Foreign direct investment in Africa could be as low as a *quarter* of African capital flight per year:
Context:
—Per the OECD, "an estimated 10 trillion Euros are currently held in offshore accounts."
—Offshore accounts are now "the most important instruments in the contemporary globalized financial system."
—Offshore is not "a violation of the system, but the system itself."
Why aren't more African countries offshore havens themselves (aside from Mauritius and the Seychelles)?
—Lack of apolitical financial sectors
—Poor judicial systems
—"Offshore agendas have rarely been purposeful domestic state-building strategies for African elites"
Recent years have seen African elites increasingly turning to Asian offshore/tax havens, due to:
—More investigative scrutiny in traditional offshore havens (things like bad press in Switzerland)
—Identical offshoring/financial secrecy services in Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore
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One of the (many) things we discuss on the klepto reputation-laundering front in this week's episode: universities.
Specifically, how kleptos have turned to Western universities to whitewash their reputation, impact future scholars, and gain access to Western policy-makers.
On the topic of oligarchs, kleptocrats, and the like using American and British universities to launder their reputations, can't recommend enough this paper:
The Lincoln administration implemented a policy of “pure Jacksonian removal” of the Dakota from Minnesota, “a dispossession that went far beyond a ‘relocation’”:
Thomas Jefferson proposed an ‘“Indian Amendment’ by way of an idea he called ‘removal,’ the wholesale transfer of tribes from their eastern lands to the West”
Plenty to disagree with in this piece—NATO is a clear net-benefit for all members, NATO’s bordered Russia since 1991, etc—but there should absolutely be more discussion on NATO policy in the US. nytimes.com/2021/06/14/opi…
A lack of NATO expansion obviously wouldn’t have prevented the rise of a kleptocratic dictatorship in Russia (see: the exact same dynamics in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc etc).
This might be the giddiest podcast episode @NateSibley, @apmassaro3 and I ever record—not least because the last few weeks have been what many counter-klepto folks have long been waiting for.
But seriously: Been an incredible few weeks on the fight against financial secrecy and trans-national corruption. Thousands of issues remain—not least implementation—but the tide feels like it's finally, maybe, perhaps turning.
And much of it driven by the U.S.!
'One profitable sphere might be to fund some academics to research a more accurate assessment of the cost of corruption to the world economy, so we can find out whether it truly is between 2-5% percent of GDP.' codastory.com/newsletters/ol…
Robert E. Lee led forces that slaughtered thousands upon thousands of American soldiers, in pursuit of shattering the U.S., all in order to extend the enslavement of millions.
He’s one of the greatest traitors this country has ever produced.
If a person like Robert E. Lee—who helped oversee the most devastating slaughter of American troops in U.S. history, all in order to disintegrate the country—isn’t a “traitor,” then the word is meaningless.