Phil Lind Initiative Interview with Misha Glenny on the "The Unravelling of the Liberal Order”

there is so much to discuss that you do with you today but before we do tell me how did you get involved in this organized crime business stuff in the first place well it was a slightly secure tiss route Rob because I was working in Eastern Europe and as you said primarily in southeastern Europe before me in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and very quickly if you were working there you noticed how organized crime became part of the furniture as it were corruption was ubiquitous but also criminal actors were ubiquitous and this was especially pronounced in the former Yugoslavia because of course this coincided with the wars there and when you have Wars which are not straightforward wars between armies but between parts of the civilian population paramilitary groups militias you usually find that organized criminal syndicates have a hand in it because wars amongst other things are a way of accumulating capital in a primitive fashion from quite simply looting the villages that your militia is taking of it's televisions its fridges and whatever comes to hand through to the wholesale confiscation of territories of commodities and so on and for a long time I just thought this is simply part and parcel of the wars in Yugoslavia but then you noticed particularly after the imposition of UN sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro in July 1992 that all sorts of people were becoming involved in breaking those sanctions I engaged in criminal activity and they didn't just come from former Yugoslavia I spent in fact I lived for three years in Thessalonica Salonika in in Greece and Salonika Airport which is just south of the former Yugoslavia became a very important hub for goods that were being smuggled into the former Yugoslavia above all oil but also things like coffee cars whatever and all the neighboring countries because they were all very short of cash started getting involved in supplying Serbia a Montenegro even those countries it was at war with so for example the Albanians who were very very hostile to the Serbs they weren't at war nonetheless were supplying Serbia with oil across llegado and so I realized that organized crime was becoming more than just a you know sort of collateral damage as it were a collateral consequence of the war but actually it was becoming integral to the economy of the war and this is the point where I started having a look and seeing is it just about the former Yugoslavia or is it also about other countries that used to be communist countries and when our emerging market economies and that's really where my my interest began and it was the start of an absolutely fascinating journey about politics about the economy about Society of the post-communist Europe I mean that and that's the journey of ich mafia which Altima culminated in the book that you release some years later that's right we're gonna get to that in a moment but I want to go back even before the wars began in the former Yugoslavia to Russia a part of the world that you're familiar with and and you have some interesting ideas about the importance of Russia as in a way demonstrating the flaws in the global liberal system or put another way the way that the global liberal system was in fact exacerbating perpetuating disruption at a period of the end of the Cold War walk us through Russia's trajectory from the late 80s to today including its implications for the Balkans more generally but how do you see Russia and its importance to global organized crime and its franchising things started opening up in economic terms in Russia in 1988 where you started getting where Gorbachev allowed people to engage in small small-time commerce and so you've got little markets set up everywhere in Russian cities but particularly in Moscow and some Petersburg what you didn't have was a judicial system or policing system that could regulate or moderate these markets and as they expanded you got more and more disputes between the between the business people involved and so in order to mediate those conflicts business people started employing what sociologists refer to as privatized law enforcement agencies and what we more colloquially know as the Mafia in order to protect their business so if they had a dispute with another business person rather than fight it out between themselves the matter would be discussed between their two mafia groups or rooves as they were called in Russia kaliesha and they were either sort out the problem and tell each business person what they had to pay or they would fight it out and whoever came out on top well the winner took all so this was the genesis of capitalism in Russia and after the Soviet Union collapsed and communism collapsed in 1990 1991 this is how capitalism emerged at a great speed throughout Russia so it was a market economy that was not regulated almost in any respect by the state but was regulated by organized crime group at the same time the most cunning of the business people working in Russia at the time the most entrepreneurial most opportunistic would seize previously state-owned assets and privatize them and pay virtually nothing for them and this is why you got huge empires of the so-called allaka oligarchs growing up in the space of two or three years people became immensely powerful so Russian capitalism had built into it a organized crime as the as the sort of regulation police officer of the whole system and be immense inequality and there was a lot of money at stake and so this generated a lot of violence because if you have organized crime as your primary policeman of a system they're defining characteristic is their ability to wield violence in order to scare off competitors or the real police force who were really a relatively insignificant force of this period this was the so-called gangster capitalism now oligarchs being as they were they understood the vicissitudes of history and they realized that this situation might not last for a very long time the West was sitting back allowing this to happen and saying oh well this is what happens with the market economy you have to go through a teeth few teething problems there was no attempt despite some some very serious calls to do so to introduce a Marshall Plan to help the the former Soviet Union regulate the introduction of a market economy what the West however was prepared to do was to accept the ill-gotten gains that the oligarch started exporting in vast sums over to the West in order in order either to buy property in London or the South of France or the south of Spain or to put into Swiss bank accounts or to shift through Vienna's very murky banking system at the time or to buy property on the west coast of the United States or to set up businesses in Israel or South Africa so suddenly Russian money was pouring out money that had been looted from the Russian people and was regulated by organized crime and the West greedily accepted this money now in the meanwhile the social consequences in Russia after the first couple of years were very very severe the majority of the population became impoverished life expectancy fell from about 69 to 58 for males in the space of about four four years and the KGB and other former state networks which had been so important in the Soviet Union felt deeply resentful and they felt even more resentful when they saw that NATO was creeping closer and closer to the Russian border so what happens in the 1990s is the introduction of capitalism in Russia plus the apparent Western complicity in the introduction of this capitalism generates a ferocious social and political resentment inside Russia which finally finds its expression in the personage of Vladimir Putin it becomes Prime Minister in 1999 and then in the year 2000 takes over the presidency and what Putin does is absolutely fascinating in the 1990s the oligarchs and organized crime controlled the president by the Yeltsin when Putin Kim's up comes he flips that situation completely and he subordinates the wealth and the power of the oligarchs and organized crime to the state so the Russian state is resurgent and it is controlled by KGB networks so this means that you still have this market system much more authoritarian now still very unequal although Putin does make sure that there is a little bit of redistribution and the oligarchs either do his bidding or they go into exile or they get or they get killed but the organized crime networks are well established now not just in Russia but in many other parts of the world where they have found counterparts and other organized crime groups who they can do business with and taking a bit further today what is Russia's primary goal right now with respect to the global liberal order so-called is it seeking to create disruption - - is it seeking to overtake it when install another kind of multipolar order that favours perhaps the Moscow / Beijing consensus is it something else that allows Russia to revive itself and assert its in the Imperial instincts as before or is it simply about demarcating its borders and and ensuring non-intervention and the continuance of the current regime how do you see Russia's ambitions playing out well I see them almost certainly as a complex mix of those various those various factors most important is is that desire by Putin and by part of the Russian population to see its reputation restored in the eyes of the West and for the red West to respect it as a strong powerful and equal partner on the global stage now on one level Russia can't do that its economy is in very serious trouble long-term one of the things that Putin has failed to do he stabilized the country socially to a degree he stabilized the economy to a degree but he remains far too dependent dependent on commodities above all oil and gas and he has not promoted the emergence of a vigorous economic middle-class in the cities although some have grown up in particular areas especially Moscow and Petersburg but also elsewhere and that I think is in part because put in fears an independent strong middle class as a potential political threat to him but be that as it may what that means is is that the weakness of the Russian economy means that he cannot compete with the immense wealth not just of the United States but not even Western Europe at all in fact if you look at the figures it's absolutely astonishing American GDP is ten times the size of Russian GDP the Russian dgb GDP is half that of poor bedraggled post brexit Britain even and so he can't compete with any of that so what does he do well he does have a stack of nuclear weapons which is persuasive in many respects and he has a pretty gifted strategic mind as well he's very good at playing people off against each other and you know influencing the world stage in a sense in a way that his economy really doesn't justify so the whole mess that the West has got in over Ukraine and eastern Ukraine but above all else you look at Syria and it's quite astonishing you know what a turnaround Russia is determining overall policy in the Middle East in a way that everyone assumed America do until you know Kingdom Come but but but no more but really the most astonishing thing that Putin has done is encapsulated in the 2013 article by his chief of staff gallery Valery Gerasimov which is now known as the Guru s Medoc tree in which grass moth admitted quite openly that Russia could not compete technologically and economically with the West and so it had to use other means to do it asymmetric warfare essentially and he highlighted the point of what he called informational conflict and so then when you read the grass morph doctrine then what Russia has been doing whether it's the dnc Haag by WikiLeaks or whether its funding parts of the FRA Arsenal in in France or whether it's purported interference on behalf of the leave campaign in brexit and above all else the supposed systematic subversion of news with fake news through fake book and everything in that for the on behalf of the Trump campaign there you see the genius of what they're doing because they're investing virtually nothing in terms of in terms of Finance in these extraordinary campaigns what they're doing is they're identifying the incredible vulnerabilities that have emerged in the West particularly since the financial crash of 2008 the rise of populism the alienation of the electorate's from political and economic elites the fear of terror the fear of immigrants and so on and so forth Putin and Russia have stoked all of these with very little investment on their part and what they have demonstrated is the fragility of our institutions and of the liberal order in general and it hasn't taken much to do it I mean let's pick up on that they sort of almost scalpel like interventions by Russia using as you said fake book I think that's what I'll call it from now on twitter Twitter let's send it violet I think it might be let's see if we'll see this podcast and deliver on that no III picking up on Russia and its its influence on Europe as you say it's been quite extraordinary in the light in just a short period of time how much dissent has been stoked as it were and just how monumental the transformations have been over the last half decade in in Western Europe in particular I'm wondering if you can give us a quick little tour towards all of the health of the European Union in particular the great expectations and hopes on France and Germany to carry the mantle the global liberal order but the use being buffeted right now by the famous for our liberal regimes that are seeking to push back and we always have this question mark around Turkey and its particular role in managing refugee and and migrant flows into Europe can you what is the health of the European Union today in the wake of brexit given the the shift in in in liberalism in in certain parts of the Western European project and in the uncertainties around Turkey and and how do we how do you see things moving forward to the next couple of years well it's it's it's complex and it's it's difficult but I would finish off by saying by make about Russia by making one observation that I I hadn't and that is what is Russia's primary desire its primary desire as an economic desire and that is it wants to supply most of Germany with its energy needs with Germany's energy needs and one of the things that Russia does for that is it tries to cut off alternative supplies that explains why Russia is interfering in Libya for example really quite considerably is to ensure that there is not a supply of cheap oil from Libya into the European Union the other is to try and persuade Germany to accept the construction of yet another gas pipeline North stream to this is helped by the fact that the chairman of the North Stream project is a former German Chancellor Gerhard schröder and Putin understands that there is a strong constituency amongst German business as there has always been historically to use the proximity with Russia as its primary energy source as it continues to expand its its manufacturing base which Germany has done very very well this creates tensions between Germany and those countries that you just mentioned less so hungry for a particular reason but certainly with Poland and certainly with the the Baltic States so that's an aspect which can't be overlooked when it comes to Russian European relations but the more general issue about where where yup is going over X it is an absolutely monumental blow to Europe there's no question about that it's a much greater blow to Britain than it is the rest of Europe I mean a more more suicidal collective political action is frankly unimaginable and as I've started to I've started to say in in in the United Kingdom Trump is for crippling for xmas brexit is for your entire life so Trump will probably go away at some point God knows what his legacy will be and how wrecked the places after he's gone but he will go if we go ahead with bricks in the still opportunity that we we won't wear it will be sufficiently mild for us not and not to notice then we are damning ourselves for at least two decades I would say probably more the point is is that with Britain inside the European Union in terms of European stability you have this eternal balance between France Germany and Britain and that makes smaller countries feel more confident because they feel less frightened above all else of of Germany although had to be fair that didn't help help Greece when it went through its crisis now the reason for that was not to do with Britain because of the fact that Britain's not part of the part of the euro but Greece is something that frightens other people in the euro other smaller countries in the European Union and then when you look at Poland the Czech Republic Slovakia and and and hungry you have a different issue they're caught in a vise on the one hand or that one half of that vise isn't is an economic force and that is the immense value that Germany has been to their economies Germany quite specifically in the last 20 years the other are cultural sensibilities born of 50 years of communism which are very different from the identity politics led sensibilities of the West and so Central Europe is caught between these two things where for example it's frankly culturally much more common to hear people who use racial epithets or to be anti-gay anti LGBT and so on and so forth all this sort of all this sort of thing and everything has come to a head with the migrant question because post the Arab Spring we have this huge flood of migrants into Europe and most of them well over a million have gone to Germany and Germany wants to spread the burden of that across all European Union countries and the Central European countries in particular are saying we don't want any of these people they're alien to our culture there are very few Muslim cultures in Central Europe and they wish to they political forces are trying to prevent them from from being sent to their countries so this is a big big crisis and as a consequence we've seen the rise of odd-man in Hungary we've seen the Kachinsky phenomenon in Poland Miller Zemin and and they babish in the Czech Republic as something slightly different in my opinion but it's in the same it's in the same ballpark so you've got crises there you've still got the correct Greek crisis ongoing you have problems with Italy also to do with migration but also to do with political stability and populism and then you have macron so macron is proving very popular in the outside world but in France his position is less secure that he's covering that covering that well so you have a very rapidly evolving political dynamic dynamic in the European Union whose outcome is entirely unpredictable and actually I think this sums up the Western world very well at the moment and if we're talking about it the liberal order is anyone who is giving you a prediction with conviction of the what things are going to be looking like in five years time is talking out of there fundament because there are so many variables in this situation that we we we can only manage the chaos temporarily there is certainly no leader strong enough with a sufficient vision and a sufficient authority to start moving us out of this this chaos and the absence of leadership has been a fascinating phenomenon through most of the past 20 to 30 years I mean absolutely I agree with you fundamentally about the impossibility of rendering any kind of prediction as to where we're going but I have two questions for you the first is and it's a question that's come up in a number of our speakers in the past whether the the Western liberal order such as it is with its open markets its emphasis on multilateral institutions its common security PACs and a set of principles and values associated with it can persist independently of its chief architected enabler United States and the Western powers and in in Europe whether other power say China or others will see it in their interests to persist with elements of this order as it were bent perhaps more to their own interests domestically or are we looking at something fundamentally different emerging in the next couple of years and I I suppose I'm curious first of all but your reactions to whether the trappings of liberal order can persist or ought to persist or will persist independent of its core founders aware and architects at has the world moved on and if not what kind of world are we moving towards in your view well that's an easy question I think it's very interesting if you have a look at Theresa Mays visit to China about ten days ago she recently visited China and she promised beforehand that she was going to raise the issue of human rights when she got there and when she got there Zippo and of course what she was doing was begging the Chinese to to give her a good post brexit trade deal and so I mean the brexit Britain is a really really good case of demonstrating how if you become seduced by the by a populist sentiment and then actually act upon that you are suddenly very much at the mercy of greater forces who are not interested in your values whatever they whatever they may be and so Britain is now sort of sucking up to really some of the way I've been sucking up to trump extraordinarily but above all else of course sucking up to you Saudi to the Gulf states to Turkey interestingly enough and the reason why it's sucking up to Turkey is arms sales that really what Britain's post-war strategy looks like is to sell as many arms to as many countries as possible because they're frankly not interested in anything else that we've that we've good that we've got to offer so so you can see how the influence of Western values becomes diminished in the absence of solidarity of Western countries in this case in European countries Western Europe has got to carry on trading with the United States obviously there are a lot of very deep established relations and so on and so forth but Trump will humiliate the weak as he has been regularly doing with Teresa may he is more wary about humiliating the strong so he has to be he is you know he has to be careful in his relationship with China and ultimately the most important relay ship in the next 20 years is going to be the Chinese American relationship but in terms of Western values and Western influence at the moment the flagbearer of that is Germany and to an extent France both of them with them fairly sizable skeletons in their cupboard certainly France if you look at what they get up to in western West Africa and that sort of places I mean there still is they have a neo-colonialist mindset and everything but that but so one always has to talk about with Western values with a pinch of salt because we all do such ghastly things so it's terrible things we have to be careful but you know there are principles of democracy rule of law institutional divisions and so on and so forth which pertain and varying degrees to the west and unless we work together on this then China Russia Turkey and various other other countries will seek to take advantage of this and of course when you look at China's extraordinary March I mean just it's gobsmacking they're in Piraeus the port in Greece they own Freeport in the Bahamas they own behalf of Sri Lanka's frozen's yeah nine hundred billion dollar 1.1 Road initiative and then there's one belt one Road which is just astonishing which is having an impact on Pakistan for example that the Americans can only dream of and this is turning into real influence real power and a kind of self-confident neo imperialist strategy the like of which we haven't seen really in 50 years or so it's quite it's quite incredible and you know what's happening in the United States and Europe with them and suggest that China is on to a winner you hinted at it before when talking about some of the asymmetric strategies of Russia and especially harnessing cyber as a way of disrupting its its foes I want to step back a little bit and just tell us give us a panorama right now of kind of the global strategies such as they are to deal with the threats of cybercrime and how do you see norms and institutions evolving and globally how do you see collaboration and work to address cyber crime happening at the sub-national and even non state level with large companies and do you think we've even remotely got a handle on things as a as an international community in inverted commas well we haven't remotely got a handle on things but things are not as quite as bad as they were and that's largely because there has been a certain rap Rushmoor between the United States and China on this on this issue so Xi Jinping and Obama came up with a set of guidelines of essentially non strike guidelines that you know they would stay off of each other but the there's a fundamental problem of cyber and that is it is not a it is not a system of deterrence it's it's a proactive weapon system ie in order for your cyber defense to be effective you have to fully know and understand the capacity of your potential opponent and in order to fully know and understand the potential capacity of your opponent you have to penetrate the bloody system so everyone has probes inside everyone else's system some of them have sleeper viruses here there and everywhere there are all sorts of things some that are going on but aggressive and fairly obvious espionage attacks between China in the United States have been reduced dramatically over the past two to three years China also now has a growing problem of domestic cyber crime attacking their banks attacking their e-commerce and and so on and they are actually reaching out to the West who are of course very experienced now relatively speaking in dealing with this sort of thing and asking for assistance that is a good thing Russia May remains resistant to all attempts by Western Europe in the United States to come to some sort of informal agreement and it is trying to push its own system of international treaties which will essentially allow the Russian intelligence agencies free hands in free hand inside inside Russia so we have a very complicated situation and unfortunately until you have an international rules of the road about cyber then it is going to be very difficult to eliminate the possibility of a Black Swan event in cyber we know that critical national infrastructure is vulnerable we have examples of it around the world now and we know that there are some state actors who punch way above their weight like for example Israel but you could also argue to an extent that Iran does us as well and we also know that although the United States remains technologically way ahead of its opponents that in cyber that advantage is reduced with a relatively limited capacity you can still cause a lot of damage and that then introduces the possibility of non-state actors becoming involved and one of the problems that we've had over the past 15 years is we're never entirely sure what is the relationship between non-state actors and state actors when it comes to launching attacks and when it comes to targeting who is it why motivation and so on it's a very very confused picture out there and cybersecurity is increasingly absorbing a huge amount of money both for commercial purposes and also for state purposes but where sorts the Wild West right now and where it has been for a while but where is the action when it comes to trying to create norms or standards or rules the road as you put it is well it's partly in the UN but I don't think that's getting anywhere at all so it's done pragmatically it's done essentially as as bilateral deals like the one that you saw between Obama and Xi Jingping and a lot of people are signing up to the Budapest which were basically there's a convention on on cybercrime cybersecurity which is seen as as good and as good a document as any but each country adopts a different position about you know how it deals with cybersecurity in some the intelligence agencies are much more involved in others the police develop special departments in Brazil for example the military is meant to play the lead role in in cyber security which is deeply inappropriate institution for so doing then you're seeing other things like Europe all in the European Union for example developing a very powerful cyber capacity but often dealing with things like illegal narcotics markets and stuff like that rather about the political stuff so there's no coherence to the responses its pragmatic and certainly if you're in the private sector for example basically it's up to you and up to you does not necessarily mean spending huge sums of money on the high-end digital solution it means understanding cybersecurity as having to be integrated into the way that you do your business so that every single part of the business and most importantly importantly every employee is potentially a vulnerability understands his or her role in the in the cyber security regime at that company you've famously said that we ought to hire the hackers what do you mean by that well quite simply this dearth of cybersecurity engineers and some of the most gifted those who've been involved in cyber criminal activity at some point or another and in my experience they're very smart very interesting people many of whom could undoubtedly be persuaded to work in the licit cybersecurity industry and I would get them in because frankly it's all hands to deck to the day are there's some good examples of where that's been done successfully there are some good examples mmm there's one very good example of some of the I know in Brazil who's now very senior cyber security engineer who was a cyber criminal who told me all his stuff from McNair about what he had done and he managed to get through here to hide his past there are some companies in the United States in Canada which hire hackers now who have convictions as well the SA P in Germany brokered taboo by actively advertising for people who suffer from autism or Asperger's syndrome any people on the spectrum to work for them not because it was corporate social responsibility but because they happen to be bloody good social security engineers there's a company in California which only employs people on the spectrum it's a cyber security company and I know a number of hackers who are now cyber security engineers and whose indiscretions were as much youthful as anything else but in the United States in particular there is a very very punitive response to people who've been involved in any type of hacking activity however old they were at the time and the American response is that usual knee-jerk reaction of the criminal justice system in the u.s. which is to put them in jail for 50 years and throw away the key you know this way failure lies you you've also recently written about your concern in the ways that this cyber criminal cybercrime generation of young digitally savvy digitally literate people who were involved in defrauding or you know illicit card sliding or other forms of sort of a listed online activity having a way start to merge with the more traditional forms of mafia that you studied in with mafia I think he described them previously as being somehow separate operating in two different kinds of worlds even in some ways grudging or barely gray only grudgingly acknowledging the other but now they've kind of come together in some places describe to me this phenomena and why it really matters well they are very different worlds back to the beginning of the conversation traditional organized crime its defining characteristic is is its ability to use violence or to threaten incredible violence that's it and cybercrime you don't need to do that I mean in one city I mean cybercrime is revolutionary because it is an it's a major form of crime and it doesn't need violence so on the one hand one ought to celebrate that because nobody's came to get their legs broke and all their head bashed in on the other hand the damage that cybercrime conflict it's in conflict is absolutely is is is phenomenal and so but what that means the absence of violence in cybercrime is is it attracted an entirely different cohort of people because the people attracted to Judaism organized crime have to have muscles and they have to have no qualms about putting a bullet through someone else's head so I have a criminal it's a very difference they usually younger they're often socially disengaged from the real world they're often very good at maths some of them are very gifted fraudsters social engineers just sort of you know enthusiastic people some of them are great organizers because the more professionalized cybercrime requires everyone doing a different different job whether it's hacking whether it's malware whether it's code writing and writing and malware whether it's money laundering blah blah blah so they've become very very organized these operations and but essentially what's happened so those two types of crime existed in parallel and one of the reasons was this is that the bosses of traditional organized crime they were like me they were old and tired and sick and steep and they didn't know how to use a computer but I have to say I knew how to use a computer a little better than they did and so and so they weren't interested they just thought you know this is crazy sort of you know futuristic stuff but it's not the sort of life that they knew but the bosses of organized crime growing up now are you know they're digitally literate they're FA with social media and they quite understand how an inventive and effective use of cyber can really improve your business prospects so we're seeing what I now refer to as the digitalization of organized crime that is this steady fusion of these two types of crime sort of you know in order to enhance each other so you will see cases like the famous one in Antwerp where by a traditional organized crime group a drugs group coerced a couple of hackers into getting into the systems the network systems of the Porter tent were and they were able to manipulate the nine digit pins which Seeger in containers each allotted and this way they could customs clear containers coming in from South America full of cocaine and get them through the Port of Antwerp without the customs looking at them and so that was that's just a very good example of how the two things are fusing we've seen similar kinds of cases with timber extraction in in northern Brazil as well with hackers who hackers who essentially cracked the certification system that's longer yeah I one final question and it's about solutions and you've alluded to a few of them in the courses conversation but how our governments and and non-state actors or private groups and citizens within the the countries of the global liberal order responding and reacting to some of this evolution of organized crime you know we've we've seen this extraordinary wave of investigative journalism in the last couple of years which has revealed a whole range and layers of corruption and and current criminality within the West and non-western countries which has to be a good thing we see an Interpol and the European Union another stepping out to take you to do more joint operations but what's your sense dude doesn't stand a chance in addressing these organized crime challenges as they evolve and accelerate or it's going to be permanent catch-up mode well on the one hand it is going to be permanent and catch-up mode on the other hand they can do some very simple things things they've been very slow at which is above all else you know if you want to hit someone involved in organized crime or political corruption we haven't talked about political corruption at all but this is the you know the other side of the coin of organized crime is is you know both organized crime compromising political figures through bribing them through sorting them threatening them or whatever so that they will do bidding or political figures in particularly countries which have which have mineral resources engaging in corrupt relationships with big Western companies you know let's not get the West off the hook on this our values are utterly vile in certain respects we have a number of cases of major banks helping the Mexican cartels to launder money just recently we have had exposed shell and any the Italian state oil company involved in a 1.1 billion dollar bribe of a governor of him of a Nigerian state and then we have the rape of resources in the eastern Congo in which Western companies have a have a role to role to play so you know these are big big crimes and we could do a lot more to stop them most important thing that we could be very very easily is to get rid of this system of anonymous companies enabling people to mask the beneficial ownership of a company this happens all over the place it happens in Canada it happens in the United Kingdom on a big scale happens in the United States happens in Switzerland and we can do this and all governments have been dragging their feet in fact under Trump unfortunately it looks like we're gonna grow back on some key aspects of the dodd-frank legislation and this is something where you know ordinary citizens civil society can really get involved and that's why I'm particularly pleased with the reaction that we've had in the United Kingdom to the TV series of McMurphy ER because the difference between me writing a book about these things 10 years ago and for it to be turned into a TV drama is it reaches millions of people and in the UK we've seen people saying what you mean all those properties are owned by people who we don't know who they how can that be the case over 10,000 properties in Westminster for example are owned by unknown characters who have companies in the Caymans and British Virgin Islands and so on literally half of Baker Street in this in central in central London including the fictional 221 B Baker Street home to Sherlock Holmes are owned by anonymous companies whose beneficial owners are unknown to us so we have a government that is bleating on permanently about taking back control from the European Union and yet will not pass legislation to force British crown dependent territories to reveal who the owners of half of Baker Street and 10,000 properties in Westminster 6000 in Kensington 2,000 in Camden and on it on it goes so there's a lot we can do and we see through some law-enforcement agencies particularly the Department of Justice Europe all works hard on this as as well some criminal justice systems like the one in Brazil which is trying to uncover and this is slightly controversial that they have uncovered the largest corruption scandal in history with the carwash scandal and then you have courageous journalists you have the Panama papers the paradise' papers you have organizations like Global Witness like transparency international which are exposing what is going on so we have the information we can do something about it and civil society and individuals can pressurize their elected representatives to really force through this so we know who the bad guys are on what they're doing with their money well Sherlock said the game is afoot and Mischa is on it so Mischa thanks so much for joining us for this podcast and and obviously looking forward to reconnecting and seeing your next production in in the coming years take care thank you

Channel: UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs

Views: 1,859

Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5

Keywords: Phil Lind Initiative, Robert Muggah, Misha Glenny, Cybercrime, Global Liberal Order, Global Security

Id: W5LNno-44iY

Length: 51min 45sec (3105 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2018