Peter Hain’s new thriller exposes huge scale of international criminality

Martin Shipton

A new thriller published by former Welsh Secretary Peter Hain exposes the huge level of global corruption that is distorting economies across the world.

At the centre of Smuggler Kingpin is a Zimbabwe-based gangster who specialises in tobacco and gold trafficking on a gigantic scale.

But the story has a serious political dimension too, highlighting how the plundering of assets by international criminals far exceeds the aid given by the likes of the UK to developing countries in Africa.

Asked how he had acquired the intricate knowledge conveyed in the book about how corruption works, Hain – who was the Labour MP for Neath from 1991 to 2015 – told Nation.Cymru: “I started off a few years ago when I was asked in 2017 to expose the global dimension to corruption in South Africa under former President Zuma, which was shameless and brazen.

“I realized that actually it’s an international problem and that Britain and many of the other traditional liberal democracies of the world are up to their necks in it. For example, the British Virgin Islands, one of the UK overseas territories that features in this latest thriller, is a source of laundered funds.

“If you look at the reality, we in Britain, Europe and the rest of the developed world think we’re being very generous in giving aid to Africa. But actually, it’s a small proportion of the money looted from Africa by kleptocrats, gangsters, smuggler kingpins and others. They all invest in places like London and New York – they don’t put it back into their own countries. They loot them and then invest it. So you actually find that the proceeds of financial crime far outweigh the overseas aid these countries receive. It’s a question almost of the poor subsidising the rich in the way it works.

“I got more and more interested in this. And then I found thrillers an easier sort of genre to try and write about it, partly because I enjoy reading thrillers in my spare time.

“Financial crime is a global problem. Two trillion US dollars are looted every year – a figure that’s almost too big to get your head around. Most of it ends up in the richer countries of the global North, robbed from the global South. And it is. It’s a global problem, and London, New York and Beijing need to get a grip.

“Hong Kong is a principal conduit for money laundering, as is Dubai. The Indian government part-owns some of the key agencies for this money laundering.

“People think street theft and robbery and muggings are bad – and of course they are. But financial crime is huge and it’s big in the UK, it’s big in Europe, it’s big in America. It’s the problem that besets the world, and it’s mostly at the expense of the poorer countries.”

Untouchable

In the book, the smuggler kingpin seems untouchable, and there is a moment when some of the protagonists discuss resorting to extra-judicial killing.

Hain said: “It raises the question, can you use unjust methods to support just laws? Can you go extrajudicially to enforce the law that the law enforcement agencies are not enforcing? That’s the kind of question you have to find the answer to in the book. It’s one that I continually came up against. Some of the people who read it in draft were not happy that I was raising that question. But I thought that’s the way of the world at the moment.”

One of the book’s characters is an MP who uses parliamentary privilege to raise concerns about corruption that have been fed to him by people in the know. As a member of the House of Lords, Hain has performed a similar role in real life, with information fed to him by informers.

Risk

Asked whether by raising such matters in public, he could be endangering himself, Hain said: “Well, that’s been a risk throughout my life. The South African apartheid forces sent me a letter bomb in June 1972, of a kind that killed other anti-apartheid leaders around the world. They specialised in that. Fortunately, there was a fault in the trigger mechanism, or I wouldn’t be talking to you now.

“People have threatened me all the way through from my anti-apartheid stop the whites-only tours days. I know these are gangsters, serious criminals. There is at least one smuggler kingpin, and I’ve studied him. But what I have is a fictional character, and it’s entirely fictional.

“Cigarette smuggling is happening in South Africa and Zimbabwe, right the way through to London and some of the towns and cities of the UK, including Cardiff and Swansea. This is a right problem – vapes and cigarettes, smuggling and contraband. It’s a big industry. This is big crime.”

Asked how he coped with the potential for personal danger to himself, Hain said: “I take the view that these guys are so well resourced that if they want to attack me, they have the ability to do so.

“There’s nothing I can do about it, but I’m not going to be deterred, because if you’re threatened and you’re deterred, then you might as well not be fighting for your values.”

Smuggler Kingpin is published by Muswell Press at £14.99

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