A Swamp Full of Dollars

Michael Peel is a Financial Times journalist who has developed a fascination with west Africa, oil and financial crime – especially when the three are combined. The genesis of A Swamp Full of Dollars was Peel’s stint between 2002 and 2005 as the FT’s west Africa correspondent, based in Lagos, Nigeria. He has since returned several times to the oil-rich region to research his book.

Peel has been with the Financial Times since 1997. In 2000 he won a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust travelling fellowship to report on multinationals and the environment in Madagascar, Papua New Guinea and eastern India . Since 2006 Peel has been the FT’s legal correspondent, covering, among other things, corporate corruption and other aspects of financial crime. His reporting from Africa has appeared in various publications, including The New Republic, the London Review of Books and Granta magazine. He is a former associate fellow of the think tank Chatham House, for whom he has written reports on the crisis in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta, and on Nigeria-related financial crime and its links with Britain.