In the summer of 2014, a tall eccentric German in a white suit and Birkenstocks did the rounds of New York’s elite law firms, looking for advice. In face-to-face meetings with senior lawyers, Ralph Kayser explained that he represented the mining minister of a mineral-rich African state, who, despite earning only the equivalent of a western teacher’s salary, needed to get about $50 million to the US, so he could set himself up with a mansion and jet and personal yacht. Could the lawyers advise on how this might be done, no names, on the quiet?
One veteran lawyer, Jeffrey M Herrmann, told Kayser that bribing foreign officials was illegal: “This ain’t for me. My standards are higher”. Another firm offered preliminary advice on how the job might be done – nests of anonymous shelf companies, in multiple jurisdictions, to cover the money trail – but said they would have to check it was legal before they could go any further. Twelve other law firms pitched for the business, no questions asked. They did not know that Mr Kayser was an investigator for the anti-corruption NGO Global Witness, and that he was secretly filming their meetings.
There are some dramatic, and tragic, passages in Very Bad People, an account by Global Witness founder Patrick Alley of his organisation’s 27-year existence: tales of derring-do on remote jungle roads, of encounters with killers and crooks, and of the murders of allies, such as Cambodian forest protector Chut Wutty , shot by a government soldier in 2012, and Berta Caceres, who led opposition to the building of a Honduran government-backed dam on the territory of her Lenca people. She was assassinated in 2016 by US-trained killers with links to the regime.
Alley has produced a clear-eyed account of a world poisoned by dark money, and a welcome reminder that resistance is possible
Yet few of these stories are as chilling as this book’s glimpses of what Alley calls the “shadow network” – the cold-blooded western law firms, accountants, lobbyists, estate agents and PR firms who facilitate the destruction of our planet, and the murder or displacement of local people who try to protect it, in return for fat fees. Unlike the kleptocrats, tyrants and bribe-payers, who run some slight risk of retribution, this shadow network operates, whether de facto or de jure, with near-total impunity.
“They don’t send the lawyers to jail, because we run the country,” boasted one New York attorney, caught out by Global Witness’s sting.
However legal their work may be, the enablers’ services have a price tag in blood. In Africa, for example, western oil and mineral giants have funnelled billions in bribes to corrupt politicians and soldiers in countries such as Angola, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea-Conakry, while the citizens of these countries have their poverty further blighted by resource wars, police brutality, land theft and the indifference of leaders who, thanks to foreign bungs, can pay soldiers and cops to keep them in power without regard to the welfare of their people.
And ultimately, all of us will pay, even the despots, oligarchs, lawyers and lobbyists. As Alley points out, the environmental cost of rampant deforestation, mining, habitat destruction and burning fossil fuels is felt planet-wide, in terms of global warming, pandemics, extreme weather events, food insecurity and resource wars.
A former businessman, Patrick Alley founded Global Witness in London in 1995, with two other environmental activists, little practical experience and no money. It was, he admits, almost by accident that they stumbled upon their core investigative mission: in much of the developing world, they realised, environmental destruction, human rights abuses and government corruption are faces of the same problem. By investigating one, you can fight them all.
From the start, Global Witness relied on essentially journalist tools – old-fashioned legwork, trawling of documents and scraping data – to produce reports calculated to feed media interest and political action. Its work, along with that of similar NGOs such as Transparency International and the Environmental Investigation Agency, has contributed to new laws in several western countries, tightening controls on looted resources and laundered wealth.
After Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in order to distract Russians from his kleptocratic, oligarch-fuelled regime, it is no longer possible to pretend that flagrant corruption, however far “over there”, will not end up producing blow-back, both political and environmental, for us all.
Although sometimes a little dense in his narration, Alley has produced a clear-eyed account of a world poisoned by dark money, and a welcome reminder that resistance is possible. And, as it turns out, his book is even more timely than he could have hoped.
Ed O’Loughlin’s latest work is The Last Good Funeral of the Year: A Memoir
