Global Witness

The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

by Nicolas Niarchos  · 20 Jan 2026  · 654pp  · 170,150 words

warning signs: As the Chinese firms began doling out signature bonuses, Gécamines paid $23.7 million to Caprice Enterprises Ltd., a firm the anticorruption NGO Global Witness described as “a previously unheard-of British Virgin Islands–registered company.” The owner of Caprice remains a mystery. Worse was to come. In 2021, the

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in Toronto. The aura of disrepute that Gertler had cultivated through his dubious dealings with Kabila and Katumba, however, attached itself to Glencore. NGOs like Global Witness have said that compliance departments should have raised genuine concerns about working with Gertler, and an investigation by the Swiss government noted that the company

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companies associated with Mr Gertler at various times, fully secured on shares and at commercial rates of interest,” the company insisted in a letter to Global Witness in 2012. Glencore went public in 2011, and the company began to renew its focus on compliance after it listed its shares on the London

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Stock Exchange. Even so, Global Witness kept up pressure on the company with a series of reports detailing how Glencore and Gertler had outmaneuvered other investors—including Forrest (through a process

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“paying the gatekeeper” by way of deals that were “nuanced and convoluted. They involve intricate financial arrangements and secret transactions through offshore companies.” The outcome, Global Witness wrote, was that “the mining giant gets its assets and the gatekeeper’s interests are taken care of.” The gatekeeper, of course, was Gertler. Former

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involving U.S. persons, in order to discharge their obligations under the terms of the pre-existing contracts.” The same day Glencore released this statement, Global Witness’s Peter Jonas blasted the arrangement, saying that Glencore was effectively acting with impunity and that paying Gertler in non-U.S. dollars was “not

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beaucoup plus vite que prévu,’ ” Le Soir, November 16, 2006. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT slow to materialize: China and Congo: Friends in Need (Global Witness, March 2011), 11, archiv.kongo-kinshasa.de/dokumente/ngo/gw_rep_0311_en.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “There he discovered that China

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(Carter Center, November 2017), 44, cartercenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/congo-report-carter-center-nov-2017.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Global Witness described: China and Congo: Friends in Need, 24. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Du represented himself as: The Backchannel, 9. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE

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February 2003,” letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as cited in Paying for Protection: The Freeport Mine and the Indonesian Security Forces (Global Witness, 2005). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Allegations abounded that: Jones, Walker, Waechter, Poitevent, Carrère & Denègre LLP, letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange

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Commission, 3 March 2003, as cited in Paying for Protection: The Freeport Mine and the Indonesian Security Forces (Global Witness, 2005). (At the time, lawyers for Freeport said that such claims were “irrelevant and false.”) GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “unsuitable for aquatic life

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/nsb?id=101995. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Another criticism leveled: Out of Africa: British Offshore Secrecy and Congo’s Missing $1.5 Billion (Global Witness, May 2016), globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/corruption-and-money-laundering/out-of-africa/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Glencore has made loans”: Glencore, “Response

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to Global Witness,” May 2, 2012, media.business-humanrights.org/media/documents/files/documents/Glencore_response_to_Global_witness_2012.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the mining giant gets”: Glencore and the Gatekeeper

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(Global Witness, May 2014), 10, globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/corruption-and-money-laundering/glencore-and-the-gatekeeper/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

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TEXT “pay the relevant royalties”: “Settlement of Dispute with Ventora and Africa Horizons.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “U.S. authorities must hold Glencore”: Global Witness, “Glencore Must Not Pay Millions to Sanctioned Individual,” press release, June 15, 2018, archived January 17, 2025, at web.archive.org/web/20250117191409/https://www

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, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT blocked them in a series: A New Rush for Lithium in Africa Risks Fuelling Corruption and Failing Citizens (Global Witness, November 2023), globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/transition-minerals/a-rush-for-lithium-in-africa-risks-fuelling-corruption-and-failing-citizens/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN

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. Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gilliam, Eva. “DRC: Mai Mai Leader Gedeon of Manono Territory—Known ‘Good Guy,’ Accused Cannibal.” MONUC, April 14, 2004. Global Witness. China and Congo: Friends in Need. March 2011. archiv.kongo-kinshasa.de/dokumente/ngo/gw_rep_0311_en.pdf. ———. Paying for Protection: The Freeport Mine

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investigations against, 277 KCC and, 332 Nikanor and, 163–64 revenue of, 278 royalty payments of, 276–77 globalization, 139 lithium-ion battery and, 375 Global Witness, 274–75 GM. See General Motors Gojek (app), 323–24 Goodenough, John B., xii, 35, 79, 83, 91, 169, 304 Gore, Al, 150 Gotion, 284

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, Vuko, 352 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 137 Netherlands, 185–86 new-energy revolution, 376–77 New York City, 75 The New York Times, 192–93, 224 NGO Global Witness, 207 Ngoie Tshibambe, Germain, 230, 235–36 Ngoy Mwanabute, Serge Noël, 243 nickel, 1, 23, 245–46, 310, 316 demand for, 181 Harita Group producing

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

by Jason Stearns  · 29 Mar 2011  · 487pp  · 139,297 words

resources in the Congo at the time was given similar information regarding how long it took to fly the stockpiles to Kigali. 40 According to Global Witness, a kilo of tin was being sold for $6 in Goma in 1998, when the world coltan price was hovering around $60 per kilo of

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. See Didier de Failly, “Coltan: Pour comprendre ...,” in L’Afrique des Grands Lacs: Annuaire 2000–2001 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 13, and “ Under-Mining Peace,” Global Witness (June 2005): 28. 41 Report of the United Nations Panel, 8. 42 Gauthiers de Villers with Jean Omasombo and Erik Kennes, Republique democratique du Congo

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa

by Paul Kenyon  · 1 Jan 2018  · 513pp  · 156,022 words

Tripoli, a rare survivor of the Abu Salim prison massacre who went through much psychological discomfort to relive those terrible experiences. Nigeria. Barnaby Pace at Global Witness gave me indispensible assistance on the story of Dan Etete and his corrupt attempts to seize ownership of Nigeria’s largest oil concession. The distinguished

The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos

by Angela Garcia  · 30 Apr 2024  · 271pp  · 85,246 words

, drug cartels and gangs went on violent rampages in four states, shutting down roads, businesses, and schools. In September, a report from the nongovernmental organization Global Witness named Mexico the deadliest country for environmental and land defense activists, with fifty-four activists killed in 2021 alone. According to the Mexican Commission for

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of; Stanford classes taught by; “suicide box” of; writing of Gay Science, The (Nietzsche) General Electric General Law on Disappearances Gibler, John gifts Giuliani, Rudy Global Witness Gonzalo, Padrino Goya, Francisco Grand Canal Grupo Amistad Grupo Amor y Servicio Grupo Centro Grupo Esperanza Grupo San Hipólito Grupo San Judas Guerrero guns Gustavo

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies

by Barry Meier  · 17 May 2021  · 319pp  · 89,192 words

also just become a private operative. Previously, Yearsley had worked as the director for special projects at Global Witness, an anticorruption group based in London whose financial supporters included the billionaire investor George Soros. Global Witness has long specialized in exposing bribes paid to politicians in developing regions such as Africa by companies eager

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to exploit a country’s oil, mineral wealth, or other natural resources. Simpson had gotten to know Global Witness during his time as a Journal reporter in Europe. The organization frequently collaborated with news organizations and, in the mid-2000s, it began investigating an

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obscure company in Ukraine that was involved in the operation of a major natural gas pipeline that supplied energy to Western Europe. Global Witness suspected that a top Russian gangster named Semion Mogilevich secretly controlled the firm and the group was sending leads to prosecutors at the U.S

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years about various oligarchs, including a database that listed the owners of properties throughout London. He was also a frequent visitor to the offices of Global Witness, the anticorruption group, where he traded tips with investigators. Hollingsworth’s dual career as a journalist and private operative would have been short-lived in

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to its competitors, enemies, and other hired spies. One of his supposed partners in that enterprise, ENRC would later claim, was Alex Yearsley, the former Global Witness investigator turned private operative who introduced Glenn Simpson to Christopher Steele. Hollingsworth and Yearsley were old friends and, in 2011, they allegedly approached one possible

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, he met with Mark Hollingsworth and reporters working for The Guardian, Reuters, and Harper’s Bazaar. Akhmetshin also dangled the records in front of a Global Witness investigator whom he invited to have breakfast with him at a posh hotel in Mayfair called Brown’s, a favorite haunt of private spies. Akhmetshin

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operative in his book, but he decided it was too late. Chapter 6 Ukraine Tomorrow LONDON, 2016 In the summer of 2016, an investigator for Global Witness, the anticorruption group, sat in a London café listening to a woman describe the documentary she was making. Charlotte Marie introduced herself as a fashion

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to filmmaking in order to chronicle the plight of political refugees fleeing the Democratic Republic of Congo to escape its autocratic ruler, Joseph Kabila. The Global Witness official, Daniel Balint-Kurti, knew a lot about the Congo and Kabila because he had spent nearly a decade as a journalist in Africa, reporting

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conviction for a tax-related crime; Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch; and two Israeli businessmen, Dan Gertler and Beny Steinmetz. As head of investigations at Global Witness, Balint-Kurti oversaw the group’s inquiries, including one that was examining whether ENRC or Dan Gertler had bribed President Kabila of Congo to acquire

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impeachment proceedings brought against President Donald Trump. The oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, also happened to have once headed the Ukrainian pipeline company that Glenn Simpson and Global Witness suspected of being secretly controlled by a top Russian gangster. In 2014, Firtash was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on bribery charges, though

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energy giants—Shell, a Dutch company, and Eni, an Italian firm—had bribed officials in Nigeria to win drilling rights there. Moore was told that Global Witness, the anticorruption group, had first uncovered evidence of the suspected payoffs and was now working with prosecutors to develop their cases. The K2 Intelligence executive

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wanted to know, Moore said, if he was interested in donning his guise as an investigative journalist and infiltrating Global Witness in order to learn where the investigations were heading. Soon afterward, Moore was in a London courtroom observing a hearing connected to the Nigerian case

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. When it ended, he approached a Global Witness official and introduced himself as a journalist and a filmmaker. “I’ve got a story that I think might be of interest to

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Global Witness, actually two, and I would love to get your thoughts on who I should be talking to,” Moore wrote in a follow-up email. ROB

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MOORE KNEW THAT Global Witness had a tradition of working with whistleblowers who had information about suspected corporate and political corruption. His idea was a twist on that theme. He

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would tell Global Witness that K2 Intelligence wanted him to spy on it and then offer to act as a double agent who would keep the group informed about

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. Moore spent weeks debating the plan’s pros and cons with friends. Some told him it was too risky and that he couldn’t trust Global Witness to keep his identity secret. But emotionally Moore’s life as a private operative was taking a toll. When he had lost his television job

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. NOT LONG AFTER HIS return from Vietnam, Rob Moore walked into London’s St. Pancras train station, a mammoth Victorian-style edifice. A founder of Global Witness, Simon Taylor, sat at a restaurant table waiting for him. Taylor was a solidly built man in his early sixties who had overseen many of

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Global Witness’s biggest cases. When accepting an award given to the group, he likened his experiences to events in the 2005 film Syriana, a thriller that

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been able to do it is knowing that this was where it would be going.” He then told Taylor about his new assignment to infiltrate Global Witness. He said he didn’t know the identity of K2 Intelligence’s client though he has his suspicions. Then he made his pitch to become

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a double agent for British intelligence. “It’s a stunning story,” Moore went on. “It’s basically what I’m pitching to you now.” If Global Witness was interested, he told Taylor, there were things he needed from the group. Most important, it had to protect his identity because he feared that

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might try to destroy him and his family if it discovered his betrayal. Also, to convince the firm and its client that he had penetrated Global Witness, Taylor’s colleagues would need to feed him tidbits about the bribery investigations that he could report back. “I’m very happy to stay in

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that’s the possible outcome.” ROB MOORE HEARD BACK from Simon Taylor not long before he departed for Canada. Taylor wrote that the leaders of Global Witness had spent weeks debating whether to go forward with Moore’s proposal but ultimately decided that its risks outweighed any potential benefits. They were concerned

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, among other things, that Moore might turn out to be a triple agent who would keep K2 Intelligence abreast of what Global Witness was doing while feeding the anticorruption group useless chum. There was another, more pressing problem, Taylor wrote. The anti-asbestos advocates were natural allies of

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Global Witness and keeping Moore’s undercover role secret would put the group in the untenable situation of being a party to that deception. “It is our

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there is no time like the present to do so.” To Moore, Taylor’s email read like a carefully crafted “cover-your-ass” memo that Global Witness could pull out in the event its interactions with Moore came to light. He didn’t take it seriously. Also, he was the person who

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’t going to happen until he got a commitment to make the asbestos documentary he was pitching. He wrote back to Taylor, saying he expected Global Witness to make good on its promise to protect him until his planned asbestos documentary was done. “For the sake of my family’s safety as

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well as my own and the success of the journalistic endeavors that are now underway, it is essential that Global Witness continue to guarantee the assurances you have given me,” he wrote. WHILE STILL AT ANGELA’S Bed & Breakfast, Rob Moore decided to call an activist

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talk about it now, Rob,” Moore later recalled him saying. “I’ve been told you work for K2 or an agency.” Moore realized immediately that Global Witness had given away the game. He admitted that K2 Intelligence had been paying him but insisted that his goal was to expose the asbestos industry

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. “It is not looking good, Rob.” Moore notified his filmmaker friend in London that his secret was out. The director started running Google searches about Global Witness and told Moore that the anticorruption organization was represented by a large plaintiff’s law firm in London called Leigh Day. Moore nearly dropped his

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from Matteo Bigazzi, who was eager to hear about what he had learned during his time abroad. Moore didn’t mention anything to him about Global Witness or the threatened lawsuit but told Bigazzi that he was having a migraine headache and would send him a report soon. When Moore’s plane

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and he would later say that he had to accept the settlement’s terms or face financial ruin. Afterward, he continued to lash out at Global Witness, Leigh Day, and other people who, he said, had betrayed him. Years later, he was working part-time at night cleaning offices and talking to

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wrote the operative, Richard Hynes. “I think that is quite reasonable.” Hollingsworth offered far more liberal terms to his old friend Alex Yearsley, the former Global Witness investigator who had introduced Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele. “Please email me your hit-list of individuals and companies and I will run searches for

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to be a group of cybersecurity experts at Citizen Lab, an organization affiliated with the University of Toronto. Founded in 2001, Citizen Lab was a Global Witness–style watchdog for the digital age, investigating how governments worldwide used new technologies to spy on their citizens and political opponents. One of its first

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hard not to be sympathetic to his situation. But some people who had gotten burned by Hollingsworth said that didn’t excuse his behavior. The Global Witness investigator, Daniel Balint-Kurti, would discover from one of Hollingsworth’s hacked emails that the journalist/private spy had passed on confidential information he had

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a piece by Katrina Mason in The Financial Times on September 1, 2017, “Russian Lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin on That Notorious Meeting at Trump Tower.” a Global Witness investigator: That investigator was Daniel Balint-Kurti. Baruch Halpert: He did not respond to numerous messages seeking comment. IMR had hired a private spying firm

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Taylor to Rob Moore, August 5, 2014. “For the sake of my family’s safety”: Email from Rob Moore to Simon Taylor, August 11, 2014. Global Witness had given away the game: Simon Taylor is quoted in my New York Times article as saying that it wasn’t up to Rob Moore

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, 135 Democratic Party (U.S.), 2, 153, 160, 208, 244, 256 Deripaska, Oleg background, 21, 22 Carr and, 50 Fusion GPS’s connection to, 272 Global Witness and, 101 Steele’s connection to, 58, 138–140, 153, 180, 217, 271–272 Derwick Associates, 89–90, 129, 292 Deutsche Bank, 148 Diligence International

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, 168 Epstein, Jeffrey, 131–132 ERG Partners, 12 Ess-A-Bagel, 119, 247 Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) background, 73–75 cyber spying by, 198 Global Witness and, 101–102 Hollingsworth and, 73–76, 138, 223–225, 227, 230–231, 290, 301 lawsuits filed against, 224–225, 252, 285 lawsuits filed by

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, 176–177 Gibney, Alex, 272–273, 304 Giuliani, Rudolph, 108, 212 Glencore, 101 Global Magnitsky Act (U.S.), 120–121, 214 GlobalSource, 79–81, 291 Global Witness background, 56 Hollingsworth’s connection to, 72 operative-for-hire investigations of, 101–103, 164–165, 167–170, 174, 231 Simpson’s connection to, 56

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Little Secrets (Simpson & Sabato), 65–66, 68 on fake journalism, 127–128 as Fusion GPS founder, 62–63, 128 on Global Magnitsky Act, 120–121 Global Witness’s connection to, 56–57 health issues, 16, 20, 22 Hollingsworth’s connection to, 75–76, 227 Horowitz report interview refusal by, 238 on Isikoff

Among Chimpanzees

by Nancy J. Merrick  · 321pp  · 96,349 words

. Its Investor Network on Climate Risk, for example, influences one hundred leading investors who collectively manage more than $10 trillion in assets. Meanwhile, groups like Global Witness are reporting to the world on the impact of corruption and conflict minerals and calling on businesses to ensure that their products do not use

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corporations irresponsibly violating international agreements or degrading critical habitats in order to obtain oil and other resources. Support the efforts of groups like Ceres and Global Witness and conservation organizations that promote greater corporate responsibility or draw attention to violations. Be familiar with the corporate responsibility of businesses you support through mutual

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, Allen and Beatrix, 78, 79 Gishwati Forest Preserve, 115 Global Forest Watch 2.0, 209, 212 Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, 211 Global Witness, 210, 216 Gobbo, Grace, 196–97 Goblin (chimpanzee), 89 Gombe National Park, 3; arrival in Kigoma, 27–29; author’s return to and tour of

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption

by Patrick Alley  · 17 Mar 2022  · 384pp  · 121,574 words

point of bogus. Mining billionaire Dan Gertler’s Fleurette Group ‘Should I decide who are my friends because of the threat of investigation, pressure from Global Witness or public relations?’ Gertler said, rising from his chair to stride the room. ‘Never!’ Dan Gertler, shortly before being sanctioned by the US for

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corruption in DRC [Global Witness] are a group of economic vandals who do not care about the lives they destroy. Ivan Lu, executive director of Malaysian logging company Rimbunan Hijau

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the nexus between human-rights abuses and environmental destruction, paying particular attention to the links between natural-resource exploitation, conflict and corruption. I first met Global Witness’s three young founders at my home in London. We were introduced by the then president of the Open Society Foundations, Aryeh Neier. The trio

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to various governments. The amounts could then be added up and the governments could be held accountable by their people for the monies they received. Global Witness as an organization was somewhat anarchic and had very little money, but I greatly admired the passion, ambition, leanness and anger of the founders.

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influence and convening power to socialize the Publish What You Pay campaign idea with senior policymakers around the world, and I provided extra funding for Global Witness’s work. In 2002, the campaign was formally launched. The British government soon took up the cause and formed the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (

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EITI), which has become the most important anti-corruption mechanism for the extractives sector. This was a significant step forward in the battle against corruption. Global Witness’s investigations around the world have gone on to unearth and expose many corrupt deals. Deals that deprived some of the world’s poorest but

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but these stories are frighteningly and unfortunately true. Corruption is one of the greatest enemies of democracy; to win the fight we need champions like Global Witness. INTRODUCTION HOTEL EUROPA, CINISELLO BALSAMO, MILAN, 4 AUGUST 2000 Leonid Minin opened a bleary eye as one of the prostitutes got up from the bed

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prevention and settlement of conflicts. It had been four years of incredibly hard work and just two years since we had published A Rough Trade. Global Witness’s two-person campaign had started a process that had brought in many allies, like Partnership Africa Canada, Dianna Melrose and others. The UN

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transaction of illicit diamonds and armed conflict. On 18 March 2002, three American politicians, Congressmen Tony Hall and Frank Wolf and Senator Patrick Leahy, nominated Global Witness and Partnership Africa Canada for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize ‘for their work to sever the funding link between diamonds and war’. We didn’t

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Also like Silas, he was a passionate environmentalist; and so Tommy had set up the Environmental Foundation for Africa. Alice and I had added another Global Witness staffer to our team for this investigation. Valerie Vauthier, daughter of a French schoolteacher, was born and brought up in Côte d’Ivoire. Her local

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the UN had a major headache. This interception was one of many that took place across Europe and the resulting publicity from these and from Global Witness’s investigations was raising public awareness of ‘conflict timber’ – and that awareness increased the pressure on politicians to act. The logging companies and their

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a new teammate. Mike Lundberg was a fresh-faced, clean-cut young American lawyer and together they were researching what would be the most incisive Global Witness report documenting the continuing arms shipments into Liberia, and Taylor’s increasing dependence on timber revenues. Piggybacking on UN-operated helicopter flights over Sierra Leone

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and also benefitted from World Bank-funded road-building contracts. He continued to do business with Danzer. The Dutch police cited UN Security Council and Global Witness reports when they brought about his prosecution in 2005. After conviction, acquittal, appeal and counter-appeal, on 26 April 2017 he was finally convicted

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talked about how aeroplanes can fall out of the sky.’ Gavin continued, ‘Then they got up and stormed out.’ But not before they had accused Global Witness of being terrorists and racists. In 2004, we released a report called Time for Transparency. Our research and field investigations into five countries in regions

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invited into the room to make a nuisance of ourselves when they were actually having their discussions.’ Anthea’s first major report remains one of Global Witness’s fattest. The cover of Undue Diligence – How banks do business with corrupt regimes depicted three pink piggy banks captioned ‘See No Evil’, ‘Hear

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taking money stolen from the beleaguered people of Equatorial Guinea. I hope they feel good about that. The work of Sherpa, Transparency International France and Global Witness had catalysed law-enforcement investigations in France, Switzerland and the US, but one of Obiang’s continuing high-end spending sprees ratcheted up the authorities

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of BSGR, David Clark. He accused us of ‘acting with Mr George Soros in conducting an investigation into [BSGR]’ and said that they understood that Global Witness was considering writing a report on the subject. The letter threatened that they would ‘respond with all available legal means to prevent damaging and defamatory

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tenacious in pursuing this story.* But whereas the responsibility of a journalist for a media outlet stops with the articles they publish, for organizations like Global Witness the exposé is just the start. Our investigations provide the evidence we need to patrol the corridors of power, to advocate for action, to pressure

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correspondence with the firm had grown to encompass three of their clients in different parts of the world who were subjects of three completely separate Global Witness investigations, including into the billionaire chief minister of Sarawak, who made the family fortune by corruptly selling off Borneo’s rainforests to the Malaysian

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Mafia. I do wonder how the partners in law firms like Mishcon can sleep easy given that their ‘politically exposed’ clients, certainly as far as Global Witness is concerned, seem to represent a rogues’ gallery. Mishcon’s letters are infamous within media circles for their aggressive stance and given their name pops

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in the public interest. Our work has always been journalistic and many of our key investigative staff, including Dan and Leigh, are professional journalists. But Global Witness is not a conventional media organization and Mishcon’s strategy rested on this point: could a non-profit investigative NGO be considered a journalistic organization

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letters replete with legal arguments about why we were obliged under the DPA to provide the information Steinmetz wanted. One of their letters stated that ‘Global Witness’s work is campaigning and investigative. It is not engaged in journalism. It seeks to influence journalism.’ Under the wise guidance of our new in

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his witness statement submitted to the High Court, Mishcon’s James Libson stated that: ‘The Claimants [Steinmetz, Cramer and Merloni-Horemans] contend that the Defendant [Global Witness] does not process data “only” for the purposes of journalism. The Defendant is a company established with the purpose of campaigning. Any activity undertaken by

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forehead and pale skin, probably from too many late nights playing pubs with his band, David Cronenberg’s Wife (available on Spotify!), Tom had met Global Witness staffer Laura Ribeiro at a gathering of friends in a Dalston bar. On finding out that Tom spoke Russian, Laura mentioned the possibility of volunteering

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for Global Witness to work on a report on Russian corruption. Gavin Hayman took Tom under his wing, initially to investigate how an obscure shell company called RosUkrEnergo

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the Netherlands, where Shell are headquartered, and Switzerland, where some of the money ended up. Things began to move fast. Like a group of toreadors, Global Witness and its allies had been goading the Shell and Eni bull, jabbing the sharp banderillas of embarrassing evidence into their thick corporate hides. A favourite

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family of the super-corrupt dictator Hun Sen. She went on to work on our Afghanistan campaign and one of my more surreal experiences at Global Witness was arriving with Ellie and fellow campaigner Juman Kubba at the barricaded entrance to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO

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UK played a key role in facilitating money laundering and therefore in facilitating organized crime such as terrorism, narco-trafficking and straightforward theft. Tom left Global Witness shortly after the publication of Grave Secrecy to become a freelance consultant, but it wasn’t his swansong. It wasn’t long before we needed

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owned by an anonymous company that is registered at the same Belize address as companies involved in an alleged Kyrgyz money-laundering scandal. However, Global Witness believes that it is more likely that Limium’s beneficial owner is Bakiyev Jr., and as such that some of the money the Kyrgyz authorities

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where it’s easier for corrupt individuals to buy up property than it is for an anti-corruption campaigner like me?’ From this point on Global Witness and Transparency International worked in close collaboration on the property campaign to optimize our complementary campaigning skills and political reach. A key element of this

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was Global Witness’s deep-dive investigative skills, and we were onto a new lead – a case that could make all the difference. On 24 February 2015,

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everything we could at this. Absolutely everything. Because if we didn’t, there was such a real risk it was just going to get dropped.’ Global Witness and TI UK cornered ministers at party conferences, collared MPs and pursued civil servants. ‘We were pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, trying to keep the

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the appeal failed. In November 2020, an investigation by The Times and Source Material, an investigative journalism outfit led by our old friend and former Global Witness investigator Leigh Baldwin, confirmed that the Baker Street properties were indeed owned by Dariga Nazarbayeva and her son Nurali. It is of course possible that

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Nazarbayev and apparently worth around US$600 million, is indeed a successful businesswoman in her own right. The cases of state looting and corruption that Global Witness has investigated over the years are littered with ultra-rich ruling families and senior politicians of notoriously corrupt states who claim that they have quite

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London. They all depended on the almost impenetrable labyrinth created by layer upon layer of secretly owned companies. Charmian had been introduced by an old Global Witness friend, the author Misha Glenny, to Bruno Giussani, the European director of TED, and she was invited to speak on the need to end

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passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which that year included the Corporate Transparency Act. Fortune magazine noted that A multiyear undercover investigation conducted by Global Witness along with extensive reports published by the New York Times have exposed the criminal enterprises that anonymous shell companies enable. In every state, more information

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brought in Billy Kyte to start researching the grim cases we would need to put together. Billy, tall, dark-haired and rebellious, had started at Global Witness following a stint with Peace Brigades International (PBI) in Mexico, where he and other volunteers acted as human shields, physically accompanying at-risk human-rights

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never investigated. Prosecution rates globally were in single digits; and even then they were usually only the trigger men, not the architects of the killings. Global Witness couldn’t investigate a murder, but we could expose the rotten system – the shadow network that made Honduras the deadliest place on Earth per capita

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reason he gave was that he wanted to search for precious metals that might lie underneath Wren’s 17th-century masterpiece. Brendan, who later joined Global Witness and worked with Simon on corruption in the oil and mining industry, was then a campaigner with the humanitarian-aid organization ActionAid. The headline-grabbing

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like an electric current: silent, invisible, powerful and, sometimes, deadly. Misha Glenny put it another way in his bestselling book McMafia, where he said that ‘Global Witness has successfully highlighted that organized crime is not about sinister corporations planning to take over the world. It is about a complex interplay between the

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do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted. This is true of most governments and companies. It is why campaigning organizations like Global Witness and investigative journalists must exist. Corrupt and usually dictatorial ruling families like the Obiangs or the Nazarbayevs use the secrecy jurisdictions of the Caribbean, the

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teeth, but it might be slow in coming given that Biden came to power at a time of domestic and global crisis. By late 2020, Global Witness was home to over 100 investigators, campaigners, IT and communications experts, fundraisers, finance managers and administrators, with an annual budget of around £10 million.

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working on 25 years before. To try and tackle the terrible problems we faced required a new approach. ‘It’s the natural evolution from where Global Witness started – the nexus between corruption and environmental abuses and human-rights abuses,’ Mike reflected. All the campaigns we’ve worked on and the skills we

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from the facts. Meanwhile the companies’ financial backers include household names like Deutsche Bank, Santander, Barclays, BNP Paribas, ING and HSBC. In fact, a 2019 Global Witness investigation exposed that over 300 banks had provided US$44 billion to just six of the world’s most destructive agribusinesses. A glance at the

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there is, the more advertising revenue the companies generate. It seems that this insatiable lust for this money trumps any other consideration. It really pays. Global Witness’s digital-threats team consists of Ava Lee, Rosie Sharpe, Naomi Hirst and Nienke Palstra. In one of their first projects, they decided to find

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arrived at the idea of the No Safe Havens campaign; Chido Dunn and Ava Lee for their anecdotes; Rachel Davies of Transparency International UK; old Global Witness hand Rosie Sharpe, and to Ralph Kayser and Karl, who recalled their surreal undercover investigations charming unwitting lawyers into telling them how to launder a

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 20 Mar 2007

Menezes: Battening Down the Hatches 145 9. Arcadi Gaydamak: Between Global Borders 165 10. Dokubo-Asari: Corroding the Soul of a Nation 189 11. Global Witness: Hooligans and Rock Stars 209 Conclusion: Drawing the Poison 223 Notes 237 Index 273 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS would like to single out

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weakening the politicians. “Losses for the state were turned into private gains for the company, Elf officials, and the ruling elite,” wrote the transparency campaigners Global Witness. “The company created conditions of deliberate indebtedness through oil-backed lending, progressively securing its hold on the country’s internal politics.”23 Milongo had inherited

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the ocean’ and ‘vultures,’” and even alleges what has to be an utterly improbable “association of malefactors” involving these funds and the anticorruption watchdog Global Witness, which has also excoriated Congo’s rulers.61 Congo’s state oil company has been putting hundreds of millions of dollars in weird special purpose

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and ERHC clearly had a very juicy deal. From then on, things began to go badly for São Tomé. Gavin Hayman of the campaigning group Global Witness described the contract, along with a couple of others that came later, as “among the least transparent, most egregious deals of all time.” Wilson

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, who will call Obasanjo and tell him to lay off? Tony Blair? George Bush? No! Because [of Nigeria’s oil!] Will Transparency International, or Global Witness, ring up? No! Those transparency NGOS have no front-end mechanisms to help you avoid corruption. They just put you on the list after you

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it was clear that he wanted to tell a long, elaborate story about himself. It was an interview riddled with pet peeves: the transparency campaigners Global Witness, who regularly criticize him; the hypocrisy of western governments; a news story that, he said, twisted some facts about a banquet that Gaydamak once

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reputable companies, then using the proceeds to prosecute brutal wars. This was a rather obvious problem that the world appeared to be ignoring. In 1998 Global Witness, a London-based campaigning outfit I had not heard of, contacted me. They had recently run a successful campaign B 209 P o i s

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looking for a way to rehabilitate its image in Angola, and supporting a diamond campaign was a good way to start. As Simon Taylor, a Global Witness director, put it, “Clinton moved partly because of the oil, and the French moved because they thought, ‘Shit! The Americans will get the oil.’”

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running out) and their brutal “Killing Fields” leader Pol Pot died in a forest hideout in 1998, the year when Global Witness began to look at Angolan diamonds. Shortly afterward, Global Witness turned to oil, perhaps partly out of a wish to balance their highly politicized diamond work in Angola. I 211 P

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oil . . . some saw the oil companies as imperialist bastards, others tried to negotiate with them, then got dragged into endless negotiations that led nowhere.” Global Witness also appear to have grasped a key point: that westerners wishing to understand Africa’s oil zones do well to discard any left-wing (or

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fistfuls at each other. “Crude Awakening created a firestorm in Angola,” remembers Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch. “The government went nuts, drawing 212 Global Witness more attention to it. They denounced and obfuscated; it was a very Soviet response.” An Angolan newspaper carried a blank page where its analysis had

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right track, and I have remained on good terms with them, although some of my ideas and insights diverge from theirs. Since A Crude Awakening, Global Witness has been at (or near) the forefront of efforts to promote transparency in oil; they are, as someone from a competing NGO told me,

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still mostly Europeans—here I would include the French magistrates and a couple of campaigning groups in Paris, as well as London-based groups like Global Witness—and the issues are now in the newspapers, a bit. If you take media coverage as a yardstick, America is still fast asleep. The

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secrecy are devastating Africa—so why has it taken so long for anyone properly to grasp the transparency issue? The answers to this suggest that Global Witness did not so much propel change, as catch, and reinforce, its wave. After African states became independent in the 1960s and 1970s, development experts

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budget balance, but on who gets the government contracts. “The IMF is looking at an economic model, when it should be looking at a 214 Global Witness political model,” a former Angolan planning minister once told me. “This has nothing to do with a capitalist system. This is not about production,

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cake to fight for.” In a well-ordered western country, economics and politics are separate. But in Africa’s oil zones, economics is politics. Global Witness’s Patrick Alley identified another generic reason for the myopia: for years, human rights organizations stuck to human rights, environmentalists stuck to the environment, and

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will henceforth carry out their most fruitful work, eclipsing narrow eyes-on-the-furrow approaches that have been a stock in trade for decades. As Global Witness pushed for transparency in African oil, big challenges appeared. In 2000 the British foreign office called a meeting of big oil companies in Angola,

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of legitimate government actions.”8 For BP, with multi-billion dollars stakes in Angola, this was no small matter. Initially BP seemed to panic, shunning Global Witness—at one meeting Taylor actually noticed a panicked official running away from him. The company has since pulled back on its unilateral commitment. BP’s

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companies. He made a sneering contrast with “one company which has run into deep trouble.”9 Yet the episode still represented progress, of sorts. Global Witness pushed ahead, expanding on the somewhat rough-and-ready, outraged A Crude Awakening and beginning a wider dialogue with governments and oil companies.10 Sonangol

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to subtly undermine the campaign. Yet the broad idea was a powerful one, and the campaign gained traction. Human Rights Watch helped deepen and broaden Global Witness’s initial analysis, prompting fresh cries from Angola of “systematic interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation.” A confidential IMF document in 2002

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. Under EITI, corrupt governments can choose whether or not to publish data: some have, some haven’t, and some have just pretended to.14 Global Witness promises to snap continuously at EITI’s heels to make sure that it stays strong, credible, tight, and relevant, and is not subverted by companies

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rest on the idea that if African citizens know more about where their money is going, they can then “call their rulers to account.” And Global Witness’ (and others’) fiery allegations of corruption have certainly opened up some political spaces in Angola and elsewhere, into which others have followed. However, with

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is hard to stir up outrage, except from local groups that are funded by western NGOs that want to drum up interest in the issue. Global Witness has other detractors. Some individuals and companies have threatened to bring them down in legal disputes (but so far they have not been successfully

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London, said she was particularly irritated with what she called “libel tourism”— where foreign companies use British courts to take legal action because of 218 Global Witness the ferocity of British libel laws. “There are British lawyers inviting despots to sue in the U.K. That is horrible.” Some of their

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field of transparency, closing down space for alternative approaches to emerge. Some grate at their often rather tabloid presentational style (one person I know calls Global Witness “the rottweiler NGO”), which grabs attention but comes at the expense of proper context and analysis, and some criticize occasional errors that have appeared,

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are protecting their turf against the British intruders.) I was reminded of another yawning weakness in the transparency campaigns in March 2004, a day after Global Witness had published Time for Transparency, a document containing colorful allegations about Arcadi Gaydamak, the oil companies, and oil-rich African elites. This was shortly

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campaigners so much for “neocolonial interference” that I sometimes get the impression they try to do exactly the opposite of whatever it is that Global Witness calls on them to do. A new chapter is opening—a not insignificant turning point in the world’s willingness to tackle the mess in

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money flows are almost entirely unregulated, meaning that African rulers can plunder their treasuries—and nobody, anywhere, can stop them. The efforts of groups like Global Witness and Transparency International are preliminary attempts to prod the world’s politicians into building up international financial architecture to match, and tame, the enormous forces

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pared back are wrong, too. The IMF and trade rules, and even African governments themselves, must not be weakened or abolished, but instead 220 Global Witness strengthened and expanded, and reformed to make them more responsive to the needs of the poor. It is essential to fix the disconnects in our

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increasingly interconnected world. Global Witness, true to its instincts for finding new linkages, is now seeking to join the dots between disparate campaigns, from Congo to Kazakhstan to Cambodia,

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to draw common conclusions. “We see the same mistakes again and again,” said Alex Yearsley, one of Global Witness’s longest-serving officials. “We see different resources, but the same players and the same mechanisms.” At the end of the day, transparency is one

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fail. How can this happen today? It took me a while to work out why it took so long for groups like Transparency International or Global Witness to appear, waking people up to corruption and the importance of transparency. But this one—dirty money—floors me. To explain it to myself

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Valérie Lecasble and Airy Routier, Forages en eau profonde, page 147. Rassemblement pour la République. Lecasble and Routier, Forages en eau profonde. See, for example, Global Witness’s Time for Transparency, March 24, 2004, page 38. Author’s interview with Verschave, Berlin, June 2003. Lecasble and Routier, Forages en eau profonde,

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that this is operated, not equity, production. For example, the arms dealer Jacques Monsieur. See The Field Marshal, Center for Public Integrity, November 15, 2002. Global Witness, Time for Transparency. Speaking on the BBC’s “Gabon: The Oil-Rigged State,” December 23, 1998. Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, Affaire Elf, affaire d’

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. Jacques Sigolet, director of Elf ’s Fiba bank, in Elf indictment, quoted in Global Witness, Time for Transparency, page 21. In Olivier Vallée, “Les cycles de la dette,” Politique africaine, October 1988, page 3. Verschave, L’envers de la dette

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, page 24; Olivier Vallée, “Les cycles de la dette”; and IMF and World Bank reports, quoted in Global Witness’s Time for Transparency, March 24, 2004, page 18. Vallée, “Les cycles de la dette,” pages 17–19. In the words of Jacques Sigolet, from

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Elf indictment, cited in Global Witness, Time for Transparency, page 20. Sigolet said that Elf would set up a company in, say, Switzerland, which would lend at a higher interest rate

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in court by Lissouba’s finance minister and by Jacques Sigolet. See, for example, Verschave, L’envers de la dette, page 110, about the CIAN. Global Witness, Time for Transparency, page 21. See African Affairs, Volume 101, April 2002, page 181. Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, quoted in L’Express, December 12,

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57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. U.S. State Department, Country Report on the Republic of Congo, 2000, and Global Witness, Time for Transparency, page 24; a similar estimate was given me by Bill Paton, the top U.N. representative in Congo, in May 2002. Antoine

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University (U.K.), May 2005, Chapter 2. Médécins sans frontières—Holland. According to a doctor from Médécins sans frontières, in October 2003. See, for example, Global Witness, Time for Transparency, page 25, and “Cleaned out,” Africa Confidential, December 5, 2003. Chapter 7—Obiang Nguema 1. Quoted in the International Consortium of

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“Equatorial Guinea: Selected Issues and Appendix,” June 2006, page 37. U.K. Channel Four News interview with President Obiang, broadcast November 18, 2003, reproduced in Global Witness’s Time for Transparency. See http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2005/pn0561.htm. “World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz’ Remarks at the Corporate

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” are up-front nonrecoverable down payments, and are not illegal. See Yossi Melman, “He’s Just a Big Shot,” Haaretz, January 13, 2002. See Global Witness, “All the President’s Men: the devastating story of oil and banking in Angola’s privatised war,” March 2002, page 13. See Yossi Melman, “Me

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to Abalone had paid off the 16 notes in full, leaving $726 million outstanding, which Angola should still pay Abalone under the 1997 agreement. See Global Witness, Time for Transparency, March 24, 2004, page 43. The memo was from 1999. Under the escrow agreement with UBS, each Sonangol payment into Abalone

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, 2006. See “Crisis in the Delta: How Failures of Transparency and Accountability Are Destroying the Region,” by Michael Peel, Chatham House, July 2005. Chapter 11—Global Witness 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. See The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds &

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Canada, (Ottawa), January 2000. Matthew Hart, Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession (Toronto: Viking, 2001). Quotation from diamonds.net and from Global Witness’s 2004 annual report. See Angola Unravels, Human Rights Watch (New York), September 1, 1999. The effort was resuscitated only with the OECD antibribery convention

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Details of Angola Operations,” Financial Times, February 2001. See “All the Presidents’ Men: the devastating story of oil and banking in angola’s privatised war,” Global Witness, March 2002. From “A Dinosaur Still Hunting for Growth: Interview with Lee Raymond, ExxonMobil,” Financial Times, March 12, 2002. Other NGOs joined these discussions

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in Congo-Brazzaville has been more active than most on this issue, and the Nigerian EITI process has elicited some interest in the Nigerian press. Global Witness has since revamped its methods to avoid repeating earlier errors. This has resulted in tighter standards of evidence, but probably at a cost of

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Gaydamak, Arcadi, 165–187, 216, 219; see also Falcone, Pierre; “Angolagate” arms deals; and foreign debt Gazprom, 158, 168 Gbomo, Jomo, 204, 205 Gibraltar, 88 Global Witness, 110, 116, 152, 162, 168, 209–221, 225 Gore, Al, 104, 111, 112 Gowon, Yakubu, 13–16 Greenspan, Alan, 190 Guantanamo Bay, 126 Guernsey,

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals

by Oliver Bullough  · 10 Mar 2022  · 257pp  · 80,698 words

, but who owned the other half? Which individual was making the kind of money that only comes when you face down a government and win? Global Witness, a London-based campaign group which works to expose corruption around natural resources, dug as deep into the contract as it could. It identified the

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the report was published, as if to taunt its authors, the owner of the other half of RUE revealed himself. His name was Dmitry Firtash. Global Witness had mentioned him in its report but struggled to find out much about him. His biography was sketchy, and in place of a photograph they

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, the Wall Street Journal announced that US law enforcement was investigating RUE’s ties to organised crime. It was this investigation rather than that of Global Witness that seems to have finally forced Firtash to go public about owning half of RUE’s shares. The WSJ reported that Asquith had gone to

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several to make sure they have the best service available when it comes to hiding their wealth. Thanks to the work of Transparency International and Global Witness, as well as the publicity generated by our London Kleptocracy Tours, which began in 2016, many MPs have become increasingly concerned about Britain’s failure

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the ruling family of Kazakhstan, a post-Soviet kleptocracy that had been dominated by former president Nursultan Nazarbayev since independence in 1991. Back in 2015 Global Witness had published an extensive report into London properties that appeared to be owned either by the president’s grandson or by Rakhat Aliyev, who had

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court case dismissed: the NCA made no effort to analyse the nature of Kazakhstan’s politics or economy and was almost embarrassingly reliant on the Global Witness report for information. There is only one use of ‘kleptocracy’ in the document the NCA laid before the court, and just two uses of ‘corruption

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being caught, means that fines for breaching anti-money-laundering rules can be seen as the cost of doing business, rather than being dissuasive,’ said Global Witness in a report in 2018. The government has been promising to replace ELMER, the IT system that receives all the SARs filed, with a more

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Gas Sector. I also depended on advice from Daria Kaleniuk and her colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Action Centre in Kyiv. The lead investigator for Global Witness when it looked into Ukrainian gas was Tom Mayne, who was incredibly helpful with his time and thoughts both for this chapter and the subsequent

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blockchain 242, 243 gambling 10, 98–102, 104, 105–7, 109, 110, 113, 114– 17, 119–20, 121–4, 242–3, 245 smuggling 92, 97 Global Witness 157–8, 169, 196, 198, 200, 205 golden visas 244–5 Goodman, Helen 172–3 Granovski, Vladimir 159 Greece financial crisis 31 visas 244 Green

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina  · 19 Aug 2019

the Amazon River Mouth,” American Association for the Advancement of Science, April 22, 2016. Before I left the United States: The Guardian, in collaboration with Global Witness, maintains a useful list of murders of environmentalists. I also consulted Simeon Tegel, “Latin America Most Dangerous Place for Environmentalists,” Public Radio International, Sept. 2

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Dangerous Country for Environmental Activists in 2015,” Greenpeace, June 27, 2016; “Olympics Host Brazil Is the Most Dangerous Country in the World for Environmental Activism,” Global Witness, Aug. 4, 2016. One environmentalist had his ears: Miller, “Why Are Brazil’s Environmentalists Being Murdered?” A nun who had been protesting: Myrna Domit, “Rancher

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Federation (ITF), and WWF International, 2005. Gilje, Paul. To Swear Like a Sailor: Maritime Culture in America, 1750–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Global Witness/IFT. Taylor-Made: The Pivotal Role of Liberia’s Forests and Flag of Convenience in Regional Conflict. Sept. 2001. Golden, Frank, and Michael Tipton. Essentials

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

by Misha Glenny  · 7 Apr 2008  · 487pp  · 147,891 words

Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite

by Carne Ross  · 25 Apr 2007  · 212pp  · 68,690 words

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth

by Tom Burgis  · 24 Mar 2015  · 413pp  · 119,379 words

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy

by Frank Vogl  · 14 Jul 2021  · 265pp  · 80,510 words

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History

by Casey Michel  · 23 Nov 2021  · 466pp  · 116,165 words

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

by Harsha Walia  · 9 Feb 2021

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

by Rebecca MacKinnon  · 31 Jan 2012  · 390pp  · 96,624 words

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back

by Oliver Bullough  · 5 Sep 2018  · 364pp  · 112,681 words

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century

by Tom Bower  · 1 Jan 2009  · 554pp  · 168,114 words

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

by Steve Coll  · 30 Apr 2012  · 944pp  · 243,883 words

A Short Ride in the Jungle

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent  · 6 Apr 2014  · 316pp  · 100,329 words

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better

by Annie Leonard  · 22 Feb 2011  · 538pp  · 138,544 words

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back

by Guy Shrubsole  · 1 May 2019  · 505pp  · 133,661 words

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green

by Henry Sanderson  · 12 Sep 2022  · 292pp  · 87,720 words

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

by Stephen D. King  · 22 May 2017  · 354pp  · 92,470 words

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

by Frederik Obermaier  · 17 Jun 2016  · 372pp  · 109,536 words

Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Travel Guide

by Lonely Planet  · 30 May 2012

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

by Greta Thunberg  · 14 Feb 2023  · 651pp  · 162,060 words

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs

by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley  · 22 Jul 2009  · 471pp  · 127,852 words

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

by Naomi Klein  · 12 Jun 2017  · 357pp  · 94,852 words

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency

by Andy Greenberg  · 15 Nov 2022  · 494pp  · 121,217 words

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security

by Deborah D. Avant  · 17 Oct 2010  · 872pp  · 135,196 words

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety

by Gideon Rachman  · 1 Feb 2011  · 391pp  · 102,301 words

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 11 Apr 2011  · 429pp  · 120,332 words

Deep Sea and Foreign Going

by Rose George  · 4 Sep 2013  · 402pp  · 98,760 words

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits

by Richard Davies  · 4 Sep 2019  · 412pp  · 128,042 words

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

by Stephen Graham  · 30 Oct 2009  · 717pp  · 150,288 words

The Secret World of Oil

by Ken Silverstein  · 30 Apr 2014  · 233pp  · 73,772 words

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry

by Peter Warren Singer  · 1 Jan 2003  · 482pp  · 161,169 words

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism

by Elizabeth Becker  · 16 Apr 2013  · 570pp  · 158,139 words

Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic

by Hugh Sinclair  · 4 Oct 2012  · 346pp  · 101,763 words

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance

by Parag Khanna  · 11 Jan 2011  · 251pp  · 76,868 words

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions

by Jason Hickel  · 3 May 2017  · 332pp  · 106,197 words

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 10 Oct 2018  · 482pp  · 149,351 words

Philanthrocapitalism

by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green and Bill Clinton  · 29 Sep 2008  · 401pp  · 115,959 words

Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope  · 17 Sep 2018  · 354pp  · 110,570 words

The Joy of Tax

by Richard Murphy  · 30 Sep 2015  · 233pp  · 71,775 words

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce  · 28 May 2012  · 379pp  · 114,807 words

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World

by Ian Bremmer  · 30 Apr 2012  · 234pp  · 63,149 words

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity

by Paul Collier  · 10 May 2010  · 288pp  · 76,343 words

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

by Gaia Vince  · 22 Aug 2022  · 302pp  · 92,206 words

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle

by Dinny McMahon  · 13 Mar 2018  · 290pp  · 84,375 words

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

by Paul Collier  · 26 Apr 2007  · 222pp  · 75,561 words

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy

by Richard Murphy  · 14 Sep 2017  · 241pp  · 63,981 words

Making Globalization Work

by Joseph E. Stiglitz  · 16 Sep 2006

Data Wrangling With Python: Tips and Tools to Make Your Life Easier

by Jacqueline Kazil  · 4 Feb 2016

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

by Jeffrey Sachs  · 1 Jan 2008  · 421pp  · 125,417 words

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century

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