Category: KLEPTOCRACY

Malaysia poll confirms ‘no reason to give up on democracy’

     

  As Malaysia’s most powerful man, Najib Razak worked hard to keep the public from accessing information about a multi-billion dollar scandal at state fund 1MDB. Now they just might find… Read more »

Malaysia’s tsunami unseats ‘kleptocracy at its worst’

     

Breaking six decades of rule by the Barisan Nasional coalition, Malaysia’s opposition Pakatan Harapan coalition, headed by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, won 113 of 222 parliamentary seats in yesterday’s poll…. Read more »

Russia’s ‘fusion of power and criminality’: how to combat Putin’s kleptocratic mafia

     

There is little prospect of a Russo-American ‘grand bargain’ or rapprochement, even if Vladimir Putin visits Washington, in part because the US will not abandon democracy promotion, a RUSI analysis suggests: Russia unsuccessfully pushed for… Read more »

Russian kleptocrats ‘fraught with anxieties’: why the latest sanctions will bite

     

The lives of Russian kleptocrats in Britain are suddenly fraught with new anxieties, the Washington Post reports: Critics in London of Russian President Vladimir Putin are reevaluating their need for… Read more »

Fighting the Hydra: whose state organs are ‘in hock to some sort of kleptocracy’?

     

The British government refused to assist a French investigation into suspected money laundering and tax fraud by the UK telecoms giant Lycamobile – citing the fact that the company is… Read more »

The Corruption Cure: Brazil’s democracy gains from anti-kleptocracy moves

     

Brazil’s jailing of its beloved former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Saturday sent a strong signal to all of Latin America that the era of political impunity was… Read more »

Countering Russia’s Super Mafia – a kleptocracy in the making

     

Mark Galeotti’s timely account of the Russian underworld – The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia –  charts its rise from Soviet-era gangsters to Kremlin collaborators under Vladimir Putin, notes analyst Oliver… Read more »

Is EU ‘enabling’ Hungary’s authoritarian kleptocracy?

     

Hungary is no longer a democracy, says Nóra Köves, an activist with the pro-democracy Eötvös Károly Institute. “I wouldn’t say that, no. Not, I think, any more. We are heading to… Read more »