The world is far more corrupt than anyone imagines. The ruling classes feel entitled to steal tax money at will, stash it in overseas accounts, and spend it like it was legitimate through shell companies and trusts. The “country” that enables this is one Oliver Bullough calls Moneyland. It has no borders, no government, and no taxes, but gets it power and support from all of those. Its citizens are welcomed worldwide, no questions asked. The richer they are, the wider the doors swing open.It use...

“Moneyland” refers to a virtual country “of the lawless, stateless superrich.” A system in which state actors and/or mob (Putin, Mogilevich) steals money from poor, corrupt countries (Russia, Ukraine), hides it offshore in a shell company (Caribbean, Cyprus) where laws are lax, launders it through people like Donald Trump and institutions like Deutsche Bank, then spends it in fun, swanky places safe under the rule of law like London and NYC. So, the downtrodden are indirectly supporting the weal...

Standing Up To Moneyland Best bit of advise I can give about this book: read The New Poverty alongside it. It documents in journalistic fashion what modern poverty looks like in the UK right now. I'm pretty desensitised to the reality of the world, but this book made me feel seriously unnerved, and when you read this book alongside it, I can guarantee your blood will boil higher than you ever thought possible.

Moneyland is about ultra-wealth management and how the financial infrastructure for naughty money is the same vehicle for dirty money. It’s an incredible documentary related to one of the most talked about issues of the current decades, wealth inequality. The thesis of the book is money is not constrained by borders, but the monetary laws are. But the laws didn’t have to be so constrained after WWII, don’t have to be now, and should not be.Thankfully, there are sections of the book where our bet...

A deeply informative and interesting read on the rich and their devious machinations to protect their wealth from taxation, or any public scrutiny for that matter. It is quite obvious, in the age of Panama Papers and Pandora Papers, that the rich have a way of finding loopholes, and the global elite has an elaborate system in place to ensure that their financial interests are well protected. What is truly sad, is not just that governments don’t do enough to stop this, as they are clearly allied

What happens with corrupt money? Where does it come from and where does it go?Most corruption works in three stages: steal - hide - spend. This book focuses on the middle stage, and shows how the 'offshore' finance industry has grown out of the fledgling 'euro-dollar' bond market in the 1950's into an enormous business with trillions of dollars sloshing around more-or-less shady tax havens, such as Nevis, Jersey and Delaware.While the ostensible purpose of many offshore schemes is to hide slight...

This book is quite outstanding and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I say this from the perspective of a qualified accountant who spent thirty odd years working in financial services dealing with the nuts and bolts of the issues this book discusses.Here are some of its strengths:It does a great job of filling a gap in the picture of how inequality is growing and undermining civil society. There are books that address the economic side of this process such as Capital in the Twenty-First Centu...

In Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back, Oliver Bullough sets out to illuminate the means and methods First World tax dodgers and Third World kleptocrats use to hide their businesses and wealth from the rest of us. Moneyland is a place, he argues, where those with assets can buy passports wherever they like, and apply the laws where they are most advantageous to their businesses. It is a virtual space with “American privacy, Panamanian shell companies, Jer...

Moneyland is a global community of the extremely wealthy and their agents who move and hide money and assets around the world to evade laws, taxes, creditors, spouses, and prying eyes. They use many different mechanisms: Open a secret bank accounts in Cyprus or Nevis, money launder through real estate in London or New York, purchase your real estate or yacht and hide your assets with a labyrinth of shell companies from the Seychelles or Estonia, establish a trust that allows you to use your mone...

This book is a ‘how to’ manual for would-be kleptocrats and budding tax avoiders. At an early stage, you get the feeling there will be no happy ending. This is essentially because you know that the world’s super-rich continue to plunder their compatriots and abuse their power. They have their yachts, penthouses and private jets strategically scattered about the globe. Chapter upon chapter explains how they do it, aided and abetted by ‘law abiding’ accountants and financiers, and ‘law abiding’ na...

As one of the little people, you will find that the rules are more ruthlessly applied to anything that you try and do. If you are fortunate enough to be able to pay in a large cheque to your bank then there are all sorts of hoops that you have to jump through to prove that you are not money laundering. However, if you are much richer then banks will be falling over themselves to ensure that they are going to be custodians of your money and they are discreet in their questioning as to where the m...

Between the relatively melodramatic title of this book and the fact that the author begins with mad leaps from Paul Manafort in the Ukraine to Malaysia and on to the emirates, one might suppose this book would be a bit sensational and superficial. The length would suggest a shallow stone-skipping over some deep subject matter, but the deftness with which the author covers a very tough topic is surprising, and makes for a lively read. Yes, Moneyland has preferred lenses, stemming from the years t...

Less is moreThis book lacks structure. It seems more like a rambling essay and hops from one example to the next and then returns to an earlier one without an obvious reason. It also contains quite a bit of irrelevant material. The author should have focused on a smaller number of examples (for example Ukraine) . This would have made the (important) message more powerful and serious. The book and message are now more anecdotal.

In Moneyland, author Oliver Bullough explores one major theme, 'Laws have borders, money does not.' Through thorough investigation, Bullough tracks the ways the wealthy shifts, hides, and protects their wealth. It doesn't matter if they gained their riches honestly or criminally, pliable governments and corrupt institutions help shield these individuals and their assets for a cut a the profits. The methods recorded in this book are numerous, but all take advantage of the legal loopholes between

Oliver Bullough has written a thoroughly entertaining account of the global phenomenon: how the very rich ensure that their wealth is protected by its non-statism. In effect, money in the 21st century confounds the ability of individual nations to identify it let alone tax it. From suitcases packed with cash, the digital age means that the touch of a computer keyboard button transforms an account into a tax-free one by internationalising it.This has had terrible consequences for the 'developing'...

My stepbrother picked this up after hearing the author interviewed on public radio. I imagine it was a good interview as the text is peppered with outrageous anecdotes and stories about the super rich and those entities which serve them.The background to this study is the increasing wealth of a global upper class at the expense of everyone else, a tendency dating back decades and exacerbated by the breakup of the Soviet Union. The overarching story is of how the rules of different jurisdictions