Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we're talking about

golden visas and golden passports, and the best description of them, which can be found in the

excellent book by Oliver Bolo. Moneyland, why thieves and crooks now rule the world and how to

take it back. My guest, the author, spent seven years in Russia as a correspondent for Reuters,

and then return to London where he has written several excellent books, including his most

recent book, Moneyland. Oliver, thank you for joining me. Thank you. It's delightful to be here.

You've written a fascinating book,

really. The writing is vivid and the stories are so interesting. Anyone who still believes

that corruption is largely a victimless crime just needs to read the first chapter, if nothing

else. I'd like to talk more about the book, but let's start with your passage about golden visas

and golden passports

first. Can you walk us through that? What are they and how did they work? There's sort of a kind of

strange undercurrent in global sort of immigration policy, which just doesn't really get talked

about. Immigration policy is like one of those real hot button issues that really, particularly

at the

moment, it seems to be front and center in Europe and in the US and in Australia and elsewhere.

And yet this particular aspect, which is that if you're rich enough, you can just buy your

way in pretty much anywhere, is something that there seems to be a sort of general lack of interest

in or maybe a sort of perhaps an agreement not to really talk about it because it's a bit vulgar. There's two, these two sort of currents of it, two sidelines of it, as you mentioned, golden passports and golden visas, which are, you know, they began very differently, but they're kind of slightly meeting in the middle, but golden passports were invented back in the 80s by St Kitson-Nivas, which is a Caribbean jurisdiction, a former British Empire country, a Commonwealth country. And they decided at independence, they needed a way to make a bit of money. And essentially, they had a kind of enterprising offshore lawyer in the government. And he thought that if they issued passports, I think his plan was that they could basically sell them to cocaine smugglers

and make it easier for cocaine smugglers to disguise the fact they were Colombian, so they'd look

like ordinary innocent Caribbean citizens instead. And so that was sort of a kind of crooked,

corrupt aspect of the business over there. And then almost simultaneously, most of the major

...