Kleptoscope 5 looks at this under-acknowledged economic catastrophe, and asks why it is so hard to recover assets stolen by kleptocrats. And what role does London play as both a safe haven for looted money, and a laundering centre for money being invested elsewhere?

As usual, the evening is hosted by investigative journalist Oliver Bullough, who will introduce a panel of hugely experienced and knowledgeable practitioners from the three spheres of asset recovery: law enforcement, private practice and civil society.

William Bourdon is a French lawyer who specialises in corporate, media and criminal law. In 2001, he founded Sherpa to “defend the victims of crimes committed by economic operators”, and has sought to bring cases against kleptocratic rulers of countries with assets in France: including Senegal, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Congo-Brazzaville. He recently created PPLAAF, a platform to protect whistle blowers in Africa (https://pplaaf.org).

Daniel Hall is a director at Burford Capital, a firm that specialises in funding asset recovery cases. He has spent more than a decade investigating fraud and financial crime, with a particular emphasis on sovereign cases.

David O’Mahony  is a barrister at 7BR and specialises in offshore issues. He has been instructed in cases involving money laundering and criminal fraud, civil and commercial law, arbitration, domestic and international financial regulation and international crime. He advises on public and private international law and international criminal law and has deep knowledge of the law of bribery and corruption.

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Inspired by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s best-selling book The Spirit Level, Katharine Round’s accomplished debut feature illustrates a more personal account of how inequality shapes our societies.

The film weaves together seven characters each striving for a better life: Wall Street psychologist Alden wants to make it to the top 1%; Glaswegian rapper Darren just wants to stay sober; Newcastle carer Rochelle wishes her job wasn’t looked down on so much; Jen in Sacramento, California, doesn’t even talk to the neighbours in her upscale gated community – they’ve made it clear to her she isn’t “their kind”. It becomes clear that a higher income doesn’t ensure happiness and inequality hurts us all – rich and poor.

The film travels across the world and into individual lives to see how broad economic shifts have shaped not only our physical circumstances, but also the way we think and what we believe in. It reveals, piece by piece, the forces that have undermined our economic foundations, and led to a dramatic transfer of wealth to the very top: the top 0.1% in the US own as much wealth as the bottom 90% of the population.

The film features high profile commentators, including former economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Sir Alan Budd, historian Sir Max Hastings, economist Ha-Joon Chang, Noam Chomsky and epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot. The Divide plots parallel character narratives together with an archive spine, juxtaposing news reports from 1979 to the present day, with the outcomes of those economic decisions and the thinking that made them possible. The lines are clearly drawn between the big picture and the very personal, producing a new and more human way of depicting the true toll of rising inequality.

Directed and produced by: Katharine Round
Executive producer: Christopher Hird
Runtime: 74′
Country: United Kingdom/Lebanon/Switzerland

Cuba was the first communist state to be created in the western hemisphere – it’s also the last one standing. But the United States’ economic embargo against Cuba, coupled with the break up of the Soviet Union, has left this island nation struggling to provide for its citizens’ most basic needs.

In 2011, President Raul Castro introduced a series of dramatic reforms designed to stimulate growth. For the first time in decades, Cuban citizens were allowed to sell their homes and open businesses. Foreign companies are now permitted to invest in Cuba too.

The President insists that these measures are designed to preserve, rather than dismantle, Cuban socialism. But can he successfully open up the economy without betraying the promise of a classless society upon which the Cuban state was built? Juliana Ruhfus and Seamus Mirodan investigate.

People and Power is Al Jazeera’s weekly investigative documentary programme that looks at the use and abuse of power. People and Power: Cuba for Sale will be broadcast on Al Jazeera English on 24 February.

Reporters: Juliana Ruhfus and Seamus Mirodan
Runtime: 25′

The panel:

Richard Gott (moderator) is a British journalist and historian with forty years experience of Latin America. He was for many years on the staff of The Guardian newspaper in London. He is currently an honorary research fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London. He is author of Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press), and Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso).

Stephen Wilkinson first visited Cuba in 1986 and has been travelling to and writing about the island ever since. Now assistant director at the International Institute for the Study of Cuba, Stephen has a PhD on the subject of Cuban literature. He has written numerous articles on such questions as the history of US-Cuba relations, Cuban attitudes and policy towards homosexuals and the nature of the Cuban state. Stephen’s book: Detective Fiction in Cuban Society and Culture was published in 2006 by Peter Lang. He frequently comments on Cuba issues on The Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free website.

Juliana Ruhfus is the senior reporter for Al Jazeera’s ‘People & Power’ investigative and current affairs strand where she has worked since 2006, when her film on Liberian ex-combatants launched the channel’s programming content. Nearly 30 films later she has gone undercover in Turkmenistan and in Cambodian orphanages, produced the five part ‘Corporations on Trial’ series, and her two-part investigation into the trafficking of Nigerian women into the Italian sex-trade is one of the most-watched People & Power shows in its history. In 2010, she was awarded the Ochberg Fellowship, and in 2011 she received a scholarship for Harvard’s Global Trauma Program. She is currently on the European board of directors for the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma.

Since 1995, Helen Yaffe has spent time living and researching in Cuba. Her PhD thesis, undertaken at the London School of Economics, was published as Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009, and subsequently in four other language editions. Her research and publications have continued to focus on Cuban political economy, as well as the political economy of Latin American regional economic integration. Helen has taught Cuban and Latin American (economic) history at UCL, LSE and Birkbeck. She is currently a Fellow in the Economic History department at the London School of Economics (LSE) where she lectures and teaches on the history of economics.

Bernard Regan, Cuba Solidarity Campaign National Secretary. CSC campaigns against the illegal 50 year old blockade of Cuba, for an end to the US occupation of Cuban land at Guantanamo Bay, and to defend the Cuban people’s right to be free from foreign intervention. The Cuba Solidarity Campaign is broad based and has more than 5,000 members, affiliated organisations and local groups. Together we lobby MPs and government, organise solidarity brigades specialist tours and exchanges, and work to build links and better understanding between Britain and Cuba.

For our first BookNight of the year, we are delighted to welcome American non-fiction writer and policy analyst David Rieff to present his new book The Reproach of Hunger over an evening with Frontline Club members.

Rieff, who has been studying and reporting on humanitarian aid and development for thirty years, investigates the causes of the ongoing food security crisis caused by the widening poverty gap and political unrest from the Middle East to Latin America.

“Rejecting equally utopian humanitarianism and neoconservative ideology, Rieff’s collection of essays provides a compelling analysis of when military intervention is necessary and when it is doomed to fail.” – George Soros

Guests are encouraged to read the book before the event, although you are also welcome to join if you’ve just started your exploration. This will be an in-depth discussion rather than a standard format Q&A. The evening will start with drinks at 7:00 PM, following by a sit-down dinner at 7:30 PM. We will get to know one another over starters before the introduction of the evening’s guest author.

The event will be hosted by Frontline Club director, Pranvera Smith, and founding member and senior correspondent at the Guardian and the Observer, Ed Vulliamy.

Menu £25 per person excluding drinks.

For more information about membership and other benefits on offer, please contact our membership coordinator Sophie Kayes.

On Monday 22 June 2015, the Frontline Club screened Mark Aitken’s new film Dead When I Got Here.

The film is centred on Josué, a former psychiatric patient who oversees the day to day running of a mental asylum in the Mexican border town of Juárez. Through Josué, Aitken tells the story of both the asylum and a town left gutted and destitute by the drug trade.

The evening was hosted by Ed Vulliamy, a writer at the Guardian and the Observer and author of award-winning book Amexica: War Along the Border Line. Vulliamy also maintains a strong connection to the city of Juárez.

Mark Aitken (left) and Ed Vulliamy

“He’s a poet,” said Aitken about Josué, “nothing less than a poet. None of [the film] was scripted, he just came out with those lines. I’ve recorded hours with him and there’s a lot more besides.”

Josué has a very dark past, and spent decades in prison for his involvement with drugs. He has now found solace in his work at the asylum and, through the documentary, has been reunited with his daughter.

This film is not, however, about redemption. “I don’t believe in redemption,” said Aitken, who told the Frontline Club audience that he was keen to avoid a clichéd Hollywood narrative. “If this was a Hollywood version you’d have Josué playing with his grandchildren and running [a franchise of asylums]. But it’s not,” he said.

One of the motivations behind the film was to show the connection between us in the West and those who we perceive as being ‘others’.

Mark Aitken

Vulliamy was keen to stress the economic connection that globalised capitalism creates between the developed world and places like Juárez.

“Juárez is… the carberetor under your car, it is the electronics in your mobile phone. It’s all made, if not there then in places like that,” said Vulliamy. “We’re not watching another world, are we Mark? We’re watching very much a part of our lives.”

There is an exploitative relationship, Vulliamy argued, which is shown in films like this one. “They make us,” said Vulliamy, referring to the town’s manufacturing past, “and we use them.”

Aitken told the club that initially he was somewhat scared of the patients at the asylum, but he gradually grew to respect them. “These are survivors,” he said, “they could teach us a few things.”

“You know we’re just more fortunate, that’s the only difference. So this ‘us and them’ dichotomy of us somehow being superior because we’re comfortable is all back to front. It’s the wrong way round,” said Aitken.

Making the film was very challenging for Aitken. The act of filming itself was easy, even ideal, a she only ever had one complaint from the patients. “Most people tended to repeat their actions…”

Ed Vulliamy

Daily life at the asylum was likewise very repetitive, giving Aitken the opportunity to get the shots he needed. “Every day they do these routines, so every day I filmed the same thing, the same people, and I could film it in different ways. And once I’d exhausted it I would move on.”

The difficulty came in the responsibility that he had as a filmmaker to ethically tell the patients’ stories. The people that he was filming were very uninhibited. “They haven’t really got the capacity to say ‘no, fuck off, don’t film me,’” said Aitken, “… I don’t want to just be a voyeur here, I have to do something with this and show them in a particular way.”

What Aitken wanted to show is that we are the same as the people in the asylum, and that we are also all connected.

“If we’re constantly told that we’re different, and the trouble is over there and not here, then it make us feel better,” said Aitken. “Maintaining that fear is very much to do with, ‘well, look at them over there, they’re falling off boats trying to get to Italy from Africa… lucky it’s not you’.”

There is reluctance, both Vulliamy and Aitken agreed, to accept that poverty and drug money are directly connected.

“I mean this seems to be the huge… why it’s not ‘them and us’, why we are them. The money out of that misery [in Juárez and similar environments] is being spent on the golf courses of Connecticut and in the wine bars of Holland Park and Canary Wharf,” said Vulliamy.

“There is this kind of abyss that you [Aitken] and I spend our lives trying to cross, trying to tell people, ‘this is you and you are it’,” he said.

Mark Aitken (left) and Ed Vulliamy

On Monday 15 June, Lofty Nathan’s documentary film 12 O’clock Boys was screened to an audience at the Frontline Club.

The film first premiered in 2013 at the South by South West Film Festival in Texas. However, in light of recent civil unrest in Baltimore, the film remains highly topical in its exploration of gang culture, poverty, and the many disparities between residents and authorities.

With unfettered access, Nathan follows a young boy named Pug through his transient teenage years as he seeks to become a member of a notorious dirt bike pack. The 12’Clock Boys are named as such, as Pug explains, because they ride their bikes upright like the hands on a clock.

The group skilfully ride through the streets of Baltimore in large packs, pulling dangerous and high speed stunts. They are in constant conflict with the police, who struggle with a policy of not chasing bikers because of the risk that doing so poses to the public.

The dirt bike culture gives the film’s young protagonist something to aspire towards – an identity, status and a tangible yet temporary escape from poverty. Nathan makes no attempt to explain, justify or judge what he sees. He allows Pug and the other protagonist articulate their own thoughts.

Without commentary, Nathan offers up an insight into the challenges of life in inner city Baltimore and allows the audience to draw their own conclusions. .

Pug, a wisecracking 13-year-old living on a dangerous Westside block in Baltimore, has one goal in mind: to join The 12 O’Clock Boys, the city’s notorious urban dirt bike gang. Converging from all parts of the inner city, they invade the streets and perform dangerous stunts at high speeds. The gang has a history of clashing with the police, who are forbidden to chase the bikes for fear of endangering the public.

Pug looks to the pack for mentorship, spurred by their dangerous lifestyle. He narrates their world as if explaining a dreamscape, and this insight is complemented by unprecedented, action-packed footage of the riders in their element. The film presents the pivotal years of change in a boy’s life growing up in one of the most dangerous and economically depressed cities in the United States.

Director Lotfy Nathan followed Pug for three years over the course of the film’s production, documenting his transition from a witty and energetic boy to a teenager eager to find comradeship in a gang that prides in its recklessness and disregard for authority. Nathan does not pass judgement on the group’s activities; instead he gains up-close access to their high-suspense rides, following the mayhem through the eyes of a boy on the margins.

Directed by Lotfy Nathan
Duration: 71′
Year: 2014

Described as India’s “tinsel slum”, the Kathputli artist colony in New Delhi is home to over 1,500 families of puppeteers, acrobats, painters and magicians. That is all about to change. When the government sells the land to private developers, traditional life is set to be razed for the city’s first skyscraper.

Where outsiders see the slum’s rancid water and shacks, debut filmmakers Adam Weber and Jimmy Goldblum find stunning colours in death-defying performances. Whether bathed in sunlight or exploding against night skies, magnificent fire-eaters, sleight of hand magicians and glorious puppets radiate beauty in crisp, brilliant detail.

As in-fighting breaks out among colony leaders, spilling out into confrontations with developers and the government, the clock ticks onwards to the bulldozing date. Will the artists’ resolve to preserve their culture and overcome the push for progress?

Gorgeous and inspiring, Tomorrow We Disappear is a splendid tribute to fading artistry and the tenacity of tradition.

Directed by Adam Weber and Jimmy Goldblum
Duration: 85′
Year: 2014

On Tuesday 27 November, a group of experts gathered at the Frontline Club to discuss the issues and nuances that surround the task of: Covering poverty in an indifferent world. This subject was recently explored by the BBC’s Why Poverty? series in an episode covering the campaigning efforts of Bob Geldof and Bono, and the resulting phenomena were also addressed by the panel.

Covering poverty in an indifferent world panel discussion

The Live Aid and Make Poverty History movements have been criticised for failing to fully achieve their ambitious aims. But today – as writer and activist Paul Vallely explained – millions of lives have been saved due to the public’s response and lobbying efforts in fora such as the Gleneagles G8 Summit in 2005.

“Most aid works, yet that’s not the perception as it comes across in the media.”

Paul Vallely also criticised an attitude of ‘cognative dissidance’ from issues of poverty as seen in the media today. This reflects, he said, an attitude of wilful ingnorance and cynicism currently adopted by many:

“They feel they want to defend the status quo which includes them not having to take any kind of responsibility for the fact that they are in a exploitative relationship with a lot of the other people in the world.”

On, the other hand, Andrew Hogg, head of media at Christian Aid, argued that in fact it is a matter of messaging:

“In terms of getting people to address that poverty, when it is presented in terms that they can understand, at the moment the door seems to be further open than it is closed.”

So what terms are currently being used to the most effect when communicating these issues? Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor of Media and Communications at LSE, proposed that currently a ‘post- humanitarian’ form of solidarity prevails. This approach, she said, moves the focus away from those who are suffering and onto the self:

“It’s about ‘us’, it’s about how we feel good, and by feeling good we are also contributing to other people’s well being… no distant sufferers are being portrayed in these campaigns, the others are completely left outside.”

It is within this paradigm that we find a significant use of celebrity she argued.

In defense of a celebrity focussed strategy, Jamie Drummond, co-founder and executive director of ONE explained:

“Every time somebody says ‘I hate it when celebrities are used to promote a cause, my answer is ‘well let’s try and get that cause, that mission, to get the same amount of coverage without a celebrity – what would it take? … Until we can do that, sometimes, we’ve got to live in the world we live in, we’ve got to use them, but we’d all like not to.”

As a closing thought, Lilie Chouliaraki added:

“Perhaps we can reverse the terms and then say ‘well why don’t we use that celebrity, that popular culture to celebritize people who are not celebrities yet, but who are doing incredible work… and make them the heros that they diserve to be.'”

Watch the full event here:

The images of the famine in Ethiopia were shocking, but nearly 30 years on, is the public immune to graphic imagery? How do you communicate poverty in the modern media landscape?

Much criticism has been levelled at Live Aid but there is no doubt that it galvanised a generation in a way that has not been done since. Join us as we discuss whether a message on poverty can harness global attention in a world more connected than ever before, and what the role of public figures should be.

Chaired by Paddy Coulter, a specialist in media and development with over 25 years professional experience. He is director of communications at the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at Oxford University’s Department of International Development, he previously worked as Director of Studies at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

With:

Jamie Drummond, co-founder and Executive Director of ONE, a grassroots advocacy and campaigning organisation that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa, by raising public awareness and pressuring political leaders to support smart and effective policies and programs.

Andrew Hogg, head of media at Christian Aid. Previously he was news editor of The Sunday Times and the Observer, and he was editor of The Sunday Times Insight investigative unit. He was also that paper’s Africa and Middle East correspondent.

Paul Vallely, a writer and activist on Africa and development issues. He is an associate editor of The Independent where he writes about ethical, cultural and political issues. He was the The Times correspondent in Ethiopia during the great famine of 1984/5. Vallely ghost-wrote Bob Geldof’s autobiography, Is That It?  in 1985 and travelled with Geldof across Africa to decide how to spend the £100m raised by Live Aid. He was later involved in the organisation of Live 8.

Lilie Chouliaraki, Professor of Media and Communications at LSE. She has published extensively on the mediation of suffering, including the books The Spectatorship of Suffering, The Soft Power of War and The Ironic Spectator.