I'm Brian Claus and you're listening to Power Corrupts, the podcast where we shine a light

under the hidden and often nefarious forces that shape our world. Welcome back to Season 3.

We're going to kick things off this season with a two-part episode in which we'll travel

to some island parodises, places lined with palm trees and ringed by turquoise seas,

to uncover the world of illicit offshore finance. And we're going to explore the dirty,

often bizarre secrets about how rich and powerful people squirrel away their money,

far away from the tax man and the prying eyes of journalists.

Our first destination, what we're focusing on in part one of this two-part episode,

is a micro-state in the furthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean, the world's third smallest country,

a country that has a square footage that is only larger than the city states of Vatican City

and Monaco. Manhattan is three times bigger. It's a country with a fate that follows many of the

most consequential developments in global politics over the last century, a little barometer for

everything that's broken with geopolitics, power imbalances, and bad people taking advantage of the

weaklings in the global system. It's a tale of greed, corruption, environmental destruction,

and how and why the Davids of the Globe can become Goliaths of illicit finance.

I think the country was worth at one point close to a billion dollars.

And what do you do if you have money but no island? Easy, you buy another island.

Unexpectedly the president accepts and will financially back this musical. Probably their

failing was they were very naive and they had no idea they were being laughed at.

We all know that offshore areas of financial secrecy exist. Today we're going to take a look at

the origin story of one of them. It's a story that will make you question the caricature that you

probably have in your head about why shadowy offshore economies develop. And it's a story that

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