Live data from Hacker News

The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

cumex-files.com

101–110 of 112 posts

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#101

correctiv.org is producing phantastic investigative journalism on a regular basis. one of their most important revelations recently was about a pharmacist who was selling heavily diluted cytostatic agents for chemo therapy. several people died because of this [1]. really awesome about correctiv is that they not just release their findings - they really make sure that something is going to be done about it. for exampl…

> it seems that journalism is more and more responsible for work police should be doing I think this echoes a lot of sentiment , if perhaps without concrete evidence, across the world. How can we solve this?

Embrace the trend and take responsibility for solving unsolved crime and peacefully bringing about justice and/or resolution (ie- inform the uninformed) to the problems for which you have solved.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#102

This article is very hard to follow to figure out what has actually happened or what CumEx is. In the beginning of the article is a rough description of the trade in question: > Cum-ex – this is the name German media have given to this scam. Internationally the different variants of these trades are known as dividend arbitrage. > Cum-ex and its variant cum-cum were highly complex share deals with no economic purpose…

Thank you very much for this. This should be the opening of the article. I don't know why articles start like novels. With so much information being published nowadays, I would think the start of the article would include a summary/abstract to help the reader decide to dedicate the time to read the entire article.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#103
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for this comment, saved me alot of time, and gave me a nice chuckle. this form of article is becoming way to common lately

It is extra weird that the ones they are talking about in this Dostoyevskian intro, are the authors of the piece themselve.

People abuse Gonzo style journalism all the time these days. What they don't realize is that Hunter S Thompson was a) an inherently interesting character and b) his character was half-bullshit most of the time to make the story more interesting.

Journalists keep injecting themselves into their stories without being either interesting or contribute in any way (other than to show off their narrative and descriptive writing skills).

I hope it's just a short term trend or due to journalism budget cuts.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#105

correctiv.org is producing phantastic investigative journalism on a regular basis. one of their most important revelations recently was about a pharmacist who was selling heavily diluted cytostatic agents for chemo therapy. several people died because of this [1]. really awesome about correctiv is that they not just release their findings - they really make sure that something is going to be done about it. for exampl…

the one thing I find most concerning about these kind of revelations is that it seems that journalism is more and more responsible for work police should be doing.

The police are generally bound by procedural rules that prevent them from doing these kind of investigations, especially where much of the direct evidence (or in many cases, the actual crime itself) is based on entrapment.

However, once journalists have done the dirty work, the police can use their reporting to find evidence that would survive legal challenges to the means through which it was collected.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#106
post #48

This reminds me of the way most application developers aren't security experts, and it's taken decades with a lot of very public hacks for awareness about the risks to be spread and for a set of security practices and middleware to evolve (hashed & salted passwords, CSRF mitigation, input sanitation, etc.), to make it feasible for normal developers to create reasonably secure applications. It seems something similar…

if you are going to be opening law to competition-based evolution, you are opening the can of worms of "alternative government systems" , which is not acceptable by the elite groups that run the world.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#107
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Danish tax disaster has a long history beginning in the early 00's when it was decided to reform and digitalize the tax collection. Contractors were brought in to develop a nation-wide tax collection system that would reduce the cost of collecting tax. This system was to take many years to develop and a plan was made to gradually lay off employees in the tax collection agency as the system was made ready so that…

I vaguely recall Holland went through a similar process and is facing similar problems. Could the Dutchies in the know here on HN shed some light on this?

Our tax agency offered a really good package to people who voluntarily left the organization, sometimes over €100.000 euro. the idea was to lose around 4500 people in 7 years this way, but the package was so attractive about 6500 people immediately took it.

The entire idea was really not implemented well and now the tax agency needs like 4000 new people to replace the ones they didn’t want to lose. Lots of senior knowledge is gone and the entire agency is struggling doing its main tasks, resulting in hundreds of millions of missed taxes.

Re: The CumEx-Files – How Europe's taxpayers have been swindled of €55B

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For people in democratic republic countries" So obviously people from the UK, Norway, Netherlands, and Spain should not get involved /facepalm

First we have to address our ridiculously outdated structure and actually government sanctioned class system. Having a queen and a ridiculously nationalist political parties has to be the most embarrassing parts of being British. God (lol) divinely gives power to the queen (lol) through birthrite (lol) and we are her subjects (lol). It is so deeply offensive that I am meant to he her slave, and its shocking how much…

Having a queen and a ridiculously nationalist political parties has to be the most embarrassing parts of being British.

I think Boris Johnson does quite a splendid job in the British embarrassment department.

Post reply on HN