if you have, you know, a parcel of rough diamonds, you could do that. Um, but the beers weren't gonna admit anything. So we started looking at their annual reports, and it was really interesting in the 90s because they'll say Angola was in the midst of a really bloody civil war, and you read things in their annual reports, and they say things like, you know, the fact we can still buy X amount of diamonds from Angola is a testament to the skill and strength of our buying teams. Um, and we compared that kind of statement with um you know humanitarian reports from relief agencies saying in whatever year 1993, 1994, X hundred thousand people have been killed by UNITA or in the war, um, and towns destroyed, etc. Um, and so you had the the juxtaposition of De Beers saying they're buying a lot of money for money's worth of diamonds and the destruction on one side, and then the other thing was that from a geological perspective, almost all of uh Angola's diamonds were in territory held by UNITA. So if anyone was buying diamonds from Angola, the chances are they were buying it from that territory um and therefore UNITA, they were therefore funding the war. Um, so we we put out a report called Um A Rough Trade um in late 98. Um, and by great coincidence, it was only 12 pages long, um, with that kind of information in it, and by great coincidence, it came out on the same day as peace talks broke down in Angola, um, and it went ballistic. The media um interest in that report, we've not been able to garner any media interest in anything we'd done up to that point, really. It went ballistic, and I think it's partly because diamonds are sexy, diamonds are forever. Um but so it got widely reported internationally, um, and actually, in you know, in a very positive way, both you know, the US and UK governments, amongst others, thought actually we're gonna take this issue up. Um, and uh another NGO uh called Partnership Africa-Canada, um, a year after our initial expose produced a similar one on Sierra Leone and what was going on there. And and with um Partnership Africa-Canada, um, the help of Amnesty International, and working with various very sympathetic officials in the UK and US, this was sort of uh uh and also in uh various countries in southern Africa, including South Africa, um, this process was born called the Kimberley Process, which was born to take diamonds out of conflict, certified diamonds from the mine through to sale. Um, and so that was a success story. It was the the Kimberley Process sort of um went went off the rails a little bit, I mean it still exists, but we we walked out of it some years later for for various reasons um related to Zimbabwe. Um but basically conflict diamonds as the scourge that they were ended around that time. It's some countries occasionally still trade them, but um in terms of funding what were three of Africa's most brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia, um their diamonds were taken out of the equation.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:09

Now Africa's moved on to other conflict minerals.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:13

Well, it was already on to other conflict minerals, but um diamonds was the kind of it was a major one in in those particular wars, and and of course, yeah, there are uh plenty of other minerals, not least oil, um, which are at the centres of you know, anything through from severe tensions to uh outright conflict, and of course corruption is the the thread that holds all those things together.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:38

Yep. And offshore finance, the the infrastructure that uh that binds it as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:45

Oh totally, and I I I sort of regard that all as a of of a package, the you know what goes on there. As I said earlier, you know, that this globalization of it's a globalized industry corruption, and what goes on in those countries cannot happen without someone buying the product, whatever it happens to be, without the bribe being paid, which will very often come from foreign companies and will come through banks and they're you know household named banks. Um and the money will flow out through those same banks to real estate in the UK, the US, wherever. Um and the enablers who make it happen operate in this kind of a cloak of legality. I call it a cloak of legality, um, where the advice to this client or that client, you know, may be legal. Um they only have to Google to find the persons are a corrupt sod, but it may be legal. Um and they will maintain this pretense, well, we're just following the law, rather than actually being a little bit exploratory about it and thinking actually we're really helping some bad stuff go down here. Um and those people, of course, um cost us a lot of money because um you know various well-heeled London law firms not infrequently have written this letters um and and tried to you know essentially try to take us down. So um as they do with journalists all the time. So that's one of the major problems.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:10

There's um there's there's like echoes of I'm just imagining, you know, an accountant, regular guy, um, but 100% complicit in the in the organization of these horrible criminal organizations, like a a banality of evil two uh headlined or something. You know, something uh that that that generates attention. So I I pr I said to you that I wouldn't ask any more anecdotes from the book because um it's uh you know it's good to just get a taste. Um and the the the uh the uh the listener will a hundred percent um uh follow up with a link in the description where they want to buy it on uh audio or they want to buy a physical copy. Um but I still have a lot of questions I'd love to ask you about global witness. So you just mentioned something that sort of piqued my interest, and you said that you know, diamonds are forever, therefore you they sort of piqued this media. Uh interest. Um w w what is the key to media interest, especially today? Uh how do you get people's attention with these issues that you're investigating when it is so easy to just say it's over there? Fuck, I can't pay attention to this. How do you get someone's attention in that type of environment?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:24

Yeah, well, I I think in what is, you know, a very news and information saturated world now, or with social media and everything else, that is a challenge in any organization like us, you know, there are kind of three things we have to do really, one one of which is get the information, two of which is to get policy makers and lawmakers to act on it. And the key to that latter one is the media, um, i.e., if a politician is being asked to consider something and knows that it's likely to be reported in the Financial Times or go wild on Twitter or whatever, then they're likely to take more notice. So it's something we've spend you know a lot of time and focus on. And I think coming back to something we said earlier, that telling the human story is a really important one. Um, you know, we do a lot of work now, in fact, most of our work now is is related to the climate crisis. Um and how do you get you know media attention in that space? And so we we look at corruption still in that space, um, and try and show the how egregious um that is, uh and it comes in its different forms. So, for example, you know, a thing that we came out with just last week um during the COP27 climate talks in in Shamel Sheikh is that uh 600 of the delegates there were representatives or are representatives of the fossil fuel industry. Um 200 of those, I think it is, are on national delegations, i.e. they're representing countries. And that number of 600 delegates is more than the delegations of the ten worst affected countries by climate change. Over twice the number of indigenous representatives also disproportionately impacted by climate change. Now that's corruption. Um that's giving, you know, we're trying to it's like getting you know the tobacco industry to advise us on giving up smoking. Um you just can't do that. And so that kind of information that that gets wide media play. You know, I'm not a scientist on on the media and comps, but people love that. You know, that's like a really obvious dirty trick. Um and and one of the things that you know is is a very sad thing that you know that we we've been involved with is our work on land and environmental defenders. Um and back in 2012, that uh a guy called Chut Bouti, who's a Cambodian forest activist, was murdered by the military police in Cambodia. And he was the first person that, you know, he used to work for us at one point, and I I knew him. Um he's the first person I'd known personally to be to be murdered. Um and we decided at that point to produce an annual report documenting as well as we could how many land and environmental defenders, people who are defending their communities, their environment from predatory companies, are killed, attacked, criminalized every year. And obviously we we we can't get all the information, it's vastly underreported. But around four people a week have been killed, murdered, um, for their work doing that. And that information, every year we produce that report, and every year the media coverage is phenomenal. And I think again it's the it's the human story because people can relate to these are ordinary people um doing extraordinary things, using immense courage to you know against you know vastly superior powers to their own. Um it brings in the corruption issue because in a you know a non-corrupt, well-ordered country, if you if someone turned up with a bulldozer and was going to knock down your house, you would be able to stop them, almost certainly. You know, the court would stop them, the police would stop them, the law would stop them. But these people are facing exactly that, and they can't stop them, so they have to protest. And so those things, that that human story, I I think takes issues a long way. Um and I think also, you know, the book came out um a month after Putin um invaded Ukraine, and that brought out a lot of things into perspective because Putin's Russia is a notoriously corrupt country, um, and the sanctioning of the oligarchs, you know, Roman Abramovich, Chelsea Football Club, the super yachts, you know, people love that kind of stuff, um, you know, seeing the money go. And through that, the all of these things are a window into a world where, you know, the subject of corruption on its own might seem rather mundane, but if you look at it in that way, what it actually looks like, um, and telling the stories of of how you can undo it, those things tend to transmit well.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:19

I'd love to ask you about the economics of global witness. As a as a business, how does it work?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:28

Well, we're not a business. Um we're a I should say as an organization. Yeah, we're a not-for-profit organization. Yeah, um no, it's a really good question. Um we are funded by um charitable foundations, so uh the Open Society Foundations, which is George Soros's um sort of charitable arm, Ford Foundation, quite a few American foundations, in fact, um, to do our work, around approximately half of our funding comes from organizations like that. The other half, um, or slightly less, would be from governments. Um, so the development agencies of various governments like Ireland, for example, UK in the past, not lately, um have provided funding, you know, if our work is furthering their work, um, and corruption is you know totally undermines international development, for example. And so the organ organizations like us, or Transparency International and others, um, yeah, can get government funding on that basis. We are very strict in that we don't we're not funder-led. Um you know, we we don't operate, you know, if someone comes to us and says, Oh, I'll give you X thousand to do this bit of work, we don't do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:48

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:48

We decide Oh, because um we decide what work it is we want to do. We have a you know every year we work out um a campaign strategy of what we want to focus on, what we want to achieve, and what we need to do to achieve it, and what does that cost? Put that down in a proposal and get that out to funders who'd be interested in that. We're not like a private detective agency where people can come along and say, Oh, I you know, I want you to investigate this bloke or this company. It's just not what we do. Um, you would go to a corporate risk outfit like Crawl Associates if you wanted to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:24

Okay, so it's um donation led by foundations and then as well um governments.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:30

Yeah, and we also have some private individuals fund us, um, which is something we would love to have more of. We have you know a few quite wealthy individual donors, um to the tune of around, I can't remember exactly how much, but it's around sort of six or seven hundred thousand pounds a year out of a budget uh which hovers around 10 million pounds a year, so somewhere less than 10% of what we get. We'd love to have more money from those sources because that money very often is unrestricted, meaning we can devote it to where we need to, um uh and also react quickly to situations where you don't necessarily have the time to go and raise money, especially. And again, the Ukraine war was one of those, and we thought actually there's something we can bring to this with our data investigations, with our work on the fossil fuel industry, um, but we don't have any money to do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:31

Um so is that uh is that a constant concern? Where is the next paycheck coming from?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:40

It's not a constant concern where the next paycheck coming from. We're you know we're a very well ordered organization now. In fact, you know, when we started, one of the things that we said we'd do is we would never spend any money until we had it. Because we'd seen organizations come acrop when they sort of you know fund themselves by credit card. Um and it it it it doesn't usually end well. Um so you know, we we plan like that, but yeah, we have budget shortfalls, um, which can be really horrible. Um occasionally have to lose people as a result of that, which is really horrible. And of course, we we like everyone else right now, um, you know, both businesses, other organizations, and and ordinary people are entering um or are in you know a very serious economic crisis, and so you know, inflation makes everything we do cost more. Um the grants we have were grants that we probably secured you know a year ago but only just received, so they don't cater for that, you know. So um yeah, it's it's we we've survived up to now. We usually get to the end of the year having raised just less than we hoped we would, but have spent less than we thought we would. Um, but yeah, so if you if you think of the big membership organizations like Greenpeace or Amnesty, who have you know literally hundreds of thousands of members, that money, you know, paid by you know a monthly donation or whatever is incredibly valuable because that means that the the sum total of that is uh you know it's not given for anything in particular. They can use it as they need it for what they want. Um and that's you know something we don't have, um, which and it's not easy to generate that kind of support.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:22

Yeah, I mean they're they're globally recognised brands. I mean getting to that level of awareness is itself like uh an incredible achievement. Um I just um and forgive me if this is too I don't know like uh uh personal or if you don't want it to go in, that's absolutely no problem. But I just wonder about like the the fragility of of being donation front uh uh front loaded, you know, and how it might be annual. And it's like, well, what happens if that money doesn't come in next year? What happens to our work and so forth?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:57

Yeah, but it no, it's it's a constant worry. We have a very strong um fundraising team, very dedicated and very good at what they do. And we all also have this kind of um sort of way of being that everybody in Global Witness is a fundraiser. We wouldn't be unique in that. Lots of organizations that would be the same. So if you know one of our campaigners is at some conference somewhere or whatever, and and talks to someone who says, Oh, I know a government ministry with a budget line for so and so, or they get introduced to a funder, they'll they'll you know make sure that information is passed back to where it should go, or join in with the fundraising team, you know, in pitches to to various donors. But coming back to the root of your question, yeah, you know, we we know that you know we make our we're deciding our budget now for next year, so we'll know that whatever it is it is we need to achieve, yeah, we'll enter that year with you know probably a third of that guaranteed, yeah, because of you know of of existing commitments, and so you have to find the rest. Um we we may have it's not like we're starting from scratch every year, you know, we're sort of carrying this stuff over, but yeah, you know, if we don't raise it all, then there's a real impact. Um we're you know, touch wood, you know, we've been we've been going 30 years now, we're a stable, well-run organization, um but we're not a rich one. Um and it is, you know, it's a bit like my own salary checks, you know. That's all I've got. If I overspend it, I'm in trouble. Um and it's never enough.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:31

Right, right. Um and uh the open society uh their commitment is 10% of whatever your total budget is, they will they will match year on year.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:42

That's no, that that's no longer true. They what when we first started getting funding from them, George Soros said he would give us 30% of our budget a year. But it only ever amounted to, in fact, about only. It was a very generous 25%, I think. Um and that really no longer applies. Um, but we we do, you know, they they do remain our our largest funder. Uh off the top of my head, I think it's about a million and a half dollars a year. Um so very important to us.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:11

And and how often is what you do drawn into question because of affiliation with George Soros?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:19

Oh, often.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:20

How do you how do you deal with it?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:23

I mean it it's what it it's it's it's never been a problem for us to do that. Um, you know, Soros um is uh an international hate figure for the right. Um and we're very often producing reports, you know, especially sort of uh in the corruption arena, and people say, Oh, like Benny Steinman's will be one thing, whether you're just part of a a George Soros funded plot. Um the you know the result the the the real the reality is that Soros has a a a charitable foundation, the Open Society Foundation, which you apply to for money and they either give it to you or they don't.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:59

Um and it's a huge, huge foundation too, right? Billions uh of dollars of an annual budget.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:06

Oh, totally. Uh and I think over time Soros has given away about thirty-six billion dollars. Um and a large chunk of that. Oh, it is incredible. Um and a large chunk of that money has gone to uh the fields of anti-corruption and human rights and open democracy, um open societies, I should say. Um and you know, I've got nothing but respect for the man, he's not not perfect, nor my. Um, but you know, that there is no plot. Um and as I said earlier on, and this is probably another answer to your question earlier on, why are we not funder-led? Well, that's one of the reasons that they give us the money we ask for if they like what it is we intend to do with it. If they don't like it, they won't give it. Um, but the lengths people go to discredit us, because you know, going back to this point of people being, you know, their their reputations being besmirched, they try and besmirch ours, of course, in the same way. And so I remember when we first worked on Angola um on diamonds, the the Angolan government were delighted that we worked on diamonds, whereas um De Beers, I think, or or one of the the diamond leaders accused us of being funded by the French Secret Service. Um, and then when we started working on oil, you know, uh someone else is funding you, you know. Um they people try and get to us that way, um to denigrate our reputation. But you know, it's all open, all of our funding's on our website. Um there's nothing secret about it. Um our accounts are on the website, so there's very little joy to be had there for people um trying to to pull the dirt on us that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:47

Well, Patrick, you've been so incredibly generous with your time. I'd love to just ask you a couple more personal questions to finish off with. Okay. Um over the course of your lifetime, do you feel like the world is getting better? Or has your proximity to all of this darkness sort of tainted your optimism?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:09

Not a very good question. Um I think one of the things on a personal level that I found most rewarding is to be able to be in the front line of the action, to actually have been part of what Global Witness is, and of course Global Witness is now many people, 85 people or so, but to be part of that and to be part of something that is fighting, you know, the dark forces, if you like, I found to be a tremendous privilege. So on the personal level, I I feel happy about that. On a in terms of the state of the world, well, I I think you know the world is in the most powerless state, I can remember it um since the Cold War, and I'm a child of the Cold War. Um but I am optimistic, I've always been optimistic. I couldn't do this job if I wasn't optimistic. And as long as we can still be getting some very bad people, um, then that's great. Um but right now, you know, the thing that motivates me is that we're on the brink of well, we're we're in various crises, you know, the crisis facing the Amazon, the climate crisis, etc. And we don't have much time. Um, so we have to fight even harder than we used to do. But on the real positive side, you know, the issue of corruption was virtually untalked about 30 years ago, and now it's always talked about. There are lots of laws in different countries as a result of campaigns by us and Transparency International and many other brilliant groups and journalists. Um so that the environment has changed, it's costing corrupt people and bad guys much more to do what they do than it used to cost them, it's much harder to do than it used to be. Um so it's it's a very long haul. Um you know, where will the world go now? I don't know. Um but it's worth fighting for.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:03

And which of the issues that you see is one the most cancerous on the planet, and two closest to your heart?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:17

One issue that's both of those.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:19

No, each, one of each.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:21

Each. I think the one that's closest to my heart is the the world's tropical forests and the people that uh live in them, the indigenous people, the local communities who are the forest best protectors, who are on the front line of a war, and that's not just a metaphorical war, it's a shooting war as well. You know, whereas campaigners like me and others can campaign for the rainforest, these guys are doing it, it's their life, they're living on the ground, they're being murdered on the ground, they have this tremendous knowledge of the world, the real living world that we simply have lost many years ago. And so I think that the fight to help those people do what they need to do, protect their way of life, to protect the environment they're dependent on, is the closest um thing to my heart. Um the closest issue in terms of campaigning for me is the one of corruption. Um I just think it's it's the worst evil, it's the most cynical crime, um, and it is the thing that weaves almost all evil on the planet together. Um there are other things more evil than it, but those things probably depend on it to do what they do with like genocide, for example.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:46

Yeah. And Okay, sorry, yeah, that does answer it. Um Finally, three questions I try to ask every guest that comes on. What is the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:02

Serendipity has played a big role in my life. Um whether one calls it that or something else. Um yeah, I I think one of the best pieces of advice I was given back in my twenties when I was a very feckless person in the construction industry was you you get sort of two or three really good opportunities in life, and the secret of life, of or a happy life, is recognising those opportunities when they come along and acting on them. Um you may or may not take them as not a right or wrong answer. And I think you know, in in in The Woman I Married, um, and in meeting Simon and Shamion cooking up the idea of global witness in pubs in in London and actually saying, Yeah, let's go do it, that's all serendipity. Yeah, um dripping with serendipity. Yeah, it wouldn't have happened, you know, and it's just like seize the moment. Um and I remember, you know, actually no, I'm not gonna say that one because it's one of the ones we haven't mentioned in the book, we need to leave some surprises.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:05

Um two questions. One a country you're particularly bullish on.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:20

I don't think I am particularly bullish or bullish on a particular country. Um I am more bullish on a particular veins of very bad people. I I think, you know, I've I've worked in many. I think Cambodia is a really good example because it's it's the country that Global Witness was born around, um cut our teeth on, helped pioneer a few things, seemed to be making some headway for a while. But because of corruption, the Prime Minister, there were two Prime Ministers when he began working there, one of them staged a coup, ousted the other one. That Prime Minister is still there, he's now a dictator, and all of the advances Cambodia made from this post-genocidal country with no civil society when we started working there, to a very rich country in terms of its quality of its people, um, its vision, its beauty, its opportunity has been destroyed by this guy. Um and he is an exemplar for me of the problem. You know, he he'll you know, world leaders are meeting in Cambodia right now, and and he's there, he should be in prison. Um people shouldn't be shaking his hand. So that you know, if if he was behind bars, I'd be I'd die a very happy man.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:56

And finally, a conversation between any two people of history, no language barrier, dead or alive. I don't know if you're a big podcast listener, but if you were to listen to a podcast between these two people, who are they?

SPEAKER_01 1:29:11

Um as soon as I finished this, I will put down the phone and then immediately think of somebody else, probably.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:19

Um Just don't say Jesus Buddha It wasn't gonna be that.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:25

Um Let me think, hold on Graham Green and Scarlet Johansson, that's a bit flippant. Okay. I was not expecting that.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:55

Why not? Why not? That'll be fantastic. All right. Thank you, Patrick. Um yeah. Loved the book. I'm incredibly inspired by Global Witness, um, and very thankful for you to be so generous uh with your time this afternoon.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:11

Well, thank you so much for asking me. I r really appreciate it, and thank you for what you're doing.