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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor's

of The Spectator and this week my guest is The Financial Times Times reporter Tom Burgess whose new or newish

book is kleptopia how dirty money is conquering the world. Now I say newish because the

book's been sort of reborn and that some of its subjects attempted to shut it down and

Tom I'd like you just start by maybe telling us a little about that

story. You've just fresh from a triumph in the High Court. Yeah, hello, Sam. Fresh from the High Court,

a few days ago, as it happened, almost exactly three years to the day after I was in, I reached a godforsaken

village in Kazakhstan and went sneaking around in the back of the car,

meeting the survivors of a massacre and others who'd been tortured by the ruling kleptocrat.

I was in the high court trying to fend off this attack on the book that contained the story of that

massacre and really the fruits of five years, wandering the world, trying to understand how

corruption works today and what this international collectocracy is that's emerging, right,

this rule through corruption. And there I was, next to my

publisher and the large legal team, waiting to see if this London company, controlled by two of the

oligarchs who appear in the book, succeed in having it censored or I found myself

occasionally wondering in the kind of Alan Partridge way of how precisely coppers of the book would

be destroyed if that's what ended up happening. Do you mean, do they get pulped into, I think he

uses the brilliant expression word porridge. Did they get pulped into it, or did they get burned, sort of slightly more historically resonant?

Anyway, you know, essentially what was happening was this, yeah, this London company controlled by these oligarchs.

They're called Alexander Ashkev and Patok Shadir, oligarchs from the former Soviet Union,

barons of huge mining empire that

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