The kleptocrats club

Business Daily

Authoritarian regimes are working closer than ever to keep each other afloat - with plenty of help from the West's financial system.

Ed Butler speaks to Frank Vogl, who helped found the global anti-corruption organisation Transparency International. He claims that the world's kleptocrats are enabled by an army of bankers, lawyers and accountants who are helping them squirrel away their ill-gotten money in Western real estate and investments.

And for regimes like those of Belarus, Venezuela or Syria, who find their power contested by their own people and their economies in tatters, there is plenty of support to be found these days from other authoritarians - chief among them Russia and China. That's according to the historian, journalist and author Anne Applebaum. The questions is whether the world's democracies will ever get their act together and do something about it?

(Picture: Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro (left) embracing Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko; Credit: Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images)