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Britain is the most corrupt country in the world?
- vemv 10y agoIt would be interesting if someone can reinforce this statement from a developer perspective.
- cannonpr 10y agoI think you should spend some time talking to people in Fintech and Adtech in London, you will have quite a few interesting conversations.
- sievebrain 10y agoWhat does your question mean, exactly? Corruption from a developer perspective? What would that look like?
- pjc50 10y agoWhat do you mean by a developer perspective? The corruption described is almost entirely contained within the area of high finance; it's not a very corrupt country from the perspective of the average John Bull. It is however quite deferential, which means that power and prestige let you get away with things.
- varjag 10y agoHave to add that in truly corrupt societies the degree of power circles corruption is not any lower. It just looks less appalling from corrupt baseline.
- mobiuscog 10y agoThe 'old boy' network that powers the country is not contained within high-finance. It is just tightly linked to through wealth management and lobbying.
- gear54rus 10y ago'Mafia expert', isn't that an interesting job title.
- wutbrodo 10y agoIf true (and I have my doubts), this is particularly funny in view of the British PM's recent comments accidentally caught on mic in which he called out the most corrupt countries in the world by name.
- felipeerias 10y agoThe UK is the second country with the most intermediaries (banks, accountants, lawyers…) listed in the Panama papers. The first one is Hong Kong, a former British colony. "More than half of the companies listed in the leaked Mossack Fonseca documents are registered in the U.K. or its overseas territories [...] If we want to understand modern Britain, we first need to realize that our primary economic function in the world today is probably our network of tax havens." http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/04/britains-empire-of-tax-evasion-panama-papers-mossack-fonseca/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/04/britains-empire-of-tax-e...
- fennecfoxen 10y agoTax havens, hmm? So around the world, basically, the good honest career politicians from Argentina to Zambia are going around to profitable businesses saying "hey, nice business you have there! We'd like to take, say, 50% of your profits, if you don't mind, and spend it on our friends - government contractors, public-sector unions and the like. All the donations to our campaign afterward are purely incidental, I assure you, and none of the subsidies or handouts we'll use your money for are vote-buying schemes, none at all. Thanks for your cooperation." ... and the UK provides places where they don't do that, not on the top-line profit anyway. Sure. I can see how having that would be attractive to both legitimate and illegitimate operators. Its net impact on corruption, though, would be a little tricky to sort out. (Postscript. As I'm being moderated down without comment, I assume that those doing so are those privileged enough to be in a nice low-corruption Western economy where we have a slightly better grade of politician than, say, Dilma Rousseff and her legislature. So I wish to note that despite cynicism about world governments I retain due respect for anti-corporate sentiment as well...)
- edko 10y agoI don't know about Zambia, but in Argentina most people don't care too much about campaign contributions. The perception is that most of the corruption there is through cronyism, and kickbacks from outrageously overpriced goods and services bought by the State. It is not politicians robbing businesses, but politicians and some businesses robbing the tax money of, mainly, the middle class.
- sievebrain 10y agoThe article (and the "Mafia Expert" it's about) are both idiotic. The premise is that because corruption involves money and money involves banks and London has lots of banks, transitively, London is very corrupt. It then tries to equate Mafia violence with financial firms refusing to hire 'whistleblowers', as if having your legs chopped off is in any way comparable to having a career issue. By similar logic, I could claim that Washington DC is the most violent city in the world, because the illegal drug trade is very violent and drugs are illegal because of politicians and there are lots of politicians in Washington DC.
- vintermann 10y agoIf you hold a position of trust (elected politician, policeman, bureaucrat, CEO, board member, employee representative, union boss), and you use the powers of that position to further some private interest rather than the interests of those you are set to serve, then you're corrupt. That's more or less Transparency International's definition, and I agree with it. But banks' trustees aren't the public. It's their depositors, shareholders and customers. And by most accounts, they serve those reasonably well. So yeah, they could maybe make a case that Britain is the most corrupting country in the world. But that is not the same thing. Compared to other nations, Britain's public trustees probably aren't so bad at serving the interests of the public.
- sievebrain 10y agoYou wouldn't even be arguing that. You'd be arguing that money corrupts people, and because there's lots of international money managed by the UK, the UK is therefore "corrupting". So what? Money corrupts, this is not news. In any economy where you have regions of the world that specialise, there will be regions with lots of banks.
- arethuza 10y ago"they serve those reasonably well." I think anyone who had RBS shares before the bailout might disagree with you on that point! Also, I wonder who the single largest shareholder of UK banks might be?
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- pete_b 10y agoSo the most ruthless mafia operate among international organizations, but from London, thus making Britain the most corrupt country in the world? Perhaps they never leave London, not old enough to travel alone, or they don't know how to use the internet. There's nothing new under the sun, just the sensationalist Bremain propaganda you'd expect a few weeks before an EU referendum.
- sklogic 10y agoIt is indeed. Just take a look at the thoroughly corrupt and secretive process of awarding a train franchise.
- marvel_boy 10y agoSpain, not UK, is by far the most corrupt country in Europe. High rank spanish politicians are involved in the Panama Papers.
- adventured 10y agoI think a distinction between most corrupt and largest dollar sums involved in corruption, should be made. The UK is a very wealthy nation with very large, global banking interests. That inherently tilts things in terms of scale. If we're going by most corrupt, the UK is absolutely not at the top of that list, nor is Spain, in regards to Europe. I'll go with Transparency International's rankings of most corrupt in Europe, I find it far more plausible: Ukraine at #130 globally, Russia at #119 globally, Belarus at #107. Those last two are fascist dictatorships, the corruption is nearly absolute in terms of state power and abuse.
- gonvaled 10y agoAlso british - Cameron's father (and probably Cameron, caught lying), non the less. EDIT Why the downvotes? Factually incorrect? Don't think so: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/david-cameron-admits-he-profited-fathers-offshore-fund-panama-papers http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/07/david-cameron-ad... You don't like it. Fine, but don't downvote it.
- xioxox 10y agoHe ran a fund which was based in tax haven to avoid double taxation. Lots of funds do things like this. It's not corruption or criminal.
- gonvaled 10y agoWhich applies in exactly the same manner to the mentioned Spanish politicians too.
- spoonie 10y agoI listened to a MoneyBox radio programme about this. The "financial expert" said that it was effectively a tax-deferral program, just like a pension plan. Any gains inside the fund were tax free until the money was brought back into the UK. It may seem unfair at face value, but any UK citizen can defer taxes on up to 100% of their annual income in a registered pension plan[0]. So, IMO, the fairness would depend on what investors can do with the offshore fund that regular people can't do with their pension plans? 0 - https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-your-private-pension/pension-tax-relief https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-your-private-pension/pension-tax-r...
- gonvaled 10y agoI would say let the UK leave the EU and let's ban financial transactions with the British-run network of global tax havens.
- phelm 10y agoBetteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- ajnin 10y agoajnin's law of adages : as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone using a popular adage to avoid argumenting approaches 1.
- paulddraper 10y agoThat doesn't make him wrong, though. If Britain were the most corrupt country, they would state it, not ask it.
- dang 10y agoWe added the question mark last night. We do that sometimes when a title is controversial and we don't have a way of verifying or disproving it. Any resemblance to actual Betteridges is purely coincidental.
- paulddraper 10y ago"Britain is arguably the most corrupt country in the world"
- dang 10y agoThat's a much stronger claim. Arguably doesn't mean what it says; it's more like a slightly weaker plausible.
- paulddraper 10y agoDefinition of arguably: "it may be argued" If a position can't even be argued, you necessarily must assert the opposite: "Britain is not the most corrupt country in the world" (or phrase it as a question and invoke Betteridge)
- id122015 10y agoGreed doesnt care which people are active 24 hours a day to acquire money, or about the perfectly fit lazy people who live off social benefits.
- cstross 10y agoThe inadmissible truth about corruption in the UK is that it's endemic. And not just money laundering; the very way governments (both Labour, Conservative, and Coalition) have pursued the business of privatization of state assets since 1979 is uniquely corrupt, on a massive scale. Hint: corruption isn't just about simple bribery and envelopes full of banknotes passing hand. Ask yourself why so many cabinet ministers retire and end up on the boards of large conglomerates that specialise in bidding for government outsourcing contracts, or why so many long-term viable agencies of government (the Post Office, the Land Registry, the National Air Traffic Control System, the NHS ...) find themselves in need of privatization in the name of "efficiency". You can make any agency -- however potentially profitable -- fail if you run it into the ground through deliberate mismanagement, then show a rebound improvement when you sell it (or the service it provides) off to your golf-course cronies. And when you roll up to the banquet later, there's no evidential chain that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that what you did was grand theft.
- branchless 10y agoExactly. Blair. Alistair Darling now on a major US bank. The UK establishment have perfected the art of making the immoral legal. They are patient and wait for their reward. Let's have another enquiry into it all! A "thorough" one that takes 5 years and costs millions only to find "systemic" issues with no individuals to blame. The UK's USP is "no time for financial crime".
- blowski 10y agoThere's nothing new about this, and nothing unique to the UK. Rich and powerful people tend to use their wealth and power to protect their wealth and power. And London has a lot of people with a lot of wealth and power. The banking system is where most of the world's wealth resides, and since the London banking system dominates most of the global financial system, a lot of dodgy dealings happen in London. If you move it to the jungles of deepest darkest Peru, then the deepest darkest jungles of Peru will become corrupt. I'm as disappointed as anyone about the cesspool of immorality that is modern finance, but David Cameron passing a few laws or conducting some kind of investigation is not going to change human nature. These are essentially the same problems that the Ancient Romans and Greeks complained about.
- IgorPartola 10y agoFWIW, a friend of mine once defined the corruption level of the country by the smallest size of a bribe you would have to pay someone. The lower the number, the more corrupt the country. Obviously not the best measure, but certainly practical.
- njloof 10y agoI like this definition, but another way of looking at it is that in more corrupt countries, the middle and lower classes have access to the bribery economy that exists regardless.
- known 10y agoAnd India is the most racist country in the world http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...
- known 10y agoHigher social class are unethical http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
- rwoodley 10y agoSo much hand-wringing. Anyone who thinks Britain is corrupt has never been to a corrupt country. I lived in Britain 5 years and never had to pay a bribe, ever. In some countries bribes are required to even clear customs. Then driving in from the airport, the police stop you at road-blocks and demand bribes. And so on.
- GordonS 10y agoCorruption occurs at different levels, and in differing degrees of visibility.
- axtheter 10y agoFrom George Bernard Shaw's "The Man Of Destiny": No, because the English are a race apart. No Englishman is too low to have scruples: no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself that he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible. Like the aristocrat, he does what pleases him and grabs what he wants: like the shopkeeper, he pursues his purpose with the industry and steadfastness that come from strong religious conviction and deep sense of moral responsibility. He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world, and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defence of Christianity; fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as a reward from heaven. In defence of his island shores, he puts a chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; and sails to the ends of the earth, sinking, burning and destroying all who dispute the empire of the seas with him. He boasts that a slave is free the moment his foot touches British soil; and he sells the children of his poor at six years of age to work under the lash in his factories for sixteen hours a day. He makes two revolutions, and then declares war on our one in the name of law and order. There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles, and cuts off his king's head on republican principles. His watchword is always duty; and he never forgets that the nation which lets its duty get on the opposite side to its interest is lost.
- to3m 10y ago<sheds single patriotic tear> They should set this to music. Fuck Jerusalem.
- sbardle 10y agoBritain is not London.
- wintermute306 10y agoWhen it comes to finance it is.
- wintermute306 10y agoThe depressing thing about this is that us UK lefties have screaming about this years and years. I know a man who works in politics that is convinced that the Tory party is not privatising the NHS because they Tory party put elections above all else.
- njloof 10y agoWhy do we not have the tools for tracing money the way we do for phone calls or data packets? We can argue about how governments should choose to use this data to prosecute crimes, but it seems mad that banks do not have to know where money comes from.
- mfukar 10y agoI don't know, njloof. Why don't banks track cash deposits? Should we track cash deposits? Why do we track phone calls and IP traffic? Should we track phone calls and IP traffic?
- jackgavigan 10y agoIronically, when I read this article, there was a banner advert for a company that helps people get MBEs, OBEs and Knighthoods: https://pic.twitter.com/UsTf892sr6 https://pic.twitter.com/UsTf892sr6
- diego_moita 10y agoI read Saviano's book. It is enjoyable but it should be said that his intention is purely drama, not rigorous, deep and comprehensive information. The same can be said about this accusation since he doesn't provide evidence, just moral outrage. How do you measure corruption? How do you know that there is more crime-originated money in Jersey than in Moscou, Lagos or Caracas?
- known 10y agoSimple solution: Expel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority from your country
- cm2187 10y agoA very heavy article on insinuations, very light on facts.
- rmmfree 10y agoI would confirm that it's my country, Spain. But you can't know it if you just read our main press, because they fake the reality. Our politicians, their relatives, their companies and their mass-media have stolen thousands of million of euros, and nothing happens. Nobody goes to jail, except the people who claims agains it.
- landryraccoon 10y agoI'm surprised nobody cares to define corruption. Given that the very topic at hand is measuring corruption, wouldn't the obvious starting point be a definition of corruption that is measurable?
- joe563323 10y agoClearly the author has not taken account of india. India is the most corrupt country. You can not get done anything with out paying bribe in government offices.