Tom Burgis - Speaker

Tom Burgis is an award-winning investigative reporter primarily known for his work covering corruption, financial crimes, and global political scandals. 

After initially pursuing a career as a poet, Tom worked as a foreign correspondent in South America and Africa. He spent 16 years at the Financial Times, as part of the investigations team. He has uncovered corruption scandals, reported terrorist attacks, coups, and conflicts, and traced illicit financial flows globally. His journalism has received awards in the US, UK, and Asia. In 2023, he joined The Guardian as an investigations correspondent.

Tom frequently appears on TV and radio, including BBC Newsnight, MSNBC, NPR, CNN, CBS, and Sky News. He has also given talks at the Oxford Union, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Chatham House in London, and the Glastonbury Festival.

His first book, The Looting Machine, was published in 2015. It examined how exploiting Africa's natural resources leads to corruption, conflict, and poverty. The New York Times described it as a ‘brave, defiant book’, and it won the Overseas Press Club of America's award for the best book on international affairs that year.

Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World, released in 2020, is an international bestseller. It reveals the connections between a massacre in Kazakhstan and a stolen election in Zimbabwe, linking them to the City of London and the White House. The book illustrates how kleptocrats are uniting and threatening democracy.

His latest book, Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth, was published in February 2024. It is a story of how globalisation and technological revolution have combined to imperil the foundation of free societies: that the truth belongs to the many, not the few.