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Britain’s White-Collar Cops Are Getting Too Good at Their Job
- forapurpose 9y ago> Green acknowledges the quandary. “You can detect a certain ambivalence about corporate crime,” he says. “You can see people wondering, ‘Why on Earth are you investigating blue chip, listed companies? Don’t we need those?’ ..." This isn't a quandary: No, we don't need corrupt companies. Corrupt blue-chip financial companies rob people and benefit themselves. The loss of the rule of law would reduce returns in markets and reduce liquidity by scaring away investors. Corrupt blue-chip financial companies cause financial crises.
- jimnotgym 9y agoDirty (especially Russian) foreign money coming in to London had long been acknowledged as the cause of the extraordinary property prices. The sad thing is that the demagogues have managed to blame it on EU migration of blue collar workers. This was a big driver for Brexit.
- zeristor 9y agoScapegoating the poor? Who would have thought.
- dash2 9y agoEvidence for either of these claims?
- hobofan 9y agoFor the property prices there is good documentary about it[0]. [0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032755/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032755/
- jimnotgym 9y agoDemagogues: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2332449/Now-houses-better-green-fields-minister-says-immigration-driving-home-prices.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2332449/Now-houses-b... Dirty money: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/london-is-now-the-global-money-laundering-centre-for-the-drug-trade-says-crime-expert-10366262.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/london-is-now-the... But a search engine will give thou many many hits on 'money laundering London' Russians buying property in London : https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/may/09/rich-russians-buying-london-property-real-estate https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/may/09/rich-russians... > Evidence for either of these claims? If you really just wanted sources I'm guessing thou would have phrased that differently? If you want to dispute the points then please post a counter argument instead. I am a UK citizen and I felt the points I made were very well known. The relative importance of each is a matter of opinion of course.
- dash2 9y agoThe fact that dirty money exists is well known. The fact that property prices are high is well known. The claim that the two things are linked requires a bit more than a newspaper article, sorry. FWIW I would not be surprised if it were true. Similarly for the claim that "demagoguery" caused Brexit. That proposition is widely believed by people who are against Brexit; I don't know of any evidence for it though.
- barrkel 9y agoThey are the cause of high prices in places like Kensington and Chelsea. The cause elsewhere is low interest rates - low interest rates lower the cost of renting money. Most of a monthly mortgage payment is determined by the interest rate, so a small drop in interest rates makes buying look much better than renting on a monthly basis, and we've had low interest rates for ages, conditioning people to think they won't rise much.
- incompatible 9y agoPresumably, the hope is that they mostly rob foreigners.
- wiz21c 9y ago>>> Green acknowledges the quandary. “You can detect a certain ambivalence about corporate crime,” he says. “You can see people wondering, ‘Why on Earth are you investigating blue chip, listed companies? Don’t we need those?’ But we’re one of the richest countries in the world. We have a responsibility to do business ethically.” Damn, that's almost Stallman level of clairvoyance :-)
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoMore context please. In what sense is that clairvoyance?
- wiz21c 9y agoIn the sense that it's my subjectivity that is at play here, such as Stallman, such as Green. But I agree with both of them, so I call it "clairvoyance" instead of "lack of pragmatism".
- dash2 9y agoI'm very sorry, but I do not understand what you mean.
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoTo be honest I have no idea what he means either, but since I had already asked for a clarification once I thought that insisting would be seeing as confrontational and provocative and get me downvoted (like you got downvoted).
- __s 9y agoHe means it as a kind of foresight, thinking longterm
- nl 9y agoI think you mean idealism, not clairvoyance? Clairvoyance generally involves some kind of prediction or guess about the future and I'm not sure that makes sense with the context you provided.
- shasheene 9y agoGiving up the principle of an impartial, unbiased, universally-enforced law JUST to do business with corrupt but wealthy nations is unfortunate and dangerous. Hopefully the next leader of this anti-corruption agency will continue to be effective as David Greene.
- zeristor 9y agoThe article’s essence appears to me that that is unlikely to happen.
- goodmachine 9y agoIn the UK, the SFO has been systematically starved of funding: "Its budget has been slashed steadily over the years. In 2008 it stood at £52m, while last year (2016) it was £35.7m" [Paywall] https://www.ft.com/content/8751e754-6e3e-11e7-bfeb-33fe0c5b7eaa https://www.ft.com/content/8751e754-6e3e-11e7-bfeb-33fe0c5b7... More depth on the same report here: https://www.financierworldwide.com/white-collar-crime-enforcement-in-the-uk/ https://www.financierworldwide.com/white-collar-crime-enforc...
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y agoComrade Ulyanov remarked that "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." However, they seem unwilling to pay for the rope themselves ...
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoIts budget has been slashed steadily over the years. As has just about every government department, I'm not sure you can read much into that.
- goodmachine 9y agoI'd like to think that was the case. Unfortunately, there is an (economically self-defeating) incentive to cripple the SFO beyond mere cost-cutting measures. The same incentive is not true for reduced budgets at other organs of government. The scale of damage is jaw-droppingly huge and largely unacknowledged. Whilst the media are weirdly obsessed with street crime, white collar crime in the US (and one suspects, in the UK) is bigger than all other crimes combined: "Contrary to the common perception, the most dangerous criminal is not a youth in a hoody, but a middle aged man in a suit." https://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/06/24/the-other-kind-of-crime/ https://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/06/24/the-other-kind-of-... It's more than a little depressing to see Britain slumping into corruption - or as Pope puts it “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.” - Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (1734)
- namelost 9y ago> For the most part, being a U.K. prosecutor isn’t even a career. Instead, barristers, as trial lawyers are known, both prosecute and defend clients, depending on the case. This is really not accurate. You can certainly have a career as a solicitor that specialises in prosecutions, the Crown Prosecution Service employs vast numbers of them. You can also have a career as a criminal defence solicitor. The barristers are there to present the case in court.
- dtf 9y agoConsider this with BuzzFeed’s reports on the recent string of suspicious Russia-connected deaths in the U.K. (police seeming to close cases either out of fear, lack of resource or advice from the security services) and the future is looking worrying.
- anon1385 9y agoFor those who have not read it: https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-14-suspected-hits-on-british-soil https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...
- makomk 9y agoWhat caused me to question the general honesty of those articles was the third: https://www.buzzfeed.com/janebradley/scientist-who-helped-connect-litvinenkos-murder-to-the https://www.buzzfeed.com/janebradley/scientist-who-helped-co... They lead with the idea that this obviously couldn't be suicide - playing up the role he played in the Litvinenko murder investigation, the supposed suspicions of the US intelligence services, and the fact that some friends and family members shared those suspicions. It took until the 28th paragraph for them to mention that he had been showing signs of depression for a while, and the 33rd to clarify that his wife had apparently caught him trying to kill himself the week before his death. They then explain that doesn't matter because a former Scotland Yard counter-terror officer told them this could just have been the result of secret mind control chemicals. (Seriously.) Their explanation of his role in the Litvinenko investigation is also just plain wrong from what I can tell. He and another scientist re-calculated polonium-210 intake and lethal dose in 2010 based on the discovery that Litvinenko has been exposed twice, rather than once[1] (which made little difference to the results). He doesn't seem to have had anything to do with the original 2006 investigation, which was carried out by a number of other scientists[2]. All of the things Buzzfeed attribute to his work - the discovery of a lethal amount of polonium, the HPA's public statement, suspicion falling on Russia, and Scotland Yard finding a radioactive trail all over London - in fact appear to predate his involvement by years. It's been rather disappointing seeing them gain further credibility and attention these past few days. [1] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093928/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/INQ007647wb.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093928/htt... [2] http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613091729/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/INQ007633wb.pdf http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613091729/htt...
- stuaxo 9y agoIf course the British Establishment was scandalised, the people being arrested are also part of it. There's a long history of contempt for people outside te establishment, from simple rent seeking through to out and out fraud, hopefully the SFO starts to send a message.
- raesene9 9y agoThis seems to fit in with the UKs ambivilence towards tax evasion. On the one hand whenever there's another leak of all the lengths people have gone to avoid/evade taxes (e.g. panama papers) the government will pledge to "get tough". But then when it comes to practical measures like reining in the tax havens which are used to hide the details of people's finances, they seems to throw up their hands and say "nothing we can do" despite the fact that many of these havens have strong connections to the UK and there is a level of pressure that could easily be exerted by the UK government for more transparency. The dissembling you see from government ministers when asked to explain why these tax havens are so popular for company formation if it's not for tax evasion reason is comical.
- DyslexicAtheist 9y agoThe UK is ranked 23rd on the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index. with the Crown¹ being especially dependent on things staying this way. __ ¹ http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/PDF/UnitedKingdom.pdf http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/PDF/UnitedKingdom.pdf
- krona 9y agoThis seems to fit in with the UKs ambivilence towards tax evasion. Do you have any evidence of that or are you just confusing evasion and avoidance, the latter being by definition legal? All the official statistics (from HMRC, not the government) on the matter point to the overall tax-gap doing down steadily over the past 10 years, as well as the proportion of that classified as either tax evasion or avoidance.
- jimnotgym 9y agoThe campaigning tax lawyer Jo Maugham suggests that HMRC are being pushed by the government into allowing tax evasion by Uber (in this case). He has been privately pursuing them for VAT (sales tax) evasion for some time. He alledges some kind of sweetheart deal between UK government and USA to clear the way for big tech firms. https://waitingfortax.com/2017/10/27/something-is-very-wrong-at-hmrc/ https://waitingfortax.com/2017/10/27/something-is-very-wrong...
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- barrkel 9y agoA significant part of the establishment supports Brexit precisely because it forces the country to do unsavoury but profitable deals. They want Britain to be an amoral self-interested global actor, taking advantage of regulatory arbitrage and beggar thy neighbour practices to extract rents and windfall profits, like a kind of global parasite. The powerful people who support Brexit most visibly in the media are not themselves concerned with immigration or the working man's difficulty competing with global labour and capital; but they leverage those fears effectively. This piece is obviously part of a PR effort to try and reduce the appeal of that path. What happens next with the office will be a decent indicator of the prevailing winds.
- krona 9y agoThe powerful people who support Brexit most visibly For example want to reduce inport duties on African farmers and Chinese shoe manufacturers; the complete opposite of beggar thy neighbour, and does nothing to make rich people richer.
- mberning 9y agoWhat a completely cynical and one sided view of a very complicated situation. First, dumping cheap labor and goods into a country has a very real impact on poor and working class people. Second of all, buying cheap crap made in China has a amorality of its own. You are exporting environmental and human suffering in exchange for cheap goods. So let’s not pretend that the pre-brexit economic model is without serious faults.
- namelost 9y agoRich Brexiteers such as Liam Fox are happy to throw UK producers (especially food producers) under the bus in favour of cheap imports from abroad which have lower environmental standards. The parent is absolutely correct that the pro-Brexit politicans are using the working poor as their useful idiots.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- osrec 9y agoAs a former investment banker, it's pretty clear that corruption is everywhere in the UK, even if it's channeled via "legal" protocols. I mean, just on the trading floor, we have all sorts of weird and wonderful deals going on between brokers, clients and other intermediaries. Most of this will never be picked up because (a) it's either shrouded in complexity (engineered by some of the brightest minds), or (b) hardly anyone actually investigates the audit trail in the level of detail required to highlight wrongdoing. As an example, the guy doing the the bad stuff is a triple first graduate from Cambridge, while the investigator is a 2:1 recipient from University of Salford. In most cases, the Cambridge guy gets away with it by outwitting his investigator.
- rahimnathwani 9y agoCan you provide a hypothetical example? I'm curious to know what type of corruption you have in mind, e.g. government corruption, or breach of fiduciary duty, or helping clients' employees defraud their employers through bespoke structured products.
- osrec 9y agoLet's take structured products as an example. Example: A UCITS fund is not allowed to invest in commodities directly, but it wants exposure to gold. The head of structuring knows the fund manager, so offers him a structured index for an under the table fee. The index contains only one item: a gold future! The fund gets the ability to speculate on commodities, the head of structuring gets a nice little payoff, and everyone's happy. When compliance asks why are you in commodities, the guys say "it's only an index" - and compliance goes away satisfied. Silly, but true story.
- mynameishere 9y agoI'm not sure where the illegality in your story lies. You perhaps intentionally left that out to make it seem more complex. I don't know. But if someone wants exposure to gold (for whatever reason) why wouldn't they just buy GLD or futures directly?
- emodendroket 9y agoThis seems like kind of a nonsense "problem" but I'd welcome these guys here if the Britons feel this way.
- TomGullen 9y agoShould insider trading be legalized? It's apparently unenforceable.
- OliverJones 9y agoShould it be legal? That depends on your view of the purpose of the market in stocks. If you believe the basic purpose is to provide capital for enterprises from the savings of individuals and the earnings of other businesses, insider trading is probably a bad idea. It erodes trust in the system and makes suckers out of the people with 401k retirement savings. It eats into the returns that can be earned by competent fund managers for savings. If you believe that the stock market's primary purpose is enabling arbitrage then insider trading is a good idea. Legalizing insider trading would make it very hard for managers of public companies to do their work. As things stand today there's a "blackout period" each quarter. That's the time when the managers of the company know the results of the previous quarter, but they haven't yet told the public. Legalizing insider trading would eliminate the blackout period. The market would be flooded with rumors and speculation. "An assistant comptroller at QRS Corporation says they lost a big customer. He's a friend of a friend." What a mess that would cause! It would make it even more attractive for companies to go private and remove the ability of the public to invest and share in their success.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago> There’s no British equivalent to aggressive, outspoken U.S. Attorneys, who seek out high-profile cases and routinely ascend to elected office. For the most part, being a U.K. prosecutor isn’t even a career. Instead, barristers, as trial lawyers are known, both prosecute and defend clients, depending on the case. To put a crook behind bars, they must convince judges and juries, rather than simply threaten a terrifyingly long sentence. Plea bargains in the American sense don’t exist, and jail terms for nonviolent offenses usually max out at about 10 years. This is a scary take-home message for us in the US.
- pjc50 9y agoWhy is this scary? Please could you explain.
- mcguire 9y agoNot the poster, but without publicity-crazed prosecutors and 'terrifying' plea bargain threats, along with other similarly bad side effects, you end up with endemic corruption that is long-term unstable.
- pjc50 9y agoWhereas with publicity-crazed prosecutors, you end up with the highest prison population in the world. Also elected prosecutors have to fundraise, which is a whole other league of legalised corruption in itself. The United States arguably has a worse corruption problem than the UK in its police system, thanks to "forfeiture" and the lack of an effective complaints system. There was an attempt to import this system to the UK, in the form of "police and crime commissioners" - an almost total failure. They're extremely highly paid, ineffective, and elected on turnouts of about 25%.
- celticninja 9y agoI dont get your point, why is the UK system long-term unstable and rife with corruption just because we dont elect prosecutors and dont try to avoid court cases with plea bargains?
- dm319 9y agoHigh moral standards are expensive. It sounds like moral standards need to be lowered to weather the predicted effects of Brexit on the economy [1]. [1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-trade-competition/trade-deal-with-britain-must-prevent-unfair-tax-labour-competition-eu-idUKKBN1FL5J5 https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-trade-competiti...
- coldtea 9y ago>To anyone unversed in the folkways of official Britain, the Green-Cameron exchange would seem strange. It’s hard to imagine a U.S. president, Donald Trump aside, being asked if he supported the FBI—let alone responding that it ought to think about the commercial damage when it goes after suspected criminals. Oh, the hypocrisy. White collar criminals get by just fine if they play by certain rules there just as well. >Green acknowledges the quandary. “You can detect a certain ambivalence about corporate crime,” he says. “You can see people wondering, ‘Why on Earth are you investigating blue chip, listed companies? Don’t we need those?’ But we’re one of the richest countries in the world. We have a responsibility to do business ethically.” Again, oh the hypocrisy. Britain became one of the "richest countries in the world" by supporting sea piracy, the East India company, the colonial plundering of the third world, the Opium trade, and so on...
- dragonmum 9y ago> the colonial plundering of the third world, At the time of the plundering, the countries that the East India Company plundered were not the third world. They were literally wealthy self-sufficient countries that had not seen famine or serious poverty. It is not an exaggeration that the EIC brought those countries to their knee. Eg: "A country that was the world leader in at least three industries- textiles, steel and ship building. A country that had everything... And after 200 years of exploitation, expropriation and clean outright looting, this country was reduced to one of the poorest countries in the world by the time the British left in 1947," he said. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/12/21/poverty-was-unknown-to-india-before-the-british-arrived-tharoor_a_21632939/ https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/12/21/poverty-was-unknown...
- detritus 9y agoI'm not much happy to defend the EIC, but Tharoor sits at the sharp edge of nascent Hindu nationalist resurgence and is known to have a bit of an axe to grind where the Raj was concerned. https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/aakarvani/dear-shashi-tharoor-the-fault-was-not-in-the-raj-but-in-ourselves/ https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/aakarvani/dear-sha...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- freech 9y ago> In October 2008, Barclays was saved from collapse thanks to a $12 billion investment led by Qatar’s government. As part of the transaction, Barclays paid Qatar a secret $452 million fee for “advisory services” and loaned the country an additional $3 billion. To the SFO, the fee looked like a bribe and the loan an attempt by Barclays to illegally fund a purchase of its own shares. (The executives and the bank deny wrongdoing.) Preventing stuff like this is essential to a working stock market. How can anyone invest in any company, if he has to fear that the companies assets he supposedly owns a share of, are given away in exchange for buying stock, so that the managers can get a bonus for the rising stock price, instead of the company getting raided and the managers replaced with better ones? There's no detail about the other cases, but at least in this case it's clear that there's no dichotomy at all between the UK's economic interest, jobs, the free market and ethics, but rather between those things and the upper management of a single company. > Bankers who manipulate markets ought to be charged, he said, but “simply ratcheting up ever-larger fines that just penalize shareholders, erode capital reserves, and diminish the lending potential of the economy is not, in the end, a long-term answer.” "penalize shareholders" Shareholders are supposed to invest in sound businesses. There's nothing wrong with them being "penalized" by fines, anymore then there's anything wrong with them being "penalized" if a companies new product fails.
- freech 9y ago> Even Green’s 93-year-old father sometimes asks if he really wants to spend his time making life difficult for companies that employ thousands of Brits. This is such a teriffic argument. The mafia also employs people. If a company that employs people that earns money with fraud, not by doing anything productive goes bankrupt, that just means that those people will now have to work for a company that does do something productive, which is a good thing.