The Middle East has finally arrived at the grim reckoning long barreling toward it: a ruinous collapse of oil revenues that renders government deficits utterly unsustainable. Among the wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, four are running persistent annual budget deficits that are eroding their sovereign wealth reserves and plunging …

Over the past three years, two U.K. companies with no prior record in the mining industry have won tens of millions of dollars in Uzbek state procurement contracts with a mining behemoth known as a “crown jewel” of Uzbekistan’s economy. One was owned, on paper, by a septuagenarian British bookkeeper …

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