Do you know where your money is? If you have placed your investments with Parmalat, the Italian food behemoth whose bosses have been indicted for fraud, or with Martha Stewart's company Living Omnimedia, whose stock has dropped as Stewart was sentenced to jail last week, or with Royal Dutch Shell, whose chairman quit last week after he was caught lying about the size of the company's oil reserves - then tough luck.

Capitalism as we used to know it is no more.

Just this past year people have lost jobs, pensions and money with Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, HealthSouth, Tyco and the Walt Disney Company. The chief executives of these companies have gone to prison or are headed there for stealing hard-earned savings. They rewarded themselves with hundred of millions of dollars even as their companies' shares plummeted because of their incompetence and dishonesty.

These global, multinational, multibillion-dollar companies - and many more investment and banking firms and accounting giants - are turning out to be far from transparent. It would not be too paranoid to say they resemble a gigantic mafia, ripping their shareholders off and covering for each other.

One global accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, has disappeared totally for helping Enron defraud its customers. Bernard Ebbers, WorldCom's former chief executive, has been hauled to trial in handcuffs for stealing $11 billion from his shareholders.

Every day brings a new scandal.

The people running these gigantic global corporations are all part of a tiny club, leaving the ordinary investor hanging out to dry. Martha Stewart wined and dined with other chief executives, and they told one another what to buy and what to sell. They never shared that information with their shareholders.

The short of it is that ordinary investors are losing out on dividends, and watching share values fall while chairmen and chief executives running their companies into the ground pay themselves off with salaries and rewards of several hundred million dollars per year. Worse, it turns out that big banks with the help of investment firms and accounting firms are helping them hide the paper trail. Take Michael Eisner, until last week chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, one of the most sacred names in the world's entertainment industry, which also owns the major American television network ABC.

Eisner received a slap on the wrist last week from his docile board of directors when he was stripped of the title of chairman but kept on as chief executive.

The board, staffed by his friends, named one of its own, George Mitchell, to serve as chairman. Eisner will continue to run Disney, even though 43 percent of the investors at the annual meeting last week demanded his resignation.

It is easy to see why Eisner is unpopular with shareholders. He has paid himself $285 million since 1996, while the value of the company fell by 63 percent. The fortunes of hundreds of thousands of shareholders went down the drain.

Like all boards of big companies, Disney's board of directors, which backed up Eisner, had been well looked after. As every chief executive of a big company does, Eisner paid his board well and spoiled them rotten. They fly on private jets paid for by shareholders and are given private booths at major games and shows. They are friends who wine and dine together as they go from boardroom to boardroom serving as directors.

There is a foul smell in the corporate boardrooms of the world's largest companies and a huge shareholder revolt is building up.

But what is more important here is that these practices are becoming a menace to the global economy. When companies like Disney, Enron, Parmalat and Royal Dutch Shell - which operate in dozens of countries, employing millions of workers and running billions of dollars of assets - catch a cold, the world's economy gets the fever.

Once people lose confidence, savings go back under the pillow instead of in the bank. People stop investing. Companies go bust. Jobs die.

It is time for the wealthy, like the Arabs who have hundred of billions of their money invested in these big companies, to ask their bankers some tough questions. Where is my money, and what are you doing with it?

Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, is a freelance writer and a director of the Strategic Energy and Investment Group.

Copyright © 2004 the International Herald Tribune

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