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Fraudsters of the world, come to London. And bring your dirty money

Kleptocrats love this country, knowing full well they’ll be free from proper scrutiny writes Nick Cohen in The Guardian

‘No one can say how many in the UK are living off immoral earnings.’ Illustration: Dominic McKenzie/The Observer 



There is no better representation of the decline of the English upper class into the global rich’s servant class than Ben Elliot. On the one hand, the co-chairman of the Tory party is now a rent collector, hauling in money for the Johnson administration from the Russian rich and native hedge fund bosses.

On the other, he is an actual servant: an upmarket flunkey, to be sure, praised by society magazines for his “puppyish schoolboy charm”, but a flunkey nonetheless. Elliot is a founder of the Quintessentially “concierge” service that gives the super-rich anything they want: luncheon on an iceberg; the Sydney Harbour bridge closed for a wedding proposal. There’s nothing Elliot won’t do for paying customers up to and including arranging a meeting with our future sovereign. Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, is Elliot’s aunt and it appears that no considerations of good form or good manners have prevented him monetising the connection. Not that the prince appears to mind. A Quintessentially advert interrupts a montage of shots of yachts and celebrities to quote his royal highness as saying he is “particularly grateful” to Quintessentially for organising a party he attended. Members of Elliot’s Quintessentially club donate to the Conservatives. The Conservatives gave Elliot £1.4m of taxpayers’ money in 2016 to “attract the right high-value individual investors to the UK through bespoke programmes”. If on arrival, those high-value individuals went on to show how valuable they were by hiring Quintessentially and donating to the Tories, the circle would be complete.

Upstairs has moved downstairs in the remains of the Tory day and a large segment of British capitalism is now employed as the best servants money can buy. The law, PR, City, estate agency and banking know that easy riches come from serving the large part of the world where it pays to forget Balzac’s warning that the secret of a great fortune no one can explain is invariably an undetected crime. For want of an agreed name I propose “Corruptistan” to cover Russia and the ex-Soviet states, the kleptocracies of Africa and the Middle East and probably soon China as the communist elite learns how to expatriate its wealth. 

Given the secrecy of the financial system, the defunding of the police and regulatory authorities and the English libel law, no one can say how many in the UK are living off immoral earnings. But two statistics and one quotation give us a measure of the UK’s dependency culture. Graeme Biggar, of the National Economic Crime Centre, said a “disturbing proportion” of criminal money from the old Soviet Union is “laundered through UK corporate structures”. Companies House, meanwhile, has become a front organisation for organised crime. So welcoming is it to criminals that 335,000 of its listed companies do not reveal the name of their beneficial owners. And 4,000 of the names it appears to reveal turn out on close inspection to belong to children aged two or under.

Last month, Professor Sadiq Isah Radda, a Nigerian anti-corruption official, encapsulated the consequences of the UK’s tolerance of theft. An opponent of corruption in Nigeria, home to countless online scams? A joke figure, you might think. But Radda spoke with a seriousness no government minister can muster when he said the UK was “the most notorious safe haven for looted funds in the world today”. The corruption we facilitate destablised Nigeria and, he might have added, many other countries besides.

Last week, a handful of MPs asked why the Conservatives were so peculiarly soft on this particular crime. In 2017, they promised a law that would compel the foreign owners of UK property to reveal their identities. (The willingness to allow private and state criminals to launder their wealth anonymously through the prime London property market was Radda’s main charge against Boris Johnson.) Nothing has been heard of this bold “anti-corruption strategy” since.

Likewise, the government has said it wants to stop Companies House being a crime scene where anyone can set up a firm without proof of identity or the most cursory checks. Even the Conservative party appeared to agree that it should not be harder to apply for a passport than to set up a shell company. But once again nothing happened.As for the recommendations in the Russia report on money laundering, they vanished as soon as they were made.

The SNP’s Alison Thewliss asked: “I wonder who benefits from this delay. Is it the oligarchs and those to whom they donate?” Pat McFadden, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, asked Conservative MPs why they thought “their party has been such an attractive destination” for £2m in gifts from Russian donors.” Change must come soon or not at all. Britain has benefited so greatly from the wealth of the corrupt we may soon be at the stage where we cannot afford to clean ourselves up. So many people are making so much money, what was once outrageous has become normal. This to my mind is why the security services and the judges just shrug when oligarchs with links to hostile foreign powers use the intimidatory costs of England’s unreformed legal system to menace critics. No one likes hard questions about a nation’s guilty secrets, not even the men and women who are professionally obliged to ask them. Labour certainly believes that tolerance of fraud is now part of the government’s economic strategy and the Treasury wants to loosen what few protections exist to compensate the financial services industry for the Brexit debacle.

Cynical readers may not care as long as the UK can wallow in streams of hot money. They should recall how many times con artists have tried to fleece them. Online fraud is the crime you are most likely to suffer from, yet nowhere in the government’s online safety bill is there a word about fighting the fraudsters who flourish on social media platforms. Once the Tories started turning a blind eye, they found it impossible to stop.

You cannot profit from economic crimes committed abroad while enjoying the rule of law at home. The presence of the global plutocracy’s valets at the top of government and society shows the UK no longer even bothers to pretend that it can.

What oath do IAS, IPS, IRS officials take when you join the Indian Government?

Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint 

Shekar Gupta in The Print

By the time you are reading this, Aryan Khan would be walking out of jail, if 25 days too late. Everything we know about the case as yet tells us there was nothing to justify his arrest, incarceration and being charged under such a draconian law in any case. His ordeal, however, has given us another ‘star’ of sorts, Sameer Dawood/Dnyandev Wankhede.

What kind of star — good or bad, a wronged hero or a villain who finally got caught out — you can decide. He’s a polarising figure. For some, he’s a reservation fraud who allegedly claimed a place in the quota reserved for Scheduled Castes, hiding the fact that he’s a Muslim. No problem with that, except that caste-based reservation wouldn’t be available to him. For others, he’s a Muslim and a Dalit who’s being victimised by entitled elites only because he dared to go after them.

For some, he’s a bully and probable “blackmailer” who targeted the rich and famous, especially in Bollywood, for fame, and allegedly, ransom. For others, he’s finally the one brave narc who decided to do his job , no matter how powerful his quarry.

We cannot take any side on this, and we aren’t. Because we do not have the facts. Our instinct comes from subjectivity, because that’s how we’d see the facts arrayed before us. We shall get off the kerb on this, and focus on something else. Less tangible, and not polarising. It is called propriety in government service. Especially as applied to the All India and Class I Services.

Let me ask you a trick question. How many IAS officers can you name in the country right now? Not members of your family or pals, but from the headlines, especially the recent ones? Or IPS officers? And finally, that one service we see so little of in our normal lives directly, the Indian Revenue Service, the so-called ‘taxman’ or woman.

So, is there a prominent IRS officer you can name off the bat? I bet it would be Sameer Wankhede. He’s not only the most famous IRS officer in the country today, but in a very long time. It is serendipitous that the two most headlined names from the All India Services at this point, IAS and IPS, have also not necessarily been there for good reasons.

Former Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai gave a grovelling apology to Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam for making false allegations over the 2G case, where he conjured up that notional loss figure of Rs 1.76 lakh crore in 2007.

It was an obvious exaggeration. But such was the mood at that point you couldn’t argue with him without risking being labelled ‘pro-corruption’. Now that story has unravelled. As indeed, unfortunately, India’s telecom sector. The same thing happened soon enough with coal.

The IPS now. The same Mumbai which produced Wankhede, the zonal narcotics chief who now, in his own defence, is citing the testimony of the young man he charged with a crime with a possible 10-year sentence (‘see, even Aryan says he’s made no charge of extortion against me’), has also given us a police commissioner who’s absconding. All of Maharashtra Police cannot find one of its most senior officers, and non-bailable warrants are being posted everywhere. 

If IPS, IRS and IAS are the trinity of our vaunted civil services and Param Bir Singh, Sameer Wankhede and Vinod Rai are their representatives in today’s most prominent — and bad — headlines, what does it tell us?

We have chosen that order deliberately. The IPS guy on top because he’s an absconder, ducking multiple criminal charges; the IRS man next because he’s in court seeking protection from arrest and yet to answer a hundred questions on his conduct; and the IAS last, for once, because at least one thing we know about Vinod Rai from reputation and track record is that he is, financially, spotless. Just that it has not achieved the best results for India.

These three stars of today speak poorly for our civil services in their own different ways. It is to fight for these services that lakhs of our brightest young people slog for years at coaching academies, often making their parents sell their land and buffaloes, in that one hope: My kid will crack UPSC. Then, they walk into their respective academies with pride in their hearts, stars in their eyes and mostly — I speak from experience of having spoken at these academies and interacted with young recruits — a great deal of idealism.

No, I am not about to lapse into convenient mass condemnation. Mine has never been the ‘sab chor hain’ view. It is absolutely to the contrary, which I dared to say even during those bizarre Anna Hazare months. The point here is, for every Param Bir Singh, there are thousands of others in his service doing their jobs honestly, sincerely, and at very modest government salaries. As there must be in the IAS or the IRS. It is just that we do not know about them. It is just that people who are becoming famous have done so for all the wrong reasons.

Trick questions again: Name the last six incumbents in the office of the Cabinet Secretary, Director, Intelligence Bureau, and Chairperson of the Central Board of Direct Taxes? If you can name six of each, that is 18 who sat at the apex respectively of these three services, I’d say you are brilliant. But you know the three names in the headlines today, sadly. Or some of you might recall the name of the young IAS officer who was asking his police to ‘smash the farmers’ heads’ in Haryana, or one in Chhattisgarh bashing up a passerby on camera for ‘defying the lockdown’ and other such. Good guys go unnoticed, unsung. Tragic, because they are straight, professional, and play by the book.

Now, what is that book? Bollywood deserves our eternal gratitude because it can always make a telling point for us. People dug out this clip from that otherwise noisy nothing of a movie Tiranga (made in 1993 by Mehul Kumar), where Raj Kumar, in his characteristic, much-mimicked drawl, pulls out two papers from his pocket to confront the corrupt traitor of a police officer. These are for you, he says. One is the order of my release from jail, and the other for your arrest. The clip is being shared with the caption ‘Aryan Khan to Wankhede’.

Go to the movie on YouTube and listen to the context of that clip. What oath do you take when you join this service, don this uniform, he asks, and then reads out the oath every Indian joining all-India services mandatorily takes while joining their service: ‘I do swear/solemnly affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to…the Constitution of India…that I will carry out the duties of my office loyally, honestly and with impartiality’.

We shall leave it to the conscience of these latest ‘superstars’ of the civil services to ask themselves if they’ve been true to this oath. It’s also a question many others in these services need to ask themselves, as they lock up students for sedition and UAPA only because of the cricket team they support, civil, servant, fame, or for sharing the Greta Thunberg toolkit, or trumping up charges against anybody they think the political bosses want ‘fixed.’ In 2021, they aren’t better than the notorious Soviet hatchet man of seven decades ago, Lavrentiy Beria, who offered to arrest somebody Stalin was irritated with. But under which charge, Stalin apparently asked him. You give me the man, Beria said, and I will give you the charge.

Late S.S. Khera was one of those immortal doyens of the old ICS, and so self-effacing that Google also throws up so little on him. He was India’s first Sikh Cabinet Secretary (1962-64), made his fame using tanks to stop the Partition riots in Meerut in 1947, and totally frowned at civil servants seeking fame. One mention in the newspapers, he said, is one black mark. Two, a bad ACR. And a photo should invite the sack. Now we know the times have changed in six decades. But we also see what this madness for fame and stardom has done to some people from great services. Even as most others work sincerely, in relative anonymity.

Too big to jail: why the crackdowns on dodgy finance have been so ineffective

Despite so many government promises, we’ve ended up with inadequate laws and toothless regulation. The Pandora papers show why urgent action is needed writes Prem Sikka in The Guardian

'HSBC admitted “criminal conduct” and was fined a record $1.9bn and signed a deferred prosecution agreement.’ Photograph: Lim Huey Teng/Reuters
Wed 6 Oct 2021 11.00 BST


The Pandora papers data leak has once again highlighted the predatory practices of the world’s political and financial elites – enriching themselves by looting the public purse, or exploiting laws which they themselves helped to establish.

Aabout $3.6tn (£2.6tn) of the proceeds from bribery, embezzlement, money laundering, tax evasion and cronyism are laundered each year, undermining the social fabric of nations across the globe.

It is not the first time that tax avoidance, bribery, corruption, money-laundering and a lack of transparency have been exposed. The Panama papers, the Paradise papers, the HSBC leaks, the Jersey leaks, the FinCEN files, the Bahamas leaks and others have provided abundant evidence of dodgy financial dealings. The UK finance industry – aided by armies of accountants, lawyers and finance experts – is central to this trade, yet little has changed since those first revelations emerged.

The inertia is institutionalised because the political system is available for hire to people with fat wallets. Financial contributions to political parties create an atmosphere where scrutiny, and unwelcome laws, are discouraged. As Mohamed Amersi, who funded Boris Johnson’s campaign to become prime minister and whose financial dealings were revealed this week, puts it: “You get access, you get invitations, you get privileged relationships, if you are part of the setup.”

Further, parliament’s register of members’ financial interests shows that too many MPs and lords are on the payroll of corporations, including some engaged in illicit financial flows. The inevitable outcome is poor laws and a lack of regulation.

In 2018, the government launched the national economic crime centre to tackle high-level fraud and money laundering. The centre has yet to prosecute a single case – even though there is plenty of evidence of wrongdoing. In some cases, banks may even have forged customer signatures on court documents used to repossess homes and recover debts.

The 2017 Criminal Finances Act introduced the offence of failure to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion. No corporate body has been prosecuted. Little has been done to shackle the tax abuses industry dominated by big accounting firms even though, on some occasions, judges have declared their avoidance schemes to be unlawful. Despite the potential loss of huge amounts of tax revenues, no major firm has been investigated, fined or prosecuted. On the contrary, they continue to advise government departments, and sometimes receive lucrative government contracts.

The 2010 Bribery Act introduced the offence of “failure to prevent bribery”, to enable regulators to sue corporations for corrupt practices. The Crown Prosecution Service has secured just one conviction. The under-resourced Serious Fraud Office has secured just one conviction after the company itself pleaded guilty. Separately, Standard Chartered Bank, Rolls-Royce and four other companies were effectively let off with a deferred prosecution agreement.

The UK political system excels at cover-ups and protects wrongdoers. In 2012, a US Senate committee documented HSBC’s involvement in money laundering. The bank admitted “criminal conduct” and was fined a record $1.9bn and signed a deferred prosecution agreement. Yet though HSBC was supervised by the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, there was no UK investigation.

Later, a letter emerged from the then chancellor George Osborne, along with correspondence from the governor of the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, urging the US authorities to go easy on HSBC as it was too big to jail. There was no ministerial statement in the UK parliament to explain the cover-up.

The Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) was closed by the Bank of England in 1991. It was the biggest banking fraud of the 20th century, yet the then Conservative government did not order an independent investigation. Through US investigations I became aware of a secret document codenamed the Sandstorm Report. Using freedom of information laws I requested a copy: the government refused. After five and half years of litigation, judges ordered the UK government to release a copy to me. It shows that the government has been protecting individuals, including dead ones, connected with al-Qaida, Saudi intelligence, royal families in the Middle East, smuggling, murder, financial crimes and other nefarious practices.

I recently raised the HSBC and BCCI cover-ups in the House of Lords. The minister did not respond.

The UK remains a favourite destination for dirty money because the political and regulatory system is ineffective. An independent public inquiry into the finance industry is long overdue, but even if one were granted it would be hard to be optimistic: it seems our law enforcement agencies have been captured by corporations. The revelation that the City of London police fraud investigation unit is now funded by Lloyds Bank – an organisation severely criticised by the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking for its role in the unresolved frauds at HBOS – does not inspire any confidence. Will it take another financial crash to generate enough political pressure to change the system?

Personal Guarantee, Debt Recovery and Fraud Tycoons

 

'Cleaning up Indian cricket is a lost cause' Ramachandra Guha

Social historian Ramachandra Guha can easily cast a spell on the listener with his deep knowledge and his spontaneity. Guha, who was briefly, in 2017, a member of the Committee of Administrators appointed by the Supreme Court of India to oversee reforms in the BCCI, has written a cricket memoir, The Commonwealth of Cricket that traces his relationship with the sport from the time he was four. He says it will be his last cricket book, but as he reveals in the following interview, he will continue his love affair with the game - despite the way it is administered in India. Courtesy Cricinfo

This is your first cricket book in nearly two decades, after A Corner of the Foreign Field was published in 2002. Why did you decide to write it now?
Two things. One, I wanted to pay tribute to my uncle Dorai, my first cricketing mentor and an exemplary coach and lover of the game, who is still active at the age of 84, running his club. I knew at some stage I would like to pay tribute to him.

Paying tribute to people I admire, respect, have been influenced by, is something I have done through my writing career. I have written about environmentalists, scholars, biographers, civil liberties activists. So I also wanted to write about this cricketer [Dorai] who had inspired me.

And I did my stint at the board. That kind of completed the journey from cricket-mad boy through player and writer and spectator to actually being inside the belly of the beast. So I thought that the arc is complete and maybe I should write a book. 

In the book you have defined four types of superstars: 1. Crooks who consort with and pimp for bigger non-cricket-playing crooks. 2. Those who are willing and keen to practise conflict of interest explicitly. 3. Those who will try to be on the right side of the law but stay absolutely silent on […] those in categories 1 and 2. 4. Those who are themselves clean and also question those in categories 1 and 2." Bishan Bedi, you say, is the only one you can think of in that last category. Why is that?
Because he is a person of enormous character, integrity and principle. He never equivocates, he never makes excuses. And he calls it as it is. These kinds of people are rare in public life in India. They are rare in the film world, they are rare in the business world, and virtually invisible in politics. They are rare also in journalism, if you go by the ways in which editors in Delhi, for many years, have been intrigued with politicians, sought Rajya Sabha seats or favours, houses for themselves…

To find someone like Bishan Bedi, who is ramrod straight in his conduct, in any sphere of public life in India today is increasingly rare. He is also an incredibly generous man. When I first met him, at my uncle's house for dinner, he gave a cricket bat to my uncle - because he never wants to take freebies.

Bishan always has given back much more to youngsters he has nurtured. He is very blunt, he is abrasive, like me. He makes enemies because he sometimes says things in an indiscreet or impolite way. But it's really the quality and calibre of his character that compels admiration in me today. When I was young, it was the art and beauty of his spin bowling. Today, it's the kind of man he is. 

You write that the superstar culture "that afflicts the BCCI means that the more famous the player (former or present) the more leeway he is allowed in violating norms and procedures". How does that start?
Your question compels me to reflect on a time when players had too little power. When Bedi once gave a television interview where he said some sarcastic things, he was banned for a [Test] match in Bangalore in 1974. Players had to get more power, they had to get organised, they had to be noticed, they had to be paid properly, which took a very long time. The generation of Bedi and [Sunil] Gavaskar was not really paid well till the fag end of their careers.

But now to elevate them into demigods and icons… one of the things I talk about is [Virat] Kohli and [Anil] Kumble and their rift [Kumble was forced to step down as coach after the 2017 Champions Trophy]. How essentially Kohli had a veto over who could be his coach, which is not the case in any sporting team anywhere.

[MS] Dhoni had decided: I'm not going to play Test cricket. He was only playing one-day cricket. And I said [in the CoA] that he should not get a [Grade] A contract. Simple. That contract is for people who play throughout the year. He has said, "I'm not playing Test cricket." Fine. That's his choice and he can be picked for the shorter form if he is good enough. [They said] "No, we are too scared to demote him from A to B." And more than the board, the CoA, appointed by the Supreme Court, chaired by a senior IAS officer, was too scared. I thought it was hugely, hugely problematic. So I protested about it while I was there. And when I got nowhere, I wrote about it.

Is it the fans who create this culture?
Of course. They venerate cricketers. That's fine. Cricketers do things that they cannot do. It's the administrators who have to have a sense of balance and proportion. And not just with cricketing superstars who are active but also superstars who are retired. Again, to go back to one of the examples I talk about in my book: that [Rahul] Dravid could have an IPL contract, but other coaches in the NCA couldn't. Now, you can't have double standards like this. Cricket is supposed to be played with a straight bat.

It is not Dravid's fault. He just used the rules as they existed for him. It was the fault of the BCCI management that it created this kind of division and caste system within cricketers, within coaches, within umpires, within commentators. It offended my ethical sensibilities. So I protested. 

You recently told Mid-Day that "N Srinivasan and Amit Shah are effectively running Indian cricket today".
It is true.

Are they really running the board?
Yeah, that's my sense. Along with their sons and daughters and sycophants. That's what it is. And [Sourav] Ganguly [the BCCI president] has capitulated. I mean, there are things he should not be doing, given his extraordinary playing record and his credibility, whether he should be practising this shocking conflict of interest. The kind of example it sets is abysmal. I say this with some sadness because I admired Ganguly as a cricketer and as a captain. I'm glad I'm out of it and I'm just a fan again. I can just enjoy the game and not bother about the murkiness within the administration.

Things were meant to change under Ganguly.
Again, I go back to what I said about Bedi: people of principle are rare in any walk of life. And in India, particularly, there is a temptation for fame, for glory, to cosy up to who's powerful. It's very, very, very sad, but it happens. Maybe it's something to do with a deep flaw in our national character, that we lack a backbone in these matters.

In the book, where you address the topic across two chapters, as well as during your tenure in the CoA, you say you were frustrated by how deep the roots of conflict of interest have grown, not just in the BCCI and state associations but also across the player fraternity. Why is it so difficult for both administrators and players, some of whom are former greats, to understand conflict?
Because it's ubiquitous and everybody is practising it. Woh bhi kar raha hai, main bhi karoonga. Kya hai usme? [He's doing it, so I'll also do it. What's the big deal?] It's hard to resist, you know, especially [when] the moral compass of people around you is so low that you just kind of go along with it. 

Sunil Gavaskar is another person who said had multiple conflict of interests.
To Dravid's credit, he saw the point and gave up his Delhi Daredevils contract relatively quickly. He exploited the rules as they were and once I protested and it became public, he realised that he had probably erred and done a wrong thing. Maybe Ganguly could have learned from Dravid in what he's doing now. Cleaning up Indian cricket is a lost cause.

In 2018, the Supreme Court modified its original order of 2016, passed by Chief Justice TS Thakur concerning the Lodha reforms. In 2019, immediately after taking over, Ganguly's administration asked the court to relax key reforms, which would virtually wipe out the reforms. Is it now the responsibility of the court to decisively put the lid on the case?

I'm not losing any sleep. Cricket lovers have to live with a corrupt and nepotistic mode. We should just move on and enjoy the cricket.

In the book, you say you write on history for a living and on cricket to live. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
When I started writing this book, I had just finished the second volume of my Gandhi biography. It's a thousand pages long, inundated with millions of footnotes. And when you write a properly researched work of history, you have to have your sources at hand. So you compile a paragraph, which is based on material you gather, and then you have to scrupulously footnote that paragraph. One paragraph may be drawn from four different sources - a newspaper, an archival document, a book - and you have to put all that in.

Whereas I wanted to write this freely and spontaneously. I could only do that in the form of cricket memoir. So that's how it happened. I wanted a release from densely footnoted, closely argued, scrupulously researched scholarly work. And this came as a kind of liberation.

You call yourself a cricket fanatic. For me, on reading the book, it's the romantic in you that comes to life.
Yeah, I think I am more a romantic than a fanatic. I'm cricket-obsessed. I've been cricket-obsessed all my life, but more in a romantic way; "fanatic" may be slightly wrong because that assumes you always want your team to win. And that's certainly not the case with me anymore.

You write in the book about a fanboy moment you had: "On this evening I did something I almost never do - take a selfie, with Bishan Bedi and the coach of the Indian team, Anil Kumble." Can you recount that incident?
It was the BCCI's annual function. One of the few things I was able to do in my brief tenure at the board was accomplished on that day: to have [Padmakar] Shivalkar and [Rajinder] Goel, two great left-arm spinners, get the CK Nayudu [Lifetime Achievement] Award - the first time a non-Test cricketer had been honoured. And also to have Shanta Rangaswamy get the first Lifetime Achievement Award for Women.

So it was a happy occasion. It was in my home town [Bengaluru]. Bishan had come from Delhi. Kumble was then the coach of the [Indian] team. I know Bishan well and Anil a little bit. I don't know that many cricketers, actually. All these years running about the game, my only friend is really Bishan Bedi, apart from Arun Lal, who was my college captain.

Kumble, of course, would admire Bishan as a kind of sardar [chief] of Indian spin bowling. I saw them and I said I'll take a selfie. What I don't mention is that the selfie was taken by Anil, because he is technologically much more sophisticated than either Bishan or me. He took that selfie very artfully, which I would not have been able to do. It came out nicely. It is the only photograph in the book. 

I am a partisan of bowlers and of spin bowlers. For me, Kumble has always been underappreciated as a cricketer. To win a Test match you need to take 20 wickets. And, arguably, Kumble has therefore won more Test matches than Sachin Tendulkar. As I again say in the book, in 1999, when Tendulkar was about to be replaced as captain, they should really have had Kumble - he is a masterful cricketing mind, but there is a prejudice against bowlers. So in a sense, [the photo was with] someone who was a generation older than me, Bedi, and someone of a generation younger than me, Kumble - both cricketers I admire, both with big hearts, and both spin bowlers, as I was myself.

That's why the caption says: "two great spin bowlers and another" - kind of implying I was a spin bowler, but a rather ordinary one.

Is it true that this possibly could be your last cricket book?
Almost certainly. It would be, because I really have nothing else to say. This is a kind of cricketing autobiography and it has covered a lot. This is my fourth cricket book. I will watch the game. I will appreciate it.

Why don't more Indian cricketers write books?
I think Dravid has a great book in him because he is a thinking cricketer. So might Kumble. But my suspicion is, Kumble will not write a book. Dravid just might. He could write a book called The Art of Batsmanship. Bedi could have written a book because he is an intelligent person. He writes interesting articles, including on politics and public life. By the way, books don't sell. That's another reason. Occasionally, cricketers have thought, I will write a book and I will make Rs 30-40 lakhs (about US$50,000) on it. But cricket books don't really make that much money.

The UK is one of the most corrupt nations on Earth

Fortunes are being made by political favourites, while Brexit could cement London’s reputation for money laundering writes George Monbiot in The Guardian

‘Awarding coronavirus contracts to unusual companies, without advertising, transparency or competition now appears to have been adopted as the norm.’ Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA


Fear, shame, embarrassment: these brakes no longer apply. The government has discovered that it can bluster through any scandal. No minister need resign. No one need apologise. No one need explain.

As public outrage grows over the billions of pounds of coronavirus contracts issued by the government without competition, it seems determined only to award more of them. Never mind that the consulting company Deloitte, whose personnel circulate in and out of government, has been strongly criticised for the disastrous system it devised to supply protective equipment to the NHS. It has now been granted a massive new contract to test the population for Covid-19. 

Never mind that some of these contracts have reportedly cost taxpayers £800 for every protective overall delivered. Never mind that at least two multi-million pound contracts appear to have been issued to dormant companies. Awarding contracts to unusual companies, without advertising, transparency or competition now appears to have been adopted as the norm. Several of the firms that have benefited from this largesse are closely linked to senior figures in the government.

Every week, Boris Johnson looks more like George I, under whose government vast fortunes were made by political favourites, through monopoly contracts for military procurement. Any pretence of fiscal rectitude or democratic accountability has been abandoned. With four more years and the support of the billionaire press, who cares?

The way the government handles public money looks to me like an open invitation to corruption. While it is hard to show that any individual deal is corrupt, the framework under which this money is dispensed invites the perception.

When you connect the words corruption and the United Kingdom, people tend to respond with shock and anger. Corruption, we believe, is something that happens abroad. Indeed, if you check the rankings published by Transparency International or the Basel Institute, the UK looks like one of the world’s cleanest countries. But this is an artefact of the narrow criteria they use.

As Jason Hickel points out in his book The Divide, theft by officials in poorer nations amounts to between $20bn and $40bn a year. It’s a lot of money, and it harms wellbeing and democracy in those countries. But this figure is dwarfed by the illicit flows of money from poor and middling nations that are organised by multinational companies and banks. The US research group Global Financial Integrity estimates that $1.1tn a year flows illegally out of poorer nations, stolen from them through tax evasion and the transfer of money within corporations. This practice costs sub-Saharan Africa around 6% of its GDP.

The looters rely on secrecy regimes to process and hide their stolen money. The corporate tax haven index published by the Tax Justice Network shows that the three countries that have done most to facilitate this theft are the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. All of them are British territories. Jersey, a British dependency, comes seventh on the list. These places are effectively satellites of the City of London. But because they are overseas, the City can benefit from “nefarious activities … while allowing the British government to maintain distance when scandals arise”, says the network. The City of London’s astonishing exemption from the UK’s freedom of information laws creates an extra ring of secrecy.

The UK also appears to be the money-laundering capital of the world. In a devastating article, Oliver Bullough revealed how easy it has become to hide your stolen loot and fraudulent schemes here, using a giant loophole in company law: no one checks the ownership details you enter when creating your company. You can, literally, call yourself Mickey Mouse, with a registered address on Mars, and get away with it. Bullough discovered owners on the Companies House site called “Xxx Stalin” and “Mr Mmmmmm Xxxxxxxxxxx”, whose address was given as “Mmmmmmm, Mmmmmm, Mmm, MMM”. One investigation found that 4,000 company owners, according to their submitted details, were under the age of two.

By giving false identities, company owners in the UK can engage in the industrial processing of dirty money with no fear of getting caught. Even when the UK’s company registration system was revealed as instrumental to the world’s biggest known money-laundering scheme, the Danske Bank scandal, the government turned a blind eye.

A new and terrifying book by the Financial Times journalist Tom Burgis, Kleptopia, follows a global current of dirty money, and the murders and kidnappings required to sustain it. Again and again, he found, this money, though it might originate in Russia, Africa or the Middle East, travels through London. The murders and kidnappings don’t happen here, of course: our bankers have clean cuffs and manicured nails. The National Crime Agency estimates that money laundering costs the UK £100bn a year. But it makes much more. With the money come people fleeing the consequences of their crimes, welcomed into this country through the government’s “golden visa” scheme: a red carpet laid out for the very rich. 

None of this features in the official definitions of corruption. Corruption is what little people do. But kleptocrats in other countries are merely clients of the bigger thieves in London. Processing everyone else’s corruption is the basis of much of the wealth of this country. When you start to understand this, the contention by the author of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano, that the UK is the most corrupt nation on Earth, begins to make sense.

These activities are a perpetuation of colonial looting: a means by which vast riches are siphoned out of poorer countries and into the hands of the super-rich. The UK’s great and unequal wealth was built on colonial robbery: the land and labour stolen in Ireland, America and Africa, the humans stolen by slavery, the $45tn bled from India.

Just as we distanced ourselves from British slave plantations in the Caribbean, somehow believing that they had nothing to do with us, now we distance ourselves from British organised crime, much of which also happens in the Caribbean. The more you learn, the more you realise that this is what it’s really about: grand larceny is the pole around which British politics revolve.

A no-deal Brexit, which Boris Johnson seems to favour, is likely to cement the UK’s position as the global entrepot for organised crime. When the EU’s feeble restraints are removed, under a government that seems entirely uninterested in basic accountability, the message we send to the rest of the world will be even clearer than it is today: come here to wash your loot.

Is the Reserve Bank of India corrupt or inefficient?

Pakistan, IMF and the Small Print

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times



Finally, after flip-flopping for nine months, the PTI government has signed on the dotted line with the IMF. It has also revived the PMLN’s tax amnesty scheme that it once lambasted as “a national security threat”. In the bargain, it has ditched the finance minister, Asad Umar, and the Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan, Tariq Bajwa. Both gentlemen seemed to be overly concerned about protecting Pakistan’s interests, while their boss, Prime Minister Imran Khan, was ready to throw in the towel. Peeved, Mr Umar is threatening to reveal details of his disenchantment with the IMF.

To be honest, though, there’s no point in haggling when you don’t have a leg to stand on. Without the IMF’s financial assistance, we will default on our external payments and be declared bankrupt. Without an extra injection of funds from the Tax Amnesty Scheme, we will have to cut back on defense or development expenditures, which we can ill-afford.

The “deal” with the IMF is subject to certain tough conditions. First, we must get the green light from FATF. As we speak, Pakistani officials are negotiating compliance before the Asia Pacific Group of FATF chaired by India. A lot of homework has been done. But this will be an on-going review process. If there are terrorist attacks in India whose footprints can be traced to Pakistan, the FATF file on Pakistan will be opened again.

Second, the IMF wants Pakistan to roll over its debts to China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE so that the burden of debt payments can be staggered over time. So Prime Minister Khan will have to pick up the begging bowl and grovel in faraway capitals all over again.

Third, the provinces will have to be pressured to accept a cut in their constitutional share of federal revenues so that IMF targets of the primary deficit can be met. While PTI governments in three provinces may be expected to roll over and play dead, Sindh will scream. But NAB can be leveraged to silence it.

Fourth, the IMF wants to “facilitate trade”. This will mean an end to export subsidies and restraint on increasing import duties. In other words, trading volumes will be determined exclusively by the exchange rate.

Fifth, the exchange rate will float freely so that the SBP doesn’t deplete its reserves by selling forex in the market in order to prop up the rupee. In other words, there will be continuing devaluation and rising inflation.

Sixth, the IMF wants to encourage spending on development and poverty alleviation. With given debt payments, that will lead to pressure on defense expenditures. Can we expect the brass to receive this with equanimity?

Last, but most important, it is an established fact that Washington leverages the IMF, World Back, Asian Development Bank and other international financial institutions through the US Treasury to achieve its foreign policy goals. Should Pakistan fail to deliver on US objectives in Afghanistan and India – a difficult task – we may expect these institutions to get tougher on future installments of funds.

The PTI Tax Amnesty Scheme is not dissimilar to the PMLN scheme that fetched less than Rs 100 Billion. But with the economy headed into a deeper trough, even that amount seems far-fetched. Some wisdom has therefore prevailed in allowing tax payable to be determined in the next six weeks but payment made over the course of the next twelve months, albeit with some surcharge.

But, like the PMLN scheme, the PTI scheme suffers from one major defect. It excludes “holders of public office” in the last twenty years. Why twenty years? Why not the last five or last thirty? What is the objective criterion for this cut-off date? Then there’s the definition of public office. It is all encompassing, spanning full three pages of an Ordinance. It includes everyone from the President of Pakistan at the top to Tehsil Nazims at the bottom, including paid private sector executives, advisors, consultants, etc., of statutory organisations or institutions or organisations in the control of the government of Pakistan. In other words, it excludes tens of thousands of officials and “public” representatives who are amongst the most corrupt in the country. This is the cream of the elite that has captured the state. This is the elite against whom we all love to rail. But what is good for the goose is not good for the gander. It seems that the bowels of the state of Pakistan are not to be cleansed after all.

The Tax Amnesty Scheme was nine months in the making. If the PMLN scheme had been extended when the PTI government took over, there would have been a lot of money in the coffers today. In the event, it took half a day to be promulgated via a Presidential Ordinance after proroguing the National Assembly so that it couldn’t be debated.

The small print in the IMF Agreement and Tax Amnesty Scheme testifies to the incompetence of the PTI regime in the face of rising national security challenges to the state of Pakistan. The forecast is grim.

Pakistan - Pity The Nation

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times





If the Miltablishment is the irresistible force, then Nawaz Sharif is becoming an immovable object. Indeed, the more the Miltablishment engineers political change to suit its designs, the more Nawaz Sharif strengthens his narrative of “victimhood” in the popular imagination by exposing its past machinations.

Mr Sharif is being branded a “traitor” and “Indian agent” by the Miltablishment and its minions for publicly challenging its national security paradigm in which non-state militant actors continue to play a central role in asymmetric strategies at home and abroad. It is interesting, however, that he is not the first, and he certainly won’t be the last to admit or challenge this fact. General (retd) Hameed Gul (ex-ISI) boasted of the fact while General (retd) Mahmud Durrani (ex-NSA) and General Pervez Musharraf (ex-COAS/President) candidly admitted it. Asif Khosa (ex-IGP/ex-FIA) and Imran Khan have both publicly criticized this national security “contingency” as proving harmful to the cause of Pakistan but they have done so without arousing the ire of the Miltablishment. Indeed, every academic, local or foreign, worth his or her salt has penned reams on the subject, almost always in critical mode, but no book or article has been banned in Pakistan for articulating such views. More specifically, everything about the Mumbai attack of 2008 has been revealed, either in Pakistan or in India and the USA, in the media or during various court trials of various accused, including the role of the “hidden hand” of the deep state. So, what’s the big deal about Nawaz Sharif alluding to much the same thing today?

In 1964, President General Ayub Khan accused Fatima Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam’s sister, of being “pro-India and pro-America” when she stood up to challenge his legitimacy at the polls. Ironically enough, Nawaz Sharif is now faced with the same allegations when he is seeking to challenge the Miltablishment’s favourites in the forthcoming elections. General Ayub rigged the 1965 elections and but didn’t last long enough to enjoy the fruits of his victory. Will the current front runners meet the same fate?

The Miltablishment may be arrogant and self-righteous but it is not unaware or uncritical of the negative role and dire consequences that these non-state actors have spawned in domestic and foreign affairs. It claims to be seeking ways and means to minimize the militant role of “some” of these actors without directly provoking them and destabilizing the state in unmanageable ways. Its anger at Nawaz Sharif is directed not so much at his challenge of their strategic national security narrative but at his refusal to seek their advice on how to decommission these non-state actors or exploit them tactically in the realm of policy. Therefore, while it may be kosher to privately admit that Mumbai was a blunder that badly backfired, doing so in front of Pakistan’s adversaries is not okay because it is bound to extract a heavy penalty.

The Miltablishment is also angry at Nawaz Sharif for trying to diminish its predominant role in national life by “defaming” its institutional chiefs. General Musharraf’s “treason” trial is the original sin, followed by attempts to degrade General Raheel Sharif’s personal credentials.

The Miltablishment’s outrage over Mr Sharif’s latest remarks is in line with its indignation over Dawnleaks. It did not take umbrage when he expressed negative sentiments in the NSC meeting about the role of these non-state actors controlled by the Miltablishment. But it saw red when he leaked it to the media because it suspected that the leak was aimed at endearing himself to the international community at the cost of the Miltablishment instead of effecting a united civil-military front against it. It may be recalled that its reaction was much the same against Mr Asif Zardari following the Osama bin Laden-Abbotatabad affair in 2012 when it accused Ambassador Hussain Haqqani in Memogate of acting “treasonably” against the “interests of Pakistan” (read Miltablishment). It is once again in the same angry reaction-mode: it sees Nawaz Sharif as trying to save his skin at home by appealing to the international community as the good guy and portraying the Miltablishment as the evil empire.

The Miltablishment felt humiliated and resentful when Nawaz Sharif sacked COAS General Jehangir Karamat three months before his retirement in 1998 for merely supporting the idea of a National Security Council. It hit back in 1999 when he tried to sack General Musharraf for his irresponsible Kargil adventure. The two sides mended fences to jointly take up cudgels against a common PPP foe in 2012. Now they are at each other’s throats again, with the Miltablishment making common cause with former adversaries. And so it goes on.

The Miltablishment has eliminated anyone who has dared to cross its path and its national security policies have only wrought fear and instability. The politicians, too, without exception, have been corrupt, incompetent or authoritarian. Pity the nation that has been so trampled upon by its custodians since independence.

Oligarchs hide billions in shell companies. Here's how we stop them

The Panama Papers have helped tax authorities recover over $500m around the world. Property registries could ensure that even more is recovered

Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer in The Guardian 

 

According to Navi Pillay, the former UN high commissioner for human rights, ‘The money stolen through corruption every year is enough to feed the world’s hungry 80 times over.’ Photograph: Arnulfo Franco/AP


Two years ago we published the Panama Papers after an anonymous source provided 2.6 terabytes of internal data from the dubious Panamanian law firm of Mossack Fonseca. We shared the data with 400 journalists worldwide and together revealed how the wealthy and powerful use shell companies to hide their assets. Such companies are exploited by dictators, drug cartels, mafia clans, fraudsters, weapons dealers and regimes like North Korea and Iran to hide their shady business transactions.


As a consequence, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the prime minister of Iceland, resigned. Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif did the same, and in the United Kingdom even David Cameron’s father was implicated. So far, the Panama Papers have helped tax authorities around the world to recover more than $500m in unpaid taxes and penalties. It could be far more if lawmakers finally take action.

After publishing the Panama Papers, we have heard a lot of promises from politicians around the world. They have talked about the need for transparency, and while the discussion is warm, the details are complicated: a multilateral exchange of information and stronger anti-money laundering regulations are as difficult to implement and control as they sound.

But why bother? There is a far less bureaucratic and more powerful measure: public beneficial ownership registries. Databases in which citizens can easily access and explore the owners of companies. Not the nominee director, not the fake shareholder – the real owner. The person at the center of the matryoshka-like corporate structures, or, as experts refer to them: the ultimate beneficial owner of a company.

A database of actual owners would enable companies to check with whom they are actually doing business with. It would enable activists, journalists and skeptical citizens to investigate the individuals running dubious companies which earn millions in alleged “consulting contracts”, which are in many cases nothing more than concealed payments of corruption money. It would also give prosecutors the opportunity to follow dark money without having to rely on nerve-racking, time-consuming legal maneuvers with foreign governments.

Searchable by company and by individual names, it would enable investigators to see if Dictator X or Autocrat Y owns companies in Country Z. Combined with a public property register, it would narrow, if not close, loopholes which allow oligarchs and their relatives to betray their own citizens and stash plundered money across the globe.

Creating beneficial ownership registries will not be easy. Recently, the UK House of Lords rejected an attempt to force overseas territories under British control to create said registries. And in the United States, where some states make it more difficult to vote than to start a company, there has yet to be any reasonable public discussion about creating these transparent registries, making America a willing accomplice in global corruption. The treasury department in 2015 estimated that approximately $300bn in illicit proceeds are generated in the US per year!

Critics of public beneficial ownership registries often say that exposing company owners could put them in danger of blackmail or even kidnapping. However, no data supports such claims and there will likely never be any. As it is, the financial elite often surround themselves with the symbols and spoils of wealth, such as big cars, yachts and villas. There is no desire to hide their treasure; in fact, they often flaunt it.

Corruption is a scourge. It hits the poor first and hits them hard. Whole continents are plundered, the proceeds of human trafficking are laundered, wars are financed and violent religious extremism is supported.

The word “corruption” comes from the Latin “corrumpere”, which can mean “to destroy”. Corruption destroys democracy. Corruption costs citizens extraordinary amounts of money. According to estimates, corruption consumes more than 5% of the global gross domestic product.

Developing regions lose more than 10 times the money they receive in foreign aid to illicit financial schemes. Without corruption and the shell companies that make it possible, there might be no need for aid to Africa or Asia. Most importantly, corruption kills. According to Navi Pillay, the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, “The money stolen through corruption every year is enough to feed the world’s hungry 80 times over”.

As Louis Brandeis, the late associate justice of the supreme court of the United States, once pointed out sunlight is the best disinfectant. Hence let the sunshine in! Lawmakers must make public beneficial ownership registries a priority to ensure that institutions remain transparent and democratic.

There is no legitimate reason to allow individuals to own anonymous companies or to help new “entrepreneurs” to create them. Lava Jato in Brazil, the Fifa scandal and nearly every other major corruption case have involved opaque company structures created to bribe, receive bribes or to hide dirty money.

Financial crimes rely on exploiting anonymous companies and trusts, and secrecy jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the states of Delaware and Nevada are partners in those crimes. They must be held accountable.

Waiting for a global solution means waiting a long time, if not forever. The only way to draw the corporate curtain back and expose corruption is for lawmakers to work in the public interest and create public beneficial ownership registries and public property registries now. The more countries that adopt these measures, the less places dictators, human traffickers, weapons dealers and oligarchs can hide.

Lawmakers that claim to stand against corruption should do so by fighting for these kinds of registries now, or forever hold their peace.