SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'If you think the UK isn't corrupt, you haven't looked hard enough ... This terrifying book follows a global current of dirty money, and the murders and kidnappings required to sustain it' GEORGE MONBIOT, GUARDIAN AN ECONOMIST AND WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'When you pick this book up, you won't be able to put it down' MISHA GLENNY, author of MCMAFIA 'Gripping, disturbing and deeply reported' BEN RHODES, bestselling author of THE WORLD AS IT IS In this real-life thriller packed with jaw-dropping revelations, award-winning investigative journalist Tom Burgis reveals a terrifying global web of kleptocracy and corruption. Kleptopia follows the dirty money that is flooding the global economy, emboldening dictators, enriching oligarchs and poisoning democracies. From the Kremlin to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, London to the Trump White House, it shows how the thieves are uniting - and the terrible human cost. A body in a burned-out Audi. Workers riddled with bullets in the Kazakh desert. A rigged election in Zimbabwe. A British banker silenced and humiliated for trying to expose the truth about the City of London - the world's piggy bank for blood money. Riveting, horrifying and written like fiction, this book shows that while we are looking the other way, all that we hold most dear is being stolen.

From the bestselling author of Kleptopia comes a true story about Cuckooland – a world where the rich can buy everything – including the truth.

Everywhere, the powerful are making a renewed claim to the greatest prize of all: to own the truth. The power to choose what you want reality to be and impose that reality on the world.

For three years, Tom Burgis followed a lead that took him deeper and deeper into Cuckooland – the place where the rich own the truth. The trail snaked from the Kremlin to Kathmandu, Stockholm to the Steppe, from a blood-soaked town square in Uzbekistan to a royal retreat in Scotland. Burgis hunted down oligarchs, developed secret sources and traced vast sums of money flowing between multinational corporations, ex-Soviet dictators and the west’s ruling elites. And he found one man who wanted the power to bend reality to his will.

This book tells an astonishing story: a tale of secrets and lies that reveals how fragile that truth can be. Whether it’s in Kazakh torture chambers or the UK’s High Court, the lords of Cuckooland are seizing control of the truth. They decree what stories may be told about war and money and power, what we are permitted to know – and more importantly, what we are not.

From the bestselling author of Kleptopia, Cuckooland is a deeply reported work of non-fiction that reads like a thriller. It is a story of how globalisation and technological revolution have combined to imperil the foundation of free societies: that the truth belongs to the many, not the few.

Overseas Press Club Award Winner 2016 A shocking investigative journey into the way the resource trade wreaks havoc on Africa, 'The Looting Machine' explores the dark underbelly of the global economy. 'The Looting Machine' is a searing expose of the global web of traders, bankers, middlemen, despots and corporate raiders that is pillaging Africa's vast natural wealth. From the killing fields of Congo to the crude-slicked creeks of Nigeria, a great endowment of oil, diamonds, copper, iron, gold and coltan has become a curse that condemns millions to poverty, violence and oppression. That curse is no accident. This gripping investigative journey takes us into the shadows of the world economy, where secretive networks conspire with Africa's kleptocrats to bleed the continent dry. And like their victims, the beneficiaries of this grand looting have names.

The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other “emerging markets” have transformed their economies, Africa’s resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world’s population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent.

In his first book, The Looting Machine, Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it’s a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states’ value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa’s new middle class back into destitution just as quickly as they climbed out of it. The ground beneath their feet is as precarious as a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill away like crude from a busted pipeline.

This catastrophic social disintegration is not merely a continuation of Africa’s past as a colonial victim. The looting now is accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa’s resources rises, a handful of Africans are becoming legitimately rich but the vast majority, like the continent as a whole, is being fleeced. Outsiders tend to think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy. But look more closely at the resource industry and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different. In 2010, fuel and mineral exports from Africa were worth 333 billion, more than seven times the value of the aid that went in the opposite direction. But who received the money? For every Frenchwoman who dies in childbirth, 100 die in Niger alone, the former French colony whose uranium fuels France’s nuclear reactors. In petro-states like Angola three-quarters of government revenue comes from oil. The government is not funded by the people, and as result it is not beholden to them. A score of African countries whose economies depend on resources are rentier states; their people are largely serfs. The resource curse is not merely some unfortunate economic phenomenon, the product of an intangible force.

What is happening in Africa’s resource states is systematic looting. Like its victims, its beneficiaries have names.