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The US plan to sell Türkiye F-35 stealth fighter jets has stalled, blocked by a Russian missile system Ankara bought years ago, Semafor reported. Lawmakers in Washington won't clear the deal while Türkiye keeps the hardware. The lone buyer in talks hasn't budged, and destroying the system is now on the table.

Russia has long used arms exports to pull buyers into its orbit, and the war it started raised the price of those ties—leaving governments that bought Russian air defense to clash with the supplier that sold it.

The Russian system is in the way

US sanctions law bars Türkiye from the F-35 program while it retains the Russian S-400, Semafor reported. That system is a long-range air defense, built to shoot down planes and missiles. Ankara already paid for six of the jets. They have sat in the United States since Washington expelled Türkiye from the F-35 program in 2019. US President Donald Trump announced plans to sell the jets more than a month ago, and nothing has moved since.

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No buyer, no easy exit

One way out is to sell the S-400 to another country. Türkiye reportedly opened talks with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) last month, but they don't appear to have progressed. American lawmakers insist Ankara must give up the system entirely first.

Republican Senator Rick Scott told Semafor that Türkiye shouldn't get the jets unless it becomes a true partner—"so if they have the S-400, they cannot have the F-35." Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, a longtime opponent, said the process is "at a standstill."

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Israel and Congress are the live block

The sharper obstacle sits in Washington, Semafor reported. A vote to sell would pit Israel against a NATO ally, and many of Trump's own allies want the S-400 scrapped completely. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the jets could "destroy the power balance in the Middle East." The outlet said AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobby in Washington, is pressing Congress to keep the block.

Selling it still runs through Moscow

Any resale carries its own catch: Russia must approve the transfer of the S-400, giving the Kremlin a reason to block it. The only option that bypasses Moscow is to disable or destroy the system outright. Türkiye earlier tried to return the systems to Moscow, hoping to thaw relations with Washington. It didn't work.

The Trump administration says Ankara hasn't met all the conditions to buy the jets, and the State Department wants the S-400 issue settled with guarantees first.

France, Germany, and the UK are working to create a format representing Europe in talks over Russia’s war against Ukraine, The New York Times reported on 15 August, citing five European officials. Known collectively as the E3, the three countries would support Ukraine’s position and protect European interests in any settlement.

The initiative is Europe’s attempt to secure a place in talks the US is expected to lead. The three governments fear that Washington and Moscow could reach a deal without them, although Europe would have to enforce sanctions, decide how to use frozen Russian assets, and help protect Ukraine afterward. European officials also doubt Washington will stay committed to serious negotiations.

The officials expect Washington to lead negotiations with Moscow. The E3 wants to become the core group supporting Ukraine, following Kyiv’s request that it prepare for talks. France and Germany are shaping the position, while Britain fears damaging relations with Trump.

Poland, Italy, and the Nordic countries would be consulted, with the EU later involved. Some Baltic states and Hungary do not trust France and Germany to represent them. London called the discussion speculative.

The Coalition has rehearsed a force but not agreed to deploy it

The E3 forms the core of the Coalition of the Willing. At a 7 June meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, its leaders backed an immediate ceasefire and legally binding guarantees, including the deployment of a multinational force.

More than 600 British troops rehearsed with French paratroopers and an Italian platoon in February for a possible deployment. They could form the core of a 10,000-strong force pledged by London and Paris after a ceasefire.

Yet some members reportedly made Russia’s consent a condition for deploying troops, effectively giving Moscow a veto. Bulgaria has left, and Germany has not committed troops. The Coalition’s leadership is also shifting after Keir Starmer’s resignation and ahead of Emmanuel Macron’s departure in 2027.

Ukraine talks still misunderstand Russia's intentions

European officials see few signs that Vladimir Putin is ready for serious negotiations, the NYT reported. A separate EU attempt to open direct contact with Moscow divided member states.

Experts told Euromaidan Press that Russia uses peace processes to stall, press maximalist demands, and improve its battlefield position. Moscow also dismissed a Black Sea ceasefire proposal after Kyiv offered a mutual halt to attacks on civilian targets.

Ukraine’s partners risk mistaking Russia’s presence at talks for a willingness to compromise. Former Ukrainian diplomat Iuliia Osmolovska warned that Moscow also benefits from failed negotiations by exhausting Western governments until they pressure Kyiv to concede.

Before 2022, Russia signed 26 ceasefires in eastern Ukraine; none lasted more than two weeks. A pause can bank concessions, rotate troops, and let Moscow resume fighting from a stronger position.

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A plan presented to the UK's new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, would extend Britain's nuclear umbrella to Ukraine and other non-NATO European states. In exchange, Britain would regain access to the EU single market for goods, The Telegraph reported on 9 August.

The proposal comes as European governments question whether they can rely on US protection and struggle to turn moral support for Ukraine into troops and weapons. Russia's invasions, despite the assurances Kyiv received from the US and the UK when it surrendered its nuclear arsenal under the Budapest memorandum, have also revived calls for nuclear-backed guarantees.

Former Conservative MP Nick Boles drafted the plan. He proposes a "European Confederation" that combines single-market access with NATO-style mutual defense commitments. 

For Ukraine, it would provide protection modeled on NATO Articles 4 and 5 while Kyiv pursued full EU membership.

Ukraine would maintain a large army as Europe's bulwark against Russia and share defense technology with other members of the Confederation. Britain would raise defense spending to 3.5% of GDP, while both countries would gain full access to the EU's single market for goods.

Boles said Europe needed a new security model because neither US President Donald Trump nor a future US president could be guaranteed to "defend Europe as if it were Kansas." 

Boles's plan is not Burnham government policy. Nevertheless, it has circulated among officials, including National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, as London considers deeper cooperation with the EU.

Britain's support bumps against Europe's political limits

Prime Minister Burnham entered Downing Street as a firm supporter of Ukraine. He assured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that British support remained unchanged and pledged to preserve aid levels.

Britain also co-leads with France the Coalition of the Willing, which plans to deploy forces in Ukraine after a ceasefire to deter another Russian attack.

The Coalition has brought together representatives of 40 countries. Still, members remain divided over how far to support Ukraine.

Britain and France have formally declared their intention to deploy forces after a potential ceasefire in Ukraine. Yet Poland offered logistical support but ruled out troop deployment, while Bulgaria has withdrawn from the Coalition. Europe has promised deterrence, but key deep-strike missiles may not arrive until 2029.

Boles's plan would pair Britain's nuclear deterrent with Ukraine's conventional military strength. Unlike the Coalition’s voluntary plans, Boles's proposed European Confederation would place its defense guarantees in a treaty. NATO would initially be responsible for carrying them out.

From surrendered weapons to a nuclear shield

Ukraine inherited the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal after the Soviet collapse, including about 1,900 strategic warheads. 

Kyiv relinquished them under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum after receiving security assurances from Russia, Britain, and the US. Despite these promises, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and launched its full-scale war in 2022.

Russia's invasions have revived calls among Ukrainian lawmakers for nuclear-backed security guarantees. Politician Roman Kostenko has called for guarantees that could include British and French nuclear retaliation in the event of another Russian attack. 

Under Boles's proposal, Ukraine would not regain its own warheads. It would instead come under Britain's nuclear shield.

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A lot is written about corruption, but fundamentally it’s about trust and how healthy societies can’t exist without it; and the World Cup has shown what happens when trust breaks down. The decision to allow U.S. striker Folarin Balogun to play in the World Cup match against Belgium was, according to FIFA, made by the relevant disciplinary committee in a routine manner. However, following the similarly generous treatment accorded to Portuguese megastar Cristiano Ronaldo before the tournament began, a lot of people not unreasonably questioned whether the rules were being set aside for commercial reasons.

It’s only football, so does this matter? In some ways, of course not. But I think the episode is instructive of how quickly trust can disappear. No one is under any illusions that FIFA is motivated purely by the desire to spread sweetness and light, thanks to corruption scandals, the grotesque “peace prize,” and all the other nonsense. But previously, what happened on the pitch was assumed to be sacrosanct, which is why these disciplinary decisions mattered more than it at first might appear.

Shortly after the U.S.-Belgium game, Argentina played Egypt, coming back from a two-goal deficit to achieve a remarkable 3-2 victory. I watched the game with my family, and it was notable how — instead of being amazed by Lionel Messi’s wizardry — all of us focussed instead on a refereeing discrepancy that led to a goal for Egypt being ruled out, and a seemingly identical one for Argentina being allowed. 

Previously we would have given the referee the benefit of the doubt: even if he’d made a mistake, we’d accept it was an honest one. But now we knew that the tournament had intervened to keep bankable stars playing for longer, in violation of its own precedents and regulations. Any decision that has that effect, as this one did, was immediately suspect. 

In the past, particularly when living in Russia, I used to hear a lot of Westerners being quite enthusiastic about corruption: it was nice they’d say, if they’d been stopped speeding, to be able to pay the police officer a bribe on the spot, and skip all the annoying paperwork. But that was a short-sighted way of looking at it: once a police officer, or anyone else in a position of power, gives anyone special treatment, then the trust that keeps all our interactions civilised, starts to break down. The more it is broken down, the harder it is to repair.

I am not particularly interested in football (Welsh rugby, on the other hand), which is a game I find both dull and mercenary. Besides, the Welsh team tends not to be very good. But I am interested in corruption, and I was surprised by how angry the Balogun affair made me. If you love a game, you need to hate its arbiters giving out special treatment, even if you are the beneficiary of it. That is a lesson quite a lot of politicians need to learn, both in the United States and elsewhere.

A report from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective makes particularly grim reading in this light. Lobbying by “high-risk foreign individuals” is higher under Donald Trump than it has previously been; the amounts being spent are often obscure; much of the lobbying is to overturn previous anti-corruption efforts; and, most worryingly, efforts are aimed not just at individual cases, but at the whole principle of fighting corruption.

“If these influence campaigns are successful, this sets a dangerous precedent where the standard for holding corruption accountable shifts according to whoever holds power in Washington. For those seeking to undo consequences of their corrupt acts, each time lobbying works, it confirms that there is a price at which these consequences can be undone,” the report notes. So just like football then.

Cometh the hour, cometh the bin

Sunlight, it is often said, is the best disinfectant. Though I don’t know if that’s literally true when it comes to bacteria, transparency is certainly a useful antidote to the kind of backroom deals that make corruption possible. Generally speaking, politicians honour this idea in principle, if not necessarily in practice, so it’s unusual for British far-right politician Nigel Farage to have launched an election campaign on the single issue that he personally should be allowed to keep his financial affairs secret.

All the other major parties have decided to sit this one out until the official inquiry into Farage’s finances is concluded, at which point there may well be another by-election anyway, leaving serial novelty candidate Count Binface to provide the main opposition. It’s odd to think that someone who obscures his face behind a giant rubbish bin and pretends to be a spacelord from the planet Sigma IX could be the voice of transparency, but it’s 2026, and that appears to be where we are. It would be genuinely hilarious if he won.

Of course, while we’re distracted by the attention-seeking behaviour of tiresome bores like Farage, actually important things are happening elsewhere. It’s definitely worth taking a look at this report into the Iranian drone industry, which illustrates how changes in the world economy have led to a weakening of American influence in particular, and Western influence in general.

This growth of a multi-node decentralised trade system is paralleled by the growth of the large and highly-efficient ‘Chinese Money Laundering Networks,’ which operate with the same scale and speed as any large financial institution, and now dominate illicit crypto activity. This is an interesting paper on how military strategists should think about money laundering, considering its significance in allowing adversaries to buy components for drones, and so on. 

We also need to remember, however, that by using money laundering legislation and sanctions profligately, we are lessening their effectiveness by teaching people how to evade them. Like antibiotics, we’ll miss them when they don’t work anymore.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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The post FIFA’s games betray our trust appeared first on Coda Story.

After kilometers of flat, orange desert, the bus dives down through an increasingly lunar landscape as it reaches San Pedro de Atacama. Amidst the sea of red rocks, patchy vegetation and distant high plains known as altiplanos, a small sign appears on the side of the road. The entry marker has been tagged in graffiti. “Se vendió los salares.” “They sold the salt flats.” 

The town of San Pedro, located in the north of Chile not far from the borders with Argentina and Bolivia, then appears like an oasis. In this hub for international tourism, small buses packed with visitors make trips from the dusty, bustling center to explore the region’s various geysers, sand dunes and volcanoes. Night sky tourism ventures offer a unique look at the southern stars. But it is the vast white salt flats, formed between 100 and 10 million years ago, that people come from around the world to see. 

As tectonic plates slowly shifted, water flowing from the Andes mountains lost access to the sea and settled into a natural drainage area known as an endorheic basin. Here, water evaporated quickly, leaving a white crust of salt on top and below, a rich mélange of minerals – lithium, potassium, magnesium, and boron — encased in brine. The Salar de Atacama is one of the biggest salt flats in the world — and one of the most important.

On March 11, Jose Antonio Kast, Chile’s new president took office. Kast, a conservative ostentatiously close to Donald Trump, has long been a critic of Chile’s national lithium strategy. One of his first actions as president was to sign an exploratory deal with the United States to extract rare earths and essential mirals. Chile, the world’s largest producer of copper and second largest of lithium, is central to the Trump administration’s plans to reduce its reliance on China as a source of the rare earths and metals that are fundamental to modern industry, from semiconductors to electric vehicles to batteries to defense technology.

Even before Kast took office, he attended Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami, an ostensibly security-related alliance that is also an attempt led by the U.S. to curb China’s growing influence in Latin America. Under the previous Chilean government, China had become a dominant player in the national lithium industry, as it had in Argentina. With Javier Milei, a Trump ally, in office in Buenos Aires, having another ally ensconced in Santiago has been a significant boost to U.S. plans to reclaim its role as the overwhelming regional hegemon. It was intervention from Washington, for instance, that led to Chile abandoning a $500 million Chinese telecom deal to link the two countries via undersea fiber optic cables.

Amidst the geopolitical wrangling, though, is the question of who benefits from Chile’s national resources and what impact the relentless drive to extract those resources has on the country and its people.

Sonia Ramos Chocobar sweeps kibble from the small kitchen table of her home on the outskirts of San Pedro and shoos her five dogs and three cats into the yard. Chocobar has just returned home after several days in neighboring Calama – where she was attending the first-ever Salt Flats Conference – and the house is a mess. The climate activist has made time between her afternoon grocery shopping and an evening community gathering to meet with me. 

Chocobar, in her 70s, is a bit of a local legend. In 2009, she made national news when she and another environmental activist (Amelia Mamani, since deceased) silently walked from San Pedro to Santiago, a distance of 1,534 kilometers, to raise awareness about the environmental risks of geothermal exploration near a geyser known as El Tatio — sacred to the Lickanantay indigenous community she comes from. The “march of the grandmothers” was followed by other environmental actions. Most recently, Chocobar walked to Antofagasta, the gritty port town that exports much of the copper, lithium and other resources mined out of the vast expanses of land in what’s known as Chile’s Gran Norte (“Greater North”) region. 

This time her message was different: save the Atacama salt flats.

The broader area where the borders of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia converge is often referred to as the world’s “lithium triangle.” This lost corner of South America is believed to hold 68% of the world’s lithium reserves — a key element in the production of the lithium-ion batteries that fuel not only electric vehicles, but, increasingly, data centers and other large “green” infrastructure projects. San Pedro, roughly in the middle of the triangle, is sitting on a modern gold mine — and a faultline for the future of renewable energy.  

The town of 2,500 full-time residents has long been at the center of a tug-of-war between different actors, all of whom claim sovereignty – dominion – over the salt flats surrounding it: the indigenous communities who have called this environment home for centuries, the Chilean state and the international markets salivating over the “white gold” extracted from it. Over the years, and through much negotiation on local, national and international levels, a sort of entente had been reached: the state owns the resource, private companies exploit it and some of the profits kick back to local communities. Lithium was even granted a special status under a dictatorship-era decree: a “strategic” mineral, only to be mined with the express agreement of the State. The election of Kast has already disrupted this tenuous equilibrium. The Chilean president has removed environmental protections from roughly 40 different types of natural resources — reopening the tap that has long fueled extractivism and inequality in Chile after four years of left-wing, protectionist policies. 

With counter space cleared and the tape recorder set, Chocobar begins to speak, choosing her words carefully and pausing regularly for emphasis. She sounds tired, but steely. “We are always in a constant effort to protect our water, our land,” she tells me. “We have the misfortune of the Pacific. And we have the misfortune that the Salar de Atacama is one of the greatest lithium sources in the world.”

It wasn’t always this way — in fact, the “resource curse” is relatively new, she explains. For a long time, the Atacama desert was viewed by most Chileans as a no man’s land. Growing up as a member of the Lickanantay indigenous community — also known as the Atacameño people — Chocobar learned how to coexist with the harsh environment, rather than to dominate it. How to extract groundwater, which plants to grow, when and where to shuffle crops. “If we are millenary people, it is because we have found many ways to survive here,” she says. “People think the desert is lifeless, but it’s the exact opposite.” 

Over her many years, Chocobar has seen these techniques slowly disappear: dried-up streams, dying flora and fauna, water rerouted from communities to corporations. The natural richness of the desert lands she calls home has been converted into a monocrop for export. The culprit? The world’s increasingly rapacious appetite for rare earths and metals.

Lithium demands huge amounts of water. To extract the resource through a process called brine evaporation, mineral-rich groundwater is pumped from beneath the salt flats at a rate of thousands of liters per second into vast open-air ponds. Then, the water is evaporated to reveal the lithium. 95% of this groundwater — which once belonged to the smattering of 18 indigenous communities that inhabit the region — quite literally disappears into thin air. 

For local communities, the strain is already noticeable. In San Pedro, an estimated 49% of residents don’t have access to running water, says journalist Ernesto Picco. In one town — the ironically named Santiago del Rio Grande — Picco has reported, 100% of residents have no access to water. 

It's not only humans who are being affected. The water scarcity has modified the breeding and feeding habits of alpaca populations, a local llama herder in neighboring Toconao, Hugo Flores, told me. A river used to run through San Pedro. On one of my days in town, I climbed down a ladder and walked across the dried up stream to get a better view of the distant Licancabur Volcano. The caked ground chipped under my sandals.

“We’re sitting on a watershed, and yet there is water scarcity,” Chocobar explains. “We’re being conquered, in a sense — commercially, economically. It is a natural laboratory that is being destroyed.” 

Lithium hasn’t always been so coveted.

When it comes to minerals, in Chile, copper was for a long time — and still is, to a certain extent —king. Since its discovery in the 1880s, the South American country has been one of the world’s largest exporters of copper, which is drilled out of open pit mines in the Gran Norte region. From the window of a taxi in the port city of Antofagasta the day before, I had admired the massive telescopic loading chutes that transport the mineral directly into the hull of boats, releasing brown-gold particles into the air that settles on surfaces — park benches, balconies, cars — across the city.

It wasn't until the 1960s that the Chilean government began to recognize the benefits of lithium after accidentally discovering it buried in salt brine during an exploration aimed at identifying additional water sources for copper mining. The timing couldn’t have been better. “After World War II, there was a lot of speculative value in lithium as a nuclear material,” James J. A. Blair, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona who has published several papers on lithium mining in Chile, explained over a recent video call. 

In 1979, about six years into his 17-year iron reign and following the lead of the United States, which had done the same, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet declared lithium a “strategic resource” reserved exclusively for the state — not on account of its economic potential, which was at the time unknown, but as a national security stockpile. 

This seemingly small linguistic tweak has had long-lasting effects. 

After Pinochet’s decree, lithium extraction came under the auspices of Chile’s State Development Agency, CORFO, which started to ink contracts with private firms for further exploration. A year later, CORFO partnered with U.S.-based Foote Minerals to form the Chilean Lithium Company (SCL), in which the state held a 45% stake. 

What began as a Cold War precaution would quietly harden into one of the most unusual resource regimes in the world. By carving lithium out from the standard mining code, written in the 1930s, the Chilean state created a hybrid model. Lithium was not exactly nationalized, but neither was it fully privatized. “Lithium sits in a legal gray zone in Chile,” Blair told me. “It’s formally non-concessionable — meaning private actors can’t just stake a claim the way they would for copper — but in practice, the state has delegated extraction through long-term agreements that are incredibly favorable to a small number of firms.”

During the dictatorship’s wave of privatizations in the 1980s, control over key lithium assets was transferred to a small circle of politically connected actors. Among them: Julio Ponce Lerou, Pinochet’s son-in-law, who would go on to run SQM, now one of the world’s dominant lithium producers.

“Decisions were made in a highly centralized and opaque way,” researcher Gonzalo Gutiérrez told me over cafeteria food at the University of Chile, in Santiago. “By the time lithium became economically important, the institutional framework was already locked in.”

That framework has proven to be remarkably durable. Even as Chile transitioned back to democracy in the 1990s and expanded its role as a global mining powerhouse, lithium remained an exception — governed not through open concessions but through a handful of contracts administered by CORFO. 

In her 2025 book “Extraction,” researcher Thea Riofrancos notes that even today, two firms — SQM and Albemarle — effectively operate as a “a legally sanctioned private duopoly.” Control over lithium, she writes, is a tightrope between “the palpable potential of public control and the reality of corporate dominance.” 

For Ramón Balcázar, the founder of the San Pedro-based nonprofit, Fundacion Tantí, this legal exceptionalism has had profound consequences on the ground. “The state claims ownership, but the impacts are local,” he said. “Communities were never meaningfully included in the design of these contracts, yet they are the ones living with the depletion of water and the transformation of their ecosystems.”

Balcazar’s nonprofit sits on a side street in San Pedro, across from a trendy French bakery called La Franchuteria that sells iced lattes at European prices. 

Since its founding in 2016, Fundacion Tanti’s small team of researchers has studied the effects of lithium mining on indigenous communities in the Atacama desert. The period has coincided with nothing less than an explosion in the demand for Chilean lithium. 

The growth has mostly been tied to a dramatic rise in demand for electric vehicle batteries. Between 2015 and 2024, global lithium demand grew roughly sixfold, largely driven by EV batteries. The boom has fundamentally reshaped lithium markets: whereas EV batteries accounted for only about 15% of lithium demand in 2017, they made up roughly 85% by 2023. In Chile, arguably the world’s lithium breadbasket, raw materials are mined for export but rarely do its benefits trickle back down to communities.

“Where is the lithium going? To Elon Musk?” Daniela Rodriguez, a local journalist and activist I spoke with in San Pedro, asked. “To send rockets into space, to power electric cars that you never even see around here?” 

In 2021, Balcazar and fellow researchers came up with a neat term for this phenomenon: “green extractivism.” “What we are seeing is not an energy transition — it’s an expansion of the extractive frontier under a green label,” he told me. 

Faced with increasing demand for lithium to fuel the “green revolution,” the Chilean state has tried to thread the needle. In 2019, after a wave of mass protests against neoliberal inequality known as “el estallido social” (the social uprising), Chileans elected Gabriel Boric, a young, tattooed reformer who promised to, among other things, reassert state control over the lithium supply chain to redistribute its value. 

“Lithium is the mineral of the future,” Boric said on the campaign trail. “Chile can’t make the historic mistake of privatizing resources again.” His government promised a paradigm shift: more community involvement, more protection of wetlands, greener methods of extraction. Lithium, he seemed to say, would benefit Chileans across the whole supply chain and not just a select few at the top.

In April 2023, the government announced its National Lithium Strategy. The policy sought to expand production while increasing state control through public-private partnerships, renegotiate the contract with SQM (the same private company once headed by Pinochet’s son-in-law) and include community and indigenous participation in future lithium exploration decisions. 

In all, Boric’s government identified 68 salt flats that could be opened to mining exploration, but also 27 wetlands to be protected, Riofrancos, the author of “Extraction,” notes in her book. 

“The national lithium strategy is Boric's most successful policy,” Nicolas Grau, Boric’s former finance minister, told me over the phone. “It will allow Chile to industrialize through lithium — growing the economy while also protecting the environment.” After years of passive control, the state would finally take a more “protagonistic role” in managing the resource, Grau said, without nationalizing it.

To Riofrancos, the juggling act under Boric was typical of what happens when a state tries to pry some space in a market where extractivism has long been left unchecked. “Boric’s blueprint cited Allende as an inspiration, but his approach was more conciliatory toward extractive capital than anything Allende had proposed,” she writes. 

Local communities in San Pedro felt similarly. “The only thing politicians care about is being in power,” Chocobar said in San Pedro. “For all intents and purposes, we might as well not exist.” 

Boric’s successor, Kast has quickly rolled back environmental protections, fulfilling his campaign promises of commercializing mining and partnering with the U.S. regardless of the environmental impacts on the salt flats. 

Jorge Heine, a former Chilean diplomat and expert on international relations, argues that Kast is more constrained than it might appear. “People tend to overestimate how much a single administration can reshape lithium policy,” Heine explained. “This is a sector governed by long-term contracts, by international commitments, and by a legal framework that has proven remarkably resilient. Kast can tweak, accelerate, or slow things down, but dismantling the model entirely would come at a significant political and economic cost.”

But huge costs are already being paid, costs that communities in San Pedro have been living with for decades. Could Kast’s attempts to liberalize lithium mining and potentially exacerbate inequalities and environmental damage galvanize resistance?

For now, the signs of that resistance are still weak: graffiti scrawled on the side of the road, a grandmother walking along a highway with a cardboard sign, four panels of wood hung in a town square. But like lithium itself, transformations tend to take place very slowly at first — millennia of build-up in the brine — until suddenly they happen very fast. From Santiago to Atacama, protesters have been taking to the streets. In June, broader protests against Kast’s dismantling of social programs and services turned violent. 

At some point, austerity for the people contrasted with largesse for mining companies, technology companies and acquisitive foreign powers becomes hard for even a government elected in a landslide to defend.

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The United Kingdom has taken over the presidency of the Financial Action Task Force, the global standard-setter on tackling money laundering, and seems determined to keep calm and carry on despite the gigantic Donald Trump-sized hole being blasted in everything it’s trying to do.

The new president of the Financial Action Task Force is Giles Thomson, a career civil servant and archetypal safe pair of hands, who’s declared that the organisation’s priority for the next two years is fighting fraud. He estimated the global cost of fraud at $500 billion, which — if compared to the standard estimates of the volume of global money laundering as making up 2 to 5% of everything — means it contributes between a tenth and a quarter of all profits from financial crime.

Fraud is clearly thus a Very Big Deal, and therefore a well-chosen target for Thomson because everyone (including me) agrees that we need to hit it. However, I think I saw a hint of other perhaps more controversial tasks in the rest of his proposed priorities. The suggestion, for example, that the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) will conduct “proportionate assessments of lower capacity countries” looks to me like a recognition that it needs to stop criticising poorer countries that don’t actually launder money just because their legislation isn’t perfect.

This has been a weighty accusation in the past, not least because of the implicit suggestion of racism, made by, among others, regulator Charles Littrell, who summarised the FATF’s great flaw in 2022 thus: “the vast majority of dirty money and assets resides in, passes through, or is facilitated by the world's largest and richest countries. How then do the world's main [anti-money laundering] risk rankings invariably centre blame upon small, relatively poor, and nonwhite jurisdictions?”

This is not an academic question. Being blacklisted by the FATF is serious, and there has been definite unfairness in the past in which countries have ended up being singled out for a punishment beating. Hopefully a recognition of this reality is hidden somewhere inside Thomson’s rather gnomic utterance that “the FATF will support countries and the private sector to focus effort where the threat is greatest.”

Fortunately, the FATF will have an immediate opportunity to demonstrate that it shows neither fear nor favour when it comes to doing the right thing when it publishes the results of the ongoing evaluation of the United States. 

The U.S. was last evaluated in 2016, and the FATF made various recommendations, which Washington was supposed to have implemented within three years, and sort of did. With the passage of the Corporate Transparency Act in 2020, some progress was made, but since Donald Trump returned to the White House that has gone into screeching reverse.

Prosecuting foreign corrupt practices is “not a priority, ”transparency around residential ownership has been suspended, the Corporate Transparency Act  has been gutted, and crypto is everywhere. Above all, of course, the president himself has been making money at a rate that even Vladimir Putin would have to admire. His headline earnings figure —  $2.2 billion in the first year of his second term —  is clearly unprecedented, but so are the details. 

What for example will future historians make of the fact that the president declared his ownership of the trademark for “THINK BIG AND KICK ASS”? Ha, trick question, there won’t be any historians. They’ll have been replaced by AI.

Tether watch

Talking of history, I had slightly been hoping that the U.S. dollars in circulation might hit the appropriately round number of $2.5 trillion to mark the round 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but it was not to be. If only the Fed had launched the $250 bill in time, perhaps it would have got there, but we’ll just have to wait.

Meanwhile, there’s an interesting time ahead for Tether, this newsletter’s favourite cryptocurrency, which is sailing into choppy waters. It has decided to pull its USDT out of the European Union rather than to comply with the Markets in Crypto Assets regulations on stablecoins, which is a boost for its great rival Circle (USDC), which is very much available in Europe. 

The two big stablecoins have markedly different strategies: Tether is dismissive of regulators, while Circle cosies up to them. And now here comes a new rival in Open USD, which is backed by many of the world’s largest banks and tech firms, and which also promises to abide by everyone’s regulations. Is Tether at risk of becoming irrelevant?

Congo’s conflict coltan

Huge credit to the good folks at Global Witness for this report from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where coltan smuggling is helping to perpetuate the grim conflict in the east of the country. It is the kind of methodical, thorough research that really helps open your eyes to how grim things can be, and how complicit the rest of us are in a global supply chain forged from conflict. 

Congolese people hack coltan out of the ground under the eyes of M23 guerrillas, who then smuggle it into Rwanda, where it is repackaged as Rwandan and given certification intended to show it’s not from a war zone. It is then shipped to refiners in China or Kazakhstan to be processed into tantalum, which is in turn sold to leading companies to be incorporated in the phones, tablets, jet engines, and other products that we all rely on for our lovely modern lives.

“Rwandan official figures show that coltan exports have increased more than 2.5 times between 2021 and 2025,” the report notes. “Coltan is an important revenue stream for Rwanda, which levies a 5% tax on exports. Since 2023, it has become the country’s second-largest export earner, after gold.”

And where does the gold come from? Also from the Congo, which is why the U.S. Treasury sanctioned a Rwandan gold refiner last month, following action taken by the European Union against the same company last year, but it has done little to rein in M23.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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I was listening to Ezra Klein interviewing a left-wing Democratic Party strategist the other day about what a post-Trump U.S. foreign policy might look like, and it was a pretty striking demonstration of Europe’s irrelevance right now that the only Western European country mentioned in the 90 minutes of the chat was the UK, and that was solely in the context of how it helps kleptocrats.

But aha, a notional Brit might have replied, at least we are about to convict Diezani Alison-Madueke, former head of OPEC, ex-Nigerian oil minister, for her alleged egregious corruption. That notional Brit would be feeling pretty foolish right now though, because this was yet another flop, with her being acquitted on all charges. 

Britain has a dire record both when it comes to enabling corruption and when it comes to successfully investigating it, as the failure of yet another high-profile prosecution shows. This latest fiasco should be the impetus the country needs to at last provide the resources and officers that its law enforcement agencies require.

Alison-Madueke saw the hand of divine providence in her acquittal. “It has been a hard journey,” she said, “but I tell you this, God will always do as he will. God will be God and God is not a man that he should lie; when he promises you something, he will see it through” — and who am I to say that she’s wrong? However, there are other potential explanations for what has happened beyond the Almighty manifesting at Southwark Crown Court to give instructions to the jury, including the entrenched incompetence of British police agencies.

It’s hard not to see a parallel with the failed attempt six years ago to investigate Dariga Nazarbayeva, daughter of the former president of Kazakhstan and possessor of a reasonable-to-large London property portfolio, which saw the National Crime Agency (NCA) being comprehensively outwitted by defence lawyers, just as it has been again.

“Today’s verdict is a major blow for the NCA who have come away empty-handed in one of their highest-profile corruption cases, which took over a decade to progress to trial,” said Zainab Saleem, Legal Fellow at Spotlight on Corruption. "It is vital that the UK government properly resources law enforcement agencies tasked with investigating complex bribery and corruption cases and does not take this defeat as grounds for rowing back on anti-corruption enforcement.”

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, results from the suggestions that the new Supreme Leader of Iran has been moving his wealth merrily around with the help of various Western banks, all of it now being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice. “Funds for the transactions have been routed through financial institutions in the UK, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the UAE,” reports Bloomberg.

What is the answer? Whatever it is, it will be even more embarrassing for the UK if it doesn’t come up with something plausible by the time it convenes its Illicit Finance Summit in December. (Unless it ends up being rescheduled again, like one of those meetings that no one actually wants to attend but also no one wants to be responsible for cancelling.)

Still, credit where it’s due, at least efforts to improve Companies House — the UK’s formerly-disastrous corporate registry — appear to be finally bearing fruit. It has sent almost a million enforcement letters to people who haven’t verified their identity, which must have been — at the very least — a useful money-spinner for the post office.

The idea of increasing funding to law enforcement agencies is something that Americans would do well to consider too, particularly when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. “In 2022, under President Joe Biden, Congress approved an $80 billion increase in IRS funding over a decade, with more than half of it slated to restore the agency’s ability to go after the super-rich. This victory was short-lived. By March 2025, Republicans had slashed that $45.6 billion enforcement budget to just under $4 billion — “a 91% decrease,” it notes in this fascinating book excerpt.

I have been interested for a while in the idea of government’s being engaged in “legalisation by under-enforcement,” which is something we see with tax evasion, pollution of waterways, and almost anything else when the rules not being enforced benefit the kind of people who donate money to political parties. But I need a better name for the phenomenon, so please help me out and send one in.

Talking of phenomena that we need a new name for, Elon Musk’s wealth is doing weird things to the Forbes billionaires list. Whoever runs it appears to have decided to only display his net worth to two significant figures. That means that, while we can see an assessment of the wealth of relative paupers like Sergey Brin to the nearest $100 million ($277.6 billion, as I write), we only get a round $1.2 trillion for Musk. Or a round $1. 4 trillion, depending on what day it is, which means his wealth jumps up and down in a minimum increment that, on its own, would be sufficient to make its possessor the richest person in every country in the world except Spain, Canada, Mexico, the United States or France.

And talking of France, the G7 summit in Evian is over. It was of course at a previous French G7 summit when participants created what became the Financial Action Task Force. That was the 1980s and they were concerned about the spread of illegal drugs, the harm they were causing, and the fact that more countries were producing them, and wanted to stop drug dealers being able to keep their profits. Among other things they committed — in the words of the 1989 communiqué — “to prevent the utilization of the banking system and financial institutions,” which is part of the clause that gave birth to the entire global anti-money-laundering system. Well, 37 years have passed, so let’s check in on how that’s going. 

This year the G7 communiqué expressed concern about the spread of illegal drugs, about the harm they’re causing, and about the fact that more countries are producing them. “We emphasize the continued need to strengthen the global anti-money laundering architecture to prevent financial crime and improve enforcement and asset recovery outcomes, in line with the Financial Action Task Force standards,” this year’s summit document states. 

Plus ça change. Maybe in another 37 years, they’ll look up and wonder whether they should try something else, and indeed whether the FATF standards aren’t ripe for reconsideration.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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I’ve been writing this newsletter since 2020, and in my first edition I marvelled at the concept of the centi-billionaire, and the fact there were at the time three people with 11 zeros in their net worth. What a six years it’s been. When I started writing this week’s edition, Elon Musk was a mere David Sun away from becoming the world’s first trillionaire, and now as I’m finishing it, Musk is worth the scarcely conceivable sum of $1.1 trillion. Nothing like this has ever happened before and there is no sign it is going to stop happening. There is no reason at all to suppose that in another half-decade I won’t be writing about how deci-trillionaires are the new thing.

This increasingly extreme inequality is a challenge for social cohesion, democracy and civilisation that we haven’t seen in modern times, second only to climate change as a threat to our future. Although in some ways, they’re the same challenge, considering the disproportionate share of emissions coming from rich people.

In some ways, if Musk’s wealth seemed to be making him happy it wouldn’t be so bad, but it appears only to make him angrier. I like to think that if I had a trillion dollars, I’d do something more constructive than stir up protests against ethnic minorities.

Reducing inequality is the right thing to do for every reason, not least because it would deprive very rich people of the ability to stoke pogroms anywhere they like. But how to do that? The only thing that has previously reduced inequality to any significant extent has been the 20th century’s series of global conflicts with massive destruction of life and property, and that’s the kind of thing it would be good to avoid.

I think there is a strong argument to be made, however, that the financial trickery abused by the very rich is also bad for national security, and it’s one nicely made here by Matthew McGlynn, who specialises in researching Russia. By degrading the ability of oligarchs to cheat their way to riches, we’d also limit the space of billionaires to dodge taxes and accountability.

It is notable that expert after expert speaking to the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services about Chinese Money Laundering Networks pleaded for the Corporate Transparency Act to be properly implemented. “When a laundering network operates by scattering its footprint across hundreds of student accounts, dozens of shell companies, and multiple jurisdictions, traditional compliance frameworks may treat flags as isolated, minor incidents. The systemic risk is consistently underestimated, and responses remain heavily reactive,” noted Louis DeTitto.

If first we come for the money launderers, then the billionaires won’t speak out because they’re not money launderers. Also, it would mean we’d do a better job of tackling money laundering, which would be nice. 

While on the subject of congressional hearings, there are interesting moves by Senator Richard Blumenthal to probe how Iranian and Russian sanction-dodgers are using cryptocurrencies. In April, he wrote to Binance requesting further information, and now he’s written to Tether asking for information about misuse of its USDT stablecoin.

The details he’s requesting are far-reaching and potentially highly consequential, since they relate to connections with Iran and Russia, including A7, issuer of the leading ruble-denominated cryptocurrency. Perhaps most important, however, is his first question: “What legal jurisdictions does Tether believe it is subject to for USDT, in particular for anti-money laundering rules, reporting obligations, asset seizures, and sanctions compliance? Does Tether believe it is legally required to comply with Department of Treasury sanctions for USDT and issue suspicious activity reports (SARs) to the U.S. government?”

If the U.S. asserts regulatory authority over dollar-denominated cryptocurrencies as it has over all transactions in dollars then that would significantly undermine their attractiveness to illicit actors, and also do a lot to reassure people like me. Tether, meanwhile, has been bigging up its cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and says it’s frozen $450 million globally.

“For the past few years, stablecoins have come to dominate the landscape of illicit transactions, and now account for 84 percent of all illicit transaction volume,” concluded Chainalysis in 2026’s crypto crime report. It estimated total illicit transactions at $154 billion last year, so the stablecoin share of that was almost $130 billion. That is a fraction of the amount of money laundering estimated to move through either the trade system or indeed the formal financial network, but still a lot of money. It’s interesting to see, however, how Chainalysis still holds out hope for well-regulated cryptocurrencies helping to solve problems caused by standard finance.

“Stablecoins and on-chain settlement mechanisms in particular offer low-cost, borderless avenues for remittances, payments, and savings,” Chainalysis said. “If coupled with sound regulation and inclusive policy frameworks, these tools could help governments leverage crypto not just for resilience, but also for broader financial inclusion as part of economic recovery.”

Seeing will be believing.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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On April 24, Brazil’s competition authority, the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) announced it was opening an investigation to assess whether Google’s use of news content amounted to unfair competition practices against the Brazilian press. The announcement was welcomed by civil society organizations that have tried to push regulation to limit the reckless power of Big Tech for years. Ajor, Brazil’s Digital News Association, said that “a balanced relationship between digital platforms and journalism organizations is fundamental to the flourishing of journalism committed to the public interest. By ensuring a fair competitive environment, Cade directly advances that goal.”

In spirit and intent, CADE’s investigation into Google is similar to legislation in Australia that recognized that value is being extracted from news publishers without proportionate recompense. In Brazil, the case has been debated since 2019, but the adoption of AI Overviews helped alter the perspective of Brazilian judges. The overviews are artificially generated summaries that synthesize information from several sources and appear at the top of Google Search results. They “raise potentially more concerns,” ruled Judge Camila Cabral Pires Alves, “as they may more profoundly alter the economic function of the interface and expand the ability to retain attention within the platform's own environment.”

CADE will now investigate whether Google should be sanctioned for “alleged abusive exploitation of a dominant position, in light of the technological evolution of the conduct.” While there is perhaps a greater global appetite to regulate the impacts of AI – even the Trump administration has recently acknowledged that some oversight may be necessary – the CADE judges have been under considerable pressure from Big Tech executives to stop investigations into how their control of the market harms Brazilian businesses. 

For those of us who have reported on Big Tech, this aggressive lobbying is not surprising. Companies like Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Amazon, and Microsoft have long attempted to interfere in any decision or legislation that can harm their interests in Latin America. According to a joint investigation by journalists across 13 countries, Big Tech lobbyists got away with convincing legislators in Colombia to weaken a rule meant to protect children’s mental health and prevent enforcement of privacy regulations in Ecuador. It took a team of over 40 journalists from 13 countries to uncover this while reporting on the ‘Big Tech Lobby’ in the continent and across the world.   

Threats by the U.S. government to retaliate against any country or international entity that sought to regulate Big Tech added another layer to an already complicated and uneven relationship with Silicon Valley. “Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology,” wrote Donald Trump on social media. “Show respect to America and our amazing Tech Companies or consider the consequences!” During the past year, Trump’s envoys have forced dozens of governments around the world to dilute or even shelve regulation in exchange for lifting tariffs. 

In “Big Tech’s Invisible Hands,” which I coordinated alongside Maria Teresa Ronderos, from CLIP (Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodistica), journalists mapped a total of 75 executives that were part of “public policy” or “government relations” teams in Brazil. Tech companies utilized a “revolving door” in which public sector employees could go straight into highly paid jobs leveraging their contacts and influence. Doors opened more easily. Invitations to hangouts and events were more likely to be accepted. 

Lobbying in Brazil is dialed up to eleven. The country has 163 million internet users, with over 150 million on WhatsApp, and over 120 million on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. With AI, Brazil is a similarly large, influential market. Portuguese is the sixth most widely-spoken language in the world, with 70% of speakers based in Brazil. Which means that, if an LLM has been trained in this language, it probably used content created by millions of Brazilians going about their business of making friends, debating politics and football online. It’s not just about journalists; we are all unpaid labor for Big Tech. 

In the words of Arthur Lira, the Speaker in Brazil’s Congress who filed a criminal complaint against Big Tech executives in 2023, companies adopted a variety of tactics “to shut down democratic debate and intimidate lawmakers” and defeat any attempt at using legislation to force accountability. Google, he said, used its search homepage, used by over 85% of Brazilians, to spread fear that proposed laws would “make the internet worse” or “make it harder to know what is true or false on the internet.” A report by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that Google invested in ads on its own platform so extensively that it tweaked the search, prominently featuring the word “censorship” in connection to the Brazilian bill. Google also hired Michael Temer, a lawyer and former President of Brazil, to influence lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices. Of course, it was not Google alone. Meta executives, for instance, even argued that proposed legislation in Brazil could lead to the Bible being censored.

But Brazilian lawmakers, the Supreme Court, and civil society have persisted. On August 28, 2025, the “Felca Law” was approved, after a video by the influencer Felca denounced the exploitation and exposure of children on social media. The law establishes that digital platforms must take measures like verifying user age, implementing parental controls, and preventing children's exposure to adult content, gambling, and pornography. They must create reporting channels and may face fines of up to 10% of their annual revenue in Brazil.

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Donald Trump have had a testy relationship, in part because of Lula’s criticism of Big Tech. In February, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Lula called for global governance of AI, warning: “When few control the algorithms, it is not innovation, but domination. Regulating the so-called Big Tech companies is linked to the imperative of safeguarding human rights in the digital sphere, promoting information integrity, and protecting our countries’ creative industries.”

By sticking to his guns, Lula may now be seeing the tide turn. He was in the White House on May 7, and though neither he nor Trump took questions, both appeared encouraged by the meeting. “Very dynamic,” was how Trump described Lula, while Lula said he was “very, very satisfied” with how the talks went. With a general election in Brazil approaching in October, Lula will be sensitive to how the White House, as it has done in other elections, and Big Tech might offer vocal support for right wing candidates.

But his willingness to stand up to Big Tech is popular with voters. A recent poll found that 78% of Brazilians want to see tech companies being held responsible for the content they publish. Another poll found that 55% of Brazilians defend regulating Big Tech, with 43.9% against it. 

And as scams, fake news, and AI slop dominate ever larger swathes of all our digital space, in Brazil, as in much of the rest of the world, the entire experience of the internet is becoming more unappealing. Big Tech, with the assistance of the U.S. government, may be succeeding in slowing down the pace of regulation and watering down the content of that regulation, but in the long run its victories might be pyrrhic. People have had enough and their governments might be forced to listen.

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Inequality is bad for you, and new figures in the UK show that the number of years when people can live healthy lives have fallen everywhere and furthest in the country’s poorest areas. This is partly a lingering after-effect of COVID, but is mostly a result of cuts imposed on health services by the last government. The results are dramatic, with the average person in a wealthy area expected to enjoy almost 20 years more good health than someone in a more deprived area. The situation in the United States is similar, and declines in health have also been observed in Germany, Canada and the Netherlands.

“Reducing smoking and improving diet and physical activity can delay the onset of illness and improve day-to-day wellbeing,” notes this extremely commonsensical analysis from the UK healthcare think tank The Health Foundation. “Secure work, good-quality housing and supportive local environments all influence physical and mental health.”

Being unhealthy is just terrible in all ways, and the problem is clearly getting worse, so you would expect the disrupters of our new economy to be finding ways to respond to this challenge. And at first glance, the Sam Altman-backed Retro Biosciences — with its focus on targeting “aging mechanisms to increase healthy lifespan” — looks promising. So does Altos Labs, with its mission to reverse “disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.” And there’s Saudi Arabia’s Hevolution, which is catalysing “the shift from lifespan to healthspan.”

And that’s before we get to the start-ups operating in a “free city” off the coast of Honduras, which has the brave approach of basically letting people do whatever medical research they like (“Prospera is a unique place where we can do such things,” says one businessman) to help drive progress towards an illness-free future.

But don’t get your hopes up. They’re not looking at ways to help people to get vaccinated, eat healthily, stop smoking or do more exercise. Instead, they’re working on gene therapy, stem cells, and other extremely expensive treatments that will only benefit people who can afford them, and who are thus already likely to be doing well. In the UK meanwhile, Genflow is also aiming to slow the ageing process in dogs, to make sure the super-rich aren’t left without their pets in this artificially prolonged future.

It’s tempting to see this as a metaphor for late-stage capitalism in the West, with its focus on the needs of the few (and their pets) rather than of society as a whole, except that we’re seeing a similar pattern in other places too. In Russia, Moscovites live longer than people from the provinces (although the picture is complicated by the relatively good health of the non-drinkers from Muslim regions), so you would have expected Vladimir Putin to be concerned about how to close that gap. But when he was chatting with Xi Jinping last year in China (where inequality has also harmed health), they were instead more focused on how to live forever. 

“Human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality,” Putin said. (Three important questions: firstly, does this mean he will be president of Russia literally forever, the world’s first un-dead head of state? Secondly, are they farming people as a source of organs for him? Thirdly, does he really believe this?)

“This century, there's a chance of also living to 150,” replied Xi, who could — under that scenario — rule China for another 77 years, which is longer than he’s been alive, by which time his nation’s population could well, according to UN estimates, have halved.

I, for one, wouldn’t mind having a vote on whether this is a future I want to be a part of.

An insider betting scam

Here’s a fascinating piece of research from the Anti-Corruption Data Collective about prediction markets, looking at how often “long shot” bets on military and security matters pay off compared to what you would expect: fully 52% succeed, compared to only 14% across Polymarket as a whole.

“Government officials and members of our military being able to turn a profit on insider information incentivises corrosive corruption in public office and undermines national security,” notes David Szakonyi, Co-Founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective.

The analysis follows the indictment of a U.S. serviceman who made $400,000 betting on the bid to capture Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, with 13 “yes” wagers on various aspects of the operation in December and January. And that was only a comparatively small military campaign. Just imagine how much money privileged insiders could have made in the past, if only they’d had access to prediction markets before D-Day, before the first nuclear bomb test, or before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

I really enjoyed this recent episode of Planet Money about prediction markets, particularly with its clear explanation that — like so much “financial innovation” of the past — they’ve not invented anything new at all; they’ve just found a clever way around regulations that previously stopped people making bets in this way.

There is fierce competition between the two leading players — Kalshi and Polymarket — although they have common ground in one area: they both employ Donald Trump Jr.

Trump sues his own government

There are so many things happening in the United States at the moment that it’s hard to keep track, but I did like this analysis from David Allen Green of a particularly strange lawsuit, in which President Trump is suing the federal government for $10 billion. The judge is, unsurprisingly, concerned about a situation where the president is basically suing himself, and wants more information about how that’s going to work.

This could, however, be a whole new money-making front for the first family, and why should the Trumps stop at just $10 billion? They could presumably take the government for every penny it’s got. I’m amazed no one has done this before.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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Donald Trump and the crypto world have done well out of each other. The Trump family has made profits of several billion dollars, and ‘cryptopreneurs’ have found the United States a newly supportive environment for their products. But the crypto world is not a single entity, and there are potential differences of opinion and approach between the parts that specialise in fraud, money laundering, and speculation (as well as the small number of societally beneficial uses), and a court case between billionaire Justin Sun and the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial threatens to blow those divides wide open.

He also had a key role in transforming Trump from cryptosceptic into cryptoenthusiast after investing millions of dollars in World Liberty Financial in late 2024, which helped to persuade the president — then running for re-election — that there was money to be made on the blockchain. 

Considering the improbability of the Trump family building an actually successful crypto company, and the strong likelihood World Liberty Financial would find a way to keep investors’ money as has happened with Trump ventures in the past, quite a lot of people assumed Sun’s money was in reality more of a gift than an investment. But it appears these doubters were wrong, at any rate that’s what it says in the suit that Sun has filed in California alleging that World Liberty Financial has abused his rights.

“Mr. Sun invested $45 million to purchase $WLFI tokens from World Liberty not only because of the project’s claims that it would promote adoption of decentralized finance… but also because of the Trump family’s association with the project,” his claim states. “But as Mr. Sun unfortunately has learned, World Liberty’s operators, including Chase Herro, see the project as a golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud.”

Sun has been careful to make clear this is not an attack on the president (“Unfortunately, certain individuals on the World Liberty project team have been operating the project in a manner that goes against President Trump’s values,” he posted on X), who is, he says, being betrayed by underlings — as autocrats have always been throughout history —  but he is certainly airing a lot of dirty laundry, which is likely to upset influential people.

Perhaps the most significant allegations, which World Liberty Financial denies, is that the Trump family’s company is on the verge of collapse, having paid most of its money to its owners, and that it tried to extort money from Sun to keep it in business. This is not just significant for its investors but also for America’s diplomatic ties, since Abu Dhabi has invested $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin, and the United States can ill-afford to further irritate its allies in the Gulf right now.

The timing of the lawsuit is interesting. It was notable that, shortly after Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused its investigation into Sun. In March, that investigation was finally wrapped up, with Sun paying $10 million but not admitting wrong-doing, so he is perhaps no longer concerned about facing legal action himself.

Sun was also a major investor in Trump’s memecoin, but is not the only person who seems to have soured on that particularly unlovely project. One of the perks of being an investor in the token is the right to have dinner with Trump, but the value of that ticket dropped this year to just $539,000 from $3.28 million in 2025, with the Financial Times quoting an expert as calling the friendship between Trump and the crypto-world “a shotgun marriage,” which seems fair.

The Trump family has, however, made $320 million in fees from the memecoin alone, so I suspect they’re not that bothered.

A tale of two scammers

There was, hard though it is to imagine, a time when Trump was just a strangely-tinted TV personality with strong views on where Barack Obama was born. And back then, in those prelapsarian days, 2014’s billion-dollar Moldovan bank fraud was a big deal. It’s great to see that mega-oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc has been jailed for 19 years for his involvement in a crime that ruined his homeland.

Moldova has struggled through the resulting period of economic, financial, diplomatic and political turmoil, and it was great to see that Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has meant it can make progress on its movement towards membership of the European Union.

The other mastermind of the bank fraud is pro-Kremlin politician Ilan Shor who was convicted and sentenced in absentia. He remains, of course, at liberty. Though his A7A5 sanctions-evading cryptocurrency has still not recovered the trading volume it had before the recent hack of the Grinex trading platform where people bought and sold it. Grinex blamed the hack on Western intelligence agencies, but Chainalysis has an interesting alternative explanation, based on the fact that A7A5 is gradually being squeezed by Western sanctions (including the latest ones from the European Union).

“Faced with mounting international pressure and a shrinking operational footprint, actors associated with Grinex could be using the guise of an alleged hack to quietly siphon liquidity and execute an exit scam,” Chainalysis suggested. I’m not saying that is what happened and to be honest, I think it’s more likely that this was the handiwork of Ukrainian hackers or standard financial criminals. I mention it, however, because Shor does have a previous record when it comes to setting up a money laundering scheme and then defrauding everyone who was foolish enough to trust him with their money. 

The billion-dollar bank fraud was a clever way to profit out of the ‘Moldovan Laundromat,’ which had been allowing Russians to smuggle money out of their homeland before Shor and his co-conspirators destroyed the Moldovan banking system and stole everyone’s cash. It would be remarkable if he had basically done the same thing for a second time with his stablecoin. Crypto people call it a rug pull.

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An endless purgatory: How an exiled Iranian waits and watches

“They’re shooting smoke at protesters.”

“They broke doors.”

“They brought an armored vehicle.”

In Aarhus, Denmark, Hemad Nazari lay in bed, refreshing his phone.

It was early evening in Iran on January 8, when the messages began arriving from Rasht, the northern city where he grew up.

Nearly two hours later, another message appeared: “We are trapped in our home.”

Then the messages stopped.

For the next eight days, Hemad heard nothing from his family.

He wasn’t the only one. Several million Iranians are part of an educated, relatively prosperous diaspora spread across the world, particularly North America and Europe, a diaspora that grew from the mass emigration of professionals and intellectuals after the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Nazari lives in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city. He works for a real estate company. He’s a photographer, an active part of the local climbing community, and over the past year, he has been cycling across the world with his girlfriend.

It looks and feels like freedom. And in many ways, it is.

But Nazari hasn’t set foot in Iran for eight years. In that time, he has met his parents three times — twice in Turkey, once in Nepal.

As for now, with a nationwide internet blackout still in effect amid a flickering, faltering peace process, he can, like everyone else around the world, only watch — and wait.

Hemad Nazari left Iran in 2016, at 27. He was not at the time a political exile. He was a civil engineer with a steady job and a passport that made most borders difficult to cross. He wanted to travel. To see the world. To live somewhere else for a while.

The sanction-ridden Iranian economy was in a state of collapse. Nazari’s salary, once worth a few hundred dollars a month, shrank rapidly as the currency fell. Saving money became meaningless. Planning a future felt abstract — a concept more than a tangible goal.

So he left. He went to Vietnam first. Then Nepal, Georgia, Turkey. What began as travel, slowly turned into something more permanent.

“I didn’t leave because I thought Iran would change,” he told me. “I left because I could see that it wouldn’t.”

And it wasn’t because people were satisfied, or afraid of change. The January protests, in which many thousands of Iranians were killed, were no eruption, no sudden flaring of anger.

Since 2019, Iran has experienced three major waves of mass protest. That year, demonstrations sparked by a sudden rise in fuel prices spread rapidly across the country. The response was immediate. There was, typically, a near-total internet shutdown and, according to a Reuters investigation, as many as 1,500 people may have been killed during the crackdown. Human rights groups said more than 10,000 people were arrested during and after the protests, with many of them held incommunicado and at risk of being tortured or facing capital punishment.

The demonstrations ultimately collapsed under isolation and fear.

For Nazari, whose travels had enabled him to put distance between himself and his homeland, the 2019 protests made it apparent that Iran was no longer an option for him, no longer a place he wanted to call home. He was not a persona non grata. There was no letter. No summons. No official declaration. Nothing that could be quoted or appealed.

Instead, he had changed.

When the internet inside Iran is shut down, information can only escape through fragments: phone calls, short videos, people with rare access still intact. From abroad, Iranians like Nazari become intermediaries by default. He translated. Shared. Verified. Some of his posts were picked up by Persian-language television channels broadcasting from outside Iran, including BBC Persian and Iran International. Channels watched closely by the authorities.

Nazari did not think much of it at first. He was not an activist by profession. He did not belong to an organization. He was simply using his name, his language, his access. But others who had said less had been detained on arrival in Iran. Cartoonists. Writers. Ordinary social media users. Some disappeared into prison for years. Some emerged broken. Some did not emerge at all.

“You don’t need to be told,” Hemad says about knowing he couldn’t go back. “You understand.”

In early 2020, after Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane and initially denied responsibility, crowds returned to the streets. Once again, arrests followed. So did the silence.

Hemad Nazari’s activity increased again. His real name was public. His face was visible; he didn’t hide. It was a choice he made despite the risk not just to himself, but to his family. “If they can’t get to you,” he told me, “they get to the people around you.”

Since then, eight years have passed.

“It’s not that I chose not to go to Iran,” he says. “It’s that every time I tried, the door closed again.” He does not refer to it as exile. But, in a manner of speaking, he had been made stateless, effectively stopped from going home, from seeing his family, from resuming the life he knew.

By  late December 2025, daily life in Iran once again became untenable. Food prices surged, paychecks were worth less every day, and families thought only about short term survival, unable to think even a month ahead.

According to Nazari, official inflation figures — though already extremely high — failed to capture the reality on the ground. By February, he told me, the cost of basic goods rivaled those in Denmark. Wages, he said, stagnated “at around $110 or $120 a month, with many people earning much less than that.” The minimum wage, the official figures from Iran’s Supreme Labor Council show, increased by 45% and still only reached $110 per month.

“The protests were fuelled by the economy,” Hemad says. “When shopkeepers and traders joined, it was a sign that frustration had reached a boiling point. But people don’t just want better prices. They want freedom. They want new leadership.”

In Rasht, his hometown in northern Iran, even families with children took to the streets in protest. “In my city, a lot of mosques are gone,” he says. “They burned them down. That tells you something.” What struck Nazari most, though, was not only who was protesting, but what they were saying, what they appeared to want. 

“For the first time, the main chant on the street was the name of the prince,” he told me. “The son of the former shah: Reza Pahlavi.” Nazari is quick to stress that he himself is “principally a believer in democracy.” But the chants were telling. 

“For 40 years, only loyalists dared utter the name Pahlavi. Now it’s spoken openly across all layers of society,” It was not about restoring the past. Instead, suggests Nazari, “for the first time, we had a plan.” People, he says, “were asking, ‘what happens if the regime collapses?’ And for the first time, there was an answer.”

In January, there was, as Nazari describes it, a rare sense of readiness among people he knew inside Iran. Friends who had never protested before were sending messages saying they would go. Family members spoke with a kind of cautious hope. This time, it felt different. It felt like change was possible.

Two days earlier, the son of the former shah had issued a public call for people to take to the streets on January 8 and 9 — not to follow a detailed program, but to say openly what they had long been afraid to say. 

From Denmark, Nazari watched the buildup hour by hour. On January 8, as protests reached their peak, the internet went dark. The blackout was not unprecedented. Iran’s authorities had used these tactics before. Inevitably, as access disappeared, reports of mass arrests and the use of live ammunition to dispel crowds spread through the few remaining channels still connected to the outside world. 

In Rasht, Nazari’s close friends sent him a video from their apartment window. Smoke drifted through the street. Shouting echoed between buildings. Gunfire cut through the noise.

During the blackout, Nazari continued to receive fragments of information — through people with Starlink terminals, through friends who still had limited access. By January 10, the informal network of activists and diaspora Iranians he was part of believed that at least 2,000 people had been killed.

Eventually, his mother managed to call him. “We’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. With international charges for calls piling up every second, they had been trying to call him for days. Since that brief call, contact has been sporadic. A snatched few minutes. And then silence again.

“People showed everything they had,” Nazari says of the protests. “They did what they could do.” He’s trying not to romanticize what happened in January, he tells me. He’s not saying, he insists, that the protests were heroic. “Iranians,” he says, “are just desperate.” As for Nazari, he tells me up until the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, he was “constantly debating whether to go home.” Right now, he adds, “it could have severe consequences, potentially a death sentence.” But, he pauses, “if it comes to civil war, I will go. My life doesn’t matter.”

For years, Nazari believed — as many Iranians did — that pressure, negotiations, sanctions, or appeals to international institutions might eventually force the regime to change. Over time, that belief had eroded. By January, he says, “it was gone.” It’s why he supported the attacks on Iran by Israel and the U.S., the execution of Ayatollah Khamenei and key regime figures.

“I’ve been saying for years that they are not going to leave peacefully,” he says. “They will fight. If the choice is that many people die, including me and my family, but the country becomes free — and then in 10 years we are back as a people, it will be worth it.”

He stops himself.

“I don’t say this because I like death, I say it because I don’t see another way. There is no peaceful path left.”

But  the hope Nazari felt when Donald Trump said the United States would respond forcefully if Iranian authorities continued killing their own people, has also now died.

On February 28, when U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian leadership and critical infrastructure began, some diaspora Iranians gathered to celebrate what they saw as the fall of a regime figurehead they had opposed for decades. Others responded with shock, caution, or grief, warning of what might follow.

In Denmark, where roughly 25,000 people of Iranian origin live, that divide played out in public. In Aarhus, several hundred Iranian Danes gathered in the city center with flags, music and open calls for regime change. Some thanked the U.S. and Israel for the strikes. At the same time, a pro-regime memorial for Ayatollah Khamenei in Copenhagen drew around 200 participants.

Their response to U.S. actions were playing out in a country where the broad view of the U.S. as a friend and force for good in the world had shifted sharply. In Denmark, as war in Iran broke out, people were still thinking of Greenland and Trump’s threats to annex the territory. In a January 2026 poll, 60% of Danes said they now see the U.S. as an opponent rather than an ally, while just 17% still considered it an ally.

Among Iranians, inside Denmark as in the wider diaspora, this ambivalence towards the U.S. is all too familiar. In a recent article in the Dagbladet Information, Iranian-born activist Nahid Riazi warned against celebrating a war that seemed to have little to do with emancipation for Iranians.

“Who says that war brings freedom?” she wrote. “It is us who are being hit. It is our children who are being destroyed.” 

Nezari says he has heard this argument. He does not dismiss it. But, he asks, “what is the alternative?” If the war stops, he says, “and the regime stays, how do you guarantee they won’t keep killing people like they have since 1979? How do you guarantee they won’t start the street executions again?”

Trump, despite the failure of the first 21 hours of peace talks in Pakistan, continues to say the war is “very close to over,” that the Iranian government wants to make a deal. A deal, presumably, that enables them to stay in power.

The Islamic Republic may have been dealt a devastating blow, but it remains intact. Its leadership structure has shifted but not collapsed. To Nazari, that does not show resilience so much as the nature of the system itself.

He rejects the idea that the Islamic Republic functions like a government in any conventional sense. It behaves, he says, more like a cartel or an armed network — something held together not by institutions, but by force and succession. Too many powerful men remain alive, still able to operate. And a system like this, he argues, does not surrender because its center has been hit. It keeps going until every center is removed.

“Not until all the heads are cut off,” he says.

But U.S. attempts to bully the world into joining a war where the goals remain so varied and nebulous have been unsuccessful. The popularity of the war inside the U.S., even among Trump supporters, is low. The uncomfortable question now is what comes next — and whether anything has truly changed.

Still, Nazari argues that the current state of purgatory, in which the war is neither ongoing nor over, is not evidence of failure, but of what was always going to happen.

“We were not living in Iran,” he says. “We were living in a military compound with cities in between.” Even if negotiations resume, he believes something irreversible has already happened. The fact that the regime’s leaders now have to hide underground means, to him, that there is no real return to the old order.

“There’s no going back to how it was,” he says. But for now, Nazari is still in Denmark. His family is still in Iran. He still holds his phone close, hoping for news. Any news. Like Iranian exiles everywhere, and like the war itself, he is trapped in stasis, caught between distance and a sense of responsibility to his homeland — deeply involved, fundamentally powerless, yet unable to look away.

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Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, faces an election dogfight. Behind in the polls, he has been effectively endorsed by both the Kremlin and the White House, and a host of conservative world leaders. As wars in Iran and Ukraine exacerbate the fissures that have weakened NATO, as well as the U.S.’s relationship with the European Union, this is an election that is being followed with bated breath in Washington, Moscow, Kyiv and Brussels. 

Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”

Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump. 

Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.

Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side. 

But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.

So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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One difficulty in writing about corruption is explaining what it is. You’re either too specific — “it’s taking bribes”. Or too vague — “it’s being bad”. Another difficulty is obtaining the raw material to analyse: corrupt people don’t tend to speak openly about it, which means you’re left looking at corruption’s visible manifestations, which is like trying to understand a virus only from its spots.

So huge kudos to Earth League International for producing a detailed, specific and thoughtful report on how corruption facilitates wildlife crime globally, which is packed full of lessons for the study of corruption in general as well. Corruption is a system, everything is connected. It’s the water in which criminals swim, and it will drown the rest of us if we let it.

Earth League International embeds investigators in corrupt networks all over the world, and reveals how it is so much more than just the “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” and their report quotes multiple specific examples. The choice for an official standing in the way of a Transnational Criminal Organisation (TCO) is not between taking a bribe and being honest, it’s between taking a bribe and having a family member killed. 

“Corruption tilts the playing field of justice by turning some officials or even agencies into additional arms of criminal networks, akin to painting a group of white chess pieces red and then commencing a match, giving the criminal side a decided advantage”, notes the report. And, it adds, “Transnational Criminal Organisations are savvy about which officials they approach, assessing weaknesses such as debt or family ties that may make them more vulnerable to financial offers or threats.”

It estimates the value of global wildlife-related crime at over $1 trillion annually, which is an astonishing amount of money, but an important point to take is that this is not a separate form of corruption. The same border officials that wave through illegal shipments of timber or shark fins also help with other forms of smuggling. The money that criminals funnel into politics undermines democracy in all ways. “Corruption is not the sole purview of less wealthy nations. It is everywhere. During investigations into illegal wildlife trafficking for (traditional Chinese medicine) in Europe, for example, Earth League International found enablers in San Marino, Italy, Belgium, and Poland,” notes the report.

There is something grimly ironic that so much of the despoliation that is making things worse for everyone is driven by the trade in “medicine” and thus a desire to make the world better. In reality, of course, pangolin scales and totoaba swim bladders are no more medicinal than my toenail clippings. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this is the demand for hallucinogenic toad venom, as detailed in this excellent article from a few years ago, which supposedly helps us all access the inner divine, but which is meanwhile wiping out the unfortunate toads that secrete it. “Most harvesters don’t have a consciousness about the sacredness of the species”, said a toad practitioner. “It’s just a hustle business.”

On a more geopolitical and less psychedelic level, this report on how Russia is repurposing its influence networks in Europe so as to maintain its fossil fuel exports show that other forms of corruption have huge environmental impact of their own. “The time for polite half-measures is over. Stronger enforcement, embargoes and tariffs on Russian fossil fuels to cripple exports, personal sanctions, and transparency rules are the only way to dismantle Russia’s covert influence architecture,” it concludes.

I’d add to that: we all need to build renewable energy sources like there’s a war on, because there is, and democracies urgently need to gain the freedom to act independently of autocracies’ control of fossil fuel supplies. You can’t act freely if someone’s hands are around your neck.

So, what’s the answer? As so often with financial crime, it’s possible to be overawed by the scale of the challenge. But the important thing is just to start. Here’s a manifesto from a coalition of British environmental groups, which gives some ideas. I particularly approve of this one: “government should introduce comprehensive protections and safeguards for whistleblowers, followed by financial incentives, to enable whistleblowers to disclose evidence of corruption and money laundering”.

Of course, corrupt officials are not just standing still while we agonise about how to stop them. I am particularly alarmed by the potential appeal of modern prediction markets for allowing politicians, military officers or anyone to profit from their privileged access to advance knowledge of government actions. Here’s a remarkable story about how people betting on the specific details of the Iran War sent death threats to a Times of Israel journalist whose reporting threatened to lose them a wager.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill, the BETS OFF Act, for which acronym they deserve credit — to crack down on the markets that encourage this kind of behaviour, which was also observed in the hours leading up to the U.S. attack on Venezuela. “There’s no getting around the fact that any prediction market where somebody knows or controls the outcome of a bet is ripe for corruption,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “When events that involve good and evil, life and death become just another financial product, morality no longer matters and the soul of America is fundamentally corrupted.” 

On that note, I see that someone is trying to juice the price of the $TRUMP memecoin by inviting its biggest holders to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, apparently with a speech by President Donald Trump (or whoever that is in the decidedly weird picture accompanying the announcement — Nigel Farage in a blond wig?), and an exclusive audience for the 29 biggest holders. The president, should he attend, will not, however, be accepting gifts, which is a weight off my mind. I had been worrying that this whole event was a bit dodgy.

The announcement of the event did boost the price of the $TRUMP tokens, as presumably did the announcement that Tether head Paolo Ardoino would be the headlining speaker, a remarkable turnaround for someone whose company was, just 18 months ago, having to vehemently deny it was the subject of a Department of Justice probe. Whether corruption will continue to be seriously investigated and punished, in a newly transactional world order, remains to be seen. The signs, though, are not promising.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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There has never been a better time to be a billionaire. It’s official, Forbes says so, and it’s got the numbers to prove it. Top of the magazine’s annual list is, of course, Elon Musk who is only a Bernaud Arnault (worth about $147 billion) and some change away from being the world’s first trillionaire.

But to get the real headliner, we need to drop down to number 17 where we find Changpeng Zhao ($110 billion, since you ask), founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance and business partner of the Trump family’s own crypto firm. Centibillionaires are old hat now but CZ is, as far as I can tell, the first centibillionaire on the Forbes list to have been pardoned by the U.S. president for egregious financial criminality. That feels like quite a big deal so congratulations to him.

CZ’s pardon last October was, according to the White House, because his 2023 plea deal and $4.3 billion fine for enabling money laundering on an industrial scale were the result of “an overly prosecuted case by the Biden administration” and part of a war on cryptocurrency.

Awkwardly for all concerned, Binance is now suing the Wall Street Journal after it reported that $1 billion had moved through the company to Iran-backed terror groups. And the Wall Street Journal has not only declined to spike the story, it has doubled down by reporting that the Justice Department is now investigating the firm’s actions. “The Wall Street Journal couldn’t determine whether the Justice Department is investigating Binance itself for potential misconduct, or solely the customers on its platform,” the WSJ said. But either way, considering the White House has committed to wiping out Iran’s support of terror groups and upended the global energy markets in its quest to do so, the news reports alleging that CZ’s company enabled those same groups would surely be embarrassing for all concerned, were any of them the kind of people capable of embarrassment.

After all, the fact that Iran is using crypto on a huge scale to evade the sanctions placed on its activities, and to support foreign proxies like Hezbollah, with the active connivance of some of the biggest companies in the crypto world, could only be a surprise to the most witlessly incurious of numbskulls. Or perhaps, I suppose, they are all making so much money from crypto that they don’t care who else might be.

While we’re on the subject of Trump, he’s at No. 640 on the list of billionaires as I write this, nearly tripling his wealth in just the last two years. Forbes has this very apropos explanation: “Donald Trump has presided over the most lucrative presidency in American history, adding billions to his net worth, largely by cashing in on crypto.” 

But, I hear you ask, what about non-billionaires? How are the few billion of us whose net worth isn’t counted in the billions doing? Well, not great. And I’m beginning to feel a bit concerned about what this all means for democracy. “The widening gap between the rich and the rest is at the same time creating a political deficit that is highly dangerous and unsustainable,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar back in January, and the situation has gotten worse since then.

The Bank of England’s animal stories 

I spend a lot of time at the moment talking in public about money laundering because of my new book. Top of my list for policy suggestions for tackling financial crime, if anyone were to ask, is that governments should stop printing large denomination bills: $100 bills, €200 notes or — worst of all — Switzerland’s colossal 1,000-france banknote are little used by ordinary people, but extremely helpful for criminals looking to transport large amounts of wealth in a small space.

So, in one way it was great that Britain was temporarily convulsed by controversy around banknotes last week. It’s high time we talked more about them. Could this spell the end of the UK’s own big bill: the £50, of which the Bank of England issued almost an extra 30 million last year, even though pretty much the only people that ever use them are criminals and tax dodgers? Would Britain finally get serious about ending the epidemic of financial crime?

No, of course not, the controversy was entirely about the Bank of England’s decision to replace the pictures of people on its next series of banknotes with pictures of animals. For some reason, badgers were mentioned. Also otters. “It says all you need to know about the lack of seriousness of the Bank,” said former business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, without any apparent irony, considering his own spectacular lack of seriousness in agreeing to comment on this absurdly unserious confection.

A sledgehammer that cracks nuts

While researching the anti-money laundering system that has grown over the last few decades, I have come to find it strange that there isn’t more public disquiet over the powers that governments have awarded themselves to check ordinary people’s transactions. When there is concern, it tends to come from crypto/libertarian bores (the kind of people who talk about ‘Operation Choke Point 2.0’), so perhaps no one else wants to be associated with it. But I think the situation would be a bit healthier if more of us engaged with what is being done to us in ways that we can get.

I obviously think that tackling money laundering is of huge importance, but I am coming round to the view that more public pushback over exactly how that is being done would be good. It would force policymakers to justify what they’re doing, and therefore come up with some techniques that actually work, instead of the ineffective but intrusive mess we have at the moment.

To cut a long story short, I found this contribution from the Dutch non-profit organisation ‘Privacy First’ to be interesting. “Instead of managing risk, banks seek to eliminate it by withdrawing altogether from customers or sectors perceived as problematic. The burden of compliance and over-enforcement often falls not on criminals, but on already marginalised communities with limited access to remedies,” it says.

I agree with that, and I agree also with its argument that beneficial ownership transparency should not be absolute. Were there to be opt-outs from ownership registries for vulnerable people, there would be less scope for rich crooks to argue that shell company transparency is a violation of their human rights. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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As the Iran war pushes oil prices over $100 a barrel, and ships are attacked and mines are being laid in the Strait of Hormuz, a taboo has been broken and nuclear energy is back in fashion. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged that “the current Middle East crisis is a stark reminder” that it was “a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on” nuclear energy. 

She was speaking at an International Atomic Agency summit hosted by France. Just days before the summit, French president Emanuel Macron spoke — a nuclear submarine looming behind him — of the need to increase the country’s stockpile of nuclear warheads for the first time in several decades. “In this dangerous and uncertain world,” Macron said, “you have to be feared if you want to be free.” 

In February, the ‘New START treaty’, a mutual agreement between Russia and the U.S. to reduce and limit their nuclear arsenal, officially expired. The U.S. said China had conducted secret tests and that Beijing had to be part of any future non-proliferation agreement. For its part, the Chinese accused the U.S. government of seeking to mask its own expansionist ambitions. In the wake of the Iran war, started apparently because the Iranian regime was just days away from securing a bomb, other countries have spoken openly of their nuclear ambitions. After the start of the Iran war, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spoke pointedly about preparing a nuclear-ready navy while inspecting a new destroyer and observing the testing of nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Even Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said Poland “will not want to be passive when it comes to nuclear security in a military context.”

On X, Tusk posted that Poland is in talks with France about joining its nuclear deterrence program. “We are arming together with our friends,” he wrote, “so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.” France is the only nuclear-capable European country, its systems (unlike the UK’s) completely independent of the U.S. and its new deterrence framework will include collaborations with Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. Macron is calling France’s new strategy “advance deterrence,” a willingness to spread French nuclear armaments across the continent. A senior Pentagon official said the U.S. would “obviously at a minimum strenuously oppose” European countries seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. The U.S., as part of a NATO agreement, already deploys over 100 nuclear weapons in Europe — in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Europe’s anti-nuclear tradition grew out of grassroots movements in the 1970s. In West Germany, protests against a planned nuclear plant in the small wine-growing town of Wyhl began when local farmers feared pollution would destroy their land and crops. By the 1980s, millions of Europeans were protesting nuclear weapons and the deployment of NATO missiles across the continent, bringing nuclear security debates into the public arena and pushing governments toward disarmament efforts. The political impact of those protests were long-lasting. Across Europe, nuclear energy programs were curtailed or abandoned entirely. Denmark banned nuclear power plants in 1985, Germany shut down its last nuclear reactors in 2023, and several countries imposed strict limits on nuclear development. Nuclear technology, whether for energy or weapons, remained politically toxic in much of Europe. But, as Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen said European deterrence “is necessary because the military threat from Russia is expected to increase,” and its reliance on U.S. military support can arguably no longer be taken for granted.

At the Paris summit, China, Brazil, Belgium and Italy all signed up to a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. South Africa signed the pledge earlier this month. The war in Iran has once again made clear that the world must wean itself off fossil fuels. The U.S. — which imposed additional tariffs on India for buying Russian oil and thus helping to finance the continuation of the war in Ukraine — has, since the start of the attack on Iran, told India it can continue to buy Russian oil. Delhi promptly bought 30 million barrels of Russian crude oil. But this month India also signed a deal with Canada to receive uranium to expand its nuclear energy program. But in 1974, Canada provided India with nuclear technology for peaceful uses that were promptly put towards the building of nuclear weapons. Nuclear collaborations between the two countries were suspended for decades. It’s not a coincidence that those ties are once again being revived in the current geopolitical context. A growing clamor for nuclear energy has clear proliferation risks.

While France has been talking about greater nuclear deterrence, most European states are speaking about a revival of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and as a means to achieve climate goals. The vast energy requirements of AI and data centres is also prompting nations to adopt an “atoms for algorithms” strategy, to be, as Macron said, “at the ​heart ​of ⁠the artificial intelligence challenge.” But to talk about energy alone is to ignore the appeal nuclear deterrence has for nation states trying to navigate dangerous geopolitical straits. Iran was attacked ostensibly because it was on the verge of having a bomb. Favored nations such as Saudi Arabia are able to sign nuclear pacts that remove non-proliferation guardrails, but the actions of the U.S. and Israel in Iran will make the bomb attractive to many more as a national security strategy.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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When the United States and Israel started blitzing Iran last weekend, eyes turned to the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The British-administered archipelago is home to a strategically vital US air base on the island of Diego Garcia. Would US President Donald Trump be using it in his “Operation Epic Fury”?

It's fair to say Trump probably didn't give a damn about Misley Mandarin’s opinion. But the self-styled “interim first minister” of Chagos, who recently upped sticks from Britain in a “super, super secret” mission to take up residence on the long-deserted Peros Banhos atoll, gave Washington his official “blessing” anyway.

I spoke via WhatsApp to the 47-year-old Chagossian in his base camp: basically a few tents, with a solar generator and a Starlink satellite connection enabling him to beam reels to his 10,000 Facebook followers. He quit his job as a bus driver in London to come here, determined to halt Britain’s plan to hand over what he considers to be his land to Mauritius after a long-running decolonization battle.

“We’re British citizens here. We’re not moving,” he said.

Mandarin wants the land of his forebears to remain under the rule of Britain, the former colonial ruler that booted out about 1,500 native Chagossians, including his own father, to make room for the U.S. military base in the late 1960s. The removal consigned Chagossians to a miserable fate in newly independent Mauritius.

Now on home turf, Mandarin, his 72-year-old dad, and two other Chagossians have dodged immediate deportation: they’ve obtained an injunction from a British court allowing them to stay until a hearing on March 13. Since their arrival, two more Chagossians have joined them. “We can do self-determination right now. We don't want to cut any links with Britain. We're not looking for independence,” Mandarin says.

“The next generation will decide on independence.”

Marriage of convenience

Life on Île du Coin, the largest island on Peros Banhos, is simple. The daily routine revolves around catching fish and finding a supply of fresh water. The new residents collect overnight rainfall in tarpaulin sheets to drink. Bathing involves a dip in the sea to wash off dirt, followed by a splash of precious rainwater to rinse. 

Mandarin appears to be relishing the experience. Soon after his arrival, the former army cook, who has bags of swagger, posted a video of himself cooking up “naan fromaaz”, or cheese naan, in a skillet on a makeshift stove. “Pa bizin madam isi mwa!” he jokes. I don't need a wife here!

The Chagossians arrived on the island on 16 February, accompanied by former army officer Adam Holloway, a former Conservative MP who recently defected to the radical right Reform UK party.

Reform, which is surging in the polls, is leading opposition to a bilateral treaty that would see Britain cede sovereignty of Chagos to Mauritius, while paying an average of £101-million ($135-million) per year to maintain a lease on Diego Garcia over the coming century. Negotiations began after the International Court of Justice ruled in 2019 that Britain should transfer sovereignty of Chagos to Mauritius “as rapidly as possible.”

The sleek yacht that brought the group on the five-day journey from Sri Lanka and travels back and forth with supplies was paid for by British-Thai businessman Christopher Harborne, a mega-donor to Reform. Its name is No Excuse – as in, “no excuse for us not to stay on Chagos,” says Mandarin.

Reform UK and the Chagossians make for curious bedfellows. On the one hand, there's a political party that has floated plans to create a Trump-inspired, ICE-style agency to carry out mass deportations in Britain. 

On the other, there’s Mandarin’s dad, finally back home after being brutally evicted from his atoll at the age of 14. “I will not go back to England. I want to die here,” said Michel Mandarin, as he set foot on his cherished Chagossian soil.

The unlikely pairing has had cause for joint celebration. Two days after they arrived, Trump withdrew his approval for the UK-Mauritius transfer treaty, which was supposed to provide legal certainty for the base in a hypothetical world governed by the rules-based international order. 

It turned out the president was annoyed at British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal to sanction the use of Diego Garcia for the Iran offensive. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” he told the British prime minister. The treaty was paused. Then war broke out and a beleaguered Starmer agreed to “defensive” strikes from Diego Garcia.

On Île du Coin, war seems like a distant prospect, even if it is potentially less than 200km (about 125 miles) away in Diego Garcia. As Tuesday drew to a close, there had so far been neither sight nor sound of the US’s deadly B-52, B-1, and B-2 bombers in the slightly overcast skies.

Kicking the can

Mandarin left Mauritius at age 22. He joined the British army in a bid to improve his lot and later became a bus driver in south London. He says he always felt like a second-class citizen in Mauritius, with “no opportunity to progress”.

Rights groups have charted how evictees from Chagos struggled to cope in Mauritius, many of them ending up trapped in an urban nightmare of poverty, mental illness, and addiction — with little sympathy from their hosts. Many Chagossians left for Britain after securing citizenship rights.

Now the fate of their homeland is being decided by a treaty negotiated over their heads. Last year, a UN committee on racial discrimination warned that the treaty could perpetuate “long-standing violations” of Chagossian rights.

The treaty says Mauritius is “free” to resettle islanders on any of the Chagos islands — except Diego Garcia. But there is no binding obligation for it to do so and the exclusion of Diego Garcia rankles. The deal also includes a £40-million trust fund to be managed by Mauritius, which has been criticised as a ruse by Britain to avoid paying proper compensation. 

“People talk about decolonisation, but if Britain did the wrongs, Britain should have to repair the wrongs — not kick the can to Mauritius,” says Mandarin. “Or they will get away with it.”

One of the reels he has filmed on Île du Coin features an industrial oven that was used by colonial officials to burn the islanders’ dogs before they were evicted. Officials threatened the islanders with the same fate if they refused to leave. Britain must pay compensation, he says.

'Belongers'

Mandarin’s joint odyssey with Reform UK has provoked mixed feelings among the Chagossian diaspora in Britain, Seychelles, and Mauritius. 

“He’s put us back in the centre of the story, but will we be overshadowed by Reform’s agenda?” asked one Chagossian in the English town of Crawley – home to a 3,500-strong Chagossian community — who is also opposed to the deal.

As the treaty was being negotiated, Chagossians’ concerns were largely swept under the carpet as a complicating factor in a pragmatic decolonization drive.

The hard right has capitalized on the deal’s major flaw, positioning itself as the main champion of Chagossians, just as their ancestral land finds itself embroiled in a conflict that could upend the global order.

One video recently posted by Reform leader Nigel Farage saw him express outrage after being “denied access” to Île du Coin for the delivery of “humanitarian” supplies to Mandarin and his men, racking up a cool 4.7 million views on X. 

Asked whether he is being used by Reform and its supporters, Mandarin is sanguine. He says he also contacted the left-wing Green Party for support, but it never replied. “Only Reform responded. At the end of the day, it’s politics. You have to make your own judgements for the sake of your people,” he says. 

He views the upcoming hearing as a potential “turning point in our fight”. The injunction barring their removal was granted on the basis that their location was too far from the base to pose a security threat. “If the court says they can’t remove us, then maybe more people will come,” he says. “This is our people. This is our time. We’re not visitors — we’re belongers.”

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