The kleptocrats club
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 30 November 2021
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Authoritarian regimes are working closer than ever to keep each other afloat - with plenty of help from the West's financial system.
Ed Butler speaks to Frank Vogl, who helped found the global anti-corruption organisation Transparency International. He claims that the world's kleptocrats are enabled by an army of bankers, lawyers and accountants who are helping them squirrel away their ill-gotten money in Western real estate and investments.
And for regimes like those of Belarus, Venezuela or Syria, who find their power contested by their own people and their economies in tatters, there is plenty of support to be found these days from other authoritarians - chief among them Russia and China. That's according to the historian, journalist and author Anne Applebaum. The questions is whether the world's democracies will ever get their act together and do something about it?
(Picture: Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro (left) embracing Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko; Credit: Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, the billions being |
| 0:06.0 | squirrelled away by the world's autocrats into Western bank accounts and property. We are talking about |
| 0:12.2 | such enormous amounts of dirty money flowing through the financial system. Only a very tiny |
| 0:18.8 | percentage of it is ever discovered by the justice authorities and by the |
| 0:23.4 | FBI. This at a time when authoritarian governments seem to be colluding ever more closely |
| 0:28.1 | to prop each other up. The cooperation is motivated by fear that ordinary people will have |
| 0:34.4 | aspirations for better societies. It's motivated by concern for their own personal fortunes. |
| 0:40.8 | They've made stealing from their own economies. |
| 0:43.2 | That's the kleptocrats club here on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.3 | We've just wrapped up what has been an extraordinary collaborative and productive meeting in the G7. |
| 0:57.9 | Everyone at the table understood and understands both the seriousness and the challenges that we are up against |
| 1:05.2 | and the responsibility of our proud democracies to step up and deliver for the rest of the world. |
| 1:12.8 | Joe Biden speaking there at the Group of Seven Nations meeting this week. |
| 1:17.7 | On December the 10th, he's going to be hosting another gathering of world leaders. |
| 1:21.4 | This for what he calls a summit for democracy. |
| 1:24.2 | It's the first such multilateral attempt to set forth an affirmative agenda for |
| 1:29.7 | democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today. Those are his words. |
| 1:35.8 | Well, what are the threats? A lot of them, some experts say, are coming on the economic front. |
| 1:41.3 | Frank Vogel is a former World Bank official. He's a former journalist and a founder |
| 1:45.0 | of the globally recognized anti-corruption group Transparency International. He's now written a book |
| 1:50.2 | called The Enablers, how the West supports kleptocrats and corruption. I asked him who these |
| 1:56.0 | enablers were that he was talking about. The enablers are bankers, lawyers, auditors, property brokers, art dealers, high-end |
... |
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