by John Heathershaw, Tena Prelec and Tom Mayne for Irish Examiner
March 10, 2025
Kleptocracy — literally “rule by thieves”, where a leader corruptly steals their country’s wealth — is not a new concept. Rulers, both ancient and modern, have exploited their position to siphon off public assets, entrenching their power through corruption and repression. Yet what is a relatively new phenomenon is how modern-day kleptocrats are able to utilise a transnational network of professional enablers located in the West — wealth managers, real estate agents, lawyers — to extract money and maintain power.
As a result, a lot of this corrupted wealth makes its way from kleptocracies to democracies like Ireland and Britain. In 2019, the US Department of Justice brought bribery charges against Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the former president of Uzbekistan, alleging she had received around $1bn in corrupt payments from telecoms companies, with up to $300m frozen in a bank account in Dublin.
Kleptocracy is intimately tied up with organised crime and again here Irish entities can be used to facilitate the transfer of criminal cash with Irish shell companies, special purpose vehicles (SPVs) and investment limited partnerships (ILPs) used, according to Transparency International, “as a conduit for laundering illicit financial flows from overseas”.
Kleptocracy therefore depends on an ecosystem of interlocking companies, trusts and bank accounts, created by enablers both here and abroad, that provide the financial, legal and reputational tools to legitimise stolen wealth. But professional enablers do not simply move money, and they don’t just supply their services. They create the structures that sustain kleptocracy, embedding it into our political and economic fabric.
Originally published in the Irish Examiner. Read the full article here.