Corruption is often posed as a third world malady; it is not, and it’s never been exclusively a Global South issue. Industrial scale corruption goes on in western developed countries as well, but it’s not just corruption it’s a kind of moral ambivalence as well. When looted money from Bangladesh ends up in Swiss Banks or London property, what questions are asked, and who benefits? London does what it always has done-attract money, and the Swiss bankers are good at keep secrets and appropriating valuable Jewish art from Nazi Germany and keeping it for themselves. 

This piece of article shows how Trump brings a new model to the corruption game and unearth the structural features that characterise the process.

There's a certain audacity to corruption when it operates in plain sight. The brazenness becomes its own kind of camouflage, surely, the thinking goes, no one would be quite so flagrant if they were actually doing something wrong?

This peculiar logic seems to govern much of what we're witnessing with the Trump family's latest ventures, as detailed in recent Financial Times reporting. But step back from the American political theatre for a moment, and you'll recognise something grimly familiar to anyone who's watched the slow-motion car crashes of governance across parts of Africa over the past half-century.

The General Who Couldn't Stop Stealing

In the sweltering heat of 1990s Lagos, General Sani Abacha had perfected what you might call the direct approach. Why bother with complex schemes when you can simply walk into the Central Bank of Nigeria and help yourself? Between 1993 and his convenient death in 1998, Abacha spirited away an estimated £3-5 billion (no one knows for sure) from Nigeria's coffers (money that should have transformed a nation sitting atop some of the world's largest oil reserves).

Abacha's method was refreshingly straightforward: he treated Nigeria's treasury as his personal current account. His family lived like royalty whilst ordinary Nigerians queued for petrol in a country drowning in crude oil. When the banks in Switzerland and Luxembourg asked awkward questions about the sudden influx of Nigerian government funds into private accounts, Abacha's people had ready answers about "security operations" and "special projects."

The general understood something fundamental about power: if you control the institutions meant to check corruption, corruption becomes indistinguishable from policy.

The Dynasty That Ate a Nation

A thousand miles south, in the lush rainforests of Gabon, the Bongo family were writing their own masterclass in state capture, albeit with rather more finesse than Abacha's smash-and-grab approach. Omar Bongo ruled for 42 years until 2009, when his son Ali seamlessly inherited both the presidency and the family business - because by then, they had become the same thing.

The Bongos perfected the art of making it impossible to distinguish between Gabon's interests and their own. Oil revenues flowed through a labyrinth of shell companies, Swiss bank accounts, and Parisian property deals. Ali Bongo's wife owned a £85 million mansion in Paris whilst most Gabonese lived on less than £2 a day. When critics pointed out these uncomfortable facts, the Bongos would gesture towards schools built and roads paved, never mind that the contracts invariably went to companies owned by relatives or cronies.

The genius of the Bongo system wasn't theft in Abacha's crude sense. It was transformation: gradually reshaping the entire state apparatus until personal enrichment and public service became synonymous. By the time Ali was finally ousted in a coup last year, Gabon's oil wealth had been so thoroughly captured that the nation remained desperately poor despite sitting on billions of barrels of crude

The Oligarch's Medicine Cabinet

But perhaps the most chilling iteration of state capture emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, where a different kind of audacity took hold. In Ukraine, the systematic looting of healthcare budgets created a corruption model that was both more diffuse than Abacha's direct theft and more immediately devastating than the Bongos' patient institutional capture.

Oliver Bullough documents cases where children were denied life-saving medicines not because the drugs didn't exist, not because the country lacked resources, but because the money earmarked for those medicines had been systematically diverted into private pockets. The procurement contracts existed on paper, the budgets had been allocated, the international donors had provided funding - but somewhere in the maze of shell companies and inflated invoices, a child's medication simply vanished into someone else's wealth.

This represents a fourth model: transition capture, where the collapse of old institutions creates opportunities for wholesale theft disguised as market reform. Ukrainian oligarchs didn't need to control the state for decades like the Bongos, nor did they require Abacha's military power. They simply exploited the chaos of systemic breakdown, using legitimate-seeming business structures to strip assets while institutions were too weak or corrupted to respond.

The genius of this approach was its diffusion of responsibility. When a child died for lack of medicine, no single person could be held accountable - the fault lay scattered across dozens of contracts, multiple jurisdictions, and complex ownership structures that made the money trail nearly impossible to follow.

The Art of the Deal, Presidential Edition

Now consider the tableau painted in the Financial Times report. Trump Media & Technology Group, controlled by a "revocable trust" overseen by Donald Trump Jr., is apparently seeking to raise £2.4 billion for cryptocurrency investments. This whilst the Trump administration pursues what observers call "very strong pro-crypto policy: favourable taxation, favourable regulation, promotion of investments."

It's not stealing in Abacha's direct sense, nor even the institutional capture perfected by the Bongos. It's something perhaps more sophisticated: the monetisation of policy influence in real time. Trump dines with cryptocurrency investors at his Virginia golf club whilst his administration dismantles Justice Department units investigating crypto crimes. His family launches a "stablecoin" bearing his likeness just as the UAE announces a £1.6 billion deal using that very currency.

Meanwhile, Eric Trump announces plans for a Dubai hotel project whilst his father prepares for a "state visit" to the UAE. The Trump family develops luxury resorts in Oman, a pivotal Middle East intermediary, whilst that nation's government owns the land and Saudi partners finance the deals.

The Pattern Emerges

What links these four stories isn't just greed, it's the systematic blurring of boundaries between public office and private gain. Abacha simply eliminated the distinction through brute force. The Bongos dissolved it gradually through institutional capture. Ukrainian oligarchs simply took advantage of the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Trump operation, if the allegations hold, represents something newer: the real-time conversion of policy positions into family wealth streams, conducted largely in public view.

Each man understood that corruption works best when it becomes indistinguishable from governance itself. When every policy decision carries the potential for personal enrichment, when family business interests align perfectly with state priorities, when the institutions meant to provide oversight are systematically weakened or captured, that's when you know the system has been successfully gamed.

The tragedy is that we've seen this film before, in countries where the consequences were measured in decades of stunted development and squandered potential. The only question now is whether America's democratic institutions prove more resilient than Nigeria's military hierarchy or Gabon's one-party state.

Note: I may be somewhat guilty of treating the FT's article as established facts rather than allegations, which is what they are at this time. However, the report as it stands represents a new model worthy of consideration.

Reference(s)

Bullough, O. (2018). Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. London: Profile Books.

Gara, A., Barnes, O., Steer, G., & Massoudi, A. (2025, May 26). Trump media group plans to raise $3bn to spend on cryptocurrencies. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/cc55d091-0b28-40bb-a11c-e32d4e121ca3