I feel slightly envious of Jason Sharman. He must have learned a thing or two about fine wine, well-cut suits, and exotic cars while swimming in the shark pool of bankers, politicians, lawyers, investigators, advocates, and regulators involved in either enabling or combating (and sometimes both) the money-laundering industry that services the kleptocrats of this world. Nobody sees fit to mention it, but I suspect there is a pleasurable side to corruption. At least that seems true of the “grand corruption” that is the focus of The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management. The mansions! The yachts! The shoes! The thrill of beating the system! But that pleasure is surely bought at the expense of a great deal of misery. The focus of Sharman’s study is not on the misery and on the costs of corruption to those he calls “victim countries,” but rather on the facilitators, those in the wealthiest countries that serve as the centers of global finance: the United States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Australia (the latter may seem out of place in this lineup but has a methodologically important purpose, and offers up more than its share of relevant scandal). Rather than doing his research in hardscrabble places, I imagine that the author spent a good deal of time in tall shiny office buildings and probably some fine restaurants as well, in places such as Manhattan, London, Bern, and Sydney.
Envy aside, Sharman is right to draw our attention to the wealthy, for in the academic study of corruption, the scholarly attention paid to poor governance in the economic periphery seems to far outweigh the attention paid to poor governance in the core. But it is the core that takes in a good chunk of the proceeds of grand corruption and allows its practitioners to launder them in secret (and sometimes not so secret) bank accounts, shell companies, trusts, and that eye-popping high-end real estate that has inflated the markets in the world’s great cities and made living there difficult or impossible for those of ordinary means to afford. The study of corruption needs to be about more than improving governance in those countries, inevitably of the “developing world,” that routinely rank lowest on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Although legal regimes have been evolving to deal with the “supply side” by targeting bribe payers, thus putting pressure on wealthy countries to constrain their corporations from offering bribes to foreign public officials, much remains to be done to address the facilitating role of finance and banking, real estate, law, and law enforcement if societies are to get serious about addressing corruption as the globalized phenomenon it has clearly become.
Sharman brings us up to date on developments relevant to the 2003 United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) and its articulation of “an international anti-kleptocracy norm” (p. 47). Kleptocracy literally means “rule of thieves.” The author aims to explain the emergence of the anti-kleptocracy norm, evaluate its effectiveness, and suggest ways in which its effectiveness might be improved. Summary does not do the argument justice, but in a nutshell: Sharman argues that the norm emerged more as a result of structural changes in the international system than as a result of the advocacy of norm entrepreneurs, and that there is a big gap between the anti-kleptocracy norm and actual practice. The end of the Cold War removed the propensity of Western governments to turn a blind eye to kleptocrats pillaging the public purse as long as they remained staunchly anticommunist, and the need to account for the failure of development finance eventually yielded a focus on that very corruption.
These two factors together, lit by sparks from high-profile scandals such as that of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, or the Abachas of Nigeria, as well as a brief upsurge of hope during the Arab Spring that certain entrenched leaders were no longer untouchable, did much to extend the anticorruption consensus to include concerns about where the proceeds of elite-level corruption actually end up—especially when they end up in global financial centers and high-end real estate in London, Paris, and Miami. Nongovernmental advocacy groups and investigative journalists played and continue to play an important role in bringing scandals to light and in applying pressure on governments and international institutions to work at repatriating stolen assets, yielding such multilateral measures as the 2007 Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, as well as a number of national-level innovations in the United States, UK, and Switzerland.
In terms of the effectiveness of the global anti-kleptocracy norm, the record is decidedly mixed; practice does not come close to living up to the newly institutionalized norms. Switzerland comes out looking pretty good in tracking down and attempting to repatriate stolen assets, which, given the importance of banking to the Swiss economy, may seem like a surprising finding. The United States has also notched some successes, though the record is uneven. The motives may be mixed as well, since at times the tracking down of corrupt proceeds seems like a positive externality of the “war on drugs” and, more recently, of the effort to stymie terrorist financing. The UK fares less well, despite the high-minded rhetoric of Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron in making repatriation of stolen assets a top priority and part of the UK’s international development policy. And Australia stands as the epitome of denial: nothing to see here.
Sharman’s analysis of the successes and failures of each country’s efforts at preventing the influx, ferreting out, and repatriating the proceeds of grand corruption is sophisticated and detailed enough to warrant a close read, and I cannot do justice to the details. Some key takeaways regarding effectiveness are that the legal costs of repatriation are seldom worth the benefits; preventing dirty money from coming in should be a far bigger priority than trying to track it down once it is already in the financial system; legal cooperation among states with very different legal systems is fraught with difficulty; a country can have great laws on the books and fail utterly to enforce them; regulatory capture by banks is a real problem in the countries studied; capital mobility renders the deterrent effect of one or two countries’ efforts at rejecting funds acquired via grand corruption questionable; and, at least the way I read it, even the most sophisticated legal systems can be gamed by those who can afford the best lawyers.
The book’s conclusion offers pragmatic insights about how compliance with the anti-kleptocracy norm might be improved. The goal is to make it harder for kleptocrats to launder the proceeds of corruption. Sharman points to tax policy as a neglected tool, noting that the campaign to improve international tax enforcement works parallel to, but in isolation from, the campaign against corruption (p. 190). Other techniques he recommends are visa denials, blacklisting, and targeted sanctions. He notes that multilateral solutions work best, but powerful actors, such as the United States, could go it alone with such tools as blacklists and still have an impact. Still, tools such as visa denials and blacklists also relax the presumption of innocence (pp. 183–84) and, thus, run the risk of violating people’s rights and liberties. As a result, some perpetrators have painted themselves as victims of human rights violations once law enforcement starts going after them (as I found, myself, when I followed up on the case of Paul Paraka of Papua New Guinea). Finally—and in his view most controversially—Sharman suggests that the ability to make private profits from anticorruption might yield better results than leaving things to governments and intergovernmental organizations alone; thus, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations and for-profit groups pursuing lawsuits in return for a share of the proceeds might be better than no action at all. I do wonder whether such a solution merely feeds the machine and makes the game of kleptocracy more sophisticated, but I suppose it is worth a shot.
Sharman is neither heavy-handed nor long-winded in selling his theoretical arguments and policy solutions, but he is creative and meticulous in amassing his evidence. He seamlessly integrates a massive amount of legwork and primary research with a judicious and thorough attention to the relevant literature, and not just scholarly literature but the investigative reporting of journalists, advocacy groups such as Global Witness, reports of governmental agencies and industry associations, and congressional hearings. Because of the secrecy surrounding corruption, one must appreciate the amount of work it took to raise this piece of scholarship well above suggestion and innuendo. The author also demonstrates imagination in method in that he hired a private investigator to track corrupt proceeds through what is apparently in practice a very opaque system in Australia. He also takes care to draw our attention to the absences, the nonevents, and the dogs that did not bark so as to guard against the human tendency to draw general conclusions from exceptional cases.
Above all, this is a good and fast-paced read unless you get absorbed, as I did, in the footnotes and spend extra time tracking down the cited reports and following up on the fate of some of the characters. Grand corruption makes for grand narrative, and there is no shortage of such narratives and outsized characters—Ferdinand Marcos, the Abachas, Vladimiro Montesinos, Teodoro and Teodorin Obiang, Benazir Bhutto, Zine al-Abindina Ben Ali, just to name a few—in the book. I strongly recommend it to anyone researching corruption, and it will be a very useful teaching tool. Perhaps one might use it alongside some sort of simulation; it turns out that there is a game called “Kleptocrat” in Apple’s App store.
Still, the book left me with lingering questions about the direction and focus of corruption research. I suspect it went to press before the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States. As I read The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management, I was also daily reviewing the investigative journalism centered on Trump’s financial ties and, most recently, those of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. The stories emerging in this vein bear a striking resemblance to some of the stories told in the book. Corruption researchers need to continue to work to undermine the myth that corruption is something that happens primarily in poor countries. I am not comfortable with Sharman’s use of the term “victim countries,” as I think it distracts from the fact that the people who fall victim to grand corruption can just as easily be in Detroit as in Lagos. Many elites seem to think of themselves as a global class, and they move their wealth around without paying much mind to borders, while the rest, and most especially those seeking to flee war and destitution, are faced with the harsh realities of often very well policed borders. The class dimensions of corruption warrant further exploration, as this fascinating book, perhaps unintentionally, suggests.
