Making a Killing

The new US Strategy on Countering Corruption was released hours before the Summit for Democracy and promises to rewrite the rulebook on global anticorruption efforts. Josh Rudolph of the German Marshall Fund joins Casey, Nate and Paul to discuss what’s in it.

Casey talks to Nate and Paul about his debut book, which chronicles the rise of US financial secrecy through the colorful stories of two famous kleptocrats—and explains why the US must lead global efforts against transnational corruption.

American Kleptocracy is published November 23, 2021 and available to preorder now: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250274526/americankleptocracy

Casey, Nate and Paul discuss the kleptocrats at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), the role of bribery in driving environmental abuses, and how green sanctions and law enforcement can punish the worst of the world's polluters.

Casey speaks with Lakshmi Kumar, policy director at Global Financial Integrity, about the damaging - and deadly - consequences of money laundering in American real estate.

Description: Casey and Paul chat about the US Treasury Department's recent sanctions review, raids on sanctioned Russian oligarchs, and why targeted sanctions remain the best tools for targeting kleptocrats - as well as their networks. The articles mentioned in this episode include:

Casey, Nate and Paul discuss the biggest stories emerging from Azerbaijan, Chile, Czech Republic, Pakistan and elsewhere, amid calls for heightened scrutiny of the professional enablers of transnational corruption—including many American lawyers.

Miranda Patrucic, a senior Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project journalist who worked on the Pandora Papers, explains how she followed the money as part of the biggest journalism investigation in history. Paul Massaro reveals the reaction from the US Congress: an ENABLERs Act to tackle professional facilitators of transnational corruption.

Casey, Paul and Nate discuss why Hunter Biden’s plan to auction his artwork to anonymous bidders engages serious money laundering risks, what Meng Wanzhou’s release tells us about China’s globalized kleptocracy, and the latest on anti-corruption reforms in Washington, DC.

Matt Schrader and Paul Massaro discuss the nature of corruption in the Chinese Communist Party and how that corruption underpins its rule in the country. They also discuss how the CCP's corrupt practices are exported abroad and how western enablers and enterprise become intertwined with the CCP in way deleterious to democracy.

Paul, Casey and Nate discuss Germany’s problematic relationship with authoritarian capital, how money laundering gutted Vancouver’s real estate market, US missteps in Afghanistan, and major legislation from the US Congress.

Paul & Casey's Foreign Policy piece: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/13/americas-money-lost-the-afghan-war/