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The 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

The 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 ago
If 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 ago
  You 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?
- touristtam 10y ago
  > Compared to other nations, Britain's public trustees probably aren't so bad at serving the interests of the public. Dave & Co have probably been the worst offenders in recent recent years for selling public assets and companies they have nationalized to buddies of theirs at massively discounted prices, beginning with the RBS.
  - easytiger 10y ago
    > nationalized to buddies of theirs at massively discounted prices, beginning with the RBS. What? I guess you have much evidence.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      Sold at a huge loss, certainly: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/rbs-share-sale-to-cost-taxpayers-22bn-obr-budget-analysis-shows-a6944146.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/rbs-share-sa...
      - easytiger 10y ago
        How does that indicate corruption?
    - hartpuff 10y ago
      "the share price had been at 400p as recently as February, leading critics to blast the decision to sell now and question the relationship between banks and the Treasury" http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/595769/RBS-privatisation-starts-and-is-set-to-LOSE-taxpayers-BILLIONS http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/595769/RBS-privatisati...
  - tankenmate 10y ago
    The Royal Mail would be a much better example of that; but then that happened on Vince Cable's watch (a part of then David's coalition). Of course the banks involved were accused of providing bad advice according to a committee of MPs; in particular undervalued property owned by Royal Mail.
Chestofdraw 10y ago
> The premise is that because corruption involves money and money involves banks and London has lots of banks, transitively, London is very corrupt. The premise was that the banks of London launder huge amounts of drug money... I don't necessarily agree with this article but you're just avoiding the points it makes.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  Money laundering used to have a fairly precise definition when the crime was first invented in the 1970's: "knowingly working to disguise the origins of money gained through crime". But over time various people (primarily aggressive tough-on-crime politicians) have watered down the definition until it's now more like "any financial transaction that someone somewhere doesn't like". We can see the slide in the USA PATRIOT Act which removed the "knowingly" from the original definition. Now you can do money laundering without even being aware of it, under the American definition, simply by interacting with money that was earned by criminals. Once they started chipping away at the mens rea requirement, the standards had to be redefined. Now it's not enough to avoid money you know to be criminal. You also have to avoid money you merely suspect might be criminal, lest it later on turn out to be the result of crime and you get sucked in after the fact. Hence banks turning away people who want to deposit cash. The fact that the cash has innocent origins is insufficient. Then they went further and defined money laundering as failing to do 'enhanced due diligence' on any transactions related to a 'politically exposed person'. There is no clear definition of either term, meaning banks have to make it up as they go along. But the spirit of the law is that a PEP is anyone who might conceivably be corrupt. This was meant to fight corruption by forcing banks to investigate anyone who might be receiving bribes. With no definition and heavy penalties for non-compliance, which by this time is entirely in the eye of the beholder, private firms sprang up to compile blacklists of PEPs, some of which contain millions of people. There is of course no way to get yourself off such a blacklist. Now throw sanctions compliance into the concept of money laundering and now you can be an evil corrupting money launderer simply by processing a payment from a firm in country A to a firm in country B where there are no laws in either country A or B against the trade, and the firm in country B is run by a guy who some powerful bureaucrat has decided is in some way shady. No evidence or trial is required and there's usually no way to get yourself off such sanctions lists. One US list of sanctioned people is simply a list of names with no other clarifying information, meaning people with generic names end up being treated as guilty-until-proven-innocent. By the time we're done, you realise that every bank in the world is guilty of the modern definition of money laundering, simply by virtue of working with money. If you're interested in the topic of abuse of AML laws, read the book "Treasuries War".
hartpuff 10y ago
> The premise is that because corruption involves money and money involves banks and London has lots of banks, transitively, London is very corrupt. I thought it was based on the premise that: London is the drug money laundering capital of the world and: 90 per cent of drug cash ends up in the US and Europe via London and: criminal corporate activities within the City of London which have dominated the headlines over the past decade and: an alternative metric for financial corruption [puts Britain and its dependencies] top of the list and: the four companies in line to buy [from the Government] the UK Land Registry [which tracks the (often foreign) ownership of UK properties] are all based in or have close links to the offshore tax havens of Jersey, Cayman Islands or Delaware > career issue AKA: powerful financial firms will destroy the lives and reputations of whistleblowers [claiming] a 100% success rate From the BBC page linked to under 100% success rate: The BBC spoke to one such whistleblower who wrote to the FSA [UK financial services regulator] on numerous occasions with his concerns about behaviour at his then-investment bank. The FSA refused to act on the information and even requested that the whistleblower never contact them again. If the British Prime Minister is happy to defame other countries by name, then the UK should be prepared to have its own monumental corruption problems put under the spotlight. This is about financial corruption; corruption in other spheres - police, judiciary and politics - is rife in the UK too. The only question about whether the UK is the "worst" is whether other so-called open, accountable democracies are any better, which I doubt. But it's about time we started putting our own house in order, instead of blindly pointing the finger at the usual suspects, poor developing countries, who can only dream of having corruption so established that it's not even referred to as such; and when someone does call it what it is, people instinctively write it off as "idiotic".
- sievebrain 10y ago
  The quote about a "100% success rate" is meaningless. It comes from here: According to our whistleblowing source, who has been asked to give evidence to the new Parliamentary Committee on Banking Standards, set up in the wake of the Libor scandal in June, banks tend to take a very dim view of employees who break ranks. "No risk manager wants to admit that he didn't do his job. So an unholy alliance of mutual self-interest kicks in," the source, who asked to remain anonymous, said. "So they'll do anything to bad-mouth a whistleblower as an underperformer. They have a 100% success record." This is literally a figure of speech from a single guy who considers himself to have been "bad-mouthed as an underperformer", yet in the Independent article it became: Powerful financial firms will destroy the lives and reputations of whistleblowers. Newsnight found they have a 100 per cent success rate ... which not only mis-attributes the quote but makes it sound like an actual statistic related to "destroying lives". This is the worst piece of journalism I've seen for a while.
touristtam 10y ago
Go back to the definition of corruption before jumping the guns.
Kurtz79 10y ago
The "Mafia Expert" (sic) is an investigative journalist and writer, fairly famous in Italy, which for his work has received enough death threats that he will probably have to live under police protection the rest of his life... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano
- mk89 10y ago
  I would like to shed some light on this "mafia expert". Saviano is officially known in Italy to be a writer, way more than a journalist - actually he was completely unknown before his first book "Gomorra", which made him famous, and he admitted not to be "a journalist, (nor a reporter), ... but a writer" (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/24/mafia-author-roberto-saviano-s-plagiarism-problem.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/24/mafia-autho...). I would add that in Italy he is pretty known to be a good show-man, even more than a writer.
- intAligned 10y ago
  Not that i have any aversion to Roberto Saviano, but i would strongly prefer to see Giovanni Falcone being mentioned, above and before any other real (or so-called) anti-mafia warrior (anti-mafia means a lot of professional layers of "antiness").

vintermann 10y ago

If 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 ago
You 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?
touristtam 10y ago
> Compared to other nations, Britain's public trustees probably aren't so bad at serving the interests of the public. Dave & Co have probably been the worst offenders in recent recent years for selling public assets and companies they have nationalized to buddies of theirs at massively discounted prices, beginning with the RBS.
- easytiger 10y ago
  > nationalized to buddies of theirs at massively discounted prices, beginning with the RBS. What? I guess you have much evidence.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Sold at a huge loss, certainly: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/rbs-share-sale-to-cost-taxpayers-22bn-obr-budget-analysis-shows-a6944146.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/rbs-share-sa...
    - easytiger 10y ago
      How does that indicate corruption?
  - hartpuff 10y ago
    "the share price had been at 400p as recently as February, leading critics to blast the decision to sell now and question the relationship between banks and the Treasury" http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/595769/RBS-privatisation-starts-and-is-set-to-LOSE-taxpayers-BILLIONS http://www.express.co.uk/finance/city/595769/RBS-privatisati...
- tankenmate 10y ago
  The Royal Mail would be a much better example of that; but then that happened on Vince Cable's watch (a part of then David's coalition). Of course the banks involved were accused of providing bad advice according to a committee of MPs; in particular undervalued property owned by Royal Mail.

Chestofdraw 10y ago

> The premise is that because corruption involves money and money involves banks and London has lots of banks, transitively, London is very corrupt. The premise was that the banks of London launder huge amounts of drug money... I don't necessarily agree with this article but you're just avoiding the points it makes.

sievebrain 10y ago
Money laundering used to have a fairly precise definition when the crime was first invented in the 1970's: "knowingly working to disguise the origins of money gained through crime". But over time various people (primarily aggressive tough-on-crime politicians) have watered down the definition until it's now more like "any financial transaction that someone somewhere doesn't like". We can see the slide in the USA PATRIOT Act which removed the "knowingly" from the original definition. Now you can do money laundering without even being aware of it, under the American definition, simply by interacting with money that was earned by criminals. Once they started chipping away at the mens rea requirement, the standards had to be redefined. Now it's not enough to avoid money you know to be criminal. You also have to avoid money you merely suspect might be criminal, lest it later on turn out to be the result of crime and you get sucked in after the fact. Hence banks turning away people who want to deposit cash. The fact that the cash has innocent origins is insufficient. Then they went further and defined money laundering as failing to do 'enhanced due diligence' on any transactions related to a 'politically exposed person'. There is no clear definition of either term, meaning banks have to make it up as they go along. But the spirit of the law is that a PEP is anyone who might conceivably be corrupt. This was meant to fight corruption by forcing banks to investigate anyone who might be receiving bribes. With no definition and heavy penalties for non-compliance, which by this time is entirely in the eye of the beholder, private firms sprang up to compile blacklists of PEPs, some of which contain millions of people. There is of course no way to get yourself off such a blacklist. Now throw sanctions compliance into the concept of money laundering and now you can be an evil corrupting money launderer simply by processing a payment from a firm in country A to a firm in country B where there are no laws in either country A or B against the trade, and the firm in country B is run by a guy who some powerful bureaucrat has decided is in some way shady. No evidence or trial is required and there's usually no way to get yourself off such sanctions lists. One US list of sanctioned people is simply a list of names with no other clarifying information, meaning people with generic names end up being treated as guilty-until-proven-innocent. By the time we're done, you realise that every bank in the world is guilty of the modern definition of money laundering, simply by virtue of working with money. If you're interested in the topic of abuse of AML laws, read the book "Treasuries War".

hartpuff 10y ago

> The premise is that because corruption involves money and money involves banks and London has lots of banks, transitively, London is very corrupt. I thought it was based on the premise that: London is the drug money laundering capital of the world and: 90 per cent of drug cash ends up in the US and Europe via London and: criminal corporate activities within the City of London which have dominated the headlines over the past decade and: an alternative metric for financial corruption [puts Britain and its dependencies] top of the list and: the four companies in line to buy [from the Government] the UK Land Registry [which tracks the (often foreign) ownership of UK properties] are all based in or have close links to the offshore tax havens of Jersey, Cayman Islands or Delaware > career issue AKA: powerful financial firms will destroy the lives and reputations of whistleblowers [claiming] a 100% success rate From the BBC page linked to under 100% success rate: The BBC spoke to one such whistleblower who wrote to the FSA [UK financial services regulator] on numerous occasions with his concerns about behaviour at his then-investment bank. The FSA refused to act on the information and even requested that the whistleblower never contact them again. If the British Prime Minister is happy to defame other countries by name, then the UK should be prepared to have its own monumental corruption problems put under the spotlight. This is about financial corruption; corruption in other spheres - police, judiciary and politics - is rife in the UK too. The only question about whether the UK is the "worst" is whether other so-called open, accountable democracies are any better, which I doubt. But it's about time we started putting our own house in order, instead of blindly pointing the finger at the usual suspects, poor developing countries, who can only dream of having corruption so established that it's not even referred to as such; and when someone does call it what it is, people instinctively write it off as "idiotic".

sievebrain 10y ago
The quote about a "100% success rate" is meaningless. It comes from here: According to our whistleblowing source, who has been asked to give evidence to the new Parliamentary Committee on Banking Standards, set up in the wake of the Libor scandal in June, banks tend to take a very dim view of employees who break ranks. "No risk manager wants to admit that he didn't do his job. So an unholy alliance of mutual self-interest kicks in," the source, who asked to remain anonymous, said. "So they'll do anything to bad-mouth a whistleblower as an underperformer. They have a 100% success record." This is literally a figure of speech from a single guy who considers himself to have been "bad-mouthed as an underperformer", yet in the Independent article it became: Powerful financial firms will destroy the lives and reputations of whistleblowers. Newsnight found they have a 100 per cent success rate ... which not only mis-attributes the quote but makes it sound like an actual statistic related to "destroying lives". This is the worst piece of journalism I've seen for a while.

touristtam 10y ago

Go back to the definition of corruption before jumping the guns.

Kurtz79 10y ago

The "Mafia Expert" (sic) is an investigative journalist and writer, fairly famous in Italy, which for his work has received enough death threats that he will probably have to live under police protection the rest of his life... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano

mk89 10y ago
I would like to shed some light on this "mafia expert". Saviano is officially known in Italy to be a writer, way more than a journalist - actually he was completely unknown before his first book "Gomorra", which made him famous, and he admitted not to be "a journalist, (nor a reporter), ... but a writer" (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/24/mafia-author-roberto-saviano-s-plagiarism-problem.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/24/mafia-autho...). I would add that in Italy he is pretty known to be a good show-man, even more than a writer.
intAligned 10y ago
Not that i have any aversion to Roberto Saviano, but i would strongly prefer to see Giovanni Falcone being mentioned, above and before any other real (or so-called) anti-mafia warrior (anti-mafia means a lot of professional layers of "antiness").