Welcome back to the podcast, Brib, Swindle, or Steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge.

And for today's podcast, we're going to listen in on a conversation from last week's

Fraudfest.

Fraudfest is an excellent event hosted by UC Berkeley, with proceeds used by the Berkeley Center for Law and Business for programs related to the study of financial fraud.

For this year's conference, I spoke to Tom Burgess about his excellent book, Kleptopia, and about the problem of kleptocracy more generally.

Let's turn to our conversation now with my thanks to the Fraudfest organizers.

Joining me today is Tom Burgess, investigative correspondent with the Financial Times in London.

But for our purposes today, Tom is the author of Kleptopia, how dirty money is conquering the world.

Tom, thank you for joining me.

Thanks very much.

I think we should just start with the big

question, the question that I think too few of us ask, which is what is the central problem that we're

dealing with and in your book, in your mind, what is the core problem that we need to address?

I think that's pretty simple. It's an undeclared unconventional

war between authoritarian kleptocracies and democracies. You can widen that out slightly to say that

there are, of course, you know, democratic forces within the most appalling dictatorship, just as there are aggressive and

enthusiastic, kleptocratic forces within the most powerful democracies in London, Washington, Paris,

and so on. That is what we're dealing with. When we talk about, when we get into the finer

points of financial regulation, when we talk about lobbying lobbying reform and we talk about all of these

questions, dirty money and so on. Ultimately, we're talking about a struggle for the survival of

freedom as we've come to know it. Okay, so that's big. So that's pretty significant.

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