KLEPTOPIA
by Tom Burgis
Unfinished books are a sad love affair.
When I was a little younger, I used to force myself to finish books that I didn’t like, especially if I’d spent the money to buy them. Nowadays that I’m older and arguably wiser, I think that my super limited reading time (due to being an adult with jobs and responsibilities and cats to feed and errands to run) is too short to waste on crummy books.
With this one, I did try to stick it through cause the subject of money laundering really interests me, but I just could not do it. My eyes hurt, my brain hurt, I put it down. Sorry Mr. Burgis.
Cover Summary
In this real-life thriller packed with jaw-dropping revelations, award-winning investigative journalist Tom Burgis weaves together four stories that uncover a terrifying global web of corruption: the troublemaker from Basingstoke who stumbles on the secrets of a Swiss bank, the ex-Soviet billionaire constructing a private empire, the righteous Canadian lawyer with a mysterious client, and the Brooklyn crook protected by the CIA.
Kleptopia follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, Paris to the Trump White House, it shows how the thieves are uniting – and the terrible human cost. While we are looking the other way, all that we hold most dear is being stolen.
So I didn’t finish this one, and here’s why
This book has a lot of potential, because it deals with something that hits very close to home in recent years – how money from illicit activity on a global scale is laundered and passed on through offshore shell companies and the top most dangerous dogs of the global political sphere. The first part of the book, which I managed to get through, focuses on Russian and Kazakh oligarchs’ financial wrong doings, a super interesting thread, and it shows that Tom Burgis put a lot of research into this book.
Having said that, I think it would have been much better to focus on one story line and only a handful of characters and avoid delving into the so many side stories. With each new name mentioned (and there were a LOT), Burgis went into their own history and dealings, leaving the story to feel very disjointed, confusing and making me lose track of the bigger stories I was actually interested in.
One example of this is the story of Rosa, a Kazakh oil worker and activist who protested against the corporation’s exploitation of their workers to make tons of money while the population could barely make ends meet. Rosa was eventually arrested and sentenced, but we never found out her full story because there were so many side characters (lawyers, oligarchs, henchmen aand so on) and Burgis chose to deflect from the main story to tell us about each and every one of their own illicit money laundering activities.
It also kept switching back and forth between people and storylines. Ultimately, this book is not coherent, and extremely confusing.
All in all…
I’m going to have to give this one a poorly one star. I wish it was written more in the style of Narconomics, where we could really follow the story and even learn something about the shady underworld. But unless you have very precise and up to date knowledge of who’s who in the big player world of oil, gas, money, post-Soviet Russia and New York immigrant gang groups, this one is extremely hard to follow and remain interested in. Disappointing because this is such an important topic.