Jamie Loftus

And as an incredibly tiny country, one of its primary assets is simply the fact that it is a sovereign nation because there's things that countries can do.

that nothing else can do, like issue certain kinds of passports and visas and do certain kinds of things with banking, right?

So if you're a really tiny country that doesn't have a shitload of natural resources, one thing you can export is the benefits of your sovereignty to, say, really rich people who might want certain things that you can do as a country for them.

So...

There's a number of ways in which Nauru has kind of taken advantage of this to get by.

One of them is that they've sort of sold access to their land to Australia to use so that Australia has used them for years as an offshore processing center for asylum seekers.

I think this stopped most recently in 2019, but there's been a couple of waves of this and it was not a pleasant place, right?

Conditions were so brutal in sort of the offshore processing center on Nauru from 2012 to 2019 that several residents carried out like deadly forms of protests, sewing their own lips shut or lighting themselves on fire as a protest of the conditions they were facing.

Pretty ugly scene.

Wow.

In the late 1990s, kind of prior to this period, Nauru was the chief money laundering location for the emerging Russian oligarch class.

They helped a lot of these oligarch types you've heard about in the context of Putin, launder about $70 billion in ill-gotten funds during the early stages of the Russian Federation.

Oh, yeah.

No, Nauru's adjacent to a whole lot of shitty people.

Yeah, here it's a lovely place.

Nauru was also designated a money laundering state by the U.S.

Treasury in 2002, which led to sanctions, which I think is probably why they moved to like letting Australia offshore migrants there for a while.

And since Australia stopped doing that in 2019, Sam Bankman Freed and his fellow effective altruists felt like they might have had an opportunity there, right?

Like Nauru is kind of looking for some new cash flow.

They're looking for a sovereign nation to do some things for.