4 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoThe 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.
- hartpuff 10y agoI wasn't addressing the veracity or otherwise of the "100% success rate" claim, I was using a different quote from the article that was linked, stating the UK's financial regulator told a whistleblower to not contact them again. Here's another quote from it: Newsnight can reveal that not a single UK- based bank has ever been punished for firing a whistleblower within its ranks - even though these individuals are protected in law Debating whether the UK is the worst or not, or whether financial firms have a 100% or perhaps merely just a 86.4% success rate at destroying honest people's lives and/or careers is a distraction. The issue is that the UK has serious corruption and (organized) crime problems, seemingly tolerated (at best) at some of the highest levels in the UK. However hyperbolic you may find the journalism to be, it's a lot more instructive and interesting than yet another bullshit list designed to show just how jolly honest and law abiding we are, compared to the developing world.
- easytiger 10y ago> The issue is that the UK has serious corruption and (organized) crime problems, seemingly tolerated (at best) at some of the the highest levels in the UK. And yet you proffer no evidence.