Moneyland

Moneyland uncovers the mystery of how the rich keep getting richer by revealing the great lengths they’ll go to so they can avoid taxes and other things that threaten their wealth.

Say you’ve just embezzled millions from your country and you’re looking for a place to hide it. The bank might come to your mind, but only amateurs use those. And while your next idea might be putting it under your mattress, that’s not a good idea either.

The greatest place to put your dirty money is in offshore bank accounts. You’d want to look for those with good financial discretion and laws that favor your position. One such place is the island of Nevis in the Caribbean.

Nevis was under the control of Britain until the 1980s. After it gained independence, a few American lawyers worked with the island’s leader to make it the perfect location for hiding undercover wealth.

The island of Jersey in the United Kingdom is another example of this. It made news headlines though when a Russian prosecutor named Yuri Skuratov noticed that his country sent billions to FIMACO, a company based in Jersey.

After digging deeper, Skuratov found that FIMACO had no purpose and suspected corruption. He had a hunch that it was a way for officials to hide the funds and use them at their discretion to live the high life.

Skuratov took this information public and soon was getting backlash. Footage came out from a state-controlled TV station that depicted someone looking like him hanging out with prostitutes. This only confirmed his suspicions of the bank’s dirty deeds.

You might be tempted to think that if your country is relatively corruption-free that you’d be safe from the issues this book describes. If you’re English, for example, you might have faith that your country’s system protects against illicit happenings like this. Don’t be so sure though, as kleptocracy, or rule by the wealthy and corrupt, has lots of ways of beating national borders. Possibly the clearest example of this is the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, a UK resident, and former KGB agent. He died of polonium poisoning in 2006. This was suspicions since this element isn’t found in the natural world. Prior to his move to the United Kingdom, Litvinenko worked to tackle organized crime in Russia. He had exposed secret organizations within his country’s government that assassinated problematic businessmen and officials. Once he got to the UK, he continued revealing information about his prior discoveries to private investigators. He is credited with helping bust a multimillion-dollar deal of one dangerous Russian leader. Not long afterward, Litvinenko was dead. One of the suspects for the crime soon got a place in the Russian…