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From the winners of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting 11.5 million documents sent through encrypted channels. The secret records of 214,000 offshore companies. The largest data leak in history. In early 2015, an anonymous whistle-blower led investigative journalists Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier into the shadow economy where the super-rich hide billions of dollars in complex financial networks. Thus began the ground-breaking investigation that saw an international team of 400 journalists work in secret for a year to uncover cases involving heads of state, politicians, businessmen, big banks, the mafia, diamond miners, art dealers and celebrities. A real-life thriller, The Panama Papers is the gripping account of how the story of the century was exposed to the world.
The courageous acts of whistleblowing that inspired the world over the past few years have changed our perception of surveillance and control in today's information society. But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and contents? This urgent intervention based on the work of Berlin's Disruption Network Lab examines this growing phenomenon, offering interdisciplinary pathways to empower the public by investigating whistleblowing as a developing political practice that has the ability to provoke change from within.
In its last decades, the apartheid regime was confronted with an existential threat. While internal resistance to the last whites-only government grew, mandatory international sanctions prohibited sales of strategic goods and arms to South Africa. To counter this, a global covert network of nearly fifty countries was built. In complete secrecy, allies in corporations, banks, governments and intelligence agencies across the world helped illegally supply guns and move cash in one of history's biggest money laundering schemes. Whistleblowers were assassinated and ordinary people suffered. Weaving together archival material, interviews and newly declassified documents, Apartheid Guns and Money exposes some of the darkest secrets of apartheid's economic crimes, their murderous consequences, and those who profited: heads of state, arms dealers, aristocrats, bankers, spies, journalists and secret lobbyists. These revelations, and the difficult questions they pose, will both allow and force the new South Africa to confront its past.
Now a Major Motion Picture The Laundromat from Director Steven Soderbergh, starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, and Antonio Banderas. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein takes us inside the world revealed by the Panama Papers, illicit money, political corruption, and fraud on a global scale. A hidden circulatory system flows beneath the surface of global finance, carrying trillions of dollars from drug trafficking, tax evasion, bribery, and other illegal enterprises. This network masks the identities of the individuals who benefit, aided by bankers, lawyers, and auditors who get paid to look the other way. In The Laundromat, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative repor...
America is corrupted, and everybody knows it. Vested interests have bent government powers to serve themselves, not the citizens, with dizzying results - egregious Supreme Court rulings, revolving doors and cozy deals between the state and the private sector, and forty years of financial meltdowns. In this blistering book, Sarah Chayes shows that today's corruption - even the venality of the Trump administration - is part of global history, going back to the invention of money itself. We're not dealing with 'bad apples' lining individual pockets, but the widespread standard practice of sophisticated networks spanning political and national boundaries. But we can change this, individually, collectively and politically. Searching and unflinching, Everybody Knows exposes a rigged system that strangles democracy, calling on readers everywhere to challenge it.
Each week the oil and gas fields of sub-Saharan Africa produce well over a billion dollars' worth of oil, an amount that far exceeds development aid to the entire African continent. Yet the rising tide of oil money is not promoting stability and development, but is instead causing violence, poverty, and stagnation. It is also generating vast corruption that reaches deep into American and European economies. In Poisoned Wells, Nicholas Shaxson exposes the root causes of this paradox of poverty from plenty, and explores the mechanisms by which oil causes grave instabilities and corruption around the globe. Shaxson is the only journalist who has had access to the key players in African oil, and is willing to make the connections between the problems of the developing world and the involvement of leading global corporations and governments.
A political betrayal. A constitutional crisis. A hidden correspondence. Gough Whitlam was a progressive prime minister whose reign from 1972 proved tumultuous after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. After a second election victory in May 1974, when a hostile Senate refused to vote on his 1975 budget, the political deadlock that ensued culminated in Whitlam’s unexpected and deeply controversial dismissal by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr. Kerr was in close touch with the Palace during this period, but, under the cover of being designated as personal, that correspondence was locked away in the National Archives, and embargoed by the Queen — potentially forever. This ru...
"Dirty money, tax havens and the offshore system describe the ugliest and most secretive chapter in the history of global economic affairs. Tax havens have declared war on honest, law-abiding people around the world. Wealthy individuals hold over ten trillion dollars offshore. Tax havens are the most important single reason why poor people and poor countries stay poor. Britain and the United States are the world's two most important tax havens. Tax havens now lie at the very heart of the global economy. Over half of world trade, and most international lending, is processed through them. Tax havens have been instrumental in nearly every major economic event, in every big financial scandal, and in every financial crisis since the 1970s, including the latest global economic crisis. "Treasure Islands" show how this happens and reveal what the economics text books will not tell you."
A remarkable debut by one of America's premier young reporters on financial corruption, Casey Michel's American Kleptocracy offers an explosive investigation into how the United States of America built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known. "An indefatigable young American journalist who has virtually cornered the international kleptocracy beat on the US end of the black aquifer." —The Los Angeles Review of Books For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn’t be...
For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defence Industry. These ‘agents of inequality’ are paid millions to hide trillions for the richest 0.01%. In this book, inequality expert Chuck Collins, who himself inherited a fortune, interviews the leading players and gives a unique insider account of how this industry is doing everything it can to create and entrench hereditary dynasties of wealth and power. He exposes the inner workings of these “agents of inequality”, showing how they deploy anonymous shell companies, family offices, offshore accounts, opaque trusts, and sham transactions to ensure the world’s richest pay next to no tax. He ends by outlining a robust set of policies that democratic nations can implement to shut down the Wealth Defence Industry for good. This shocking exposé of the insidious machinery of inequality is essential reading for anyone wanting the inside story of our age of plutocratic plunder and stashed cash. Also available as an audiobook.