The more things change, the more they stay the same, as someone once wrote a long time ago. Having taken a hiatus to write a book (the manuscript is now in editing), I was hoping to find upon my return that my pet peeves had been solved and that in this new year I would branch out into new and exciting spheres of optimistic enquiry. 

Well, Donald Trump’s back in the White House, Vladimir Putin is still waging his horrific campaign against the Ukrainian nation, and too many governments are blaming foreigners instead of oligarchs for the collapsing state of public services. Back in 1993, the then Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin observed, after yet another policy failure, “хотели как лучше получилось как всегда”. Literally translated, it means “we wanted the best, but it turned out like always.” But I’ve never found an English version that fully captures the poetic irony of the Russian original. 

THE NEW CLASS OF MULTI-CENTIBILLIONAIRES

In 2020, I marvelled at the concept of the “centibillionaire,” someone whose wealth was worth more than $100 billion. Back then, the OG centibillionaire – Jeff “Amazon” Bezos — had just gained his first comrades, ushering in a whole new class of the super-rich.

It’s not even half a decade later, and that already looks hopelessly dated. Pah, everyone and his gran has got $100 billion these days. Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison have already seen their net worth vault past $200 billion, while Elon Musk has more than double that again. This, I think, makes Musk the richest man who’s ever lived, since the previous presumed holder of the title – Mansa Musa, the 14th-century emperor of Mali – owned  a mere $400 billion in current terms, much of which he spent on a spectacular pilgrimage to Mecca.

ONE DOLLAR, MANY VOTES

Wealth inequality will be a major issue this year, partly because the creation of a new class of American uber-mega-super-oligarchs is inherently interesting, but also because – as Elon Musk’s unhinged interventions in British and German politics makes clear – this has real consequences for the rest of the world. 

Too much discussion of inequality focuses on incomes, such as this piece in the Financial Times with the misleading headline “Inequality hasn’t risen. Here’s why it feels like it has”. If you look at how much people own, however, it’s another story. Since 1977 — the year I was born, as it happens — the richest one percent in America has increased its share of the nation’s stuff from 22.7 percent to 34.9 percent. That is a lot of money.

And money is power, as Francis Bacon didn’t say. If you are wealthy, you get a wildly disproportionate amount of attention, which means you can bend laws, corrupt politics, and reshape the world to suit your vision. It’s often said that modern democracy isn’t one man/one vote, but instead one dollar/one vote. In reality it’s worse than that. A hundred billion dollars buys you a lot more than a hundred billion votes.

This must be great for the centibillionaires but, for those of us who believe in democracy as a vehicle for representing the views of everyone, it’s all the more reason to try to build and/or rebuild defences against the oligarchs.

THE TRANSPARENCY BATTLEGROUND

The dirty secret of the international financial system is that the tools used by Putin and other kleptocrats to hide, move and multiply their stolen wealth were designed not for them, but for Western tax-dodgers. Once shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, Swiss bank accounts, trusts and all the other paraphernalia had been created, financial criminals realised that they liked convenience, value and discretion just as much as tax dodgers did. 

Wealthy Westerners haven’t stopped wanting to dodge taxes and scrutiny just because Putin’s a baddie, and transparency measures have proved distinctly unpopular among the one percent as a result. “Sure, I want to stop corrupt crooks from taking over the world via anonymous shell companies, but why should that mean I can’t use them?”

It explains the bizarre ping-pong that was played with the US Corporate Transparency Act at the end of last year. The CTA, passed in the dying days of Trump’s last term in office, obliges states to collect information on who actually owns companies, thus ending the race to the bottom that has allowed Delaware and Nevada, for instance, to demand less information from applicants for corporations than for library cards. This piece of legislation was a big deal. It has taken four years for FinCEN, the Treasury Department’s financial crime experts, to craft the detailed regulations that would make the law a reality, and finally – at the start of 2025 – it was due to start collecting information about who owns what.

The CTA would not actually require this ownership information to be published, it would just be collected and made available to law enforcement agencies. Even that was too much for the improbably-named Texas Top Cop Shop Inc, which sells “tactical gear” to police officers and is suing to stop the CTA.

  • “Though seemingly benign, this federal mandate marks a drastic two-fold departure from history. First, it represents a Federal attempt to monitor companies created under state law — a matter our federalist system has left almost exclusively to the several States. Second, the CTA ends a feature of corporate formation as designed by various States — anonymity. For good reason, Plaintiffs fear this flanking, quasi-Orwellian statute and its implications on our dual system of government,” the complaint states.

(Off topic, but, I think we may soon need an international legal treaty decreeing that anyone who calls something Orwellian should lose their case automatically. This might sound a bit, well, Orwellian but a hard line is needed.) 

In early December, a Texas court responded to Texas Top Cop Shop Inc by granting an injunction, preventing the U.S. government from requiring companies to provide ownership information as the CTA demanded. On December 23, a higher court stayed the injunction, and the law was back on. But on December 26, a different panel of judges (who presumably hadn’t had much of a Christmas) stayed the stay on the injunction, and the law was paused again, so the government has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. And that’s where we are at the moment.

LOOKING AHEAD

Offshore tax havens that also sell anonymous companies have long been able to point to the dire state of corporate transparency in the United States and use it as an excuse not to take action themselves. This means secret shell companies are still available for the Russian regime to hide its ownership of oil tankers behind, thereby circumventing Western sanctions and continuing to fund its war against Ukraine. Around a fifth of oil tankers are now in this “shadow fleet”, which poses a huge environmental threat, as well as a financial one.

Just over two years ago, a similar challenge to transparency measures in the European Union managed to halt them for a while. Fortunately Brussels is pushing out a new package of anti-money laundering measures, which would open up corporate registers to journalists and other bona fide researchers. That’s not to say that the EU has become closed to dodgy money, as this troubling investigation from September revealed, but at least it is trying to expose who owns it.

In the year ahead, I’ll be keeping an eye on government efforts to stop financial crime and the legal challenges against them brought by the Texas Top Cop Shops of this world. I suspect there will be many and perhaps, when it turns out like always, an English-language equivalent will be found for Chernomyrdin’s wistful cynicism.

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