Showing titles in White Collar & Corporate Crime

Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger. Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family.

In March 2021, an obscure financial technology company called Greensill Capital collapsed, going into administration. As it unravelled, a multibillion-dollar scandal emerged that would shake the very foundations of the British political system, drawing in swiss bankers, global CEOs, and world leaders, including former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. At the centre was an Australian financier named Lex Greensill. Pyramid of Lies charts the meteoric rise and spectacular downfall of Greensill and his company.

Arms trafficking, offshore accounts and luxury property deals. Super-yachts, private jets and super-car collections. blood diamonds, suspect oil deals, deforestation and murder. This is the world of Global Witness, the award-winning organisation dedicated to rooting out worldwide corruption. And this is co-founder Patrick Alley's revealing inside track on a breath-taking catalogue of modern super-crimes—and the 'shadow network' that enables them. Very Bad People is about going undercover in the world's most dangerous places and bringing down the people behind the crimes.

As a private banker working for the largest bank in the world, UBS, Bradley Birkenfeld was an expert in Switzerland's shell-game of offshore companies and secret numbered accounts. He wined and dined ultrawealthy clients whose millions of dollars were hidden away from business partners, spouses, and tax authorities. As his client list grew, Birkenfeld lived a life of money, fast cars, and beautiful women, but when he discovered that UBS was planning to betray him, he blew the whistle to the US government.

After years on the financial world's margins, crypto went mainstream in early 2021. Everybody was talking about it: giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady and Justin Bieber endorsed it, and Washington bigwigs debated new regulations, as if it would be a permanent part of our financial system. It seemed like everyone knew someone who was bragging about their returns from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and other bizarrely named "digital assets." Observing this mania, Zeke Faux set out on a quest to pull back the curtain on the wizards behind this new financial machinery.

Written and read by the author, Empire of Pain tells the story of the Sackler dynasty, their company Purdue Pharma, its bestselling drug OxyContin, their immensely generous philanthropy and their involvement in the opioid crisis that has created millions of addicts, even as it generated billions of dollars in profit.

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar start-up, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose start-up ‘unicorn’ promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier.

For three years, Tom Burgis followed a lead that took him deeper and deeper into Cuckooland – the place where the rich own the truth. The trail snaked from the Kremlin to Kathmandu, Stockholm to the Steppe, from a blood-soaked town square in Uzbekistan to a royal retreat in Scotland. Burgis hunted down oligarchs, developed secret sources and traced vast sums of money flowing between multinational corporations, ex-Soviet dictators and the west’s ruling elites. And he found one man who wanted the power to bend reality to his will.

From a famous actor and an experienced journalist, a wildly entertaining debunking of cryptocurrency, one of the greatest frauds in history and on course for a spectacular crash.

McKinsey earns billions advising almost every major corporation as well as countless governments, including Britain's, the USA's and China's. It boasts of its ability to maximise efficiency while making the world a better place. Its millionaire partners and network of alumni go on to top jobs in the world's most powerful organisations. And yet, shielded by non-disclosure agreements, its work remains largely secret—until now. In this propulsive investigation, two prize-winning journalists reveal the reality.

A small number of people, motivated by an insatiable greed for power and wealth, and backed by a pinstripe army of enablers, have driven the world to the brink of destruction. Patrick Alley, co-founder of Global Witness and the author of Very Bad People, introduces us to some of the world's worst warlords, grifters and kleptocrats who can be found everywhere from presidential palaces to the board rooms of some of the world's best known companies. Pitted against them, the book also follows the people unravelling the deals, tracking the money and going undercover at great risk.

In 2006 an oddball group of bankers, traders and brokers from some of the largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor - the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide - was set daily by a group of easily manipulated administrators, and they could reap huge profits by nudging it fractions of a percent to suit their trading portfolios. This group generated incredible riches - until it all unraveled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

Money laundering has been around for centuries. For as long as people have been stealing money, there's been an industry ready to wash it. But recent tech innovations have created vastly complex new systems for laundering that threaten to overwhelm authorities, destabilise economies and disrupt societies. Ranging from the flamboyant luxury of Dubai hotels to quiet coastal Ireland, from the UK to Nigeria and from Indonesia to North Korea, Rinsed is a truly global relevatory investigation into the new army of innovative launderers ... and the consequences for all of us.

Late one evening investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer receives an anonymous message offering him access to secret data. Through encrypted channels he then receives documents showing a mysterious bank transfer for $500 million in gold. This is just the beginning. Obermayer and fellow Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Frederik Obermaier find themselves immersed in a secret world where complex networks of shell companies help to hide people who don't want to be found.

On May 6, 2010, financial markets around the world tumbled simultaneously and without warning. In the span of five minutes, a trillion dollars of valuation was lost. The Flash Crash, as it became known, represented the fastest drop in market history. When share values rebounded less than half an hour later, experts around the globe were left perplexed. What had they just witnessed? Navinder Singh Sarao hardly seemed like a man who would shake the world's financial markets to their core.

Blackwater is one of the most misunderstood companies of our time. As Erik Prince, its founder and former CEO, writes: "Hundreds of American citizens employed by private military contractors, or PMCs, would lose their lives helping our government wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to have their memory tarnished by the unfair and/or ignorant depiction of PMCs as profiteers, jackbooted thugs, or worse."

Every catastrophe has a beginning. For the opioid crisis in America, the seed was a drug called OxyContin. First hailed as a miracle drug for severe pain in the early 1990s, OxyContin went on to ignite a plague of addiction and death across America. Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story and business exposé, Pain Killer is the origin story of the opioid crisis, a hard-hitting look at how a supposed wonder drug became the trigger for a national tragedy.

When investigative journalist Dan McCrum first came across Wirecard, the hot new tech company that looked poised to challenge Silicon Valley, it all looked a little too good to be true: offices were sprouting up all over the world, and they were reporting runaway growth. In the space of a few short years, the company had come from nowhere to overtake industry giants like Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank on the stock market. As McCrum began to dig deeper, he encountered a story stranger and more compelling than he could have imagined.

How did a bank, which boasts ‘we’re committed to helping protect the world’s financial system on which millions of people depend, by only doing business with customers who meet our high standards of transparency’ come to facilitate Mexico’s richest drug baron? And how did a bank that as recently as 2002 had been named ‘one of the best-run organisations in the world’ become so entwined with such a criminal? Too Big to Jail is an extraordinary story brilliantly told by writer, commentator, and former editor of The Independent.

This account describes how a 28-year-old from Watford, Nick Leeson, plunged Barings Bank into ruin. In 1994, Leeson seemed to be making the company millions of pounds a week, but he explains how the cover-up of a colleague's small error led to the crash of Britain's oldest merchant bank.