Review by Choice Review
Moneyland offers an amazing, fascinating, and eye-opening look into the secret superrich and politically powerful people who operate with little to no oversight or accountability. More than being nationalists to any one country or activists for a particular cause, these people know no true nationality, have no true patriotism, and find more in common with kindred stationed all over the world than with the people they grew up with. Make no mistake, this is a meticulously researched behind-the-scenes look into the world of super-rich corruption and lawless greed. It offers many snapshots of secret areas that often sit right under the noses of the global community or, worse, operate in full view of the world because the world is relatively powerless to stop it. This is not a formal, rigorous act of scholarship. It is more like a tell-all, a journalistic exposé meant to titillate people with the sordid details of kleptocrats and kleptocracies, but not necessarily lead to true roots and causes. But perhaps this book will serve as an introduction for new minds, scholars included, to break these ugly processes down and set about deterring them. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; professionals. --Matthew D. Crosston, American Military University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
DURING THE FEDERAL TRIAL of Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, prosecutors extensively detailed his lavish spending on clothing, listing multiple purchases that included an $18,000 suede coat, pairs of trousers at $2,800 each and total spending of nearly $1 million at one Manhattan store over a multiyear period. By enumerating these purchases, the prosecutors hoped to present a picture of unbridled greed to support their portrait of corruption and tax evasion. Though they were scolded by the judge, who snapped, "We don't convict people because they have a lot of money and throw it around," they did win the case; Manafort was ultimately sentenced to seven years in jail. For many, the case was a leading indicator of the corruption surrounding Donald Trump, but for the British journalist Oliver Bullough, it is simply one more glimpse into a world he calls "Moneyland," a shadow system of trillions of dollars of hidden assets that transcends nations, feeds corruption and "quietly but effectively" is "impoverishing millions, undermining democracy, helping dictators as they loot their countries." After years of exhaustive investigative research for the book he also calls "Moneyland," Bullough offers not just a bill of particulars spanning continents but a polemic about the dangers of a global cancer that must be exposed and combated. In dizzying detail, Bullough takes us on a tour of Moneyland, a place one part defined by geography and several parts more by demography. The physical havens of Moneyland are the familiar offshore tax shelters like the Isle of Jersey, Switzerland (until recently) and the Cayman Islands, as well as less familiar ones like Nevis, where Bullough finds nondescript buildings housing 18,000 corporations and very few actual people. The neighboring island of St. Kitts has its own brisk business of selling passports for tens of thousands of dollars a pop. There are also domestic havens, ranging from the trust-friendly city of Reno, Nev., to the corporation-friendly state of Delaware. And of course there is the luxury real estate of London, with scores of mansions in Mayfair, and New York, with sparkling towers whose apartments sell for tens of millions of dollars to Ukrainian and Russian billionaires - and Greek and Chinese and Brazilian and American ones - dwellings with few actual occupants. Then there is the financial infrastructure of Moneyland. Bullough offers in sometimes excessive detail anecdotes of the rich and not-so-famous secreting fortunes, often through webs of interlocking trusts that disguise identity and place assets beyond the reach of governments. Legions of lawyers make use of codes and loopholes like the EB-5 program in the United States, whereby anyone who invests $500,000 to $1 million can gain a visa; by some estimates, that program alone contributed more than a billion dollars to the new, gleaming Hudson Yards project in Manhattan, mostly from wealthy Chinese. A large swath of Moneyland is completely legal, especially given that multiple jurisdictions have designed laws intended to create a comfortable home for capital that wants anonymity. That legal blanket has, alas, enabled despots and other powerful individuals to skim assets in countries where the rule of law is thin - think Zimbabwe or Russia - and stash them beyond anyone's reach. In Bullough's estimation, Moneyland is the dark twin of globalization, an unregulated system made possible by the same tissues of connectivity that have enabled global supply chains, cross-border trade and electronic cash flows. The efforts of governments, especially Washington, to plug the loopholes and prevent, say, a multinational bank like UBS from using Swiss laws to help American investors evade taxes, are a game of whack-a-mole. Without concerted multigovernment efforts, the system will remain unassailable. Like all polemics, this one is strong on passion, but even with ample examples, the assertion that Moneyland is a fatal rot does not make it so. Corruption may weaken open institutions in countries where they were never entrenched, but is that cause or effect? Bullough brilliantly uncovers the scope of hidden money, but whether that represents an existential threat to democracy remains an unresolved, and crucial, question. Zachary karabell is an author and investor; his next book, on money, power and the making of America, will be published in 2020.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In the pursuit of monetary crimes, the old adage has always been follow the money. In the world of plutocrats, kleptocrats, and oligarchs, that is nearly impossible. Bullough's (The Last Man in Russia, 2013) term for this universe is Moneyland, and like the board game it could well be based on, it's a labyrinth in which tax evasion, off-shore accounts, and bank fraud are the coin of the realm. In many cases, the superrich who avail themselves of the arcane, obscure, and perplexing loopholes in financial, legal, and accounting practices have stolen their wealth from the countries in which they hold positions of power while ordinary citizens struggle for basic human needs. In other instances, corporate titans funnel exorbitant profits into luxury lifestyles while their employees live from paycheck to paycheck. An indefatigable investigative journalist, Bullough has traveled the world, from Siberia to the Seychelles, to untangle this web of deceit, avarice, and amorality. The result is an eye-opening and stomach-churning exposé of financial transgressions on a global scale that threatens democracy and the institutions charged with its protection.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An eye-opening investigation of the places where dark money goes to hide.As Guardian writer Bullough (The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, 2013, etc.) notes, there was a time when a kleptocrat who stole money from their nation had a fairly limited set of options for what to do with the loot: buy a nice yacht or a fleet of cars, which can be easily accounted (and prosecuted) for. The dark magic of offshore finance, with its shell companies and hidden bank accounts, changes all that, providing a "magic teleportation box" whereby the money disappears only to pop up on the other side of the globe, difficult to trace and useful in bribing local officials. "It's no wonder officials become such gluttons," Bullough writes, "since there is now no limit on how much money they can steal, and therefore no limit on how much they can spend." The author's first case study is Paul Manafort, the now-disgraced chair of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, master manipulator of "financial plumbing" that allowed him "to suck money out of Ukraine and pour it into luxury goods in New York and Virginia." That money flowed into laundering companies in the Caribbean, Cyprus, and several U.S. states, all secret stations on the way to "Moneyland." Governments around the world foresaw that such a place might exist, which led to the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, meant in part to "stop uncontrolled money flows" and to buttress otherwise corruptible democracies; those laws have pretty well been scrapped. Bullough ably explores the shadow world of finance, writing of the gold standard of old as well as the modern moneyed class, who "don't tend to be part of a specific geography," as one investigator put it, "but tend to be very global, hanging out in plutonomy destinations with fellow plutonomists"the very people, by the author's account, who truly run the show.Students of the modern economy, to say nothing of politicians and nations for sale, will find Bullough's work fascinating. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
