The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management

For a long time TruePublica has consistently reported that Britain is the centre of the global money laundering business with its London Headquarters and network of off-shore tax havens. We have challenged reports and studies that have protected ‘The City’ and its army of suited mobsters that openly defy both domestic and international financial legislation whilst it administers and manages what is now describes as the global looting machine.

(Read our piece: Enemies of the State: How The Financial Services Industry Is Destroying Democracy).

As TaxJusticeNetwork point out though – there’s a new book out that looks very interesting reading from Professor Jason Sharman with the rather catchy title: The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management: On the International Campaign against Grand Corruption. It has been reviewed here in The Economist.  This study of kleptocracy looks worth reading, and the amounts of money stolen are staggering. For instance, the estimates on Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak are as high as $70bn.

At the Tax Justice Network they are always highlighting the need to tackle the enabler professions and those countries that wind up being the main beneficiaries, and we’re pleased to see it looks like this book will very much be pointing the finger in the right places. According to the book review, “much of the money is siphoned off through “legal corruption.” Indeed.

And three of the favourite places where this money ends up? The United States, Britain and Switzerland.

Sharman doesn’t neglect his own country of Australia though, which he describes as “able but unwilling” to tackle the inflows from China and Papua New Guinea.

As the book points out, the Egyptian government got so fed up with the lack of cooperation from the UK it sued the British Treasury after it denied fifteen requests for information to help return some of the Egyptian peoples’ money. Today little of it has been returned, and that fits the broader pattern when it comes to asset recovery under such circumstances.

Among other things, Sharman calls for tougher penalties for those firms who help this money laundering plunder. Here he is giving a lecture at Griffith University while working on the book, which is now on a shelf at a bookshop near you. (Hopefully one that pays its taxes…)

Watch the (YouTube) video HERE

 

---