Third-world economists (and some from the West) had been saying this for a long time: foreign 'aid' organisations like the World Bank, USAID, and others funnelled money into the coffers of large American companies, which was pocketed by 'a few wealthy families.' Enron, the Houston-based oil-and-gas company that went from being the seventh-ranked company on Fortune 500 to a bankrupt shell, ultimately spilt the beans.

And after the Fall, the books have come on the great rip-off: Enron: The Rise and Fall and Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, Jealousy and the Death of Enron, quite apart from Susan George's earlier classic, How the Other Half Dies. John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman (Erbury Press/special Indian price, �4.75) has another take: the role of pliant management accountants who twist and turn facts and figures to entice Third World countries to take international loans that would be siphoned off to US companies through engineering and construction projects.

Perkins, an economist who worked for the US multinational, MAIN, as a team leader and consultant calls the men who played dirty tricks as "economic hitmen" or EHM. "They are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars � I should know because I am an EHM."

Confessions of an EHM works on the basis of the "Ponzi Scheme", one of the classic types of fraud by which depositors are kept busy with interest paid on their own capital, in the belief that the capital is still intact and earning profits.

(The original Charles Ponzi, called the Boston Swindler, got away with a mere $7.9 million in 1920.) Third World countries are plied with more and more loans to end up in a debt trap -- taking loans to service the accumulated debts, which are finally paid off with 'favours, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources.'

The study is divided chronologically into four parts: 1963-71, when the EHM was born and apprenticed into wheeling-dealing with field experience in Indonesia; 1971-75, the student matures and becomes an important player and leader; 1975-81, with independent charge in full swing in central America; and 1981 to the present, when enough became enough and Perkins quit to write his memoirs.

The entire ground cannot be covered here but the stories of the greatest interest are those in which Perkins was directly involved in the economies of Panama, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Colombia.

It all started in Indonesia. Top officials were bribed in cash and kind, figures were cooked up, leading to bail-out economic packages with a string of conditionalities that crippled the economy further. The lessons learned in Indonesia were fine-tuned in Saudi Arabia in early 1973, when Saudi oil prices per barrel jumped from $1.39 in 1971 to $8.34 in 1974.

The trauma of oil prices "served to strengthen corporatocracy: its three pillars -- big corporations, international banks, and government were bonded as never before". This led to the US-Saudi Joint Economic Commission, which was the opposite of the traditional foreign aid programmes: it relied on Saudi money to hire American firms to build up Saudi Arabia.

Perkins says that "the primary objective here was not the usual -- to burden this country with debts it could never repay -- but rather to find ways that would assure that a large portion of petro-dollars find their way back to the United States. In the process, Saudi Arabia would be drawn in, its economy would become increasingly intertwined with and dependent upon ours�"

Money would be earmarked to create an industrial sector focused on transforming raw petroleum into finished products for export.

With different countries, different tactics. In the highly vulnerable economies of central and Latin America, it was pure and simple arm-twisting. "You do this, or else you'll be next in the line of fire." It was pure gangster politics without any sophistication whatsoever.

Perkins does not quite address two addresses. If the US had got away with it so far, it could only have done so with the active connivance of the local elites.

Who were they and what inducements were given to make them come around? How was it that EHMs failed in Iraq? And following from this, shouldn't national governments also take the rap for compromising their interests for immediate economic benefits?