Summary of Tom Burgis's Kleptopia , livre ebook

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37 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Nigel Wilkins was a banker who had never been a banker. He was too shy to shoot looks of granite, but behind it lay not only the stifled arrogance of the cleverest man, but also an unbearable awkwardness. He loved economics, the art of telling money’s stories.
#2 Nigel was a free man because he had made plenty of money and had little to spend it on. He preferred his old radio and the antediluvian three-piece suite his friend had given him. He had been a quiet child, but with adulthood came a distrust of authority that could approach contempt.
#3 Nigel was a compliance officer at a Swiss bank, and he was excited about his new job. He thought he could force the bank to comply with regulations. His eagerness did not put Charlotte at ease. She warned him not to go to BSI. But he went anyway, and for a while, no ill came of it.
#4 Nigel’s father had always said that anyone who did wrong would get what was coming to them. Nigel thought that principle needed some enforcing. He had stumbled upon the world’s biggest fraud, and there was something else, something deeper, connected to what was happening to money.

Informations

Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	07 avril 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669381396
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Insights on Tom Burgis's Kleptopia
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Nigel Wilkins was a banker who had never been a banker. He was too shy to shoot looks of granite, but behind it lay not only the stifled arrogance of the cleverest man, but also an unbearable awkwardness. He loved economics, the art of telling money’s stories.

#2

Nigel was a free man because he had made plenty of money and had little to spend it on. He preferred his old radio and the antediluvian three-piece suite his friend had given him. He had been a quiet child, but with adulthood came a distrust of authority that could approach contempt.

#3

Nigel was a compliance officer at a Swiss bank, and he was excited about his new job. He thought he could force the bank to comply with regulations. His eagerness did not put Charlotte at ease. She warned him not to go to BSI. But he went anyway, and for a while, no ill came of it.

#4

Nigel’s father had always said that anyone who did wrong would get what was coming to them. Nigel thought that principle needed some enforcing. He had stumbled upon the world’s biggest fraud, and there was something else, something deeper, connected to what was happening to money.

#5

In 2008, while it was still possible to pretend the crisis wasn’t happening, a billionaire named Alexander Machkevitch made his way to the Banqueting House on Whitehall. He wanted money because he felt the power it would bring him.

#6

The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was a former Communist Party boss who had gained and kept his position by being loyal to the state. He demanded and received a share of the country’s booty commensurate with his position as father of the nation.

#7

The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, gave and took away. He had given three grandchildren to sugar daddy Patokh Chodiev, one of the country’s oligarchs. But when Chodiev tried to demand democratic reforms, Nazarbayev took away his businesses and sent him to a prison camp.

#8

The Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, led by Sasha, his partners, and their hundreds of guests, had sold a share of the company to the public. The money managers of endowments and pension funds would now as a matter of course invest in this formidable corporation.

#9

The London Stock Exchange allowed the Trio, the Kazakh state, and another oligarch who together owned ENRC to place just 18 percent of the company’s shares on the market, sacrificing a minimal portion of control to attain the sanctity of a London listing.

#10

The financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated the kleptocratic nature of the world's governments. The unctuousness of the City of London's welcome for rich ex-Soviets was no longer being reciprocated.

#11

The same month that the Trio threw their banquet on Whitehall, 2008, Shawn McCormick, a career oilman from Mississippi, drew Lough aside to warn him that he was being watched by the FSB.

#12

Lough was working on matters close to the heart of Putin’s regime. He had been assigned to a team trying to figure out how decisions were made at Gazprom, the state company that Putin had appointed an old ally to run. One day, a strange man sat down next to him and began talking. He asked Lough about his family, his job, and his life in the UK.

#13

Lough was eventually let go from his job, and it was then that he began to realize something was definitely wrong. He had been warned not to go to Russia, and yet he was still being followed.

#14

The FSB interviewed Shawn McCormick, and he gave an account that was completely different from the truth. He said Lough and Zaslavskiy had been friends, and that Lough had requested that TNK-BP take on Zaslavskiy as a consultant.

#15

The FSB interrogators typed up a summary of McCormick’s evidence. McCormick signed it. They added it to their file, alongside similarly helpful testimony they had collected a day earlier from another witness.

#16

The Swiss bank BSI, which was created in 1873, helped money cross national borders. Its founders saw their task as helping money cross borders. Between the wars, foreign wealth managed by Swiss banks increased tenfold. After 1945, banks like BSI started opening offices in strange places.

#17

The Swiss bankers didn’t do anything clever or original with the money. They just invested it in stocks and bonds like anyone else lucky enough to have a little to put aside. The money moved to a special place, beyond the reach of governments, law, and society.

#18

The financial crisis was getting worse outside, but Nigel noticed something else happening in parallel: the banks were splitting open, and yet, more money was going to ground.

#19

Peter Sahlas was a liberal to his bones. He had taken on the task of writing Russia’s laws, but he had failed. He was a liberal to his bones.

#20

In 1991, Peter and his friend Vinay traveled to Russia to teach English. They ended up in Leningrad, which was soon to be called St Petersburg, and stayed with a taxi driver named Oleg.

#21

In 1996, Peter and his girlfriend, Cécile, moved to Russia. They began working with the Russian government to draft a civil legal code. In 2000, Putin took over as president, and he was pleased with the progress Russia had made. But his people took a man, a young lawyer Peter’s age, and slowly killed him.

#22

The rise of Russia’s oligarchs was the result of the government allowing private companies to buy up state-owned companies. This gave birth to Russia’s oligarchs: Vladimir Potanin, Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, and the rest.

#23

The Yukos case was far more important than the seizure of an oil company. It was the rule of law in Russia, and this was geopolitical stability. Russia was still a nuclear state, and Europe needed Russia to be law-based and stable.

#24

The German author Franz Fraenkel understood the relationship between dictators and the law. He believed that Nazi Germany was not a straightforward totalitarian system, but a prerogative state that violated the law.

#25

In 2006, Vasily Aleksanyan, who had studied at Harvard, was appointed the CEO of Khodorkovsky’s oil company, Yukos. He was charged with having used his professional skills to legalize shares in Yukos oil projects that the company’s executives were supposed to have embezzled.

#26

In 2008, Aleksanyan appeared before the Supreme Court to appeal the latest extension of his detention. He addressed the court by video link from a cage in his prison. When Peter Sahlas watched the footage, he was mortified. It felt like watching a murder.

#27

The case was not about the law, but about geopolitics. Peter Sahlas, a Canadian, was trying to save Aleksanyan. The European Court of Human Rights ordered his release, and he left prison.

#28

The testimonies of the IT guy and the private banker were recorded behind a screen. The IT guy was a Central European who used to work at a bank in Liechtenstein that provided anonymous accounts to its clients. He had stolen 12,000 records and began to disseminate them.

#29

The world’s richest private bank, UBS, was forced to confess to the committee that it had set up sham companies to hide money from tax authorities.