In this episode of the Taxcast, the monthly podcast of the Tax Justice Network, Naomi Fowler looks at how the very wealthy shape the world, and why the rest of us really, really can’t afford them.

It never ends just with the pet mansions and the cashmere-lined private jets, but as one fascinating story of the EU Court of Justice ruling that reversed progress on public registers of beneficial owners of companies demonstrates… There’s plenty we can do about it!

‘The real centre of the offshore system is not the wealthy clients everyone talks about in the newspapers, it is the grey bureaucratic people called wealth managers, the attorneys, bankers, accountants, tax advisors etc who are the brains of the system,’ Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College in the US and a wealth manager anthropologist, says on the podcast.

‘If you want to sanction wealthy people, what you actually need to do is knock their wealth managers out of the system, or disable their wealth manager’s ability to serve those oligarch clients.’

Produced and hosted by Naomi Fowler of the Tax Justice Network, the podcast features:

• Florencia Lorenzo of the Tax Justice Network
• Mark Bou Mansour of the Tax Justice Network
• Brooke Harrington, Professor of economic sociology and wealth manager anthropologist
• Luc Caregari, journalist at https://www.reporter.lu in Luxembourg
• Also featuring: spoiled dogs, private jet business colleagues, a disillusioned youtube jet entrepreneur, a new jet owner and his excited friend, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton (plus her dogs and a reporter), a millionaire who’s ditching his jet, author of ‘How Bad Are Bananas?’ Professor Mike Berners Lee, Dun & Bradstreet youtube briefing

A partially automated podcast transcript is available here.

The Taxcast is a monthly podcast from the Tax Justice Network.

Home page photo by Aditya Vyas via Unsplash.