Today The Sunday Times published
its annual Rich List. As it happens, I’m also reading Guy Shrubsole’s new book,
Who Owns England? Both reminded me of
an old Blog, published here on 2 June 2011 (probably responding to that year’s
Rich List) and now re-published more or less unchanged:
Half the world's nastier
regimes are often described as kleptocracies. Those in power are motivated by a
desire to steal money. So money coming in as foreign aid is siphoned off to
private bank accounts and income generated from oil or mineral exports
likewise. It's as easy as this:
An aid agency
contacts the local Ministry of Finance and asks for bank account details so
that it can shell out. Back comes the numbers of half a dozen accounts, no
names, but actually: the President's personal account, his wife's personal
account, his brother-in-charge-of-internal-security's personal account ... and
ten percent to an account from which the Ministry of Health will spend money on
the projects for which aid is being granted.
Much of the
money will then be transferred abroad to countries like Switzerland and the UK
from where it can be accessed if the Day of Downfall ever arrives - but also,
just for shopping trips abroad to buy new houses, cars, yachts, shoes ..... See now Tom Burgis, The Looting Machine ( https://www.readingthisbook.com/2015/04/review-tom-burgis-looting-machine.html ). Nicholas Shaxson's book on tax havens, Treasure Islands also provides a lot of relevant detail.
It's gone on
for decades like that since the End of Colonialism and is part of the deal by
which the West has kept oil- and mineral-rich regimes on side. France is one of
the worst offenders: for fifty years, its governments have supported any regime
in ex-colonial Africa so long as it is uncontaminated by any belief in Liberty,
Equality or Fraternity.
But
kleptocracies are nothing new. They have dominated world history.
I just
finished reading Tony Faber's Faberge's Eggs, a careful and
well-written study of the famous Easter Eggs which the Court Jeweller, Carl
Fabergé, prepared for Russia's last two Tsars to give to their wives and
mothers at Easter.
The Romanov
family held on to absolute power in Russia for just over three hundred years -
from 1613 to 1917. The veil they passed over their own kleptocracy was
ingenious: since their word was law (that's what "Autocracy" means)
whatever they did couldn't be stealing, could it? You can see where the
communist idea came from.
Old style
kleptocrats were less likely to keep their money in bank accounts, but they
liked to keep a lot of it portable - just in case. So when in 1918 the
Bolsheviks took the last of the Romanovs down in to the cellar of the House of
Special Purpose in Ekaterinburg and lined them up to be shot, the Tsar's
daughters obstinately refused to fall down dead from the bullets and required
additional bayoneting and beating. Why? "The reason only became clear when
Yurovsky [ in charge of the operation] began disposing of the bodies. The
corsets of three of the grand duchesses contained eighteen pounds of jewellery,
enough to make them armour-plated" (Faber, page 148). But the jewellery
they had smuggled into their final exile was no more than a grain of sand from
what the family really held.
Lenin famously
sent out instructions to "Loot the Looters" - the modern equivalent
would be "Freeze their Bank Accounts". And so by the beginning of 1919,
"thirty-three warehouses around Petrograd were filled with antiques and
other objets d'art", the
contents of which were sold off over many years - notably in the USA - to supply the new regime with much-need
foreign exchange. There was much more besides, more valuable items, kept in
secure vaults rather than warehouses.
Carl Fabergé's
son, Agathon - a gemmologist - had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1917
and eventually saved his life only by agreeing to describe and value the jewels
the Bolsheviks had amassed. He eventually fled to Finland and passed the rest
of his life as a stamp collector - my own work as a stamp dealer often brings
me into contact with material from the vast collections he accumulated.
Occasionally,
kleptocratic families harbour real kleptomaniacs, though they might be able to
pass a veneer over their habit. Faber writes this about Queen Mary of Teck,
wife of Britain's George V: "Owners of private houses were said to dread a
visit; they would prepare by hiding whatever they had that was valuable or
beautiful, for they knew that if Queen Mary saw an object, she might well
admire it with open covetousness, dropping heavy hints until the treasure was
offered to her. She would take it away with her there and then" (page 194).
[ For more insight into the Royal Family's Grandma Swag, Jane Gardham's Old
Filth has some entertaining details of her war-time evacuation to
Badminton].
Kleptocracies
are nearly all family affairs - modern ones are often called "republican
dynasties".
There is one
important exception: the Vatican. This is an institution which has sucked blood
out of rich and, mainly, poor over centuries and has accumulated fantastic
wealth, much more opaquely held than that of, say, our own Royal Family* . But
it cannot be passed on as in a family because of the rule of priestly celibacy.
You only get life-time enjoyment. That's not the kind of enjoyment the rulers
of North Korea and Kazakhstan and a hundred other regimes are interested in.
______________________________
* On the
Sunday Times Rich List, the Queen is currently in position 257
with personal wealth of just £300 million, including a stamp collection,
jewels, cars, horses, shares and properties personally held (Sandringham,
Balmoral and others). Excluded is the Crown Estate (valued at £6.6 billion but
controlled by the Treasury) and the Royal art collection (valued at £10
billion)
© Trevor Pateman 2011 and
2019
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