The 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…
Sounds like my native Portugal. Spain has similar issues. Not sure about Greece and Italy but I wouldn't be surprised if the same was going on.
Every time i read news about corruption i check if Italy is being mentioned. This is how i found your comment. This is how i decided to reply that yeah in Italy corruption is a second state (voluntarily lowercase).
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…
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
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").
The end-point of your logic is that bankers are too important to prosecute, which is obviously unacceptable.
How can you honestly think that after reading this thread? The parent comment may or may not be correct (I honestly don't know), but author makes it really, really clear what his logic is, and it's nothing like it. If you came to such a conclusion, it means that you skimmed through the comments above in 2 seconds, and not even trying to understand what was actually written.
Oh, I read the thread. The problem with his logic is that it leads to the conclusion of systemic importance; it's the same argument as too big to fail, in a different guise. If the evidence truly is enough to convict in court, isn't it antithetical to the rule of law not to convict, and accept settlements instead?
How can you honestly think that after reading this thread? The parent comment may or may not be correct (I honestly don't know), but author makes it really, really clear what his logic is, and it's nothing like it. If you came to such a conclusion, it means that you skimmed through the comments above in 2 seconds, and not even trying to understand what was actually written.
Excellent comment. People need to be called out for this behavior.
I think my comment pinpointed the contradiction at the heart of his logical argument; it was only acceptable if you don't believe in the rule of law.
I think they're very much in favor of redistributing wealth. It's just the socialists' preferred direction of the redistribution that they don't agree with.
Funny how they're massive socialists when it comes to supporting the military, but not when it comes to healthcare? They're just self-hating socialists.
Honestly, they've been cutting government expenditure pretty heavily across the board (to the best of my knowledge) and military expenditure is way down.
I'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?
How can you honestly think that after reading this thread? The parent comment may or may not be correct (I honestly don't know), but author makes it really, really clear what his logic is, and it's nothing like it. If you came to such a conclusion, it means that you skimmed through the comments above in 2 seconds, and not even trying to understand what was actually written.
Oh, I read the thread. The problem with his logic is that it leads to the conclusion of systemic importance; it's the same argument as too big to fail, in a different guise. If the evidence truly is enough to convict in court, isn't it antithetical to the rule of law not to convict, and accept settlements instead?
Size of organizations involved was never mentioned, so I really don't see how it's related to "too big to fail".
His logic was completely different, and pretty straightforward: that anti-laundering legislation first threw mens rea out, and then ended up in a state where everybody is guilty be default.
> if the Maffia recycles money into legitimate assets in Italy then trades those assets in London, it's pretty rich for an Italian to try to pin that on London It's not rich to criticise London if London is aware of or suspects that it's the Mafia they are dealing with and that the "legitimate" assets are simply laundered. I also don't see why it's rich for an Italian to do the criticising. Perhaps you can explain th…
If a bank has any reason to suspect that funds they are handling involve laundering they have very clear responsibilities to report them, and have strong incentives to do so as the watchdogs have real teeth. It's rich because the police and banks in the UK can and do co-operate with the Italian authorities on criminal activities occurring in Italy, but at the end of the day the crime happened in Italy. Only someone w…
So it's simply grinding an axe against London, and not that, according to the UK National Crime Agency, "hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks, including their subsidiaries, each year”?