When shadow of economic crime falls on the State

THERE is a silence that follows tragedy—a phone call in the night, a trembling voice, a parent who will never be whole again. A needle, a pill, a decision made in darkness. In that moment, the world seems unbearably indifferent. Yet indifference is never neutral—it is the shadow in which evil thrives.

- By Asanga Abeyagoonasekera

Trump's war against the unseen empires of crime begins from that silence. He does not fight abstractions; he strikes at the machinery that devours human lives. Beneath the fragile order of nations lies a darker economy—one that trades not only in drugs and weapons but in despair.

I have spent years among those who study this hidden order—at the Economic Crime Symposium at Cambridge University—where minds from Interpol, law enforcement, and academia gather to trace the anatomy of global corruption. For 42 years, this symposium has built a vast body of knowledge, layer upon layer, each generation adding its colour to the same unfinished canvas. Those before me witnessed what I now confront in altered form; those who follow will craft better defences against it. Its founder, Professor Barry Rider, foresaw the many shades through which economic crime would evolve—how it would infiltrate nations, institutions, and lives. And through these decades, one truth has become inescapable: economic crime and geopolitics are not separate realms but two faces of a single system. Rogue regimes stretch their reach across borders, funding corruption, capturing elites, and manufacturing chaos as strategy.

In Washington, at the height of this disorder, the Economic Crime and Geopolitics Index (ECGI) was born—a compass for a disoriented world. Since then, nations such as the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar have begun to look within. In Manila, $ 20 billion has vanished into ghost projects. In Myanmar, digital scam centres and in Thailand, the Chinese gambling networks and spread like a second state, undermining the first.