Moneyland: The Inside Story Of The Crooks And Kleptocrats Who Rule The World

"Give Oliver Bullough points for prescience. He wrote a book about corruption in Ukraine before so very many people were concerned about corruption in Ukraine. After president Viktor Yanukovych fled his country in 2014, Bullough walked through Yanukovych’s opulent estate and wondered how the leader of a poor country could afford such luxury. The answer is “dark money”: untaxed, unregulated, untraceable and uncountable, stolen by kleptocrats and dictators and funneled into shell companies, secret bank accounts and real estate in London and New York. Bullough gamely travels the world in search of the money and mostly doesn’t find it, but that’s the point. Along the way he examines the legal loopholes that allow it to vanish and makes two persuasive arguments. First, theft on this scale is eroding democracies. Second, if we better understood how this kind of semi-criminality works, we’d be very angry. Give him points as well for writing a book that’s both furious and funny."