Curious Worldview

Oliver Bullough | The Awful Consequences Of Moneyland Are Compounding

• Ryan Faulkner • Episode 229

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Four years ago, almost to the day of recording, Oliver Bullough was a guest on this show for the first time to discuss his concept of 'Moneyland'. This borderless virtual country where the wealthy go to keep their wealth beyond the reach of any government, any tax office, any voter. Between then and now, I've maintained interest on this thread. Nicholas Shaxson discussed on the pod the cancerous plumbing of the offshore world in Treasure Islands. John Christensen showed how that plumbing quietly corrodes culture and politics. Bill Browder shows where the abstraction becomes violence. Nathan Lynch showed how Australia is every bit as dirty as anywhere else, and Matt Friedman, just a few weeks ago, put a number on the human end of it: $236 billion a year in illicit profit from modern slavery.

Oliver's latest book is Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won. His argument is bleak, precise, and very hard to wave away. We have spent decades and roughly $200 billion a year building an anti-money-laundering fortress, and by the best available estimates the share of the world economy being laundered hasn't moved since the 1990s. 

We get into why governments have failed so completely at this one. We follow the money where it actually goes: not just through banks, but through cash (central banks printing $100 bills faster than they can build factories), through crypto and stablecoins, and through the oldest trick of all — value hidden inside shipments of used cars, watches, oil, grain, the way the Medici did it in Florence. We talk about the scam compounds of Southeast Asia, where trafficked people are tortured into defrauding pensioners on the other side of the world, and how that horror connects — directly, traceably — to the very top of global power, through Tether, Cantor Fitzgerald, and a US Commerce Secretary's family.

And underneath all of it, the real subject: the relationship between money and power, and what happens to democracy when the two become the same thing. Oliver's "offshore bandits" — elites who loot their own countries while living and banking somewhere else, feeling none of the consequences — are a darker upgrade on Mancur Olson's stationary bandit. It's a Moneyland story, and it's spreading.

There are lighter turns too — Wright Patman, the forgotten Texan congressman who fathered anti-money-laundering law; Peter Pomerantsev and the propaganda war; Bill Browder before he was Bill Browder; and an unexpectedly lyrical detour to the walnut forests and white mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

Oliver Bullough...

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SPEAKER_00

Oliver Balo is a journalist and author. He has written Let Our Fame Be Great, The Last Man of Russia, Moneyland, Butler to the World, Everybody Loves Our Dollars, How Money Laundering Won, which is his latest, and what we're going to be speaking about today. Oliver was first a guest on the show almost four years ago to the day. I actually just checked. It was the 15th of March 2022. And I've been interested in money laundering and the cancerous nature of offshore finance since I first discovered Oliver's book, Moneyland, which has followed up many other guests since. Money laundering gets to the bottom of how criminal organizations can scale to the heights that they do, make scamming more scalable, cartels more scalable, trafficking more scalable. It's the heart of the cancerous plumbing of financial secrecy. Welcome back to the show, Mr. Bob. Yeah, it's great to be here. So is Moneyland an inevitable consequence of globalization? So if countries with no competitive advantage to speak of look out into the market and have no way to really generate an income for themselves, is using financial plumbing to create one an inevitability?

SPEAKER_01

Yes. I suppose it's an inevitable consequence of the combination of globalization and greed. The core problem, I think, with the way the world is organized or the way the world has come to work, is that money operates internationally, but the laws that restrain money, whether that is taxes or limits on money laundering or financial crime or whatever, those laws only work nationally or, you know, at best regionally. And so if you own enough money to move it around, if you can afford to move your money between countries, then you have an inevitable advantage over everyone else because you can move your money to a place where no one can find it. Now, you know, as, you know, as it were, to get ahead of the people who will inevitably write in to tell me that I should be more sympathetic to the needs of refugees and so on, yes, this is true. There are certain people who, as it were, have a need to move their money places where the authorities can't get it. Switzerland dined out for decades on the fact that it had supposedly and rather spuriously helped Jewish refugees hide their wealth from the Nazis, which it may or may not have done to a small extent, but it certainly was a no-hurry to give it back afterwards. It is of far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far greater significance that tax dodgers, particularly very wealthy citizens of Western countries, and kleptocrats and cartels and mafia groups are able to take advantage of financial secrecy to move their wealth around, to hide it from the authorities, and therefore to evade any accountability for the crimes they have committed. That's the really big deal here. Essentially, there is an inbuilt advantage for the owners of wealth who can afford the services of expensive lawyers, accountants, and so on to move their money outside the reach of their authorities. And this is corrosive to democracy, it's corrosive to accountability, it's corrosive to everything that we like. So, yes, to answer your question, moneyland, what I call moneyland, which is this sort of, as it were, virtual country where the wealthy can keep their wealth, moneyland is an inevitable side effect of the combination of partial globalization, which is globalization for money but not for legislation, along with greed. And that isn't just greed of the owners of wealth, it is also greed of their advisers, what I call their butlers, in my second book. You know, because often, although the it's the offshore centres like the British Virgin Islands and so on, Switzerland, that get criticized for accepting this wealth and hiding this wealth, they often don't do it of their own accord. They often get, you know, at the very least, advised by foreign professionals of how to do it. And in the case of quite a lot of offshore centres, the legislation was in fact entirely written and grafted onto their countries by, you know, foreign advisors, whether that's lawyers from the UK or the US or wherever. So yeah, there's a whole system. And basically, to cut a long story short, it means that if you're rich, you can get away with stuff that you can't if you're not.

SPEAKER_00

If you track the titles of the books, you go from Motherland to Butler of the World to How Money Laundering Won, there's a descending up to optimism that runs throughout those. And I can even sense in your response just now, it is such an overwhelming problem that you've decided to dig so deeply in and write about. If, take, for example, some of these offshore havens and they're going to act in their own best interest, which might be greedy interests, which allow for this international plumbing. Is there realistically any way out of it without one world government?

SPEAKER_01

Well, it it's it's a really interesting question about optimism. When I was researching Moneyland, actually before I'd even come up with the idea of writing a book about corruption and offshore finance, just when I was mainly looking at corruption in Ukraine or corruption of money in and around Ukraine coming out of Ukraine, I was so appalled by what I was discovering that I essentially assumed that all I had to do was tell someone about it, and all of these problems would be solved. It was, you know, but that didn't happen. And then I suppose I assumed that the problem was so terrible that it would definitely be solved before I wrote a book about it, right? That I probably needed to hurry up and get the book out because otherwise the problem would be solved before the book was published. But, you know, I have become a little bit less naive since then. I'm still optimistic. You have to be optimistic, really. Otherwise you'd give up and become a money launderer yourself. You know, and there's no point in being pessimistic because that just means the bad guys have already won. But it is it it can be at times difficult to continually explain, you know, to people in positions of authority the significance of what it is you're talking about and hear them say, oh yeah, that does sound significant, and then nothing ever happens. That can get at times a little bit wearing. But you know, you just carry on. I mean, it could be worse. I could have to work for a living.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Can anyone in some sort of position of authority who may potentially be able to make a change around this plead ignorance anymore?

SPEAKER_01

I don't think so. I mean, I think it's all right to plead ignorance to particular some of the more Baroque details of what criminals get up to. Criminals are incredibly entrepreneurial. I mean, one of the things I really enjoyed with this latest book, in a way, I mean, if enjoyed is the word, was just some of the details of how criminals move money around, the degrees of imagination involved. You know, I feel that if some of these money laundering gangs had set their mind to solving climate change or something, then the problem would have been solved decades ago because they're just so good at solving problems. So no, I think you know, anyone in a position of responsibility now has to be aware not only of what's happening and how it happens, but also of the consequences of it. That I think become it's become grossly obvious to everyone from, you know, not least the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, if it wasn't obvious before that. But I suppose what I get into in this latest book, Everybody Loves Our Dollars, was trying to work out and explain why it is that efforts to solve this problem, the problem of money laundering and unaccountable offshore wealth, you know, why they've failed. Because, you know, I would get contacted, not all the time, but also not infrequently, after my previous two books about money came out, by people working in government or law enforcement or banks or whatever, telling me that I was being a bit mean, that I was cr critical of their efforts. And actually they were working really hard and doing their best. And couldn't I recognize that at least they needed a little bit of credit for that? And so, you know, enough of them had contacted me, and I'm not here to be mean to people, I'm, you know, I consider myself to be a relatively um nice person temperamentally. Uh and I wanted to, if they were genuinely working really hard, I wanted to give them credit for that. So I took them at their word and decided to analyze why is it that if there are lots of people in banks and law enforcement and government who are working really hard and they do care about this issue as much as I do, why have they completely failed to solve it? Because they have. The best estimates that we have of the volume of money being laundered around the world as a proportion of the global economy have remained unchanged since the 90s. And since that time, the world has built up a huge and incredibly expensive and extremely intrusive system for checking financial transactions. And I think that actually there is a surprising lack of public concern about how intrusive this system is. It is amazing the powers that governments have essentially delegated to banks to check our, as it were, private and secret financial affairs. But having given themselves these very intrusive powers, governments have totally failed to solve the problem they've been setting out to fail. And that is really interesting because governments, if they set themselves the task of solving a problem, they tend to be pretty good at solving it. You know, you can look at deaths in road traffic accidents or diseases like smallpox or whatever, which the government's just said that's a bad disease, we should get rid of that. And in surprisingly short order, they did. So that hasn't happened with money laundering. On the contrary, money laundering is booming. It is easier now than it's ever been. And why is that? You know, that's a that's a really interesting question. And that's the question that I sort of set out to answer in the book.

SPEAKER_00

Why is that? I suppose despite all the amazing anti-money laundering measures that British banks or Australian banks or Swedish banks, you talk about SEB in the book, might have to go through. There is an international market for competition. And one can simply go elsewhere. And that doesn't even start to mention the fact that there is crypto and Solana and cash, which has moved through enormous quantities. I thought that was a really fun, interesting chapter in the book. Just how much cash is put in a box and sent somewhere.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, it is fascinating the degree of inconsistency and incoherence in society's response to financial crime. And in my quest for a convincing metaphor in the book, I was trying to imagine, you know, the authorities building a fortress around our economy to keep the criminals out. And yet, although some bits of the walls of that fortress are astonishingly well fortified, and you know, slipping, you know, criminal wealth through financial institutions is obviously not impossible because it happens all the time. But you have to be pretty sophisticated. It requires a quite a lot of forethought and planning in order to outwit their automated red flags that they that they put up over any suspicious transaction. But at the same time, there is this amazing parallel economy that entirely runs in cash, which no one gives any thought to at all, and which is booming. I mean, I think it is really counterintuitive to a lot of people, the fact that cash usage in all, actually pretty much all countries on Earth, I imagine, particularly in developed countries, cash usage is plummeting. You know, it wasn't that long ago in the UK when, you know, it was what 10, 15 years ago, like about 50% of transactions involved cash. Now it's fewer than 10%. The decline has been precipitous. And that is true, not quite as steeply in, say, the United States or in the European Union, but you know, really that that decline is mirrored everywhere. And yet, the amount of cash being printed by major central banks just goes up and up and up. You know, it hits a record high every month in the United States. Same, you know, the same is true to a lesser or greater extent absolutely everywhere. And where's the cash going? You know, because we only you know, central banks issue us cash if we want it. You know, that's the deal with cash. You can buy it if you want it and sell it back to them for the same price if you don't. That's why cash is a useful thing to have. But we don't want it. We should be. If central banks, you would imagine if they had a problem, it would be that they had more cash than they know what to do with it. It was just piling up in rooms somewhere because we kept giving it back to them. But on the contrary, you know, in the United States, they're having to build a whole new factory in Maryland to keep up with demand for cash. And where's the demand coming from? So you have this really extraordinary weird situation where governments are imposing these really onerous and expensive checks on banks that banks have to do on their customer deposits, while at the same time they are printing more cash than it's pretty much possible to imagine to allow the criminals to outflank those same checks. Um so it's like with one hand they're punching you in the face and the other one they're shaking your hand, or with one foot they're stamping on the accelerator and the other one they're stamping on the brake. It's it's completely bewildering how stupid this is. And the thing is it's it's not like I broke any news here. You know, that's what's so sort of strange about quite often what I what I do is I feel like I'm I'm just writing about stuff that everyone already knows, and yet nothing ever gets done. That's what's, I mean, kind of annoying, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Ross Powell, If you feel like you're writing about a stuff that everyone knows, are you then surprised by the success of your books and then how they might be spoken about in narrow parts of the culture? Alistair Campbell, for instance, is mentioning you all the time. And um, presumably in the UK he gets a big rap. I see the books everywhere on bookshelves. So do how how can you feel that way, but that also be the case? Yeah, I I don't know, really.

SPEAKER_01

I suppose there's a there is a a role to be played in society by the fool, you know. Like in uh in the medieval court, you'd have people whose job it was just to just to be inappropriate, to say the stuff that everyone knew but no one said, you know. And I do feel a bit like that sometimes, that I'm just the person like the annoying kid brother in a family gathering who stands up and points out that Auntie Shirley is cheating on her on her husband and you know, Uncle Colin drinks too much. But maybe that's my job. But just to be the person who says, we're spending $200 billion a year on compliance every year, and yet at the same time, you know, the the US government is exporting $100 billion worth of hundred dollar bills. Where are they going? You know, why are we spending all this if we're also making money out of that? Do you what you know, why don't we just stop doing both? Yeah, and you know, they net out above and below the line. You know, and so I I suppose there's an element of of that. Because it isn't just that the money laundering system that we have is really expensive, although it is. I mean, $200 billion a year, which is what banks spend on compliance. No, that's globally. Globally, $200 billion. You could, with $200 billion a year, you could, according to the UN estimates, you could provide clean water and sanitation to everyone on earth and enough food to everyone on earth, and you'd have $50 billion left over. That's a lot of money right there. And it's achieving nothing. And you know, and there should be far more consideration about that. So it isn't just that the system is really expensive. It's completely ineffective. It is totally failing to do the job which it's supposed to be doing, which is to stop money laundering. And it's also, and I think this is a really important point from the book, which I I'm really keen to get across, it's really unfair. The people who are affected by our system of tackling money laundering are the people who are already disadvantaged above all. If you are rich, even if you're a financial criminal, it doesn't much matter. You will always find someone who will take your business. But if you are poor and you look like you might be a financial criminal, no one cares whether you are or aren't. They will just kick you out of a bank. That's what happens. And you see this happening en masse globally, whether that's in the UK or Australia, in the US, Canada, European Union, everywhere. You see this with Muslims en masse because Muslims are suspected of involvement in financing terrorism to a far greater extent than other ethnic groups. Muslims have distinctive names, which they often share with many other people. So you'll see someone's name in a media report and you don't know if it's the same person. And if these people are poor and they can't said they're not really generating fees for a bank, they'll just be debanked in a flash because why bother doing the checks? Why bother taking the risk of moving terrorist money if you don't have to? And it isn't just uh disadvantaged communities who are being affected, it's also disadvantaged countries. There's been some really troubling research by the central bank in the Bahamas. And, you know, okay, special pleading, the central bank in the Bahamas is often criticized for being a tax haven. But at the same time, if you look at the work that they've done analyzing the international checks made by the Financial Action Task Force, which is the global money laundering watchdog set up by the G7 back in the 1980s, if you look at the checks they make on countries, you could predict the results that those checks would come back with, not with no knowledge at all about the financial system of the country, but based entirely on whether the that was a poor country and whether its population had black or brown skin. And that's a really worrying situation that we have. If we have a system that is, by its results, objectively racist, then it should at least be looked at to ask whether there is a deep underlying reason for that. Um if if that's the result that we end up with, you know, and it's for good reasons, well, it's sort of worrying and suspicious, but okay. But there's no reason to think that it is for good reasons. It's just that we have a system that, you know, is prejudiced against poor countries. And that's stupid, because that's not where money laundering happens. Money laundering happens in Manhattan, London, and Switzerland.

SPEAKER_00

A couple of things on that. If is the $200 billion figure calculated as potential income that wasn't accrued because they had the measures in place? Or is that a raw, this amount of money has been allocated by the state to the corporations to implement anti-money laundering?

SPEAKER_01

No, no, that's that that's the amount of money that that I mean, this is an estimate from LexisNexis, the, you know, I mean, international information company. Lex that's the amount that LexisNexis estimates that financial institutions spend complying with laws against financial crime. So that is that is money that has been taken from, as it were, a bank's shareholders and they've been forced to spend individual costs to the banks. But that isn't obviously the shareholders aren't going to be spending it themselves and sucking up that cost. They're going to be passing that cost on to their clients. So that is, you know, money that society is spending tackling financial crime. It isn't called a tax, but it effectively is a tax because governments are forcing private institutions to spend it. So even though it isn't going via the government, it may as well be a tax. So it is a tax on society.

SPEAKER_00

A super lefty comment here. But if, for example, we take $200 billion as this incredible amount of money, and you said you could cure hunger, water, sanitation for $150, I would say it is not nearly close to being enough when you have a look at you start the book off with broad estimates, with the lower end being all illicit money activity could be the equivalent to the 10th largest country in the world, and on the higher end, the third largest country in the world. So we're talking trillions of dollars here. Therefore, the balance between the money that's being spent on anti-money laundering and then the money that is being profited from money laundering itself is uh off-kilter. It's totally imbalanced and therefore much more money, significantly more expense, significantly more problems, actually maybe should be in enforced onto the banks.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I I mean I I totally understand that that perspective. But I think the problem is that it's based on a flawed assumption, which is how money laundering works. Money laundering doesn't only work via banks. There are many other ways of moving money around. And it's really actually money laundering is an annoying term that we've ended up using, partly because it doesn't involve any actual laundering. Obviously, it's metaphorical in that regard. But more importantly, because it doesn't necessarily involve any actual money. We're not talking about money, we're talking about value. And value can move around the place in many forms other than money. Yes, it can go via a bank account, and yes, it can go via a big box full of banknotes. But you can move value in the form of a used car, in the form of a shipment of cocaine, in the shipment of of luxury watches, of handbags, of anything at all in in oil, in grain, anything which has value, that value can be manipulated to move excess value from one place to another. And this is a far more significant problem than the financial system, simply because it is completely, really, I mean, by the standards of the financial system, essentially completely uncontrolled. How do cartels move their wealth around? Yes, they use crypto, and yes, they use cash, but they also use really large quantities of manufactured goods that they ship from one place to another and they hide their profits and losses in the shipments. This is how the Medici's used to bank in Renaissance Florence, and it's how criminals still bank today. And so the problem is that I I completely agree with you that banks have a responsibility to the societies in which they're based not to move criminal wealth. And I don't have any problem at all about governments imposing rules on banks to force them to live up to that responsibility. What I do have a problem with is that we have a really stupid system where governments don't appear to have realized that it isn't only banks that move criminal wealth around, and that you need to, if you're going to have any chance of stopping it, you need to impose similarly strict checks on the movement of other things as well as the movement of electronic money. Otherwise, you're just going to end up with all of that criminal wealth moving via different channels completely uninterrupted. So we we essentially impose very steep costs, both in discrimination on poor Muslims particularly, and in fees on businesses and ordinary people, we impose those strict costs on everyone without actually achieving enough because we've created a really incoherent and inconsistent system where if you can't get a bank account, you can just use cash or move money in the form of used cars like the Hespolardi.

SPEAKER_00

Could you argue, though, that without the formal bank account, which is attached to one's ID and it's attached to a tax file number and it's attached to corporation numbers and filings and so forth, crypto and cash wouldn't be able to travel as far. And therefore it might be the most significant leg to properly enforce, since enforcing against cash and crypto is a much steeper hill to climb. I mean That might be an argument for why it should be more.

SPEAKER_01

Yes. Yes, I I mean I I know what you mean. Obviously, you know, using a financial institution bank account is super easy and useful and convenient, and criminals would like doing that as much as everyone else does. So, yes, there should obviously be checks there, but it isn't sufficient. If you look at, I mean, do you Mention crypto, if you look at a lot of modern money laundering methodologies which have been exposed in the last couple of years, and we see this in with Russian propaganda organizations, Russian spy agencies, just Russian ordinary criminals. We see this with Chinese money laundering gangs, we see this with the cartels in South America. You know, you hand over cash and then receive and exchange crypto, and crypto is used for moving essentially value from one country to another, but within that country you just use cash. That's completely outside of the regulated financial system, unless you consider crypto to be regulated, which it sort of kind of is a little bit in some places. You know, so so that is is happening completely in the dark. And I think that the problem is it's a little bit like that joke about, you know, it's not a very funny joke, but anyway, it is technically a joke. It's the structure of a joke. With a policeman walking along, you know, on his rounds at night and he sees a drunk guy scrabbling around on the ground under a streetlight, and he says, What are you doing, sir? And the man says, I'm looking for my keys. And he goes, Did you lose them here? And he goes, No, I lost them in the park, but it's dark over there, so I'm looking where I can see. Um, you know, and it's a little bit like that with where the government is looking for criminal money. It's like, well, it's really hard to look, like you say, in cash and crypto. And it's really hard to look in the trade network, possibly impossible. So we'll look where it's easy to look. And it's easy to look in the financial system because all you've got to do is search through a spreadsheet and you can automate that. Now, the criminals know this as well as anyone. They are as well networked and significantly more entrepreneurial than pretty much everyone else. So they know where the government knows how to knows to look, and they know where it's easy to find stuff. So they adapt to that and they and they they just operate elsewhere. Um so you know, it is a just a very badly designed system, and it's very expensive and it's discriminatory, and it's completely ineffective. That's the problem. So yeah, I mean I'm not I'm not very much not coming at this from a particular political viewpoint, except for the political viewpoint that I really don't want there to be financial crime. And that's my main overriding interest. Because, you know, I see the terrible damage it does pretty much everywhere, and it's doing ever more. You know, I I don't just I suppose I don't just consider this to be a financial crime problem, but this is a democracy problem. You know, this ever-growing gravitational pull of the offshore money is beginning to rip apart the structures of democracies. And in, you know, we see this at the moment in the United States very dramatically. But I think that that's I don't think anywhere is safe.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Can you give more evidence on that latter point where money laundering is a threat to democracy?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, I think I mean, you know, the the the part of the world that I know best apart from the bit that I'm looking at from my window is the former Yes, it is beautiful today, green and lovely. Nowhere nowhere is more beautiful than Wales in April. But that is a a hill I will I'm prepared to die on, and we have a lot of very lovely hills. Possibly Wales in May. Anyway, the the part of the world I know best apart from this bit is is the former Soviet Union. And I moved to Russia in the late 1990s when Russia had a chance to build democracy for the first time in its history. And, you know, there are many competing explanations for why it failed. Maybe it was an impossible task. Who knows? Maybe building democracy in a big country like Russia and as spread out and is as as diverse as Russia is is inherently impossible. I don't believe that. I think anywhere can be democratic. But I do think that the way the country's elite was able to steal everything, and then having stolen everything to stash their wealth outside the reach of the government, um, and essentially to to create an alliance between the government and financial crime so they became the same thing. I think that that meant democracy was impossible to build, because it was impossible for any rival interest group built on the will of the people rather than just the will of the wealthy people. It was impossible for that to influence the country's money. And that, you know, we've seen in lots of other places, all across the former colonies of Africa and South America. We've seen the same thing happening whereby a very small class of people have basically monopolized the country's resources, stashed their money offshore, and allowed their offshore wealth to project influence back in an unaccountable way to their homeland.

SPEAKER_00

That's the problem. But Oliver, what why is it why is that money laundering, which is at fault there, a sort of tyrannical, power-hungry dictatorship, whatever you want to call it, leadership style of people before there was electronic transfer of funds and a huge international competition for banking services, would have still have behaved in the exact same way. Is the point you're making that the the scale which money laundering, the current offshore system allows for, is the real threat versus it actually money laundering itself? No, I think. Putin and his cronies might have still controlled their corner of power within Russia, even if they couldn't have parked their money offshore.

SPEAKER_01

No, I d see I don't agree with that, because I think that there is something fundamentally different about the modern globalized economy compared to previous economies. I mean, all current democracies have been at a time not democracies. I mean, particularly if you look at European countries, you know, Britain, France, whatever, how did those countries that were not democracies become democracies? It was an incredibly slow, laborious process with lots of missteps and backwards and forwards, and obviously they're not perfect today. But the really important point, and I'm you know very influenced by the argument that Mansoor Olson makes about the development of states, the really important point is that you get a time when the the interests of the owners of wealth become aligned with the interests of ordinary people, that they all want, you know, better roads, they all want, you know, law and order on the streets, they all want courts that function, they all want, you know, essentially an efficient and an effective government system. And that is the pathway that creates an efficient state, an effective state, and eventually a democratic state. You know, that I think is is, I mean, it's an argument I find very convincing. Where the system with somewhere like Russia or somewhere like Nigeria or somewhere like Bangladesh is different is that those countries came essentially to democracy, to freedom at a time when there was a fundamentally different form of the economy, which is that it was possible to move your money outside of Russia or Bangladesh or Nigeria to keep it elsewhere, but to still have power and influence over your own country, which essentially means that the government of those countries became that it was almost like they were colonizing their own country in a way that you didn't see with Henry VIII, for example, or Louis XVI. That was a different system. So that form of globalized, you know, I mean, Mansoor Olsen makes a distinction between roving bandits and stationary bandits, that roving bandits would go around stealing stuff from people, and then they became stationary bandits and just established themselves in a group of people and predated from them all the time. And that's the beginning of government. That's when you get an alliance between the powerful and the weak. But what we have with what's happening in Russia or Azerbaijan or wherever is offshore bandits, people who essentially don't really care about the long-term future of the society that they govern because they can just keep abstracting wealth from it. And that is fundamentally different, and that's a moneyland story. So, you know, I do think that the system we have with globalized wealth but nationalized regulations is very corrosive if we let it be to the long-term future of democracy.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell And I guess it becomes even more of a moneyland story when those extracting the wealth don't even need to live in their own countries to extract it and therefore experience all of the negative externality of not keeping up with the roads, not having a functional legal system, having poverty all around them.

SPEAKER_01

Aaron Powell Yeah. And and I mean I do think there is an important consequence of crypto here that I don't think has been adequately discussed. And this I think it might be something I might address in a future book, that say what you like about a tax haven, right? And this is a stupid thing for me to say because I have, you know, been on record for being a bit critical of tax havens in the past. Say what you like about a tax haven. At least it's a country, right, that you can diplomatically pressure and that you can have some form of political engagement. You know, the British Virgin Islands does have pressure points as a country that you can influence. And, you know, so does Switzerland. Switzerland held out for the longest time, but eventually the United States and other countries managed to force Switzerland to reveal the secrets of its banks to them. You know, that has happened. That isn't the case with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies don't have a country. They're just everywhere and nowhere. You know, you've ended up with a a globalized form of money that is accountable only to its owners. Privatized money is a really worrying invention. And, you know, it's always talked about as if it's a, you know, a repository of freedom, but it's only repository of freedom for the people who own it. It's not for anyone else.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you make that argument really well in the book. I think it was something like fighting against the libertarian instinct of crypto after a bunch of preambles saying how much you didn't want to write about crypto within the book.

SPEAKER_01

I do I mean I do. I just find crypto people extremely irritating. I find evangelical people really irritating in in general, to be honest. But I find crypto people particularly irritating because I it feels like that that they're, you know, it's it's so much special pleading of like, oh, this is so amazing, this is gonna change the world. It's like, no, it's gonna change things for you. It's not gonna change things for anything anyone else. It's certainly not gonna improve things for anyone.

SPEAKER_00

Are you holding your breath for some type of quantum chip to just come and destroy the blockchain across the board?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, listen, I'm not, you know, I'm sure I mean it's weird, isn't it? The blockchain. Everyone held up the blockchain, it was gonna be the answer to everything, and then everyone's forgotten and now it's AI is gonna be the answer to everything. You know, I mean, I'm sure the blockchain is a useful piece of technology in a sort of, you know, plumbing of the world kind of a way, and maybe it could be repurposed in a useful way. But but you know, I'm currently writing an article that the edits I'm going through at the moment are about uh you know, a Russian cryptocurrency called A7A5, um, which you know was created by a cryp uh partnership between a convicted fraudster and a state bank to help Russians dodge sanctions. You know, and that is a really potentially incredibly powerful development as a way to create a new form of financial system totally outside of any other government's oversight, but allowing you to project influence into the world. And that's something we should all be really aware of and worried about. And the idea that everyone's just looking at this as an unmitigated good thing is is uh is I think very short-sighted. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's nuts, isn't it? Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean I mean financial financial innovation Financial innovation is always a myth, really. There's no such thing as financial innovation. You're just coming up with new ways of doing things that have always been done in the past, but wrapping them in a new acronym and making it look clever and new. But it's always the same old thing. And and it takes you ten or fifteen years for the governments to catch up and say, Oh yeah, God, yeah, we already had rules against that. It's like, well, oof.

SPEAKER_00

A bunch of different exchanges of value. Yeah, exactly. This one can't be seen by these people, this one can be seen by those. Yeah. It fe it feels like this uh this is the the coming to the top of the hill of the great argument that uh obviously is touched upon in Moneyland, touched upon a butler to the world, touched upon in the latest book. But what you really want to get to, which is how this offshore plumbing is actually just so cancerous to our modern society. And it is actually a bigger story than simply how that same plumbing allows for the scale of all these criminal organizations and allows for all these bad guys and allows for your grandma to get scammed. But it's actually much more pernicious than that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, I think the really important point to get to, I think, and it it's something I've been thinking about quite a lot recently, is the relationship between money and power. Why aren't money and power the same thing? You know, why is it that if you walk down the street in Wales where I live, that, you know, the the someone who's got more money isn't immediately able to do whatever they want? And you know, the reason for that is that there are other alternative sources of power, whether that's the court system or the media or you know, or politics or whatever. Or society in general. You know, but the more that rich people are able to break free of the chains of that society and the change of those institutions, the more that money and power will just be the same thing. And we'll and we'll return to you know a medieval system. And if you look at if you look at you know statistics for inequality, you know, in a lot of societies we've gone back in terms of the inequality of wealth in society, back to where we were in the years before the First World War. And that is worrying because you know you end up with the say that again. That's a significant statistic. Is that the case? What kind of if you look at if you look at figures for the United States, you know, the wealth inequality in the US is very comparable to what it was back in the Gilded Age now. If you look at figures for Russia, it's it's more unequal now, probably, than it was under the Tsars, which is kind of extraordinary. Um, in in I mean, different there are different I mean, the same is true in in places like uh China or India. I mean, this is often conflated globally. If you look globally, the situation with wealth inequality is has actually been quite good over the last 30 or 40 years because of the impact of the the rise of China, which meant an awful lot of very poor people have risen um globally into the ranks of the more sort of middle income. But if you look within countries, within China, within India, within the US or wherever, you you see uh this steepening inequality almost everywhere. You know, inevitably, off inequality leads to other forms of inequality. That's just the nature of of people. And you know, and that's something I think we all need to be much more aware of. So essentially, sort of underground, underneath everything that I write about, whether that's you know offshore finance or money laundering or whatever, it's just about the owners of wealth figuring out ways or or being given ways to evade the responsibilities being placed on them by everyone else. And them to say, no, I'm wealthy, I don't need to listen to you because you are not.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell But how much can you really lay at the feet of money laundering, the problem of growing wealth inequality? Clearly it's a part, but it seems like that might be too long of a bow to draw.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it is you're right, it is only a part of it. You know, the the the more powerful you are, the more you know your financial misdeeds are not actually criminal, because you get to write what the laws are and therefore decide what is and isn't criminal. You know, in this book in particular, I was focusing on money laundering because you know it's an i it's a very interesting subset of you know financial misbehavior uh with a with its own particular philosophy and history. I suppose in previous books, particularly in in Moneyland, I was very careful to make the point that the institutions and innovations of the offshore financial world, whether that's offshore trusts or shell companies or numbered bank accounts or whatever, these were not invented for financial criminals. These were not invented for the cartels or the mafia or or even for the KGB. These were invented to allow wealthy people to dodge taxes. That's where the demand always is. So, you know, the first the first British Virgin Island shell companies were sold for US people to dodge US taxes. You know, Swiss bank accounts became popular to help French people dodge taxes. You know, this is this is always the way Jersey, for example, as a as a tax haven grew up because British people wanted to uh dodge taxes, or particularly people from the British Empire who didn't want to put their money in the UK. You know, the the the overarching story all the way through, so there isn't a distinction really, if you look at the money, there isn't a distinction between money laundering and and other forms of financial misbehavior, whether that's tax dodging or just kind of general, you know, grey behavior. You know, it is always done by the same institutions and the same structures designed by the same people. You know, it isn't there isn't there isn't really a distinction. A really important point, again, going back to crypto, if you're looking at the people who are really profiting from crypto at the moment, you know, yes, there is there are various billionaires who are doing very well out of it, but also there's quite a lot of family members of senior ad administration officials in the United States. You know, there's an that alliance between different forms of power, political power and financial power. You know, that that's been embedded at the heart of this always.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Is there a part of you that's shocked there isn't more of a condemnation that seems to affect the family members of the President of the United States and he himself for his dealings with Trump coin and cryptocurrency?

SPEAKER_01

I think it's very It's very interesting in lots of countries, and lots of countries. We see this to a certain extent in in the UK as well, where where our own sort of right-wing party reform UK is is very extensively funded by crypto people. I find it very interesting that there is this alliance between right-wing populists and crypto people that somehow has managed to persuade a significant proportion of the population that they're on the side of the, you know, the ordinary man and woman. You know, that they're not just like every other rich financial group. They're just going to rip everyone off for their own benefit, because that's always what happens. You know, it really interests me that that that that propaganda job has worked um so successfully. And I'm yeah, I'm interested by how that is. And actually, I think, to be honest, that this is um very much to the demerit of, you know, as it were, the old Verticomas progressive classes. The fact that they've been presented as being so out of touch and so sort of, you know, self-serving is really it's a real failure by the traditional leftish parties. Um, and and something I think they should be much more aware of. And that it's been so easy for such obvious fraudsters to present them as being themselves fraudsters is is a pretty bad sign for their own propaganda skills.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Ross Powell Do you have any speculation as to how the propaganda has been so effective? Something psychological, maybe about it.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, there's so much to it, isn't there, about the skills of finding wedge issues and stuff. I mean, you see this in in in the US debate in particular all the time. I mean, the fact that they managed to make your opinion on abortion somehow correlate with your opinion on the the top rate of tax is is kind of extraordinary. You know, and it yeah, it's very much to the credit of the propagandists uh who managed to to achieve this. But I mean I think the rest of us should be a little bit more aggressive in pushing back against it, maybe.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Ross Powell Did your time in Russia overlap with Peter Pomaranza?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I know Peter really well. We were we were good. Yeah, we're good mates in Moscow. Yeah. He's so he's a a very, very gifted observer. I mean, you know, if people listen to this don't know his books, his first book, Everything Is Went It's the first one is true. Nothing is true and everything is possible. That's why I always get that the wrong way around. Is I think the most brilliant evocation of the sort of shifting sort of uncertainties on which the whole modern propaganda world is based. He's a very funny guy, but also an incredibly thoughtful thinker about how power talks to the powerless, and he manages to communicate that incredibly well.

SPEAKER_00

That was just a massive aside. The last 20 minutes has been more about broader issues for which the plumbing of offshore finance reaps its consequence on the world. But to make it more narrow, uh you take a look at something like modern slavery. I interviewed a guy the other week called Matt Friedman, and he cited a figure that as much as $236 billion annually in illicit profits can be attributed to modern slavery. Now, this is criminal activity. It's most largely cash-driven, crypto driven. But to bring it back to a more narrow, emotional, unanimously across the board, this is what the this is as depraved as the offshore plumbing system makes possible. Can you tell some type of story for how money laundering would make the scale of those types of organizations possible? Hopefully through some type of anecdote which you would have come across within your research. And I know that was a terribly bundled question.

SPEAKER_01

But with Yeah, I mean I think the most disturbing example of the nexus between what can feel like a fairly theoretical problem like money laundering and something that's so visceral as modern slavery. I think you see this in the particularly the kind of scam compounds of Southeast Asia, of Cambodia and so on, um, where you have, you know, groups of buildings surrounded by barbed wire where trafficked people or people who have been enticed into work by completely misleading job adverts and have sought work, they are imprisoned in these compounds and abused, you know, with cattle prod's torture essentially, to to keep working, not allowed to leave. And their job is to prey on vulnerable people all over the world, you know, often pensioners in Western countries who who aren't very good at, you know, computers or or the financial tech, and prey on them to extort their money from them, to defraud them of their money, so that money can go to the traffickers of these people in these scam compounds. You have essentially, I mean, I was talking about the nexus between wealth and power. This is the most direct example of it. The fact that these gang bosses have control over the bodies of these trafficked individuals, and they're able to use that control to project their influence globally to steal money from vulnerable people in the US and the UK and Europe, Australia, wherever, is the most extraordinary example of how slavery works in an offshore world. And, you know, that is largely run on the blockchain. A lot of that is is from stable coins, other forms of cryptocurrency. And it is happening because of the complicity of government officials in in the countries of Southeast Asia, and it is to the detriment of people absolutely everywhere. And it's really shocking that that continues and persists, and it proving incredibly hard to do anything about it. And I really, you know, it it's just a a grotesque, almost a grotesque over exaggeration of something that we're seeing happening in other areas too, just not quite as dramatically. That form of the the world's failure to do something about the way financial criminals are able to. Project their influence across borders in order to defraud people, to steal from people, to make other people's lives miserable and unintolerable, the reality of what money laundering is and why it's such a big deal. So yeah, I mean, you know, they are grotesque in a in a in a whole new way, the scam compounds of Southeast Asia. But you know, but that's just a question of of degree rather than of kind. You know, all financial criminals are up to that, those tricks, just not quite as successfully. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00

Go, go even a little bit more fine-tuned on those details. Say for in for instance, in one of these towers in Cambodia, they need to buy a bunch of computers, a bunch of software, pay a bunch of an electricity bill, and then also need to facilitate the money from the scam into some third account. You mentioned stable coins and cash, but I feel like there is several more layers of actual money laundering, how do they make it such that this uh these organizations can scale to the heights that they do and not just be small?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, if you are generating that degree of wealth in cryptocurrencies, you're not going to find it difficult to exchange that with complicit financial institutions or crypto exchanges into fiat currencies that allowed you to buy things in the real world. I suppose what I find extraordinary is that a lot of the cryptocurrency transactions that you read about are done in stable coins, particularly in one called USDT. And I should say that USDT, which is run by a company called Tether, uh, you know, Tether insists that it cooperates with all the world's law enforcement agencies and proactively freezes transactions when they are alert when when it is alerted to them. Um, and all of that is, I'm sure, true. You do see this happening. But what's particularly extraordinary is that there's no doubt that a lot of the growth of USDT has been driven by its convenience for criminal groups, whether that's you know the cartels in Colombia who've used USDT, whether that's Russian money launderers have used USDT, whether that's the scam compounds in Cambodia who used USDT. You know, there are now something like USD Tether now owns something like $120 billion worth of US government bonds to support the value of its cryptocurrency. You know, it's a fairly significant investment in US government debt. So you have a situation where the interests of the US government and the interests of one of the world's biggest cryptocurrencies are directly aligned. And it's not just that, because you know, financial services to Tether were provided for, well, still provided by a U.S. financial institution called Canter Fitzgerald, which is, you know, a significant financial institution in New York, that was run until he became commerce secretary by Howard Lutnick and is now run by his sons. That how Counter Fitzgerald has a 5% convertible bond in Tether. So you have a situation where a man who is the Commerce Secretary of the United States, his family can personally profit from this cryptocurrency, which, although, as I say, it does cooperate with law enforcement agencies and does freeze money when asked to, but at the same time, a lot of its utility comes from the fact that it's so useful for criminal gangs to move money around. You know, and so when I talk about the nexus between wealth and power, that's what I'm talking about. You know, and we see this again and again and again in lots of different ways. So, you know, I think it's really important to keep focus on the victims of the scam compounds in Southeast Asia. Absolutely, of course it is. But we also at the same time, you need to, with one eye, look at that, with the other eye, make sure that you you can trace the connections to the very top of global power and how this is working. It isn't enough to only look at one, it isn't enough to only look at the other. It's all connected, it's all one system.

SPEAKER_00

If if we were watching a movie set in like the 60s or 70s, and you had just detailed that scandalous relationship between the Lutniks and Tether and the US bonds, the conclusion of the movie would be something along the lines of it brought down all the bad guys, and this entire criminal organization was shut off because of it, and the journalists involved were all, you know, hailed as heroes. So you can document right there this insanely corrupt relationship, right? Do you think that there is less of an appetite today for just the hard facts of these types of um examples of corruption to be sufficient enough to actually drive change? Or do you think it's kind of always been this way and we just sort of romanticize in the past several instances where an investigative journalist's work has actually brought down some type of power structure?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, I think it I think it's easy to it's easy to think that we were better at this in the past than we are now. I mean, you know, a lot of a lot of you're talking about is is a consequence of the decline of the legacy media, the mainstream media, the, the, the old, you know, printed media and its influence. And that's good and bad. And there have been plenty of examples in the past, whether that's the Watergate scandal or whatever, where, you know, proper investigative journalists have brought down powerful men, but there have also been plenty of examples where journalists have been complicit in the misdeeds of powerful men and have hidden them. So, you know, social media, you know, is good and bad too. If you look at the work that, say, an organization like Bellencat does, which is every bit the match of any investigative journalist journalistic work ever done anywhere ever, anywhere, you know, that's impossible without social media. So, you know, I mean, I'm not I'm not personally a fan of social media as a rule. I I particularly don't like the way it is controlled and gamed by the Elon Musks of this world. Aaron Ross Powell, but I but I don't think we should be too starry-eyed about how the media was in the in the good old days as well. I mean, you know, Rupert Murdoch as a media magnate was every bit as political and ideological as Elon Musk is now, you know, and his influence over, you know, particularly the media in the US, the UK, and Australia is legendary.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Just a few more for you, Oliver. Australia, where does that come into your life as you're doing research for money laundering?

SPEAKER_01

I don't know Australia at all. I wish I did. I'd like to go. Uh there. I mean, but there has been some really interesting Australian researchers who have done really foundational work about the volume of money being laundered and so on. So I mean, I've have spoken to quite a lot of Australians. To be honest, I think one of the most entertaining examples of Australia's influence was the Australian researcher who came up with the term Vancouver model to describe a particular form of money laundering via casinos and blamed it on British Columbia, despite the fact that this was very much present in Sydney and he could have easily called it the Sydney model. I feel the fact that he successfully managed to blame the Canadians for something that was happening rampantly in Australia at the time is is very much to the credit of the Australian who managed to blame that on the Canadians. And the Canadians should have got in their head and called it the Sydney model. The Vancouver model really should be called the Sydney model. No, I mean Australia is very much the you know, the Lucky Islands, whatever you call yourselves. Australia is Australia is every bit as involved in the global money laundering system as as everywhere else is. I just, from my perspective, it's a long way away and I've never been there. One day. One day I'll make it.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell There's a fellow, Nathan Lynch, who wrote a book called The Lucky Laundry.

SPEAKER_01

Lucky laundry, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Right up your alley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also you open up the book with the the dinosaur analogy, which was from an Australian economist. I got my notes here back from 1995, which was uh quite neat.

SPEAKER_01

Aaron Ross Powell I mean that that that economist, I mean that that analysis which quoting a dinosaur was m you know, money launderers leave traces in the ground like dinosaurs, and you have to analyze them, you know, it's an entertaining metaphor. Yeah, but that's actually one of the foundational analyses of of money laundering, which which really set the tone back in the 1990s. It was an important one.

SPEAKER_00

Just one detail about money laundering here, which I just wondered whether it had come up in your research or not. But famously we have more pokies per capita slot machines than any other country does. And they sort of dominate every single pub. You know, the sort of, I don't know whether you call it fact or not, but the talk is that half of these pubs would be out of business if they didn't have the slot machines for people to come in and play at lunch. Anyway, you can go in there with a bunch of cash at lunch, deposit into the machine, do a 10 cent slap, take out a token, and then go redeem that for a digital receipt at the at the bar and then leave. And so there was uh this whole ring of um money launderers who were abusing the pokies that way just as a way to clean cash, which supports this huge economy here for it's quite I mean, it's quite a small way of cleaning cash, right?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, this is you know, this this used to happen in casinos. It's one there's a strong reason why the mob has always been so keen on casinos, right? It's you could do that to a much larger extent in casinos in the old days and just take in money, change it into chips, and then change them back into a check and you were done. That tends to be something that casinos are on top of these days. Well they're certainly supposed to, but but it was really I mean, it is one of the noticeable things about the book of quite how casinos remain central to a lot of money laundering methodologies, just because you know there is money going in and out of them all the time.

SPEAKER_00

Final two for you, Oliver, but I just wanted to see whether there was something particular you thought would be necessary to say, given the nature of interview so far.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, I'm I'm sorry we haven't mentioned Wright Patman. Wright Patman is the father of all anti-money laundering law, um, and I think an amazing guy and a Texan congressman.

SPEAKER_00

He's a great character.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, he he's he represented his district um in northeastern Texas from 1928 all the way up to 1974. Not a perfect man, uh Southern Democrat, but by the standards of Southern Democrats a good person. Um, not least because he retained a healthy distrust for financial interests, what he called the money monopoly, and he re very much refused to be bought at any time during his time in Washington. He deserves to be far better known than he is. He's he's he's been largely forgotten now, despite the fact that he achieved many extraordinary things during the course of his long and eventful life. So, you know, I I'm I'm hoping that as a result of this book he becomes slightly better known. But, you know, I'm not holding my breath.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Well, you dedicate an entire chapter to him. I believe it was uh towards the beginning of the book when it came out. I mean Would you say you're the most prominent journalist and author who was writing about money laundering, just in terms of book sales and appearances?

SPEAKER_01

I wouldn't say so. I mean, I I think I'm you know, there's a small group of us who write about it in in various different ways. I mean, I tend to write it about it a bit more directly than a lot of other people, but there are lots of people doing amazing work on individual financial crimes, on individual mechanisms. I mean, so no, I mean I think there's a there's a bit of a crew of us, and I and I'm really, you know, pleased to read their their work. There's an amazing book coming out by a guy called Matt Walker who writes Bloomberg Business Week. I think it's coming out a bit later this year about antiquity smuggling out of Cambodia, which is incredible. Tom Burgess here in the UK has done amazing, amazing work, so has Catherine Belton. Um, you know, I mean loads of people. So I mean too much far too many to mention, and I will have forgotten lots of people. But no, I mean I think we're we've got a there's a it's quite a good crew, and you know, the more the merrier, really.

SPEAKER_00

Quite the coincidence. Just this morning I woke up to a message uh from Matt Walker that we're gonna do a podcast later.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, I'm really, really glad to hear that. It's such a good book. Really extraordinary example of you know the kind of grotesqueness of of I mean, in that particular one, it's so visceral with the war and genocide in Cambodia combined with the sort of smuggling of antiquities at the same time. It's so visceral, the kind of the the the gross and the horrible and the sublime, but at the same time all enabled by this sort of money laundering system. It's astonishing.

SPEAKER_00

But does having Alistair Campbell mention you move the needle at all? Why haven't you gone on leading yet or with that podcast?

SPEAKER_01

I haven't been invited. I mean, I suppose it does. I mean, he's he was nice about my previous book as well, Butler to the World. So I hopefully um hopefully that that helps introduce people to the book who wouldn't otherwise have come across it. I mean, it's certainly very well listened to as a podcast. And every time he he mentions me, I get messages saying, Oh, you've been much about Alistair Campbell's. You know, clearly it's it's it's quite, you know, it it's clearly a um uh you know a bit of a publisher do it, Oliver.

SPEAKER_00

Just write to them.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, I have done. I have I have but you know they don't get guests on there very often, and when they do, they tend to be like former heads of state and stuff, rather than you know, some rando journalists from for from Wales.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell A detail that I love from doing the research into you was that you you lived in Kyrgyzstan. Is that true?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, Bishkek is it I mean it it's not a it's not a great place. I mean, sorry, that's really rude to Kyrgyzstan. I mean it's not I mean it's not a great looking place, Bishkek. You know, it isn't a uh that wasn't an architectural golden age, the 1950s and 60s in the in the Soviet Union. And so the buildings are a bit grim. But the location is unbelievable. Um, you know, that Central Asia has this steppe which sweeps down, which is, you know, flat, uh not completely as a pancake, but it's really flat for for for thousands of miles. And then and then you hit this wall of mountains where that Tian Shan, which is where Bishkek is in the foothills, and it is driving towards it is the most stunning thing you because you're going over this steppe which you just get very used to, it's just flat. And then in the distance you see this rampart of white mountains, and it's like they're rising directly vertically out of the steppe, and uh, you know, it's almost like uh computer generated, it's so astonishing. So no, Kyrgyzstan was amazing. I loved living there. Um I've been back a couple of times, so I'd like to go back again. Um, the mountains are gorgeous, got lakes up in the mountains, very attractive culture, very generous culture, a lovely place. Not not all that great for a vegetarian, um, I have to admit. I didn't I didn't find it from a culinary perspective, particular joy, but every other way it was stunning and wonderful. No, I really I I mean I lived there. It was a long time ago now, like 25 years ago. But I loved it. And um, yeah, I'd definitely like to go back. More stunning than Wales in April? Different kind of stunning. You know, we don't for all of our for all of our undoubted superiority in Wales in many ways in April, we don't have any peaks over 7,000 meters. Like they but they're they're they're doing they beat our highest mountains by about seven times. So they're doing very well in that.

SPEAKER_00

Isn't there some unbelievable statistic about Kyrgyzstan that something like 94% of their countries is mountainous, literally bordered by mountains?

SPEAKER_01

It is very mountainous. I mean, it is, you know, it the the sort of delineation over the borders of the former Soviet Union uh in the 1920s and 30s by the by the government in Moscow was a was a sort of sort of curious combination of sort of guesswork and conspiracy to try and really snarl things up for everyone. So essentially Uggyistan is kind of the bit where the mountains are, not the only bit, because there's a lot in Tajikistan as well, but but they made sure. So if you go, particularly down in the south, where there's a, you know, that the Fagana Valley is this very large expanse of very fertile ground, which is kind of cut out of the middle of Kyrgyzstan and given to Uzbekistan. So, you know, it is a, you know, that Kyrgyzstan is the mountainous bit. Um you know, there are flatter bits, but you know, even the flat bits aren't particularly flat compared to what they've got in Kazakhstan. You know, but it is a I mean, it is very, very beautiful as a result. I mean, I'm I particularly like mountains. But it's not just the the mountains that are stunning. I mean, in the south, they've got incredible walnut forests um on the on the slopes of the Fagana Valley as it goes up into the foothills of the Chan Chan. And the walnut forests just go on and on and on. I mean, in and I don't I don't know how it is in other countries, but you don't tend to see walnut trees in forests in the UK. I in fact I've never seen them in Europe, really. They tend to be sort of individual things. You often get them in people's gardens and stuff. So just having walnut forests in in whole fo you know, just going on and on is is astonishing. And so, yeah, and then, you know, because of the silk plantations, you get a lot of mulberry trees just along canals and stuff, which is pretty amazing. And and you know, the the the wildlife is remarkable with, you know, the eagles and stuff, which you just don't get in the UK. We we don't tend to have, you know, big animals or birds. So, um, or big anything much. So it's yeah, it's it's it's big, it's grand, it's stunning, but they do tend to put mutton in everything. So, you know, if you're a vegetarian, make sure that you're gonna rely on know that you're gonna rely on bread.

SPEAKER_00

I would I'd suggest to you, if you haven't read it already, it's called On the Trail of Kengaskar by Tim Cope, an Australian adventurer. Uh an extremely romantic adventure. From the old Mongol capital across through to Hungary, 10,000 kilometers, three horses. I don't think they go across Kirchistan, but they they cross the entire steppe. And I don't know, whether it'll transport you back to your year in Vishkek and all the time you spent on a horse there. I go just um, it's it's incredibly well written too. Tim's a very sort of gifted lyrical writer.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, there's a there's there's a great book called Eastern Approaches by Fitzrail McLean, who is uh one of those people who they say James Bond was based on. He was one of these improbable 20th century guys. And he he he had an incredible career in World War II um in the Western Desert and then in Yugoslavia. But then beforehand he served in the British Embassy in in Moscow and spent a lot of time travelling through Central Asia trying to trying to see how far he could get before the KGB stopped him. And yeah, again, I mean it it it's an amazing place to travel.

SPEAKER_00

Really lovely. Final question for you, Mr. Balow. What is the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, occasionally I think about this the astonishing good fortune of so many occasions when things could have gone horribly wrong and didn't, or went really well when they didn't have to. I've been unbelievably lucky in in all ways, you know, and I am aware of it all the time. So no, I'm I'm yeah, just I mean, an example, I suppose, was that when I was living in Kyrgyzstan, every morning I would go to work and I would turn on the computer and boot up the internet and read the BBC website to see what was happening in the world. And one morning they didn't have uh the BBC website wasn't working for some reason, it was down, and I was like, oh, who else does news? Reuters does news, I'll look up Reuters. And Reuters didn't really have a news website back then, it just had a corporate website. But I was like, oh, that's disappointing. But they had a section that said job offers, and I clicked on that, and that's how I got a job at Reuters. So if the BBC website hadn't been down that day in December 2000, uh or whenever, yeah, then you know I I probably wouldn't ever have got a job in Reuters. So there you go. That was lucky.

SPEAKER_00

All right, that's a nice little example. Any other ones that sort of have been driven you forward? Moments like that where had one thing happened, the other wouldn't have occurred?

SPEAKER_01

There's been quite a lot of occasions in Russia where had I been less fortunate with what was happening, I probably would have ended up in prison for some number of years. And that definitely would have been a bit of a spanner in my career, I suppose. So that's the nature of Russia. It's always a bit of a toss-up whether you're gonna get out away and get out all right or not. So there's been an element of that kind of stuff. So I mean it in general I've had a I've had a lot of fun over the years. But you know, the the the way it is with things that are fun that often they they're only fun because they were so nearly not fun. And so there's been quite a lot of that over the years.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Powell Yeah, the risk is a necessary element to make something you know truly enjoyable. Maybe. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01

So I try and I try and hide that from my children.

SPEAKER_00

Aaron Ross Powell Speaking of Russia, I know I said it was a loss, but did your time there overlap with Bill Browder by any chance? Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01

It it did. I mean I knew I knew him when he was a fund manager um in the early 2000s. Uh you know, he used to give you press conferences uh when he was still um invested heavily in Russia, uh, before he um uh then obviously sold his fund in Russia and then his his taxes were embezzled and then and then Sergei Magnitsky was tortured to death. Yeah, I I'm I know I knew him back then, and it's kind of um extraordinary how he's reinvented himself in his career. I mean, he's achieved an incredible amount as an advocate for financial transparency, an advocate against kleptocracy in a way that I think is is I mean, I'm not saying it would come as a huge surprise to people who who knew him back then, because I didn't know him as a person, I just knew him as a fund manager, but it's certainly not what you expect from a fund manager. I wouldn't have anticipated it. So Jameson Firestone, who was his lawyer back then and was the direct employer of Sergei Magnitsky, has got a book coming out later this year, I think in in a couple of months probably, which is really, really good. It's called Rule of Lies. I have a copy of it here, My Wild Ride through Chaos, Corruption and Murder in Putin's Russia, out in June. And it's an extraordinary book. And Jameson is an amazing guy with a really wild life story in m so many ways. And I mean, not only his time as a lawyer in Russia, but his time before as well. So I mean, uh you know, there was Russia seemed to attract a lot of really interesting people. Uh, you know, not just Bill Browder, whose own family life as the grandson of the Communist Party head of the USS It was pretty amazing. But l loads of people who you know, it was a ri it was a fun place. Thank you so much for your time, Oliver. Pleasure speaking with you, mate. Hey, and it's it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.