Economist James Henry provides an excellent overview of corrupt dictators and the mainstream banking system that has colluded in hiding stolen assets.

Raymond Baker, Director of Global Financial Integrity in Washington, describes how offshore banks are used to hide stolen money and the proceeds of crime and used by drug cartels to launder their earnings. However, the majority of funds passing through tax havens are international corporate transactions. Corporations use these offshore mechanisms to facilitate tax evasion by assigning costs in high tax jurisdictions and profits in low tax jurisdictions. Baker has become one of the world’s leading advocates for reform of the global financial system.

Montreal-based sociologist Alain Deneault describes a global base of operations from which massive criminal enterprises and corrupt corporations operate freely and with impunity, menacing developing nations and advanced democracies alike.

Ndikumana and Boyce’s research shows that over half the money borrowed by African governments departs the continent in the same year, some of it ending up in private accounts of the same banks that provided the loans. Between 1970 and 2008, sub-Saharan Africa lost more than $700 billion to capital flight, far greater than the region’s debt of $175 billion. The human costs of these lost resources are devastating; the authors calculated that debt service payments on loans that fuelled capital flight have resulted in more than 75,000 additional infant deaths annually in the sub-Saharan region.

This book has been called the best exposé of the tax evasion industry ever written. Shaxson explains the origins and modus operandi of the world's leading tax havens along with other opaque parts of the global banking system and why little has been done to shut them down, despite the enormous damage they cause to the economies of both developed and developing countries.