Welcome back to the podcast, Bribes, Swindle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogi. Today we're going to listen in on a webinar, kindly organized and hosted by Tom Keating at Rousie, the Royal United Services Institute, the world's oldest independent think tank on international

defense and security. The webinar features Tom Burgess, an investigations correspondent at the

Financial Times, and author of Kleptopia, How Dirty Money is Conquering the World. We'll jump straight

in. In your book, you say that the majority of the world citizens live in kleptocracies,

which was just a fascinating comment to read. And it makes me think that we should perhaps start by

backing up a little bit and having you describe what you mean by kleptocracies and, of course, kleptopia.

What is kleptocracy?

Corruption is everywhere and always has been and always will be.

The abuse of public office, or sometimes put the views of public trust for personal gain.

The simple difference between a system that's a kleptocracy and one that isn't is whether

or not corruption is the aberration or the system itself.

When corruption becomes the system through which power works, then that system has become a kleptocracy.

The purpose of it is for the enrichment of those who hold power.

That's its primary purpose.

Kleptopia is the emerging transnational alliance, if you like, of kleptocracies

and kleptocratic networks. I think it's important to make that distinction. I think sometimes

we fall into a trap of thinking that there are kleptocrats that live in very hot or very cold

countries where we can't pronounce

people's names and people have cultures we don't recognize.

And those are the kleptocracies.

And then there are the democracies, the rich countries, which are somehow sort of occasionally

polluted by those kleptocrats and their money and their lobbyists.

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