MONEYLAND

by Oliver Bullough

(Profile £9.99, 320 pp) A SEEDY office building in a nondescript street in north-west London seems an odd place for the headquarters of a company owned by President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.

But Manafort, along with one of his biggest clients, Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine, inhabits a place that the journalist and author Oliver Bullough calls Moneyland: a ‘new land that lies beneath all our nation states, where borders have vanished’, governed by ‘whichever laws are most suited to those wealthy enough to afford them’.

The effects of this alternative reality are everywhere — from the Belgravia mansions owned by anonymous trusts to Yanukovych’s outrageously tasteless hunting lodge.

Bullough pithily anatomises the offshore economy that affects us all, whether we realise it or not.