Noël Pons was formerly a tax inspector and an official at the central French agency for the prevention of corruption (Service Central de Prévention de la Corruption, or SCPC). For many years he has had a special interest in the prevention of fraud and corruption, and in the links between organised crime and the business world. He has given many seminars on the prevention of fraud and corruption, in France and abroad.

Is the financial chaos the world economy is in part of an economic cycle, or is it the devastating consequence of borderline criminal acts protected by “soft corruption”?
According to Noël Pons, the countless analyses of the global financial crisis have revealed a symbiotic relationship between business networks and politics. Since Bernard Madoff has taken the blame for the financial community as a whole, nothing much will happen to the other players — and they are many. And so the next crisis is quietly being prepared, and we already know it will rest on the same pillars as the earlier one: deregulation, which chips away at the possibility of initiating criminal prosecutions and allows high-risk financial packages, self-regulation whose futility has been amply demonstrated and collusion in every area. A comprehensive system has been established, one that is both discreet and effective; it has gradually mutated from straightforward corruption to soft corruption, which is much more insidious because it opens the way to all sorts of collusion.
By describing in depth the murky role played by lobbyists and experts, the widespread laxness toward conflicts of interest, the dubious forms of logic at work in the financial world, the infiltration of the economy by criminal organisations, Noël Pons gives us new insights into the heart of current events, such as the sovereign debt crisis, but he also reveals others, like the Mafia operations in the latest information and communications technologies, or in the green economy.

• An expert in the current fight against political and financial fraud gives his viewpoint and shows that not all dysfunctions in the system can be blamed on individual or temporary excesses.

• The author’s precise analyses are also highly corrosive — and will certainly shake up the humdrum monotony of economic thought.