kleptocrat

Transparency International ranked him as the world's top kleptocrat, with a fortune estimated at $15-35 billion.

They call her “a kleptocrat in an Hermès scarf.”

You think anyoneshappy that were in bed with a kleptocrat despot who thinks the words secret police and freedom arent mutually exclusive?

Critics considered Marcos the quintessential kleptocrat, having looted billions of dollars from the Filipino treasury.

He made one of them, Pedro Espada, an open kleptocrat, the president pro tempore of the Senate.

Asia’s self-described “longest ruling prime minister,” Hun Sen, is a murderous kleptocrat, Brinkley shows.

Yet for Indonesians themselves to push the boat out so far for the old kleptocrat suggests a failure to come to terms with the scale of his crimes.

The vain, ranting windbag of a kleptocrat said Bush should stop reading polls "and read this: the Constitution of the United States."

Transparency International ranked ex-President Suharto, who died in January, as the world's leading kleptocrat with a fortune estimated at $15-$35 billion during his 32-year rule.

Footage of people chanting for the overthrow of Ben Ali, Tunisia's kleptocrat leader, added more fuel to a fire that shone beyond the country's borders.

"When he left power he was universally excoriated as Africa's greatest kleptocrat," noted Mobutu's obituary in the Guardian in 1997.

In Raktakarabi ("Red" or "Blood Oleanders"), a kleptocrat rules over the residents of Yaksha puri.

One steamy May day in 1997, the playboy son of the kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko was treating the capital as his fief.

Investigations often go great guns but die after a few months, blocked by officials who are either protecting the kleptocrat or fear their own stolen money will be next in line.

“If a kleptocrat from an African state moves money into these banks they will simply accept his assurance that it is ‘from my own property dealings’ rather than asking for documentation.”

Then there was the corruption, her reputation for which prompted British socialite Jemima Khan to describe Bhutto as "a kleptocrat in a Hermes headscarf."

None of the single-word labels people usually attach to Putin - KGB thug, kleptocrat, autocrat - offer a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon of his rule.

After decades in which corporate tax fiddles have mushroomed, and colossal amounts of criminal and kleptocrat money have sloshed through the world financial system, even limited progress is welcome.

The C.I.A.'s success in the Congo led directly to the three-decade dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, staunch ally and murderous kleptocrat.

IF THERE was ever a role model for Than Shwe, Myanmar’s vicious, nutty, reclusive “senior general”, it was Suharto, Indonesia’s late kleptocrat.

He has support too on African streets, where he is seen by some not as a usurping kleptocrat but as a latter-day Lumumba (Congo’s independence hero), facing a French-led, neo-imperialist plot.

Wearing a blue suit and tie, he was older, frailer, but still recognisable all these years later as Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, once the Caribbean's most notorious playboy, dictator and kleptocrat.

Many people in the Central African Republic, and most of the rest of the world, regard Bokassa as a typical kleptocrat or describe him as either an egotistical madman or a bloodthirsty dictator.

Ms. Montero, the pianist, said: “When you’re dealing with a man who is a complete kleptocrat and tells lies and believes his lies, it is up to the artist with a public voice to make truth be known.”

After insisting for years that Mr. Marcos had not been a kleptocrat but a public servant who made other people rich, she declared in an interview with The Philippine Inquirer, "We practically own everything in the Philippines."