Bullough - Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World

London wears many different faces, depending on whom its talking to. There is the pageantry and ceremony of the Changing of the Guards: all red-jacketed soldiers, glossy horses and cheering crowds. Thats for the tourists. There is the steel and glass of the City, Londons financial district, garrisoned by an army of bankers and clerks who teem across the bridges in the early morning. Thats for the business folk. There are the suburbs, with their semi-detached houses, hedges, no-through-roads and parks. Thats for the locals.

And then there are places like Finchley, in northwest London, and the short street called Woodberry Grove, where the cars were new a decade ago, and the nearest stores sell Polish beer and tabloid newspapers. It isnt a street youd visit, or even notice, unless you had a good reason to, which is perhaps why Paul Manafort situated one of his companiesPompolo Ltdat house number 2.

According to the indictment prepared by the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort, Donald Trumps former campaign chairman, moved some $75 million through various offshore bank accounts, much of which he used to buy high-end properties and luxury goods. He earned this money working in Ukraine, primarily for thuggish ex-president Viktor Yanukovich, and was found guilty of hiding it from the Internal Revenue Service, as well as assorted other crimes. The meticulous indictment listed the companies through which he owned the bank accounts that channeled this money, which is how we know about Pompolo Ltd. Pompolo controlled a bank account that paid $175,575 to a Florida home entertainment company and $13,325 to a landscape gardener in the Hamptons on the same dayJuly 15, 2013.

That may well be all that Pompolo ever did. It had been created just three months earlier and was dissolved by the UKs Companies House a year later, something that happens automatically if companies do not file the necessary paperwork. I had come to 2 Woodberry Grove to look at the street address that was Pompolo Ltds supposed base of operations.

It was an uninspiring destination, a two-story office building of russet bricks, some of them overlaid with beige stucco. Its roof tiles appeared to be held together by clumps of moss, and the window frames were stained so dark they were barely recognizable as wood. A row of doorbells ran down the side of the door. I pressed one of them and was greeted by a middle-aged man with a South African accent and a faded T-shirt advertising the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden. He ushered me inside.

I wasnt quite sure what to expect from a place that had been a junction in the financial plumbing that Manafort used to suck money out of Ukraine and pour it into luxury goods in New York and Virginia, but Id imagined something more exciting than a tidy, dull office with an institutional gray carpet and a poster advising workers on how to sit at their computers to avoid damage to their backs. While I waited for the Iron Maiden fans boss, I listened to two women gossiping about their weekend plans, and tried to peek into their cubicles. Sadly, the boss wasnt available, and I left with nothing more than an email address (his reply, when it came, included a denial of any wrongdoing and a strong tone of exasperation: I cannot speak with any authority as to what motivations people like Manafort may have, so I am afraid that you will have to draw your own conclusions) as a reward for the fifteen-minute walk to Woodberry Grove from the Tube station.

There are two places to go next with this story. The first would be to give up on Pompolo as a dead end and instead focus on Manafort, on his sordid client base, his amoral maneuvering and his remarkable appetite for luxury goods. The second would be to look back at 2 Woodberry Grove and to ask why Pompoloa company with access to significant amounts of cashwould base itself in an unglamorous part of an unfashionable corner of London.

Its understandable that most journalists would prefer the first approach. It makes a more compelling story to write about ostrich-skin jackets and luxury condominiums, about the way Manafort laundered the reputations of dozens of unlovely politicians and oligarchs, than it does to describe ugly British institutional architecture. But the second approach is the more rewarding, because if we can understand what links Manafort to Woodberry Grove, we gain a glimpse behind the personalities, into the hidden workings of the financial system, into the secret country that I call Moneyland.

The indictment against Manafort, and against associate Rick Gates (in whose name Pompolo was registered), revealed the existence not just of Pompolo Ltd, but also of companies in the Caribbean states of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, as well as in Virginia, Florida, Delaware and New York. And these companies had multiple bank accounts, supposedly independent of each other, but in reality connected by their sharedand hiddenowners. They moved money back and forth between each other in a ceaseless and bewildering dance, the patterns of which are far too complicated for even many experts to understand. Trying to draw the complexity of the financial arrangements among all of these entities is a job for a whole team of law enforcement professionals; its all but impossible for a layman.

Manafort and Gates exploited this system for a decade or more, but they didnt create it. Nor did they seek out 2 Woodberry Grove and decide to make it their base of operations. That was done for them by an entire industry of people who enable the crimes of people like them, people with money to hide. The real tenant of the office building in Finchley is A1 Company Services, which creates companies for its customers and gives them a postal address. A1 Company Services is emblematic of something far greater than a political scandal, even one as big as this. It represents a system that is beggaring the world by hiding the secrets of the rich and powerful.

Manaforts secrets were so well defended that had Robert Mueller not started investigating the former Trump campaign chairman, he would almost certainly have gotten away with his crimes. And this is a worrying thought, because there are many other people still using the exact same system. House number 2 on Woodberry Grove is or has been home to thousands of other companies16,551, according to one databaseas have the addresses Manafort used in the Grenadines, and in Cyprus, not to mention those in the United States.

Most people view Paul Manafort as important only insomuch as he revealed corruption surrounding the election of Donald Trump. But in fact, his link to Trump inadvertently gives us a window into something much bigger, a shadowy system of which few of us are aware. Its a system that is quietly but effectively impoverishing millions, undermining democracy, helping dictators as they loot their countries. And we can learn more about this world by looking at one of the biggest clients for Manaforts services: Viktor Yanukovich, ex-president of Ukraine.