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9 Oct 20, 3 tweets, 2 min read
Mukhtar Ablyazov, the Kazakh oligarch at the heart of one of #Kleptopia's great power struggles, has been arrested and charged in France in connection with the alleged looting of billions from the bank he used to own. He had just been granted asylum (1/3)

lemonde.fr/international/…
The Kazakh regime (itself massively corrupt) says Ablyazov is a master criminal. He says he's a dissident being persecuted for challenging the dictator. A host of lawyers, spies and spin-doctors have joined the fight. (2/3) ft.com/content/1411b1…
Ablyazov's story is one of the four interwoven tales I tell in Kleptopia. Here's an extract from the audiobook: the terrible night in Rome his wife and daughter were kidnapped tomburgis.com/kleptopia#audi… (3/3)

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More from @tomburgis

Tom Burgis Profile picture
7 Jul 21
*** NEW @FT INVESTIGATION ***

Mohamed Amersi calls himself “a renowned global communications entrepreneur, philanthropist and thought leader”. He's given some of his fortune to the Conservatives - a fortune made in part in Putin's Russia. (1/9)

ft.com/content/5dab0a…
The $4m Amersi made from a 2005 telecoms deal came from a company in a group that was, a Swiss tribunal ruled the following year, secretly owned by Putin's telecoms minister Leonid Reiman. Reiman (2nd right) denies that. Amersi says he believed the owner was a Danish lawyer (2/9)
Amersi mixed with other powerful figures in Russia and went on to do deals elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. (3/9)
Read 9 tweets
Tom Burgis Profile picture
3 Dec 20
*** NEW INVESTIGATION: A MONEY PIPELINE ***

He's a billionaire. Son-in-law of a Kazakh dictator. Director of Gazprom.

Documents I’ve seen indicate he was also the beneficiary of a secret scheme to divert profits from big state pipeline contracts. (1/9) ft.com/content/80f25f…
Timur Kulibayev was a top official overseeing Kazakhstan’s business interests when the Russian group ETK won pipeline contracts. The leaked documents indicate that ETK agreed to channel a share of the profits from pipeline contracts to Kulibayev. (2/9) gazprom.com/about/manageme…
It all started back in 2007, as the financial crisis was shifting power from west to east. The rulers of Kazakhstan and China agreed to build a multibillion-dollar pipeline to carry Central Asian gas, long mostly exported to Europe, to China. (3/9) ig.ft.com/sites/special-…
Read 9 tweets
Tom Burgis Profile picture
8 Oct 20
The law is becoming a weapon in the US election.

That's what happens when kleptocracy starts to take hold.

Here's why.

(1/15)
Anyone who's witnessed elections in kleptocracies – places ruled through corruption, like Nigeria or Ukraine or Malaysia or Brazil – can tell you they become struggles to control the looting machine. But above all ... (2/15)

qz.com/379750/goodluc…
... kleptocrats fighting elections are seeking, more even than retaining the power to loot, to keep the immunity from prosecution that comes with high public office.

Here I am with @FrankFigliuzzi1 and @SRuhle on @MSNBC discussing this point. (3/15)

Read 24 tweets
Tom Burgis Profile picture
1 Oct 20
*** NEW INVESTIGATION: SILENT WITNESSES *** ft.com/content/7dc13e…

This white Audi pulled out of a Johannesburg car park one evening in 2016. Inside was André Bekker, a convivial geologist. Minutes later he would be dead. (1/11)
Bekker’s body was found on the back seat of the burned out Audi. A private investigator got nowhere for a while. Then he heard that Bekker had been going around raising doubts about a mining deal involving a multi-billion-dollar London-listed corporation called ENRC. (2/11)
Bekker was not the first person from this perilous world to die in suspicious circumstances. The previous year, in May 2015, James Bethel (left in this picture) and Gerrit Strydom were found dead at a motel in Springfield, Missouri. (3/11)
Read 11 tweets
Tom Burgis Profile picture
28 Sep 20
The @nytimes story on #TrumpTaxReturns says of Russia: "the tax records revealed no previously unknown financial connection — and, for the most part, lack the specificity required to do so". That's no surprise because. Here's why. (1/11)
When, around the end of last century, banks finally despaired of his endless commercial failures, @realDonaldTrump found a new way to make money. He would use The Apprentice to play the business genius he wasn't, then rent out that brand ... (2/11)

... to developers who would put his name on top of buildings built with money from the kleptocracies that had taken over the former Soviet empire. Trump's cut would run to many millions. He boasted about these projects in a letter to the @WSJ wsj.com/articles/SB119… (3/11)
Read 12 tweets
Tom Burgis Profile picture
10 Mar 18
One of the less remarked things that @realDonaldTrump and #KimJongUn have in common is a long reliance on the financial secrecy system to bring in funds 1/4
2/4 @realDonaldTrump’s real estate ventures suck in money, often from the former Soviet Union, through front companies, such as these millions from an alleged Kazakh money laundering network ft.com/content/33285d…
3/4 The North Korean regime has used similar structures to circumvent sanctions. It has a special unit for this, called Office 39. Here’s how it used front companies to do deals with a Hong Kong-based network linked to Chinese intelligence ft.com/content/4164df…
Read 4 tweets

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