It's a great time to be an #oligarch! If you have accumulated a great fortune and wish to put whatever great crime lies behind it behind *you*, there is an army of fixers, lickspittles, thugs, reputation-launderers, procurers, henchmen, and other enablers who have turnkey solutions for laundering your reputation and keeping the unwashed from building a guillotine outside the gates of your compound.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/24/launderers-enforcers-bagmen/#procurers
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The field of #InternationalRelations has studied the enemies of #TheKlept in detail: the #TransnationalActivistNetwork is a well-documented phenomenon. But far more poorly understood is the #TransnationalUncivilSocietyNetwork, who will polish any turd of sufficient wealth to a high, professional gloss.
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TUSNs are the subject of a new, timely scholarly paper by #AlexanderCooley, #JohnHeathershaw and #RicardSoaresDeOliveira: "Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism," published in July's #EuropeanJournalOfInternationalRelations:
The authors document how a collection of institutions - some coercive, others organized around good works - allow #kleptocrats to take power, keep power, and use power.
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This includes "wealth managers, company providers, accounting firms, and international bankers" who create the complex financial structures that obscure the klept's wealth. It also includes "second citizenship managers and lawyers" that facilitate the klept's transnational nature, both to provide access to un-looted, prosperous places to visit, and boltholes to escape to in the face of coup or reform.
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It includes the real-estate brokers and other asset facilitators, who turn whole precincts of the world's greatest cities into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, while ensuring that footlose criminal elites always have a penthouse to perch in when they take a break from the desiccated husks they've drained dry back home.
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Of course, it also includes the PR managers and philanthropic ventures that allow the klept to launder their reputation, to make themselves synonymous with good deeds rather than mass murder. Think here of how the #Sacklers used charity to turn their family name into a synonym for culture and fine art, rather than death by opioid overdose:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed
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Beyond providing comfort to "#PoliticallyExposedPersons" and "#HighNetWorthIndividuals," TUSNs are concerned with neutralizing TANs. Activists in these transnational networks play an inside-outside game: in-country activists will recruit peers abroad to bring attention to the crimes of their local kleptocrats.
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These overseas partners target the klept in the places they go to play and spend, spoiling their fun - and if they succeed in getting corrupt leaders censured abroad, then in-country activists can leverage that bad press to fight the klept at home.
To fight this "#BoomerangEffect," TUSNs seek to burnish corrupt officials' reputations abroad, getting their names on humanitarian prizes, beloved sports teams, cultural institutions and great universities.
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They seek to capture international governance institutions that might wrong-foot kleptocrats, co-opting them to enable and even celebrate looters.
When it comes to elite philanthropy, TUSNs are necessarily selective. Kleptocrats' foundations don't fund anti-kleptocratic groups - they stick to "education, public health, the environment and the arts." These domains steer clear of human rights questions that might implicate their benefactors.
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Russian oligarchs love children's charities and disability rights - provided they don't target the Russian state.
If charitable giving is reputation laundering's carrot, then "reputation management" is the laundry's stick. Think of copyfraudsters who clone websites that have criticized their clients, then backdate the articles, then accuse the originals of infringing copyright in order to get them de-listed from Google or taken offline altogether:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops
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Reputation managers also spend a lot of time in court. In the UK - the world's leader in libel tourism, thanks to a legal system designed to let posh monsters sue muckraking journalists into silence - Russian oligarchs have perfected the art of forcing their critics to shut up and go away:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/04/londongrad/#enablers
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Indeed, London is a one-stop shop for the global klept, a place were forelock-tugging Renfields will buy you a Mayfair mansion under cover of a numbered company, sue your critics into silence, funnel your money into an anonymous Channel Islands account:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/07/the-klept/#pep
They'll sell you whole galleriesworth of "fine art" that you can have relocated to a climate-controlled container in a Swiss or Irish freeport:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/14/poesy-the-monster-slayer/#moneylab
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They'll give your thick-as-pigshit progeny a PhD and never check to see whether he wrote his thesis himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSE%E2%80%93Gaddafi_affair
Then they'll hook you up with a cyber-arms dealer to hunt your enemies by capturing their devices:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas
But don't let Brexit stop you from shopping for bargains on the continent.
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The Golden Passports of the EU - available in a variety of flavors, from Maltese to Cypriot to Portuguese - offer the discerning failson access to the luxury good shops and fleshpots of 27 advanced economies, making it a favorite of the #KhmerRiche - the junior klept of Cambodia's ruling faction:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/cambodia-hunsen-wealth/
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Cambodia’s ruling elite are patriots who would never hide money abroad, says the country's leader, Hun Sen. But a Reuters investigation shows that Hun Sen’s relatives and allies have overseas assets worth millions of dollars, and some have bought themselves European citizenship.
But golden passports are for amateurs. Skilled klepts travel on #DiplomaticPassports, which offer the twin benefits of free movement and consequence-free criminality, thanks to diplomatic immunity. The former Kazakh dictator's son-in-law enjoyed a freewheeling diplomatic life in Vienna; one daughters of the dictator of Tajikistan had a jolly time as an envoy to DC; another, to London (where else?).
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All this globetrotting serves a second purpose: when rival elites seize power back home and force the old guard into exile, those ex-monsters can show up in the lands they called their second homes and apply for asylum. It turns out that even bomb-the-boats UK will welcome any asylum seeker who enters via the private jet terminal at City Airport (to be fair, these "refugees" have many properties in Zone 1 and country places in the Home Counties, so they won't need housing).
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This stuff *works*. After Kazakh state goons murdered at least 14 protesters at a Zhanaozen oil facility in 2011, human rights groups around the world took up the cause. But they were effectively neutralized by TUSNs, with former UK PM #TonyBlair writing on behalf of the Kazakh government to the EU condemning any international investigation into the mass killings (add "former Prime Ministers" to the list of UK commodities for sale to sufficiently well-resourced murderer).
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The authors close their paper with two case-studies. The first is of the daughters of Uzbek dictator #IslamKarimov, Gulnara and Lola. And President Karimov was indeed a dictator: he trapped his population within his borders, forced them to use unconvertible scrip in place of money, and ordered the murder of hundreds of peaceful protesters, plunging the country into international isolation.
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But while Uzbeks were sealed within their borders, #GulnaraKarimov became an international player, running a complex network of businesses that mixed the products of the nation's oilfields with her family's fortune. She solicited - and received - bribes from Teliasonera, MTS and Vimpelcom, who were all vying for the contract to provide service in Uzbekistan.
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All told, she extracted more than $1b in bribes, laundering them through Latvia, Hong Kong and New York. She acquired real-estate in France and Switzerland, and her spree continued until her father collaborated with Uzbek security to seize her assets and place her under house-arrest.
#LolaKarimovaTillyaeva was Gulnara's estranged younger sister.
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She and her husband #TimurTillyaev ran the Dubai-based #SecureTrade, which did extensive business with "opaque #ScottishLimitedPartnerships," laundering more than $127m in a single year to offshore accounts in the UAE and Switzerland. They acquired many luxe assets - a jet, a Californian villa, and an LA perfumier.
Lola styled herself as the face of the Karimovas abroad, a "philanthropist and cultural ambassador."
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to have safer sex.
The second case-study is on #IsabelDosSantos, "Africa's richest woman," daughter of Angolan dictator #JoseEduardoDosSantos. Isabel's vast fortune stemmed from her personal capture of vast swathes of the third-largest economy in Africa: "telecommunications, banking, diamonds, real estate and cement, among many others." Isabel enjoyed seemingly limitless access to state credit and co-investment, and was given first crack at newly deregulated industries.
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Foreign firms that invested in Angola were required to "partner" with Isabel's businesses.
Isabel claimed to be a "self-made woman" - a claim credulously parroted by the western press, including the #FT. She used her homegrown fortune to become a major player abroad, especially in Portugal, where she was represented by the leading Portuguese law-firm #PLMJ.
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Cory Doctorow