Foreword

Summary

One problem, two architects

Wherever you are in the world, The War on Dirty Money should make you angry. Few other sinews of modern globalism have woven such a powerful and effective network of cooperation as illicit financial flows, connecting every corner of the world. Dirty money leaves an impact everywhere – from poor, underdeveloped countries that are losing gargantuan amounts of public funds which should be contributing to the improvement of the lives of their people, to the streets of London, New York and many other cities in the developed world which witness the effects of the inrush of such funds in the form of block upon block of plush, newly built – and for the most part unoccupied – apartment buildings, all snapped up as convenient parking lots for foreign money, both inflating the area's housing prices and driving large numbers of local people out of the city in order to find affordable accommodation.

Those who want to move their dirty money need the willing assistance of others in the destination location to complete the movement safely. This has fashioned a huge conspiracy of silence and deliberate ignorance: between criminal perpetrators, on the one hand, generating the illicit funds, and, on the other, accommodating bankers, lawyers, accountants and estate agents who are disposed to not ask too difficult questions, to look the other way and not voice concerns. The unholy alliance is no better symbolised than by the classic triptych – the unseeing, the unhearing and the unspeaking.

One problem, two fates

Two images are seared into my mind when, as an official working in the UK government department responsible for development aid, I started out on our efforts to combat the corruption that blights the developing world. The first snapshot shows two children knee-deep in a muddy drainage culvert surrounded by an assortment of battered but brightly coloured plastic buckets and containers. Hands on hips, looking like wizened old labourers, they stare with tired resignation into the camera. They can be no more than seven or eight years old.

They are collecting the family's daily water supply, from what appears to be a ditch. They had probably walked many miles that morning to reach this spot – instead of going to school – and faced the same trudge back to their home, bearing their now heavy loads.