The former FTSE 100 company – which has brought separate legal action against the Serious Fraud Office for alleged misfeasance in public office over its ongoing investigation into allegations of corruption and bribery – is suing Financial Times journalist Tom Burgis for libel at the High Court over his 2020 book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World.

Worst of all, money-hungry Western banks, lawyers, public-relations firms and security consultants exacerbate the sleaze, developing a sort of international kleptocracy-service system. And there was something else, something deeper – Nigel sensed it faintly, with a shiver – connected somehow to what was happening to money: far away, the screams of the tortured, the silence of the dead. As far as Nigel was concerned, the landlords were using feudal rights to blackmail their tenants, Charlotte among them.Crisis was all around, but the chamber of rare beauty into which the oligarch now stepped was a place apart. For the Kyrgyz philologist, the Uzbek diplomat and Alijan Ibragimov, the canny Uighur trader who was the third member of the Trio, here was a dream made reality. ENRC sued Burgis and publisher HarperCollins over ‘very serious’ allegations made in Kleptopia, which the former FTSE 100 company said means that it had three people murdered ‘to protect its business interests’ – claims which are ‘highly disputed’.

The mafia would admire the loyalty they inspire: at the Donald's impeachment trial for his Ukrainian favour-trading, Republican senators listened to cast-iron evidence that he had abused his office, then acquitted him. Neither Sasha Machkevitch nor his partners had been born there, yet they were said to control as much as 40 per cent of the economy. Burgis draws on the work of German legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel, who published “ The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship” in 1941. The publisher said: “It is grossly unfair that yet again HarperCollins and our author have had to risk substantial legal costs and personal liability defending public interest journalism. It describes the modus-operandi of pre/post Soviet Russian political dynamics in laundering dirty money and influencing world politics.Are we still living in a society where the Machiavelli's Prince should be the text book for everyone to life a prosperous life? Burgis anchors the book with the stories of four individuals, which the Financial Times described as "elegantly woven together and delivered in a form that makes the technicalities of finance accessible to the non-expert. In a new book, Financial Times correspondent Tom Burgis places Trump within the context of a widening number of international kleptocrats. Their barrister Andrew Caldecott QC told the High Court: “The question is whether the suspicious nature of the deaths would be linked by the ordinary reader to individuals, rather than a company.

The book reads like a spy novel and it is gripping right from the very beginning, with so many mind-blowing plot twists that prove the dirty money behind several world occurrences, from election rig in Zimbabwe, to Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal, that Saudi Ritz-Carlton Purge, to the acquisition of ABN Amro by Royal Bank of Scotland. After Trump stumbled in business again and again, Burgis argues that Trump regained and maintained his financial footing at the very same time he was associated with many crime-linked business figures. Kazakh oligarchs and white South African moneymen who sound like bad guys from an '80s action movie?A fast paced book and a look at the world of money laundering, corruption, billionaires and oligarchs. To describe the global mechanism of corruption, Ms Chayes uses the metaphor of the hydra—an image that has been common in polemics against international finance since the 19th century. Our legal system, corporate lawyers, bankers, real estate agents, title companies and accountants are eager to turn dirty money into gold. As the author succinctly encapsulates, "the thieves had used power to steal money, then used that money to steal more power", p.