“An Octopus That Reaches around the Globe”

Corruption is an international undertaking. A global cast of enablers, including oil-rich players from Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, Caribbean letterbox companies, banks in Switzerland and Singapore, American real estate agents, and the giant investment bank Goldman Sachs, helped an ambitious young Malaysian businessman capture and spend over $4 billion in just a few years. Most oil boom corruption cases followed roughly the same playbook: spirit away illicit funds via offshore shell companies and bank accounts and then sink them into foreign property, businesses, luxury goods, and public relations campaigns. Through these channels, corrupt money and its destabilizing influence spread around the world.

The Kleptocracy Kings

Chapter 4 traces into the umbilical tie between kleptocratic regimes and their oil and describes how the industry helps keep them alive. The leaders of Angola, Azerbaijan, and Russia used their booming oil industries to strengthen their political positions. Thanks to their long-term horizons and monopolies on power, they nurtured the oil sector while also strategically milking it for political and personal purposes. Above all else, they channeled the oil boom windfall toward their allies, making sure that the riches only fattened the pockets of oligarchs loyal to the regime.

The Crisis of Corruption

Observing oil boom corruption is like placing a drop of dye in the circulatory system of global corruption, and watching it reveal the system’s channels and pathways as it spreads and spreads. Chapter 1 kicks off these observations. It explains how witnessing an upsurge in graft while working in Nigeria motivated me to write this book and outlines its contents. The chapter also contains background on the players and peculiarities of the oil sector and on the book’s approach to defining corruption.

We Know How to Fight Corruption

The oil boom reveals how corruption works, including the players and tactics that appear across multiple cases. These are the problem areas that need to be fixed most urgently. The boom also reveals what solutions are working and need to be scaled up. After all, every corruption case know about is a success story of some kind, or it would have remained unexposed. Taken together, these lessons can help build a smarter fight against corruption, in the oil sector and beyond.

Corruption’s Motley Foes

While some political heavyweights used anticorruption campaigns to go after their enemies, many of the battles against oil sector corruption ended in true success. More and more, anticorruption actors are working across borders, just like the corruption they’re trying to fight. Foreign governments stepped up their enforcement of antibribery laws and debuted innovative tools for stemming the flow of dirty money. International networks of journalists exposed corruption on an unprecedented scale, and activists pushed an ambitious transparency agenda. Even the international enablers of corruption—those bankers, lawyers, and accountants who help the dirty money flow—showed on occasion that they could be anticorruption heroes too.

Corruption and the Competition for Power

In several democratic countries, public officials sought oil money in part to finance their election campaigns. In Brazil and Nigeria, landslides of corruption followed, and billions of dollars in public funds were lost. National oil companies proved particularly susceptible to abuse. But it was not all bad news, as some democratic institutions proved their mettle. Electoral and judicial agencies worked as intended, and kept the perpetrators from enjoying their loot in peace. In the United States, the tactics were more subtle with oil companies spending handsomely on election campaigns, public advertising and lobbying.

“Being a Friend in a Nest of Vipers”

During the boom years, companies, banks, and other private sector players used all kinds of tactics to tilt the oil sector playing field in their favor. They wined and dined top decision-makers, went into business with political insiders, and paid bribes, often via middlemen or fixers. Collusion and tax avoidance reared their heads too. Stories from Angola, Australia, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Libya, Nigeria, Norway, and the United States reveal the risks companies took in order to win a piece of the oil boom action.