@guardian investigations. Books: Cuckooland, Kleptopia, The Looting Machine. Let us know what needs to come out.
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Feb 29 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
***OUT TODAY*** After three extraordinary years following a thread that led from Conservative HQ to Putin's St Petersburg via Kathmandu and a royal Scottish retreat, my new book CUCKOOLAND is out. It's the tale of a world where the rich own the truth. Our world. 👇🧵
It started back in 2021 when I heard that a rich Conservative donor called Mohamed Amersi had hired lawyers to go after a former MP who'd raised questions about his past, including how he made his money in Russia and elsewhere. ft.com/content/5dab0a…
Dec 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If Putin gets to keep the Ukrainian territory he's seized, millions of Ukrainians will be condemned to live under the occupation. My latest @guardian investigation reveals how this gangster regime works. (1/4) theguardian.com/world/2023/dec…
Before the war, Volodymyr Saldo's political career in the Kherson region was on the wane. The police chief says they'd opened a case against him over a contract killing. Now he's beyond the reach of the law - he's Putin's gauleiter. (2/4) facebook.com/ivan.antypenko…
Feb 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Here’s an irony of war. The UK’s position as the global hub for dirty money puts its government in a uniquely strong position to hurt Putin’s kleptocracy - and kleptocrats everywhere - by attacking financial secrecy. (1/4) #Ukraine on.ft.com/2PzCHkA
Sanctions alone lose their bite when corrupt regimes can use the financial secrecy system to dodge them. And London’s “reputation management” law firms are on hand to target reporters who dare to look into the sources of their clients’ wealth. (2/4)
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)
Dec 3, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
*** 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…
Oct 8, 2020 • 24 tweets • 14 min read
The law is becoming a weapon in the US election.
That's what happens when kleptocracy starts to take hold.
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)
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)
Sep 28, 2020 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
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)
Mar 10, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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 1/42/4 @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…
