There is a particular kind of reporter who keeps asking the boring follow-up question until it stops being boring, and Oliver Bullough is one of the best of them. British, and formerly a correspondent in Russia and the wider post-Soviet world, he arrived at financial crime by way of politics: watching how power in Moscow protected itself, and noticing that the protection was mostly bought abroad.
His books have made him one of the clearest voices writing in English on the subject. Moneyland introduced readers to the borderless country the very rich inhabit, and Butler to the World argued that Britain has quietly made itself the most obliging servant that class could wish for. He writes without jargon and without cynicism, which is a rarer combination than it sounds.
What distinguishes him is temperament. Bullough treats his reader as an intelligent adult, explains the plumbing of offshore finance patiently, then lets the outrage arrive under its own steam. The result is journalism that informs rather than merely alarms, and it has changed how a good many people read the property pages.
10 hours and 57 minutes
