Investing
Kimberly Kay Hoang follows the people and entities that route offshore capital into Vietnam and Myanmar, exposing the relationships that blur legal and illegal finance.
The author argues that behind every visible chief executive stands a backer so rich they never appear on public wealth lists, present everywhere yet accountable to no one. The person named on the deal serves as its face and, if things go wrong, as the one who takes the blame.
Much of this wealth is made not by breaking the law outright but by working the space between what is clearly legal and clearly illegal. The author reports that most capital accumulation takes off through deals widely seen as corrupt or dirty.
In emerging markets, public officials and private investors are often the same people, or closely tied. They use that overlap to secure exclusive, quasi-legal openings for private gain, delivering public services while lining their own pockets at the same time.
Where permits move slowly, investors speed up access to land or final sign-offs by lavishly entertaining officials. The author describes women being used as part of this exchange to get officials to sign crucial documents, so personal relationships stand in for formal process.
An investment can do real social good while money is quietly drained from it through offshore accounts. In one case the author describes, funds supported women's education, yet no one could tell how much was taken off the top.
The author argues that ordinary people are prey because mandatory retirement savings put their money into indexes they cannot see into. When a risky venture collapses, early insiders cash out first and the small investors left holding it pay the bill.
Newly opening economies are fresh territory for these money networks, but the author notes the methods themselves have been in use since the late 1800s. What changes is where the web spreads, not how it is built.
Money crosses borders through chains of offshore funds, holding companies and special-purpose vehicles, with each investment often sitting in its own separate company. The resulting web of linked subsidiaries spread across many countries can become practically impossible to trace, so ownership and responsibility vanish from view.
We tend to picture rich, rule-bound countries and corrupt ones as separate worlds, but the author finds they are woven together. The wealthy pick and choose legal jurisdictions as suits them, and shell companies in rich countries play the same game, so the biggest players may sit in the most developed economy.
The author treats this system as a zero-sum game in which the superrich and organized crime become hard to tell apart, and inequality as its direct result. Exposures such as leaked documents have not changed the underlying political and economic structures that produce it.