Indulging Kleptocracy is the latest in a series of recent books that are elucidating how global power is shifting from mainly democratic nation states to a network of authoritarian states and private actors.
This power shift is often described as the end of the rules-based western order, but it is not simply a transfer of power from western democracies to rising autocratic powers such as China. Instead, this ongoing transformation is multifaceted. A shift in economic strength from west to east is being accompanied by a rise in power of private non-state actors such as multinational corporations and super-rich individuals on the one hand, and kleptocratic networks on the other.
The rise of these non-democratic actors has been facilitated by democratic states. As a result, as Indulging Kleptocracy alarmingly shows, democracies have been actively hollowing themselves out, empowering anti-democratic forces and, in the process, dramatically eroding their capacities to address the multiple challenges their citizens face. Indulging Kleptocracy details how the UK has played a major role in enabling the establishment of this new global order.
Understood as “rule by thieves”, the rise of global kleptocracy has been charted in the last decade by authors such as Tom Burgis (Kleptopia), Oliver Bullough (Moneyland), Sarah Chayes (Thieves of State) and most recently by Anne Applebaum (Autocracy Inc).
The nodes in this architecture are the kleptocrats (corrupt rulers who siphon off the wealth of their state), their overseas enablers, and the assets and accounts in which this stolen wealth is held and invested, mainly in democratic states.
As the authors emphasise, once the wealth leaves the country of origin, the vast bulk of the activities within this global network are entirely legal – deeply immoral and devastating in terms of their impact on poverty and human rights in the countries from which wealth is being stolen – but legal, nonetheless. As Indulging Kleptocracy makes clear, the whole point of enabling is to provide a service to move illicit wealth (which is criminal, unethical and noncompliant) to the licit (which is lawful, ethical and compliant according to professional standards).
The UK’s enablers, or corruption services industry, cover a vast range of services provided to the super-wealthy by respectable British companies. They range from regulated services such as estate agents, lawyers, accountants; to unregulated professions such as PR agents, wealth managers, citizenship-by-investment advisers, and corporate intelligence companies; to the gift managers of universities, charities and political parties.
A major aim of the book is to warn of the grave consequences of this entirely legal and lucrative industry. The UK’s enabling of kleptocracy is having huge consequences, the authors write, for the development of the Global South, for the rule of law and democracy, and for security and power relations internationally.
Indulging Kleptocracy also vividly substantiates the claim made by Chayes that democracies have now come to resemble kleptocracies. Chayes has argued that when we look at the ways in which the rules within democracies have been written for the benefit of elites, the similarities with kleptocracies become readily apparent.
The veracity of Chayes’s claim is particularly apparent in the chapters on granting citizenship and silencing critics where, in both cases, the power of British private firms supersedes that of the UK state.
With regard to granting citizenship, the UK’s Investor Visa scheme, which offered wealthy individuals access to temporary residence and a path to British citizenship, outsourced the checks carried out on applicants solely to the private-sector law firms and wealth managers representing them. “In essence,” the authors write, “immigration and nationality has essentially been outsourced to the private sector for the wealthy, while poorer immigrants are still dealt with by the state.” This scheme ended following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The almost unassailable power that British private law firms now also wield is evident in the use of libel law in the UK to silence critics of the super-wealthy. The deep asymmetry between the financial resources of the super-rich and those they bring to court most often forces defendants to give in to the wealthy claimant’s demands.
The authors present counterexamples of Burgis’s Kleptopia and Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, which were published only because their publisher HarperCollins stood up to Russian and former Soviet Union oligarchs. However, Burgis warns, in the vast majority of cases, journalists and authors are too scared to write and editors too scared to publish.
“The enabling of corruption” is in the subtitle of Indulging Kleptocracy. Either of the phrases “Living well at others’ expense” or “Killing at a distance” would give a better sense of the deep immorality and deadly consequences of the corruption services industry. That this industry is almost entirely legal is because the super-rich have been granted the power by democratically elected governments to deem it to be so.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy and a senior research fellow at the MaREI Centre at UCC.
