Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won, With Oliver Bullough 8 | 17

While the Radical Candor podcast team is on a Radical Sabbatical, Kim Scott is sitting down with the authors of the books that have most shaped her thinking over the past two years. This week's guest is Oliver Bullough — a journalist from Wales who has spent his career chasing dirty money across the former Soviet Union, the City of London, and the world's quietest tax havens.

On this episode of the Radical Candor Podcast, Kim talks with Oliver Bullough about how money laundering went from a niche service for tax-dodging celebrities into a global system that hides trillions of dollars for kleptocrats, cartels, and crooks. They trace the line from the post-war Bretton Woods order to today's world of shell companies, crypto, and AI — and what its unraveling means for democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Watch the episode:

Naughty Money vs. Evil Money

Bullough draws a sharp line between “naughty money” and “evil money.” Naughty money is wealthy citizens of the US and Europe dodging taxes through havens like the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and Jersey — a habit that goes back to the 1950s and 60s. Evil money is the proceeds of cartels, traffickers, and corrupt dictators. The crucial point: the tax-avoidance industry came first, and it built the secrecy infrastructure that the genuinely dangerous money later flowed through. Once the services existed to hide one kind of wealth, they were sold to anyone who could pay.

Yanukovych's Palace and the Globalization of Corruption

The story that set Bullough on this path: touring the grotesquely opulent compound of ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, he asked a friend how the country had let him get away with it. The answer — “you're not even standing in Ukraine right now, you're standing in England” — sent him to the property registry. The land was owned by a company on London's Harley Street, which was in turn owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein. Ukrainian corruption, he realized, wasn't Ukrainian at all. It was global, assembled from anonymous shell companies and the lawyers, bankers, and accountants of countries that pride themselves on being clean.

From Bretton Woods to Offshore Finance

After World War II, the architects of the Bretton Woods system understood that unchecked money threatens democracy, and deliberately made it hard to move wealth across borders. Bullough compares it to building compartments into the hull of an oil tanker, so the cargo can't all slosh to one end and capsize the ship. Offshore finance — starting with the invention of the Eurodollar — drilled holes in those compartments. By the Reagan-Thatcher era, governments were mostly just legalizing what bankers had already made possible. The result, Bullough argues, is a return to 1920s-style instability, only faster.

Crypto, AI, and the Future of Money Laundering

Today the money moves instantly, and every new tool cuts both ways. Bullough recounts a bank whose AI caught a vast laundering scheme invisible to human analysts — only to realize the scheme itself was so intricate it could only have been designed by AI. “The robots are fighting the robots.” Cryptocurrency, prediction markets, and “pig-butchering” scams run out of trafficked-labor compounds are the new frontier, and the disincentives have largely vanished: the criminals are almost never caught. His latest book, Everybody Loves Our Dollars, is the story of why the world's war on money laundering has failed.

Radical Candor Podcast Resources

• Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won by Oliver Bullough
• Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything by Oliver Bullough
• Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough
• Oliver Bullough — author page

Radical Candor Podcast Transcript

[00:05] Kim Scott: Hello everybody, I'm Kim Scott here with the Radical Sabbatical. Today I'm talking to Oliver Bullough who wrote two books that I have read and loved, Money Land and Butler to the World. And he's got a new one coming out. Everybody loves our dollars. Welcome Oliver.

[00:25] Oliver Bullough: Thanks very much for having me on the show.

[00:27] Kim Scott: Thrilled that you are here. I have read your both of your books twice and I'm very excited for for Everybody Loves Our Dollars. I'll tell you why I love the books and you can tell me if if this is a strange analogy. But all each of the times I've read your books, I the heart of darkness comes to mind. There's that that you know, the scene where the narrator tells the Kurtz's fiance that he's died and she says, what did he say as he was dying? And of course he said the horror, the horror, but the narrator tells her that he said her name. And I sort of feel like for those of us who grew up thinking we live in a non corrupt society and things are basically reasonable. Maybe there is a sink. You said at one point there's a sinkhole opening up at your feet. So how do you feel about The horror, the horror.

[01:27] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, I hadn't really thought of myself as voyaging up a river to try and retrieve it.

[01:31] Kim Scott: Now, I think you and I are just the fiance, you know?

[01:36] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, I mean, a, it's a fantastic book, obviously, one of the one of the great books. And I think, you know, obviously, at the beginning of the Heart of Darkness, it's situated on the River Thames, you know, they're sitting on a boat on the River Thames, and then he tells the story about going up the Congo. And there's always all the way through, there's that sort of implied analogy between the Heart of Darkness, the river going up into Congo and sort of the

[01:51] Kim Scott: Yes. Yes.

[02:05] Oliver Bullough: Know, darkest Africa as it was then understood as this sort of unknown savage constant. the parallel that's drawn with the Thames going up into the city of London, which is where the capital was coming from, to fund the kind of raping and pillaging of these colonies. you know, actually, there is a, you know, a real parallel with a lot of how I think about the world about this. The period I'm sort of obsessed by begins

[02:15] Kim Scott: Yes. Yeah.

[02:34] Oliver Bullough: In the 1950s and particularly in the 1960s with the creation of offshore finance, the reinvention of the city of London as an offshore financial center rather than a colonial center, the development of places like Nevada, South Dakota, Delaware as offshore centers, obviously the famous tax havens throughout the Caribbean. And this form of

[02:40] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[03:03] Oliver Bullough: Globalized unaccountable money that became a new phenomenon. We've all become completely accustomed to it, but it was a really new invention in that post-colonial era. so it ties into, I suppose, what Conrad was writing about, because it is this new iteration of colonialism. Karl Marx said that colonialism was the last form of capitalism, which I felt

[03:25] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah.

[03:31] Oliver Bullough: Quite optimistic of the old guy. The idea that it couldn't get more rapacious, but actually it turned out that it could, and it did.

[03:34] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah, it could. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you talk a lot about sort of the naughty money and the evil money. So talk a little bit about what you mean by the naughty money and the evil money. And then I want to jump you, you're such a great storyteller. So I want to jump into some of these stories first, but because

[03:56] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, so I mean, this offshore finance now, you know, tends to be talked about in the context of, you know, how the cartels move their money or, you know, terrorist groups move their money. But that isn't where it came from at all. know, tax dodging and particularly in the Caribbean, so Cayman Islands, Bahamas and so on, we're talking about Americans dodging taxes and, you know, and a sort of surprisingly wide

[04:12] Kim Scott: It was just dot tax dodging, right? Yeah. Yes.

[04:26] Oliver Bullough: A range of people dodging taxes. mean, there's a book with a really detailed account of how Credence Clearwater Revival dodged taxes back in the 60s, which is so improbable that they had their own kind of tax shelter. And, know, and meanwhile, on our side of the Atlantic, had, you know, Switzerland, obviously, Jersey, Guernsey, other tax havens that helped Europeans dodge taxes. And then in other parts of the world, they have different places. you know, it's this desire from

[04:44] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[04:55] Oliver Bullough: Know, wealthy citizens of, you know, the US and European countries to opt out of that kind of New Deal post-war arrangement whereby there was a sort of, you know, more or less social democratic system whereby, you know, people would be supported if they fell on hard times and taxes would be high to pay for that. And there was a sort of understanding that that money and democracy were in opposition to each other and we needed to protect democracy from the influence of money. Fortunately for the owners of money, they were able by using modern technologies, the Telex jet aircraft and so on, to kind of opt out of that by moving their money overseas and outside the reach of the national governments. And this created this whole network of offshore money in the city of London, in Switzerland, in the Bahamas and so on, which gradually eroded.

[05:45] Kim Scott: Yes.

[05:49] Oliver Bullough: The ability of governments to police what wealthy people were doing. I mean, it's kind of amazing if you look back to the 1960s, what the federal government used to do in terms of controlling what rich people could do. There were limits on the amount of debt you could take out to buy shares, like really strict limits. There were limits on the interest rates that banks could charge. There were really ferocious limits on, I mean, the taxes were very, very high indeed.

[06:06] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, income taxed it was 91 % at

[06:17] Oliver Bullough: Exactly. mean, you know, that, that, you know, Beatles song, you know, tax man, you know, it's a marginal tax rate here in the UK, the top rate of 95%, which is extraordinary. And then, but then gradually, fortunately, for the owners of lots of money, they got these services offshore, which dissolved, you know, these restrictions. And that's what I call naughty money. You know, and then

[06:23] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes, which had a pretty bad effect. yeah.

[06:44] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, mean, but still, I you know, I think you need to make a distinction between tax dodging and cartels, terrorists, that kind of thing. You know, they are ones worse than the other. so but it is naughty money creates the pathways. And then the people who were selling the services realized they could offer them to, you know, corrupt dictators, to terrorist groups and so on. And they did. And then that then that's when the rock really, really set in.

[06:49] Kim Scott: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes, yes. So let's go back to your tour of Yanukovych's palace, because you had there's such a good story. So you ask the question and we got to remind people who Yanukovych was. But but you ask your guide, how did they let their president get away with it? And he gave you a very interesting answer.

[07:28] Oliver Bullough: Sit. I so to put it in context, I'm a Russianist, really, by inclination. I don't live in Russia anymore for fairly obvious reasons, but I lived in Russia for seven years or something. I traveled there a lot, even after I left permanently. And I traveled very widely in the old Soviet empire. And I became, well, fascinated

[07:45] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm.

[08:01] Oliver Bullough: After the 2014 Ukrainian revolution by the fact that there was this sudden window when no one really knew who was in charge. In fact, no one was really in charge. was just sort of, if you were sufficiently confident and you had the chutzpah, you could get away with almost anything, which I mean, the Russians, yeah. I mean, the Russians famously took advantage of this to annex Crimea. I took advantage of this to just go and poke around all the president's palaces. He had...

[08:10] Kim Scott: Yeah. And you could go anywhere and see anything. Yeah. Right.

[08:27] Oliver Bullough: The president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, had been astonishingly corrupt. A really thug. Well, was kind of, mean, Russia relied, but he was his own kind of thug as well. He wasn't just a bought thug. He was a thug on his own account. He was just a nasty piece of work. His press secretary once bit me, which is the only time I've ever been bitten by a press secretary. Yeah, it was very weird, quite painful.

[08:32] Kim Scott: And he was a Russian puppet, basically. Yeah. Okay. Right. Right. Right. my God. Why did he bite? Wait, wait, wait. didn't, I don't remember this story. Why did he bite you?

[08:57] Oliver Bullough: No, haven't. No, she was trying to stop me asking a question and trying to hold me back, but I was stronger than her, so I was just pushing forward. so in order to try and prevent me from getting to him, she bit me really hard on the shoulder. So anyway, that kind of gives a bit of a sense of the general Yanukovych vibe. But he had fled this popular uprising and leaving behind stuff he couldn't carry, which included his palace.

[09:01] Kim Scott: She. my gosh. Right. Right.

[09:25] Oliver Bullough: Which was a sort of, it's a log cabin, but a log cabin on, you know, monstrous steroids. I mean, of an astonishing proportion, sort of, you know, set in a park that had stolen with all these kinds of temples. had a kind of, like a kind of cod Spanish galleon thing down by the water, which, you know, where they'd hung out. There was an enclosure for shooting wild boars. They'd bring in wild boars and put them in this enclosure and then kill them. It was just grotesque. then he also had a hunting lodge.

[09:31] Kim Scott: Yeah. Right. Ha\! Yeah.

[09:54] Oliver Bullough: In a forest outside Kiev. I went there with one of the revolutionaries who was also interested in this stuff, and we were just poking around. And that was, I mean, it was a slightly less tasteless, but still pretty grim. And that was when I said, you know, it was so extraordinary, you know, that these palaces, wasn't like they were hidden behind high walls, you could see them, you know, it was pretty obvious what was going on. And I said, you know, yeah, how did you let him

[10:02] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[10:24] Oliver Bullough: Away with this. he replied, you know, in a degree of, you know, I mean, not furious, but with a degree of crossness. He said, you know, listen, we didn't know what was happening. You this, you're not even standing in Ukraine at the moment. You're standing in England. Look it up. And I didn't really know what he meant by that. But I went back and I did look it up. And you can look up on the registry of who owns what. And indeed, that piece of land was owned by a company which was registered in London.

[10:26] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[10:53] Oliver Bullough: It was owned by a completely legitimate looking company registered on Harley Street, is a really pretty posh street in central London, which is famous for private healthcare, just off Oxford Street. then that was in turn owned by a foundation in Liechtenstein. And it was all completely opaque and murky. couldn't tell who owned it. But what was amazing about it was this was the first realization that for me, that Ukrainian corruption isn't Ukrainian.

[10:54] Kim Scott: Wow. Yeah.

[11:23] Oliver Bullough: Global, that it uses all the tools of the global financial system. And you can't understand it as a Ukrainian phenomenon. You need to understand it as a global phenomenon. And as this outgrowth of this incredibly complex, murky, ever shifting financial system that allows people to hide their money and move their money and spend their money without anyone knowing what they're doing. And Yanukovych had been deeply plugged into this. he was a thug, a mob boss. He didn't know how to structure a shell company.

[11:23] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Right.

[11:53] Oliver Bullough: And he had, but he had all these people, know, lawyers in the UK and Austria and places who did this for him. You know, famously political consultants, you know, from the US who were helping him win elections. you know, he was a, basically he had bought all these services, kind of corruption services and embedded himself in the global economy. And it was the first insight I had really into how modern corruption, you know, what we call kleptocracy, how that works, the extent to which this is not.

[12:11] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[12:23] Oliver Bullough: The old kind of corruption where there's just a deal between someone pays a bribe and someone takes the bribe and you slip it in their handshake or you give them a brown envelope or whatever. It's not that. This is talking about huge amounts of money moving via bank accounts in totally different countries, all of it owned by shell companies that you never know who owns it. And it's completely unaccountable. that was, it just appalled me and fascinated me.

[12:33] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[12:52] Oliver Bullough: Decided to try and just understand what was going on and how this had happened and how this was possible and what it meant. And so that's what I do now. I thought it would, to be honest, it's quite funny looking back at it now. I thought that what I was describing was so appalling that the only reason it could possibly exist was because people didn't know about it. It was just, wasn't possible that this could be tolerated. And I kind of assumed a lot of the problems would be solved before I could finish writing the book.

[12:58] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[13:22] Oliver Bullough: But then.

[13:22] Kim Scott: Yeah, and you probably had no idea. It's like upwards of 10 % of the wealth of the world is in these like, yeah. And there's all kinds of like reasonable seeming, know, lawyers and accountants and clerks like supporting all of this.

[13:28] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, out there. Yeah, out there somewhere, you know. Yeah, but it's, but the impacts are extraordinary and dreadful. So yeah, I naively assumed all I had to do was write a book and then someone would read it and be like, wow, this is bad. Yeah, let's throw that out. Yeah, yeah, not so much as it turned out. And then I wrote another book and again, and now I've written another book and I mean, it just carries on. It's a very lucrative business for a lot of

[13:46] Kim Scott: Yeah, yes, yeah. And then everybody would say, this is horrible. We'll fix it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[14:10] Oliver Bullough: People

[14:11] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[14:11] Oliver Bullough: In both of our countries, in the UK and increasingly now the US, where

[14:14] Kim Scott: Yeah. Well, I think always in the there's, we, I interviewed, David Gellis of a few weeks ago, who wrote a book called revolt of the rich about how a lot of this stuff started getting legalized, under Nixon and Carter. And then of course, Reagan and Clinton really opened up the.

[14:35] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, I mean, so the one thing the US has always been very, very good at, there are some ways that the US is sort of behind European countries in the kind of direction I'd like to go. So particularly around transparency of shell company ownership and stuff like that. But there are other ways in which the US was traditionally miles and miles ahead. And that was particularly around investigation and prosecution of financial criminals.

[14:42] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[15:03] Oliver Bullough: Partly because of the history of prosecuting the mafia, but for lots of reasons. The US was always way ahead of European countries on that. That has sadly declined, and particularly with the developments around cryptocurrencies now, the US is pioneering a whole new financially innovative form of corruption and money laundering, which I don't think we've really understood the consequences of.

[15:07] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and probably more like 60 % of crypto is this kind of evil money, not just naughty money.

[15:39] Oliver Bullough: It's hard to say because crypto, there are lots of different kinds of crypto. People use it for speculating and I suppose that's bit pointless, but fine. People use it for straight fraud and then there's people who use it for money laundering and there are different kinds of crypto being used in different ways. It's certainly enabling an incredible growth of particular kinds of crime, particularly fraud, things like these romance.

[15:44] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[16:07] Oliver Bullough: Frauds, you know, what they refer to as pig butchering scams, you know, which are which are growing, you know, inordinately in, in, I mean, all over the world. that that

[16:11] Kim Scott: Yeah, it's awful. So explain explain a pig butchering scam for folks who have been fortunate enough not to read about it yet.

[16:22] Oliver Bullough: Well, sort of all of these scams, they all kind of work in a similar way, which is that someone will reach out to you via social media or over the telephone and will find a way to cart you from your money. They might claim that your computer is at risk and then you need to move your money to a safe bank account, or they might pretend to be in love with you and that you need to give them money to pay for the visa or

[16:42] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[16:52] Oliver Bullough: Or they might claim it's an investment opportunity or whatever. It's very, very sophisticated and it is an industry which is run in a centralized way by very, very sophisticated organized crime groups. But what's particularly dark and distressing about it is that a lot of the people who are actually contacting you to claim to be in love with you or to claim to have an investment opportunity

[16:57] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[17:22] Oliver Bullough: They are also victims. have often been trafficked to be imprisoned in compounds surrounded by barbed wire. if they step out of line, they get zapped with cattle prods and so on. there is victims all the way down. These are trafficked people who are defrauding vulnerable people. And all of this is enabled by the ease of moving money in cryptocurrencies. There are huge

[17:48] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[17:52] Oliver Bullough: Growths of these kind of scam compounds, particularly in Southeast Asia, places like Cambodia, but also in other parts of the world. You see it in Georgia, for example, in other places too. And this is how modern criminality works. It's so easy to move money and so hard to then find it or to recover it after it's been moved that basically, there's no disincentive for the criminals. They're never going to get caught. They're never going to get prosecuted.

[18:14] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah, and then the investigatory arms of government are either being disinvested or corrupted themselves.

[18:32] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, I mean, you know, in I mean, in the US, which is the only country that really ever investigated this stuff much to begin with, there has been definitely a an effort to push efforts away from that kind of work and in other directions. But then, you know, over on our side of the Atlantic, we never really did it in the first place very much. I mean, it's been, you know, it's been a source of sort of shame for a long time that, you know, none of these

[18:53] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah.

[19:00] Oliver Bullough: Kleptocrats and oligarchs who established themselves in London and bought property and everything that none of them ever get prosecuted. This is a very safe place for them.

[19:11] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully you're gonna change all that Oliver, no pressure. So talk about Woodbury Grove, where Manafort like in your description of going there was so fat, it's like, you know, the banality of evil kind of.

[19:16] Oliver Bullough: You Well, I mean, is, you know, it's one of the things that's always quite entertaining about doing this work is how, yeah, like you say, how banal so much of it is. You get in your head, particularly if you've read about these places on paper, the idea that these particular addresses are kind of, you know, they're sort of almost, you know, epic destinations of criminality. then, and so Woodbury Grove was the home of...

[19:42] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[19:59] Oliver Bullough: Company formation agent that was used by Paul Manafort to hold some of his business interests when he was operating in Ukraine. Manafort supported Yankovitch and was of course a Republican operator in the US with great controversy. Woodbury Grove was just a really dull office building, just like of the fourth rank, a really

[20:07] Kim Scott: And Manafort supported Yanukovych, right? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[20:28] Oliver Bullough: Quite substantial walk away from the final stop on the tube line, on the Northern line. You go all the way to the end and then you keep walking for 15 minutes and you finally turn off the main road onto this side road and you find this squalid little office block. And that was where his companies were. But it was a sort of, you know, just one of these funny things. You know, you've got a few hours spare. Why not go and have a look? And then, and you know, and you get there and all of your visions of the sort of, you know, the,

[20:37] Kim Scott: Right. Yeah.

[20:56] Oliver Bullough: The glamour of crime are just dispelled because you could imagine there are some poor people working in there for the minimum wage, doing this menial grudge work. But the crimes that they're enabling are world class. And you see this again and again. mean, so many of these company formation places are just like that. mean, you go to the British Virgin Islands, which is a...

[20:59] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. are huge, yeah. Yeah.

[21:23] Oliver Bullough: Major center of shell companies used in crimes all over the world. And it's similar. mean, it's perfectly nice, but these are just boring office blocks with just boring work being done in them. And everything, the glamour is just not there. There's nothing. I have the same in Nevada, talking to a company formation guy in Nevada, and he just lived in a tractor, houses next to a golf course, a sort of, I don't know, about 45 minutes drive outside Reno.

[21:31] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[21:52] Oliver Bullough: You know, and there was just nothing there. And that's, that's what's so weird about it all is it's just these multiple nodes in this system, none of which are really very interesting in and of themselves, but collectively they add up to this incredibly potent, kleptocratic, wealth moving machine. And, know, and the amount of money involved is just, you know, awe inspiring. mean, you know, the effort, people who try to estimate how much money is laundered

[21:52] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah.

[22:22] Oliver Bullough: Every year, you it could be up to $5 trillion. You know, that's a, you if you had a trillion dollars and you wanted to, you know, to try and count them, that would take you 30,000 years. know, so, you know, $5 trillion, there's 150,000 years worth of counting of individual dollars to get to $5 trillion. It's so much money. And it's all of it moving through these kind of banal places like Woodbury Grove.

[22:47] Kim Scott: Yeah. And I think it's part of what makes it hard to understand. I mean, the combination of evil and boring is real. It's hard to penetrate the boring parts in order to elucidate, to illuminate the evil parts. Um, but I like, well, go ahead.

[23:01] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, I mean, I was going to say just partly it's very well defended. There is a whole industry of people whose job it is to prevent you writing about this stuff. I had in my first book about money, I read a couple of books before about Russia, but my first book about money, Moneyland, I wrote about this reality TV show, Say Yes to the Dress, which is

[23:07] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

[23:30] Oliver Bullough: Just in case the listeners haven't ever watched it, I highly recommend it. It's fantastic. And it's set in a bridal boutique and brides go in three a week and they buy their dresses and they look fantastic. And there's drama and tears and all the stuff you get around a wedding. And there's one episode when they have these VIP brides with unlimited budgets. And it's all very exciting because there's so much money involved. one of the... VIP brides is introduced as like being like almost a princess from Angola, you know, she's got so much money. And every penny she spends is, you know, marked up on the screen, you know, it's like, you know, whatever it is, that what a how many. Yeah, it's like, why isn't this great? And isn't she going to be happy? And doesn't she look beautiful? And don't her bridesmaid look amazing? you know, fair play, they do, they look great. If you like that kind of thing. It's a bit it's a bit over the top for me, but okay. And then what was wild about it is then her father who

[24:03] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and everybody's celebrating it. Nobody's asking any questions. Yeah. Yeah.

[24:28] Oliver Bullough: At the time was the vice president of Angola, sued me for having revealed, yeah, sued me in Portugal and in Germany. And they also tried to sue me in Scotland, but that didn't amount to anything, for having exposed this and presented him as a bad person. I was just, as I was telling the judges who fortunately decided that I had no case to answer and that he should go away, I was saying I didn't.

[24:34] Kim Scott: So do you. Ugh.

[24:57] Oliver Bullough: This is not investigative journalism. didn't do any investigative journalism. watched an episode of Say Yes to the Dress. There was no whistleblower. She threw the whistle on herself by doing this on television. But what was so strange about that was that it took years for this case to finally wrap up. And there was all these lawyers who were willing to take his money to find a jurisdiction where he could bring this case and to

[25:01] Kim Scott: That was a TV show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[25:26] Oliver Bullough: And to try and sue me for having revealed his secrets, even though the secrets had already been revealed. that scaled up. see that again and again and again. It's something that a lot of American journalists don't really understand because it's a different tradition. But in Britain and in other European countries, the libel laws are really strict. And you have to be very careful about what you're saying and how you're saying it. Not so much because you think you might lose a case, because you can be very confident in the work you've done, but just the expense of fighting a case means that you'll just bankrupt before you even begin. And this whole industry is built up to protect the money in Moneyland from being exposed. And it makes it quite difficult to try and do the work I do.

[26:13] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and in that case you won, but there was another case when you were following another oligarch's child and you spent two years investigating a case and you were not able to publish it. I don't know what you can say about that, but that was...

[26:27] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, that was it. Yeah, that came to nothing. was a dispiriting case. was oligarch, being generous, calling him an oligarch. mean, there were rude words you could use. And he had made his money in lots of ways, but including in the sale of knockoff designer clothes in colossal quantities, so fake designer clothes.

[26:48] Kim Scott: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[27:01] Oliver Bullough: Including Dolce & Gabbana, all the brands that you would expect. And it was amazing because I figured out who his children were, who were living in Western Europe very happily and spending daddy's money. And one of them, his daughter, was living this very luxurious life and had a, you she shared a lot of stuff on Instagram, including photos of her selfies actually with Dolce & Gabbana, like the people. And like Dominique Codolce.

[27:04] Kim Scott: Yeah. Mm-hmm. you why are they supporting her?

[27:31] Oliver Bullough: Well, because she was buying clothes and she was at fashion shows and she was in that world. But that's the thing, they didn't know, obviously. mean, she's just a rich person. But it was this sort of amazing connection between the fact that you're making money by essentially ripping off Dolce & Gabbana and spending the money on actual Dolce & Gabbana. it was... Anyway, that piece, sadly, that piece never got anywhere.

[27:36] Kim Scott: Yeah, but our father is like robbing them. Don't they know? Yeah. Yeah.

[28:01] Oliver Bullough: Because of the legal risks. And it was one of several that never really made it, which can be frustrating, but it's just part of the work really. And I'm trying to figure out my way around.

[28:11] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah. But that is the story. Like I think I celebrate every time you get, you know, shut down, like you build a case why you need to change these libel laws. So I have another question for you. You were 13 years old in 1991 when there was the Soviet Union had already collapsed and then there was this coup.

[28:23] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, absolutely.

[28:37] Kim Scott: So why at age 13 were you so fascinated by the coup in Russia and the collapse of the Soviet Union?

[28:45] Oliver Bullough: It's always been a great source of mystery to my family. I grew up in mid Wales on a sheep farm in mid Wales. I yeah, I always had a apparently irrational and, you know, kind of from nowhere obsession with Eastern Europe in general and Russia in particular. I read lots about it. I used to listen to the radio. I remember we went on a sailing holiday in

[28:51] Kim Scott: Uh-huh.

[29:15] Oliver Bullough: Off the coast of Scotland. And that was when the coup was happening, actually. And we didn't have a radio on the boat or television or anything to follow the news. But we did have this device that you used in a fog to find radio beacons. it was very directional. So you put headphones on and you would point it and it would find the pulse of the radio beacon and you could keep it pointed and see what the compass bearing was. And I figured out that you could point this thing

[29:20] Kim Scott: Yeah. huh.

[29:42] Oliver Bullough: And find radio masts in the mountains and point it. And if you kept it very still, you could listen to the radio, which isn't what it was supposed to be for. So, you know, I'd be there desperately trying to hear the news from Moscow. This is such a nerdy thing for a 13 year old, right? But I'm listening to the news to Moscow and then the boat would move and I would lose my position and I'd have to find it again because it was very, very, very precise. So, yeah, I was always just obsessed by Russia, Eastern Europe. And then in the 1990s, you know, as you remember, I mean, you were there.

[29:45] Kim Scott: Wow. Right.

[30:12] Oliver Bullough: It was just one thing after another coming from Eastern Europe. was so, it felt like the cockpit of history. And there was this real opportunity to go to Russia and see its transformation, you know, from dictatorship to democracy. It just felt so exciting. You know, you'd never have that opportunity again. It was like being able to go to, I don't know, Germany in the 1920s or something, just so exciting. And yeah, so I did. I arrived in Russia.

[30:16] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[30:41] Oliver Bullough: After university in the autumn of 1999. And I mean, they'd just appointed a new prime minister. They were getting through the prime ministers a lot in that day. His name was Vladimir Putin and yeah, he's still around. And so I never knew Russia before Vladimir Putin, but I did see what he did. I witnessed, you know, his gradual, you know, it was gradual.

[30:51] Kim Scott: Yeah, Putin. Yeah.

[31:10] Oliver Bullough: The way he reshaped the country to his specifications in more or less brutal ways. And so that, and then the way he enriched his friends, I'm always amazed by the way that there are still purportedly leftish politicians in Western countries who talk about the Russian regime as if it's somehow admirable. This is a... a regime that so capitalist it makes what's happening in the United States look like North Korea. mean, it's just the degree of brutality is extraordinary, the way that they will just steal and rob everything. So yeah, I got a real insight into that early on. I mean, I didn't stop loving the place. I still, I loved living in Russia. It was fascinating. I very, very good friends and I...

[31:37] Kim Scott: It's... Yeah. Yeah.

[32:06] Oliver Bullough: And traveled very widely, had a great time. But yeah, it's a difficult story to tell because it's quite depressing.

[32:13] Kim Scott: It is very and it started out with such optimism. So I got there in 1990. I was there 90 to 94. And and when I left, I left because I picked up the paper one day and I read about and by the way, this is a lot of what happened there then was fueled by American neoliberalism, like, just privatize once you get all this money in a private hands, it'll be fine.

[32:16] Oliver Bullough: Yeah.

[32:43] Kim Scott: It was not, it was not. But there was one banking group competing with another and they beheaded their competitors and left people's heads, the bankers heads on stakes in a suburb of Moscow. And I remember thinking, I have to leave. I have to go back home where it's safe. And so I went back to the States. went to business school.

[33:10] Oliver Bullough: I don't know if you've if you come across, did you know Jameson Firestone when you were in Moscow? Do you know Jameson? He's written this book. He's a, there's a, I mean, this terrible case slightly later, guy called Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured there. So Jameson was his employer.

[33:17] Kim Scott: I did not, I did not, but. Yes.

[33:30] Oliver Bullough: And he, he, so he moved, I mean, he has a wild and amazing life. If ever you're looking for a fun guest to have on the podcast, I'd really recommend him. He, he, he, he moved to Moscow in, in the same time as you basically, and, then established a legal practice, which persisted until it became impossible because they'd tortured his law, his colleague to death and he had to leave. But he's a lovely guy. But, but yeah, the similar stories to tell as you in terms of just the, the insanity of that time. mean, I can remember I was, I first lived in St. Petersburg and

[33:31] Kim Scott: Wow. Okay. Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah.

[34:00] Oliver Bullough: And there was one of the tabloids had a feature, the assassination of the week. And, you know, there was just, I mean, I can remember really clearly there was one guy who was the business director for a beer company and had been in the kitchen of his apartment feeding his children and just been shot by a sniper through the window. and, and it just, I can't just say, how is this? What, what is, what's going on? You know, it was, it was all very like that. Strange times.

[34:05] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm. Gosh. Uh-huh. God. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes, yeah. I was talking, I think part of the reason why it's important to read about what happened then and there is, and what is happening then and there now is because I was talking to someone who had covered the presidency in the United States for a long time. And she said, it really can't get any worse. And I was like, yes, it can get so much worse if we don't do something.

[34:50] Oliver Bullough: Okay. I always get very frustrated by that expression. You've heard that lot in this country, so it can't get any worse. like, you've got no idea.

[34:59] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah, it's you have. yeah, you have no idea. I mean, hopefully it won't. Hopefully we'll stop it, but it will get worse unless we do something. And we had done something in after after World War Two to prevent this from happening again. And that was Bretton Woods. So a couple of minutes on Bretton Woods and then we'll move back into Moneyland. But Bretton Woods kind of closed the sinkhole for a while.

[35:22] Oliver Bullough: Yeah. I mean, the bread. I mean, Bretton Woods is an amazing time. mean, it's a place in New Hampshire, so I mean, that's the place where this arrangement was agreed. It's always referred to as the Bretton Woods system, but it's not actually Bretton Woods. So there had been obviously a degree of soul searching about what had caused the Second World War, like why you had one world war and then shortly after you have another one. I mean, they'd really, really messed up. And they'd come to some pretty

[35:40] Kim Scott: Yes. Yeah. Yes.

[35:56] Oliver Bullough: Profound understandings of the connection between the irresponsible finance that led to the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and nationalism and extremism. They had a real desire to prevent that from happening again, essentially to make democracy safe from money.

[36:06] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[36:23] Oliver Bullough: The idea that money is power and you can't have democracy if some people have more power than others. So you need to try and make that, to create a degree of fairness. And it was all part of that New Deal system which spread to the great society and all that. those kind of ideas about creating a new kind of democracy, which is for everybody.

[36:28] Kim Scott: Yeah. Right, right.

[36:52] Oliver Bullough: And really what they did was to severely limit the ability of the owners of wealth to move it around the world. You could move money, but you needed to have permission to move it from one country to another. Money essentially was a dollar didn't really make sense outside of the United States, or a pound didn't make much sense outside of the UK or at the time what was left of the British Empire. And so that... essentially meant the owners of wealth were, their wealth was subject to the laws in which that wealth was generated. That wealth was generated and therefore there was a democratic accountability. And it was, you know, for a time, an incredibly successful system. If you look at, you know, most indicators in terms of, you know, economic growth, equality figures, you know, everything was moving in the right direction while Bretton Woods existed.

[37:50] Kim Scott: Yeah, economic growth was twice in that period what it is now under neoliberalism.

[37:55] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, all, you know, mean, let's not pretend it was a perfect period. mean, obviously, civil rights battles in your country and mine were were severe. And, you know, equality was very much not for everybody. Yeah. But I do think that, you know, the direction of travel was positive, I think, in most places. And that

[38:01] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was the color of law. mean, it was, yeah. Yeah.

[38:25] Oliver Bullough: Was very threatening to the owners of wealth, and particularly threatening to people who made money from moving wealth around. And this is why the invention of offshore finance, the invention of a system that allowed you to keep your wealth outside of your country, essentially to give a dollar meaning outside the United States. They created something called the Eurodollar, which is essentially an IOU for a dollar. It isn't an actual dollar, but it says, I owe you a dollar.

[38:52] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah.

[38:55] Oliver Bullough: And as it turns out, an IOU for a dollar is basically as useful as a dollar if you're just using it to buy things with. It's kind of what they're doing now with some forms of cryptocurrency. They've kind of done that again. Yeah, exactly. They now have an IOU for an IOU for a dollar. So it's actually like it's almost even further away. But that system, the offshore finance, the euro dollars, then the bond market that sprung up for the euro dollars.

[39:05] Kim Scott: Yeah. Dollar denominated, yeah. Yeah.

[39:21] Oliver Bullough: Essentially allowed an unaccountable form of wealth to appear, which then could be filtered back into the original countries and gradually to buy influence to undermine the restrictions. And you see that throughout the 1970s and then into the 1980s, the restrictions on what you could do with wealth, the restrictions on what big banks could do, all of this begins to be liberalized, deregulated and all the nice words that we have.

[39:48] Kim Scott: Yes, yeah, yeah.

[39:51] Oliver Bullough: System that associated always very closely with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, also Helmut Kohl in West Germany, that system of essentially freeing wealth to move around the world to do what it liked was a response to the fact, a legal response to the fact that de facto that had already happened. Because of offshore finance, you were already able to do that if you wanted to. essentially, the governments were just catching up with what the bankers had already

[40:14] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah.

[40:21] Oliver Bullough: Allowed to happen. then, you know, and then this, the effect that this had on Western countries was not great. But we at least had developed institutions which were able to withstand the sort of inflow of corruption, but in countries with weaker institutions, so former colonies in, in, in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the republics of the former Soviet Union when they became independent.

[40:41] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm.

[40:49] Oliver Bullough: Was devastating because you had no institutions able to withstand the corrupting effect of this kind of money. The oligarchs in Russia who, thanks to the various advisors from the US, got to privatize everything very quickly, they were able to remove their wealth out of Russia immediately and move their wealth to keep it in London or Switzerland or whatever, which meant that they were not accountable to anybody. They could keep stealing and keep doing what they liked.

[40:55] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[41:14] Oliver Bullough: And was none of the, the idea behind the rapid privatization was it would eventually create the rule of law. did the opposite. It just created a predatory class who essentially colonized their own country. And this is the, the effect of offshore finance. And what I think we're seeing now is that corrosive, corrupting sort of criminogenic effect of that money, which we saw the impact of it on places like Russia and Nigeria and so on. I think we're beginning to see the impact of that on Western countries too.

[41:20] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[41:43] Oliver Bullough: We're seeing it in the US and a lot of European countries. And that's a real worry.

[41:51] Kim Scott: Yeah, you had this great analogy of the oil tanker and, you know, all these explain the oil tanker analogy, all these compartments, but it feels like now there's enough money sloshing around that it might sink even the formerly stable places, you know.

[42:08] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, I mean, I'm always quite guilty of coming up with quite hokey metaphors, it actually helps me to understand when I'm writing it, because I'm not an economist, I'm a journalist, so it helps me to understand. But the idea of the Bretton Woods system was that the world economy had been like an oil tanker. If it gets into a storm, the oil, with one big tank, the oil sloshes backwards and forwards, and it picks these big waves inside the boat, and they get so

[42:14] Kim Scott: That was really good. Yeah. Yeah.

[42:38] Oliver Bullough: So powerful that waves inside the boat that they can essentially make it fall over and sink and collapse. So what they did by keeping money locked up behind national borders was essentially create compartments within the hull of the oil tanker. So the oil could still slosh about, but it can only slosh about a small amount and not sufficiently to harm the integrity of the whole vessel. That's what, essentially that was my metaphor for what they tried to do at Bretton Wharf, which was to basically

[42:43] Kim Scott: Sink the boat. Yeah. Yes. Yes. That was very helpful.

[43:06] Oliver Bullough: Prevent the oil from sloshing from one end of the boat to the other and basically sinking it. That's what they were trying to do. What was done with the creation of offshore finance was to create essentially drill holes in those partitions to allow the oil to go back and forth, unmonitored, uncontrolled and do what it likes. So you ended up with initially those holes were quite small, but then they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then the partitions are abolished altogether. And so you end up with the situation like we have now with the money, which is sloshing around in the same way that it did in the 1920s.

[43:11] Kim Scott: Yes.

[43:36] Oliver Bullough: Just much more so because it's not moving by letter now. It's moving by email, by instantaneous. It's kind of extraordinary how we talk about the impact of artificial intelligence. The impact of artificial intelligence on corruption is a whole new model. I was talking to a bank compliance guy last year who had seen coming out of Vietnam

[43:36] Kim Scott: Yes, or maybe even more so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oof. Yeah.

[44:05] Oliver Bullough: A whole sequence of transactions that individually looked completely normal, like totally normal. But then when they trained their new amazing AI model on them, they could see that all these transactions were actually related, that it wasn't possible that they could be moving this kind of money in these sort of related ways without a single controlling intelligence, that this had to be actually one gigantic money laundering scheme. And they were amazed because it was only possible for them to find this with artificial intelligence. And they were like, isn't this incredible? Isn't AI wonderful?

[44:22] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

[44:34] Oliver Bullough: And then they thought about it and looked at it and they realized that this scheme was so complicated. It could only have been designed. Yeah, so it's like the robots are fighting the robots, you know, and so they cancel each other out. So we just end up back where we began. And that's the way with all these sort of great new innovations, know, they're always equally of use to the criminals as the law enforcement agents, in fact, probably of more use to the criminals because they adopt them.

[44:39] Kim Scott: It's their AI versus our AI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, So steal, hide and spend is speeding up. AI will help you steal, and spend.

[45:05] Oliver Bullough: Yeah. Absolutely. AI combined with crypto, mean, you we have this, the amazing phenomenon of these prediction markets now, which is, you know, I mean, it used to be that corruption was was quite, you know, it was quite sort of retail, you know, you you wanted to do something, I demand a bribe, you know, I can use power, but I can only use it on a case by case basis. The amazing thing about a prediction prediction market is it kind of wholesales corruption, you know, I can use

[45:11] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[45:34] Oliver Bullough: The knowledge, the preferential knowledge I have all the time. you know, prediction markets are being, you you can use crypto to bet on them. You can obscure the wealth, move it around. And it's extraordinary how that's happening. mean, and again, I mean, going back to the concerns that I have and many Europeans have about what's happening in the US at the moment, you know, it's extraordinary that

[45:45] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah.

[46:00] Oliver Bullough: That Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to both Polymarket and Cal-She. They're of vicious competitors with each other, and yet they both have this, they're united by the fact that they both have a good friend in Donald Trump Jr. And you see this across the crypto space as well about the involvement of the first family or the family members of senior administration officials. It's really alarming and quite radically new.

[46:05] Kim Scott: It's yeah, yes. It's yeah, and and just blatantly corrupt. And Richard Palmer, the CIA station chief, said like back in what was it like 99, he warned that profits from theft due to offshoring were gonna be a threat to the stability of the US. He was right. How did he know back then?

[46:50] Oliver Bullough: Well, it's really interesting that actually, do think, I mean, going back to Russia, and I know, you know, there's a bit of a risk of thinking if all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. You know, if all you know is Russia, you just think Russia is this answer to everything. but I do think that there are, that there is a lot of value in looking at what's happened in Russia as a sort of canary in the coal mine to use rather tired metaphor for, the rest of the world, that the way that democracy was

[47:00] Kim Scott: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[47:19] Oliver Bullough: Undermined in Russia does present a playbook for other authoritarian minded governments to do the same thing. mean, I have a good friend called Peter Pomerantsev, who wrote a fantastic book about this. And you know, he's a, you know, he's a very gifted writer and a very, you know, clear thinker about this kind of stuff. But but it's it I think is absolutely right that the that the the erasing of sort of trust and the erasing of belief in truth

[47:21] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yes. Yes, such a great book.

[47:49] Oliver Bullough: And really goes hand in hand with corruption and the undermining of the rule of law and legal norms and so on. And they make it all easier and they confuse everybody. And they make it really hard to know what's true and what isn't anymore. And that's just a great environment to be corrupt because then you can get away with so much more. And so I do think that there's a lot to be said for reading around what's happened in Russia. There are lots of good books about it, fortunately. And know, you know, Catherine Belton's book is another really, really good one. know, David Hoffman's book on the oligarchs, you know, there lots of good books. I think it is it is very instructive. love that book. Yeah, really. You know, it's very, very instructive, I think, to for what we're all up against a bit now in Western countries.

[48:19] Kim Scott: Yes. Christia Freeland's Sale of the Century. Yeah, it's a great book. So there's three services you describe, I think, in Butler to the World. The money laundering, the reputation laundering, and the golden visa. want to double click on the, got, somebody gave me some feedback, they hate that term. I want to dig in deeper on reputation laundering and the story that you told about Dimitri Furtash. It's infuriating and also really, it's like a universe through a grain of sand.

[49:03] Oliver Bullough: Yeah. Yeah, mean, so Dmitry Fyotash is a Ukrainian gentleman who made his money selling gas. before 2014, Ukraine had another revolution before that, the Orange Revolution 10 years earlier. And it brought to power a pro-Western government who were opposed to Russian influence in their country. And Russia didn't like this. And they had one weapon that they could really use against the Ukrainians, which was that Ukraine was completely dependent on Russian gas, not just dependent for itself, but it was also a big source of the transit fees of moving gas through its territory. And essentially, they weaponized that control to essentially increase the prices they were charging Ukraine, and then they cut the gas off when Ukraine wouldn't pay. eventually, in the middle of winter,

[50:03] Kim Scott: In the middle of winter when it was freezing cold, like negative 30 degrees or something.

[50:07] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty brutal. And essentially the Ukrainian government backed down and this destroyed the revolutionary coalition. And it was, it was really bad. The person who profited from that, well, lots of people profited from it, but the Ukrainian guy who profited from it was Dmitri Firtash, who was the intermediary who was negotiating this deal. He made hundreds of millions out of this. Like he really did very well indeed. And, you know, what are you going to do if you've got that much money and you want to spend it? Well, he came to London. it's a good place to spend money. And it's kind of amazing how quickly he managed to become integrated into the establishment. He bought himself a really nice house, like properly nice house near Harrods, if you know Harrods, big department store. And he bought himself a tube station, which was next door, not because he wanted a tube station, it was a disused tube station, but simply he didn't want anyone else to have it. He gave a decent amount of money, but what was for him?

[50:44] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[51:06] Oliver Bullough: Pocket change to Cambridge University to fund a Ukrainian studies program, which got him onto their, you know, sort of lovely group of benefactors. And he got to meet the Queen's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, may he rest in peace. He did various sort of stuff in parliament. He got to meet the Speaker of Parliament, all this. It was extraordinary how he, within years, yeah. Yeah, he had gone, you know, he'd gone from being a guy who, just to put this on the record, he is always denied.

[51:19] Kim Scott: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah. How quickly money bought him access like

[51:34] Oliver Bullough: Business connections with Simon Mogilevich, who was a notorious Russian mobster. And I have no reason to doubt him, but it is definitely the case that there had been in in serious publications, published allegations that he was a business partner of Simon Mogilevich. That was what people knew about him. He was, you know, Putin's guy in Ukraine. He was supposedly the business partner of Simon Mogilevich, even though he denies that. And I have no reason to think he was. And then he went within five years to being

[51:50] Kim Scott: Right. Right.

[52:04] Oliver Bullough: Noted philanthropist, owner of Spectacular House in London and all this. And it is kind of extraordinary how quickly he managed to achieve this. Sadly for him, there were some energetic prosecutors and investigators in the FBI in Chicago who didn't think that he was a philanthropist and thought that he was a corrupt businessman. And they were investigating a titanium deal that he did in India, which they They claimed jurisdiction over because of various transactions that happened through the United States financial system. And so they indicted him in early 2014, just after he had closed the deal on the tube station, actually, in London. he ended up... He does, but I think he has a pretty substantial mortgage on it now, so I'm not sure there's much he can do with it. he basically, they... I mean, I've spoken to some various people who are involved at the US end who don't speak publicly about it, but they were really concerned because the countries where...

[52:44] Kim Scott: Does he still own it? Okay.

[53:02] Oliver Bullough: Firtash tended to hang out were Ukraine, obviously, the UK, France, and none of those places the US thought were likely to extradite him. There'd been this really long extradition battle over Julian Assange, which they were like, we don't want that again. France never does anything that the US wants, obviously, because they're kind of wonderful like that. And then the Ukrainians wouldn't do it either.

[53:06] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.

[53:31] Oliver Bullough: So they waited till he was in Austria, and then they unsealed the indictment and got, you know, then hopefully the Austrians will, but they overestimated the willingness of the Austrians to help. So he remained, he managed to keep this tradition battle going for 10 years and Austrians have finally rejected it. He's not going to be extradited to the US. But it is just a really extraordinary demonstration about the difference between the US and the UK approach to a guy with money. The US was like,

[53:36] Kim Scott: Got him. At large. wow. Yeah. Yeah.

[53:59] Oliver Bullough: That looks a bit dodgy. Should we investigate that? The UK was like, how much of that can we get for ourselves? And that's the Butler to the World story kind of in a nutshell. It's just such an extraordinary example of the British willingness to just take money from anywhere, to make a buck from anywhere, which was very different to what was happening in the US. But sadly,

[54:04] Kim Scott: Yes. Yeah.

[54:27] Oliver Bullough: Certainly in the current administration, there seems to be a more of a, you know, even bigger butler to the world philosophy thing going on perhaps in Washington now.

[54:35] Kim Scott: Yeah, yeah. And it's not, mean, what he did is not so different from what Epstein did at MIT and Harvard. I would say in some senses, I feel like we have, in addition to money land, we have money brain, in which all the, you know, The Koch brothers gave so much money to think tanks, which convinced everybody that neoliberalism was this wonderful thing for them. And it's just wrong. mean, the reputation laundering has given us money brain. think we need to, maybe that's your, after everybody loves our dollars, maybe that's your next book. So, go.

[55:19] Oliver Bullough: I mean, I agree, is definitely a, there is a sort of equating of wealth and virtue.

[55:29] Kim Scott: Yeah, like yes to the dress and nobody asks any questions because she spent a lot of money on the dress. Like let's ask the questions, you know? So tell us about Everybody Loves Our Dollars and I know we're almost at time, but I'm excited for this book.

[55:32] Oliver Bullough: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So everybody loves our dollars is my story of why the world's battle to stop money laundering has failed. It just basically goes through how the world has tried to stop money laundering and it's failed completely. And why is that? And I mean, I had a lot of fun researching it. I always liked to go to places I haven't been before. I got to go to the Marshall Islands, the Marianas Islands. But actually one of the places I enjoyed going to most was Texas.

[55:54] Kim Scott: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[56:18] Oliver Bullough: The origin of money laundering, all money laundering legislation, in fact, the origin of the idea of fighting money laundering is, I think, unjustly forgotten US congressman called Wright-Patman, who was one of these extraordinary, slightly contradictory guys. He was a Southern Democrat, so not, you know, very much not perfect. He, you know, he opposed desegregation of schools in the 50s. But by the standards of Southern Democrats, he was a good guy.

[56:25] Kim Scott: Huh. huh. huh. Yes. Uh-huh.

[56:46] Oliver Bullough: And he grew out of that populist tradition of the American South and Midwest, populist in the original sense, that was in the late 19th century when they were very fiercely opposed to monopolists of the Gilded Age and so on. He grew out of that tradition, had a huge distrust of financial interests. One of the first things he did on arriving in Congress in 1928, or within four years, he tried to indict Andrew Mellon, the Treasury Secretary.

[56:59] Kim Scott: Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

[57:14] Oliver Bullough: You know, completely by his own initiative. I mean, he was in his 30s and he was like, right, that guy is a crook and he was a hell of a crook. he launched impeachment proceedings to the complete bewilderment of everyone else in Washington. And Andrew Mellon only survived being impeached by being packed off to be ambassador in London. know, so mean, Patman did not care whose toes he trod on. He was a scrapper. And anyway, he eventually rose to be chair of the House Banking Committee in the 1960s. And he

[57:14] Kim Scott: Wow. Yeah. Yes, he was. Wow.

[57:43] Oliver Bullough: Convened a series of hearings on money laundering and the misuse, particularly of Swiss bank accounts by criminals and so on, which led to, in 1970, the passage of the first piece of money laundering legislation. called the, it's always referred to as the Bank Secrecy Act. That's not actually what it's called, but that's what people always call it, which is the origin of all global efforts to stop money laundering. So I really enjoyed, I had to spend a lot of time in the LBJ library in Austin. where Wright-Patman's papers are as well. I spent a lot of time in Texarkana up on the northeastern corner of the state. And it was just great. I had a really interesting time. And that, you it was wonderful. and I mean, also while in Texas, I got to visit the factory where they print the dollars, which is in Fort Worth. And, you know, one of the most fascinating things to write about in the book is the strange paradox of why it is that we're using cash less and less and less, and yet we're...

[58:39] Kim Scott: Yeah.

[58:40] Oliver Bullough: We are printing more and more of them every year. And where is all the, where is it all going, right? Let's, you know, that's a question that's very important not to ask because printing cash is super profitable business. And if we were to stop doing it, we would all be out of.

[58:42] Kim Scott: And where could it be going? What a mystery. Wow, wow. Well, maybe maybe the cashless. Well, I don't know. mean, crypto may be worse than cash.

[59:02] Oliver Bullough: Well, sadly, it's not an either or. It tends to be a yes and. You get the crypto for cash. So yeah, they tend to just make each other worse. But yeah, sadly, not published in the US yet. It's come out in the UK. It's coming out in Holland shortly and various other places. But not in the US yet. But fingers crossed that someone will pick it up.

[59:06] Kim Scott: Yes, that's true. You get the crypto and then you go get the cash. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's possible to get a book to cross the ocean. I'm going to do that.

[59:27] Oliver Bullough: Yeah, I'm told. I'm told.

[59:30] Kim Scott: Thank you so much, Oliver, and keep doing the work you're doing. The world needs these books.

[59:37] Oliver Bullough: Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's been really, really fun. you know, thank you for, for, for, you know, getting up early in California to talk to me late in the afternoon in the UK. It's not always easy.

[59:47] Kim Scott: Thrilled to chat. Thanks so much.