The FCA, the Treasury, and the Treasury Select Committee have all been alerted to conflicts of interest, misselling, and fraud in Fund Management, Pensions, Local Government and Small Business but have repeatedly looked the other way.
Kent have been hit hard by the Iceland Crisis, the LOBO scandal, and now they are losing money at Woodford.
Outsourcing firm Capita’s traces are often to be found near the scene of the crime.
Retail fund manager Hargreaves Lansdown is also caught up.
But it’s Bailey who is instrumental in obstructing justice for small businesses on an industrial scale.
While banks fraudulently missold investment products to business customers which were then used to steal their customers’s assets, Bailey has done all he can to protect the criminals.
Is the top job at the Bank of England his reward?
Slack Journos
Journalists like the BBC’s Andrew Verity & James Hurley of the Times like to make out they are on the side of the defrauded small businesses.
But when it comes down to it, the language they use on social media and in their output downplays the level of fraud coming out of the FCA, the audit firms, and the banks.
To be fair, Verity works for the BBC and Hurley the Times, so there is only so far they can go.
The main work these journalists do is in deciding what to hide from the public as opposed to what to disclose.
No wonder Bailey remains the favourite to take over as Chairman of the Bank of England.
Were our mainstream journalists not so craven, Bailey would be looking at Belmarsh, not Threadneedle Street.
City Apologist
The biggest Bailey cheerleader of them all is Alex Brummer, City Editor at the Daily Mail.
Brummer writes very well on foreign takeovers.
But when it comes to Bailey, Brummer is the most corrupt.
As Ofcom regulation of the BBC only started in 2017, there might still be teething issues.
Still doesn’t explain why Ofcom are turning a tiny blogpost into such a big deal.
It’s common knowledge that the BBC is biased and that Ofcom is a toothless regulator.
And Fake News is now part of the lexicon.
Corporatist voices and organised silence of Carbon Bubble, Clean Air and Climate Change are all classic symptoms of a captured media regulator.
How can Ofcom’s Director of Communications, Chris Wynn, deny that Ofcom, the BBC’s regulator, has a problem with collusive corruption?
The perception of bribery and corruption in UK business has been getting much worse over the last six years according to Big Four Audit firm Ernst and Young’s latest fraud survey.
It is the first time Ofcom has found the BBC in breach since taking over regulation of the corporation in 2017.
So Ofcom took more than 7 months to find the BBC had breached their own broadcasting rules. From August 2017 to April 2018
That’s a long time to correct climate denier Brexiteer Nigel Lawson. Why so long?
And what have Ofcom got to say about the way the BBC legitimise deregulation, fracking and war?
BBC silence about the merging of corporate and state interests is consistent with collusive corruption and the dehumanising corporatist dismantling of public services.
BBC’s political presenters attack anyone with an ecological worldview even though it is widely understood our air is not clean and that pollution kills.
Ofcom is ok with Andrew Neil presenting BBC politics programmes while speaking at antisemitic Hungarian think tanks and chairing the Spectator whose assistant editor is racist Rod Liddle and whose culture critic is the openly fascist James Delingpole.
David Goodhart and several BBC commentators dismiss Windrush deportation cases as mere bureaucratic oversights. Imagine saying that about Nazi deportations? It was called a hostile environment. And Ofcom and the BBC did nothing to help report the illegal deportations as they happened
Some of Ofcom’s top brass are very much onthe gravy train. They are mainly ex-Treasury and audit people. The ones policing the content are mainly ex-BBC. So conformity is scripted. The type of culture change we need to get a progressive agenda at the BBC and other Public Broadcasters just doesn’t exist. There is too much co-operation with the old way of doing things.
This is Lord Burns. Crossbencher in the Lords but obviously a Tory.
He’s not on the Gravy Train. He is the Gravy Train.
There’ll be no interesting decisions under him.
Then there’s Baroness Noakes.
Jim Waterson of Guardian Media says that though Noakes is a card-carrying Tory, like others on the Ofcom Board, she can’t be done for bias because there is no business decision that she has taken that can be seen to be influenced by her political position.
This is because Noakes deals with finance and not content. But funnily enough, I can’t find any minutes of what she has actually said in any meeting. So it looks like we can’t know.
Do she, or the other Tory directors, have any say in choosing who regulates the BBC? .
It’s still altogether wrong that Noakes retweets Brexiteers, Privatisers, the Israeli Ambassador and Climate Deniers while chairing top committees at Ofcom and RBS. She’s also on an EU Lords Subcommittee.
It’s plain wrong to act as though she has no authority. She has. How is she using it? We deserve to know.
It’s a common perception that the BBC is super biased.
How can Noakes get away with being at the top of Ofcom and voting with the Government, but never get questioned over conflict of interest?
Noakes was contacted over 50 times regarding market abuse, file falsification, abuse of death certificates etc etc all ignored on her watch. Now that is some risk committee 🙈🙈. It seems Nelson is now making the same grave mistake #DejaVu#RBS#GRG
Fat cat RBS non-executive directors — Brendan Nelson, Sir Sandy Crombie, Robert Gillespie, Baroness Noakes, Penny Hughes — are being paid up to £30,000-a-year EXTRA to “review” GRG scandal for which they’ve been blamed. My Scottish MoS piece w/ @laneyk91pic.twitter.com/GSKuWr2zo8
Same Execs who were central to the biggest cover up in recent banking history, perpetrated by Chris Sullivan of @santanderuk when he was the @RBS puppet master. Noakes & Nelson are a disgrace to the banking profession and @BankConfidenti1 has the evidence to prove so! @Ian_Fraser
RBS non-execs handed up to £78,000 extra since May’15 to “oversee” GRG (= limit payouts to customers; water down S166 report?!): Brendan Nelson & Sheila Noakes (ex KPMG), Sandy Crombie (ex Standard Life), Robert Gillespie (ex UBS), Penny Hughes (ex Coke) https://t.co/2NQiJuacgJ
Ian the information we have & evidence of the most substantial cover up at RBS involving Nelson, Noakes, Hester, Hampton etc. will stun you. We just can’t expose this yet, every tweet we put out is monitored by @TheFCA and we need to give them the opportunity to come clean first!
In 2016 former Minister for Culture, Karen Bradley kicked former editor of the Economist Bill Emmott, off the Ofcom content and main board for being too pro-EU.
But Noakes is allowed to stay because her politics don’t actually affect her ability to be on the board.
What does the rest of the country think? Most people will never know as our media keeps this type of thing quiet.
Makes sense of @Ofcom‘s ‘fit and proper’ shambles over Murdoch’s Sky bid. Baroness Noakes still tweeting #BrexitCentral Darren Grimes despite all the parliamentary evidence. And eminent Economist editor @bill_emmott gets sacked for supporting Remain.
She has consistently voted with the Government for Brexit in the Lords and is therefore too biased to regulate the BBC.
She shouldn’t be allowed to back the Government in the Lords as well as in our living rooms.
Separate questions about her role overseeing the re-appropriation of hundreds of millions of pounds worth of small and medium sized businesses’s assets at the Royal Bank of Scotland also cast doubt on whether she possesses the probity and good judgment required of a media regulator.
Tweets
Here she is, only last week, retweeting the most controversial of characters, Darren Grimes of Vote Leave.
This young man took hundreds of thousands of pounds from Vote Leave to launder money and the youth vote for the corrupt Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the Brexit Vote.
As a gay man and ardent Brexiteer, this is bollocks. Our equality, non-discrimination and family rights were hard fought for over many years by parliamentarians in the UK. The idea we’ll become intolerant of minorities without the EU is nonsense on stilts. https://t.co/tXnqGWHyQ6
For those who are new to the scandal plagued RBS GRG unit, this has been described as an “abattoir” for small businesses and that it may be the “biggest theft ever”.
The bank, state-owned at the time, stole millions from innocent small business customers in what became known as the dash for cash:
This cases are just the tip of the iceberg as so much remains covered up.
This from February:
That’s right, this woman is deeply involved in one of the biggest banking scandals of all time.
Noakes was once described as the country’s top accountant and has lots of experience in PFI both for the government, the audit firms as well as in the private sector.
But sadly, it looks as thought our BBC has been entrusted to a card-carrying Tory Brexit propagandist.
Freedom of Information
John Mann sent a Freedom of Information Request to the Bank of England about former Deputy Governor Paul Tucker’s role in getting Barclays to readjust their LIBOR submissions during the crash in 2008. Mann was on the Treasury Select Committee and so the FOI was treated as urgent and replied to swiftly.
I suggest that a Labour member of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee or the Shadow Minister for Culture, Tom Watson, send in an FOI to Ofcom asking to see whether Baroness Noakes membership of the House Lords has ever been considered a potential conflict of interest.
Certainly all of Noakes’s correspondence on the subject of Brexit during the run up to the referendum and ever since are highly relevant at this time. Perhaps a group of Remainer MPs on the DCMS select committee, including Damian Collins, would like to start asking Ofcom these crucial questions.
Collusive Corruption
Anything less would demonstrate a high degree of collusive corruption.
I asked David Whyte if the UK is a corrupt country in the run up to last year’s election:
For those who are new to the scandal plagued RBS GRG unit, this has been described as an “abattoir” for small businesses and that it may be the “biggest theft ever”.
That’s right, this woman is up to her neck in criminality and that is before the mega scandal that is about to break.
By the way she was once described as the country’s top accountant and has lots of experience in PFI both for the government, the audit firms as well as in the private sector. So yes, we’re talking about a mega-looter as a well as propagandista extraordinaire!
Good luck, Shelia Noakes, you’re going to need it!
Bloomberg has just shown that the May Government’s proposals to shut the Serious Fraud Office are part of the UK’s post Brexit offer of Corruption-as-a-Service.
UK territories already include tax havens like Jersey and the Cayman Islands, so why not go the whole way and get rid of fraud prosecution altogether?
Steve Middleton, Financial Adviser and Founder of Bank Confidential, says that if you’re an up-to-no-good financial services outfit, who would you rather be on your case, Hercules Poirot or Inspector Clouseau?
That is the current state of affairs in the UK with the FCA, Bank of England, City of London Economic Crime Police, Audit Firms, Law Firms, SFO and the revolving door with the Banks.
As long as regulators are muzzled and employees afraid to speak out, the culture of Omertà that financial journalist Ian Fraser has said exists in UK financial services will never go away.
A potential whistleblower has to jump through many legal hoops in order to get whistleblower status and all for very little reward.
See it. Say it. Sorted.
The government’s recent “See it. Say it. Sorted.” campaign applies to unattended baggage and foreign looking individuals,
Apparently wearing a coat now makes you a terror suspect… Especially if you look like a Jew as depicted by the Nazis pic.twitter.com/JNeOXRwpGJ
But as pointed out by the Bloomberg Report, the government’s entire post Brexit strategy is premised on suspect packages of cash making their way into the UK financial system with absolutely minimal questions asked.
The “See it. Say it. Sorted.” campaign is run by British Transport Police which reports to the Home Office.
Contrast that with typing “Speak up”, “Whistleblower” into a UK-based search engine. What you get is a fractured wild west of consulting firms all of whom are competing with each other to get private sector contracts to help companies deal with whistleblowers.
The hostile environment that Theresa May has chosen to create for immigrants in this country does not extend to dirty money, dictators, or the proceeds of massive financial crime.
Senior Saudi Officials are in town this week. The type that hire American mercenary firms to torture their own cousins in American owned Marriott Hotels in order to extract $100 billion and show everyone who’s boss.
This would be equivalent to Amber Rudd hiring ex-Met Chief Phillip Hogan Howe’s new HSBC financed security firm to torture the previous Home Secretary Theresa May for a few months in exchange for her and her husband’s pension and most of their life savings.
Of course all talk of British made bombs being dropped on innocent hungry Yemeni children is off limits.
The UK is still angling for the Saudis to give clearance for Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil firm, to float on the London Stock Exchange.
Such a transaction would allow for millions in commission to float through to the City of London and to the advisers on the deal – HSBC.
One of the main advantages the UK has over the US is that in the UK no-one will ever bring a lawsuit agains the Saudis for harbouring terrorists.
In New York, lawyers are licking their lips at the chance of winning compensation for 911 victims from Saudi Arabia as 11 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.
If Gadaffi had to pay for Lockerbie than why not the Saudis?
So UK really is selling immunity as a service. The ultimate form of liberalism. We believe in a form of diversity that takes in acceptance of war criminals and genocide as well as mere guns, drugs and terror.
I interviewed anti-corruption campaigner and HSBC Whistleblower Nicholas Wilson during the last election and he explained the situation nicely:
Nicholas Wilson has blogged, tweeted and spoken about these issues and UK politics in general from an HSBC angle. The data he presents and the power mapping he has done points strongly to the systems that are in place to protect the UK establishment as well as transnational corporations at the expense of much human life and the environment. To those of you who are interested in political puppetry and the revolving door, I strongly suggest following his campaign.
Public Relations
You have to admire the chutzpah of these Tories. It’s all done in plain sight and they only ever lie about it when questioned.
This puff piece in defence of Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) is by an employee of the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society and appears in the Independent which is owned by the same Russian Oligarch that employed George Osborne to edit the Evening Standard.
The Standard and Independent’s mission is therefore clear: Oppose Brexit but promote anything which protects billionaires, like money laundering.
On Thursday George Osborne, current editor of the Evening Standard and architect of extended austerity policies that inflicted misery on millions, issued a self congratulatory tweet upon the news that the austerity deficit target had finally been met, two years after he was ejected and nearly 8 years after it started.
The question i ask myself is whether anyone is going to get the Labour Party to debate these issues openly and vigorously and put clear unambiguous pledges and policy in its manifesto that can stop this sort of thing forever.
Those who wish to contribute, please step forward.
These are questions I feel compelled to ask after watching just a few minutes of Howard Davies and Ross McEwan, of the taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), giving evidence before last Tuesday’s Parliamentary Treasury Select Committee.
To not, as a society, vehemently question the goings on at these proceedings implies a collective post traumatic stress disorder following the 2008 crash that has robbed us of the dignity and empathy that we need to recover.
But recover we must. Current tolerance levels for corruption and injustice remain incredibly high and we all too often simply carry on.
Dialectic-as-a-service
Rushdie used to quote Kundera by saying that man’s struggle against the system was like the persistence of memory when trying to forget.
What happens when we can’t forget?
Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche
What happens when powerful individuals are given platforms to defend corporate criminality while the rightful anger and people’s sense of injustice is segmented and siloed off to the point of non-existence, like the risk on a series of high risk collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) repackaged as Triple A reliable investments during good times only to re-emerge as toxic during the bad.
The risk and the anger never go away. They just get stored up for a later date. “They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind”. Some will wonder why no-one heeded the warnings. How the journalists are to blame just as much as the government and the bankers.
Maybe the warning signs are hidden in the business pages. As Harvey Cox says in The Market as God, the concepts in the business pages are theological. Redemption and Retribution. People getting away with stuff and others getting punished. Why does God permit it? Nowadays we have PR people, Regulators, Central Banks, Blacklisted Whistleblowers and a growing number of unhappy customers.
If you kick off about this stuff, people ridicule you for making a big deal out of nothing, for being an anti-business Social Justice Warrior that knows nothing about the way of the world.
If the facts of life really are conservative then why make a fuss about anything?
Anyway, here’s that master class in how to carry out state-sanctioned cannibalistic, rampant Crony Capitalism in broad daylight — and get away with it.
Lots of innocent Small Business Owners have been asset stripped of their families, marriages, businesses and homes by the RBS Global Restructuring Group (GRG), and all many of them will get is this:
It is hard to see which features of Crony Capitalism don’t apply here:
Crony capitalism is an economy in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk taken for them, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class. This is done using state power to crush genuine competition in handing out permits, government grants, special tax breaks, or other forms of state intervention[1][2]over resources where the state exercises monopolist control over public goods, for example, mining concessions for primary commodities or contracts for public works. Money is then made not merely by making a profit in the market, but by profiteering by “rent seeking” using this monopoly or oligopoly. Entrepreneurship and innovative practices, which seek to reward risk are stifled, since the value-add is little by crony businesses as hardly anything of significant value is created by them, with transactions taking the form of “trading”. Crony capitalism spills over into the government, the politics and the media,[3] when this nexus distorts the economy and affects society to an extent it corrupts public-serving economic, political and social ideals.
The term “crony capitalism” made a significant impact in the public as an explanation of the Asian financial crisis.[4] It is also used to describe governmental decisions favoring “cronies” of governmental officials. In this context, the term is often used comparatively with corporate welfare, a technical term often used to assess government bailouts and favoritistic monetary policy, as opposed to the economic theory, described by “crony capitalism”. The extent of difference between these terms is whether a government action can be said to benefit the individuals rather than the industry.
Off with their heads. No questions asked.
But for some reason, the British sense of fair play perhaps, they remain.
But how long can this carry on?
Here are the rules on lying to Select Committees from a Parliament Document:
So none of what is said in a select committee hearing can be relied upon in civil or criminal proceedings against anyone but attempting to mislead is Contempt of Parliament.
I’m still waiting for the full transcript of Davies and McEwan’s hearing to go up. I feel the people at Parliament are dragging their feet.
McKinsey, Treasury, Seconded Special Adviser to Nigel Lawson when he was Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bank of England, Head of the Audit Commission which is now defunct but was instrumental in overseeing Thatcher’s Privatisation and Denationalisation agenda including Fraud Investigation, the London School of Economics from where he had to resign because of his closeness to Colonel Gaddafi, and now he’s the Chair of the Fraud Machine that is the 71% taxpayer owned Royal Bank of Scotland.
www.prweek.com 
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