THE MASS media constantly feeds the public with stories of the activity of criminals, individuals and gangs who make and maintain eye-watering fortunes through abuse of “the system” — until they are finally exposed and brought to justice. The public is rightly appalled.

In Criminal Capital: How the Finance Industry Facilitates Crime, Stephen Platt shines a light on these dirty dealings but from a different perspective.

He examines the role of the finance industry in money-laundering, tax evasion, drug dealing, bribery, piracy, migrant smuggling, human-trafficking and the financing of terrorism, in operations that know no national, international or organisational boundaries. The sums run into the trillions.

There can be few better placed to comment on the subject than Platt. A barrister, researcher, consultant and trainer, he has for decades worked at the highest level in this field and is recognised globally as an expert on the criminal abuse of financial products, services, arrangements and relationships. Among many projects, he’s worked on the World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative and its study on illicit financial flows from Somalian piracy.

Given the complexity of its subject matter, this is an accessible work, setting out plainly how some of the worst financial abuses of our time have been and can be carried out. For this alone the book is an important one to read.

But where I take issue with the author is in his conclusions. He rejects the notion that, in his own words, “there is innate toxicity at the heart of the financial services industry.” Crime is committed by individuals or groups abusing a “neutral” system, operating for the righteous rich. The finance industry can be reformed and “prosecutors and regulators have to wield bigger sticks.”

Platt exposes the inherent corruption of individuals, not the system itself. Of course, in the short term criminals must be caught and punished but capitalism and all its apparatus is bankrupt, rotten to the core and incapable of solving the problems of humanity. It cannot be reformed and the only alternative is to replace it.

This is the truth that the mass media sets out to mask with its coverage of individual criminals and the purported remedies of the capitalist justice system. Meanwhile the majority of the people of the world are forced to pay dearly to prop up what only serves the few.

Review by Liz Payne

• Liz Payne is chair of the Communist Party of Britain.