Quotessence
Home / Books / Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

Book by Tom Burgis · 3 quotes · Corruption, Oligarchy, Tony Blair

Filter quotes by topic

AllCorruptionOligarchyTony BlairNazarbayevKleptocracyBsi BankCity Of LondonEfg BankFree Market IdeologyGlencoreHitlerJonathan AitkenJp MorganNazismPeter MandelsonSir Dick EvansSwitzerlandTony Judt

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World Quotes

“It was to Blair that Nazarbayev turned for counsel at this delicate moment. The information blackout on Zhanaozen had been insufficient to prevent the basic details leaking out. It was as though someone had spoken aloud a forbidden truth: for the kleptocrat, ruling by licensing theft rather than seeking consent, money can achieve most of what needs to be done. For everything else, there is violence. And so, as he arrived in Cambridge, Mecca of the rational, to deliver his speech, Nazarbayev resolved to follow Blair’s advice. For these Westerners, anxious after years of war and terrorism and, lately, the financial crisis, he would be the bringer of stability to a troubled world.”

CorruptionOligarchyKleptocracyTony BlairNazarbayev
Book:Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
Create image

“Nazarbayev found that he and his regime had a certain chemistry with figures from Blair’s strand of Western politics: the Third Way. It was a system that purported to wed the humanity of the left to the dynamism of the markets. Its proponents possessed, as Tony Judt put it following Blair’s election, ‘blissful confidence in the dismantling of centralised public services and social safety nets’. They felt themselves to be part of a new, transnational elite that would harness the miracles of globalisation. Peter Mandelson, Blair’s strategist, announced the end of the left’s anxieties about the hoarding of wealth. ‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,’ he said. (He added, ‘as long as they pay their taxes’, though the caveat was often forgotten, perhaps because they did not.)”

CorruptionOligarchyFree Market IdeologyTony BlairNazarbayevTony JudtPeter Mandelson
Book:Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
Create image

“Nazarbayev had learned that Westerners could be just as adept as he was in turning money into power and power back into money. Some, like Dick Evans and Jonathan Aitken, went about it from positions at the top of business and government. Others had to wait until they had left office to monetise their access and influence. They had to get theirs from what they called ‘consultancy’. Blair was said to have made $1 million from Ivan Glasenberg’s Glencore for three hours spent talking the Qatari prime minister out of blocking its merger with a mining company. JP Morgan, the Wall Street bank that had won the financial crisis, retained him too, as did a Swiss insurance company, the government of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi’s investment fund. Some days he was a business consultant, others a philanthropist, or a governance guru, or a peacemaker. His money sat in a web of companies that almost rivalled the complexity and opacity Nazarbayev’s Swiss bankers had devised. By one estimate, less than a decade after he resigned as prime minister, his fortune stood at $90 million.”

CorruptionOligarchyTony BlairJp MorganNazarbayevSir Dick EvansGlencoreJonathan Aitken
Book:Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World
Create image