I am a journalist, author, and activist based in Berlin. I have over 30 years’ experience as a journalist, having written for the Financial Times, Guardian, Economist, Vanity Fair, New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and many others. In recent years I have focused on finance & economics, and their relationships to people and societies. My books include Poisoned Wells (2007), about oil, politics and conflict in West Africa; Treasure Islands (2011), about tax havens; and The Finance Curse (2018), about the domestic impacts of oversized financial sectors. I was a foundational member of the global tax justice movement which has helped drive major global policy changes in the areas of international tax and transparency. In 2021 I co-founded the Balanced Economy Project (BEP), the first general international anti-monopoly NGO of the modern age. I recently left BEP to focus on writing my next book, about multinationals, market power and the global economy, which will have a substantial (but not exclusive) focus on Big Tech and surveillance capitalism. This book, which I expect to be published in 2026, will have an international perspective but will pay special attention to the UK and Europe.
Project: This project seeks to investigate, map and estimate Google’s profits, and its excess profits, for Europe as a region and for individual European countries, including the UK. Triangulating with different methods I will seek to develop politically salient figures for the scale of the extractive elements in Google’s business, tracing the historical and other links with the different phases of surveillance capitalism, and putting this in a wider analytical and storytelling context. The principal outputs will be journalistic, including a chapter in a book on monopolies and market power, but also including at least one academic output.