About this item
In this shocking, meticulously reported work of narrative nonfiction, an award-winning investigative journalist exposes "capitalism's monster" -- global kleptocracy -- and reveals how it is corrupting the world around us.Financial Times reporter Tom Burgis has spent fifteen years reporting from five continents on conflict, corruption, globalization and organized crime. In pursuit of the networks that underpin the new global order, he has traveled to the killing fields of eastern Congo and to a Ukraine riven by Russian occupation and delved into the hidden corners of the great repositories of stolen wealth in New York and London. He has interviewed the boss of the Moscow mafia as well as hundreds of middlemen, moneymen, bagmen, frontmen and other denizens of the game of secrets that defines contemporary geopolitics.
About the Author
I've been reporting from Africa since 2006, mostly as a correspondent for the Financial Times based first in Johannesburg then in Lagos. I've covered coups from Madagascar to Guinea and oil- and mineral-fuelled wars from eastern Congo to the Niger Delta. I've descended the world's deepest mine in South Africa, slunk through Zimbabwe's brutalised diamond fields and developed an addiction to Afrobeat. I'm currently the FT's investigations correspondent, based in London. My investigative reporting has won several awards, including a Society of Publishers in Asia award, and was shortlisted for a European Press Prize and a British Press Award.
The Looting Machine tells the story of how Africa's great natural wealth has become its curse, of what life is like for those who live under that curse, and of how shadow states across the continent have, in cahoots with multinational corporations and tycoons from east and west, harnessed Africa's treasure to their own oppressive interests. The book won an Overseas Press Club of America award and was named a book of the year by the Financial Times and the Spectator.
