The UK Banking Fraud

Libor scandal: gunfight on Threadneedle Street

This is not just some common or garden mishap or even misbehaviour at a big business. This is 'fraud'

• Editorial
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 July 2012 20.50 BST

Only two weeks into the market-rigging scandal and already the economic-policy establishment resembles the final scene of Reservoir Dogs: a bunch of men in suits all blindly shooting at each other.

Former Barclays boss Bob Diamond has landed the Bank of England's Paul Tucker in deep trouble, with a note implying that he encouraged the misreporting of money-market rates. Barclays' ex-chief operating officer Jerry del Missier told MPs this week that Mr Diamond ordered him to fiddle Libor rates. And Barclays was accused by theFinancial Services Authority (FSA) on Monday of a "culture of gaming – and gaming us". The FSA has been dumped in it by Mervyn King, who argued on Tuesday that it was not the Bank's job to regulate Libor – the implication being that it was the FSA's fault. Both the FSA and the Bank agree that prime responsibility for monitoring Libor lay with the British Bankers' Association. And then there is George Osborne, whose main contribution to the chaos has been to suggest to a magazine interviewer that Gordon Brown and his lieutenants are somehow to blame.

This is the British economic-policy establishment under unprecedented pressure – and what an unseemly, blame-ducking, buck-passing panic it presents. Not just the humbling of some of our most senior and respected officials but also the erraticism with which they have been making policy. Take, for instance, the ousting of Bob Diamond. The FSA's Adair Turner told MPs this week that when he spoke to the Barclays chairman Marcus Agius after the Libor scandal, he had expected Mr Diamond to walk the plank. Something was obviously lost in translation, however, because Mr Agius stood down instead. It took the intercession of Mervyn King to force out the Barclays chief executive. And why exactly was Mr Diamond pushed out? Not for any direct involvement in the Libor scandal but, in the words of Mr King yesterday: "They [the bank] have been sailing too close to the wind across a wide number of areas." No actual infraction; just a general sense of having gone too far for too long. This raises the question of why no regulator seriously intervened in Barclays before the Libor scandal. Bob Diamond has been head of one of Britain's biggest banks since January 2011, yet no official has brought up a previous incident where they told the board to change their behaviour or their personnel. The impression left is of rather rough justice. As Andrew Tyrie, head of the Treasury select committee, drily observed in the same session, by that measure every chief executive in the land is "only a couple of bad dinners" away from being forced out of a post.

This is not just some common or garden mishap or even misbehaviour at a big business. As Mr King observed on Tuesday, this is "fraud". And it has not just been carried out by Barclays, but by a string of other financial institutions – who between them fiddled the benchmark interest rates that are used as reference for hundreds of billions of pounds' worth of transactions. Some of the commentary about this scandal has brought up the fact that this occurred during the credit crunch in 2008, when it would apparently have been in everyone's interests to pretend that all was normal in money markets. Maybe, except that this scamming took place over at least four years – and the kindest interpretation of the evidence to date is that officials asked barely any questions. In place of supervision there was what looks like worrying chumminess. "Well done, man. I am really, really proud of you," Mr Diamond emailed the number two at the Bank on his promotion in December 2008. Mr Tucker replied: "You've been an absolute brick."

This story has so far revolved around one bank rigging one set of interest rates, involving emails and letters and committee hearings. Imagine what a serious, wide-ranging inquiry could uncover. Britain certainly needs one, because this blossoming scandal threatens not just the reputation of an industry but the regulators and ministers who let it run riot.

This German circumcision ban is an affront to Jewish and Muslim identity

A German court has rejected identity and history in favour of a liberal concept of choice, but there's more to right and wrong

• 
• • Giles Fraser
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 July 2012 10.50 BST

'Circumcision is the way Jewish and Muslim men are marked out as being involved in a reality greater than themselves.' Detail of Circumcision of Jesus Christ by Pellegrino da San Daniele Photograph: Elio Ciol/Corbis

In November 2010, a Muslim doctor in Germany carried out a circumcision on a four-year old-boy at the request of his parents. A few days later the boy started bleeding and was admitted to Cologne's University hospital who reported the matter to the police. Last month, after a lengthy legal battle, a judge in Cologne outlawed male circumcision as being against the best interests of the child.

Muslim and Jewish groups have been understandably outraged. This week, Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel set herself against the court ruling by telling members of her CDU party that "I do not want Germany to be the only country in the world in which Jews cannot practise their rites." It beggars belief that a German chancellor ought to have to utter such a sentence.

Yet the circumcision of babies cuts against one of the basic assumptions of the liberal mindset. Informed consent lies at the heart of choice and choice lies at the heart of the liberal society. Without informed consent, circumcision is regarded as a form of violence and a violation of the fundamental rights of the child. Which is why I regard the liberal mindset as a diminished form of the moral imagination. There is more to right and wrong than mere choice.

Indeed, making choice the gold standard in every circumstance is to concede to the moral language of capitalism.

I was circumcised by the mohel when I was eight days old on my grandmother's kitchen table in St John's Wood. It wasn't done for health reasons. It was a statement of identity. Whatever is meant by the slippery identification "being Jewish" – my father is, my mother is not – it had something to do with this. Circumcision marked me out as belonging. Years later, when my wife objected to the circumcision of our new son on the grounds that it was cruel and unnecessary, I reluctantly gave way. Intellectually, I knew that there was little left of "being Jewish" to protect. After all, my wife was not Jewish and I had become a Christian priest. Halachically, it made no sense.

For all of this, I still find it difficult that my son is not circumcised. The philosopher Emil Fackenheim, himself a survivor of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, famously added to the 613th commandments of the Hebrew scriptures with a new 614th commandment: thou must not grant Hitler posthumous victories. This new mitzvah insisted that to abandon one's Jewish identity was to do Hitler's work for him. Jews are commanded to survive as Jews by the martyrs of the Holocaust. My own family history – from Miriam Beckerman and Louis Friedeburg becoming Frasers (a name change to escape antisemitism) to their grandson becoming Rev Fraser (long story) to the uncircumcised Felix Fraser – can be read as a betrayal of that 614th commandment.

And I have always found this extremely difficult to deal with. On some level, I feel like a betrayer.

As I argued in this week's Church Times, one of the most familiar modern mistakes about faith is that it is something that goes on in your head. This is rubbish. Faith is about being a part of something wider than oneself. We are not born as mini rational agents in waiting, not fully formed as moral beings until we have the ability to think and choose for ourselves. We are born into a network of relationships that provide us with a cultural background against which things come to make sense. "We" comes before "I". We constitutes our horizon of significance. Which is why many Jews who consider themselves to be atheists would still consider themselves to be Jewish. And circumcision is the way Jewish and Muslim men are marked out as being involved in a reality greater than themselves.

This, however, is a complete anathema to much modern liberal thought that narrows religious and ethical language down to the absolute priority of personal autonomy and individual choice. Liberalism constitutes the view from nowhere. Liberalism has no sense of history. And it is because the Cologne court had so little sense of history that it made such a ridiculous and offensive decision.

After 800 years, the barons are back in control of Britain

The Magna Carta forced King John to give away powers. But big business now exerts a chilling grip on the workforce

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 20.30 BST

King John, surrounded by English barons, ratifying the Magna Carta at Runnymede. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Image

Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen's estates surrounding Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn't work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born.

At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries) call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old rugby pitch of Brunel University's Runnymede campus. It's a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.

The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the hill into the woods behind the campus – pressed, as if by the ineluctable force of history, ever closer to the symbolic spot. From the meeting house they have built and their cluster of tents, you can see across the meadows to where the Magna Carta was sealed almost 800 years ago.

Their aim is simple: to remove themselves from the corporate economy, to house themselves, grow food and build a community on abandoned land. Implementation is less simple. Soon after I arrived, on a sodden day last week, an enforcer working for the company which now owns the land came slithering through the mud in his suit and patent leather shoes with a posse of police, to serve papers.

Already the crops the settlers had planted had been destroyed once; the day after my visit they were destroyed again. But the repeated destruction, removals and arrests have not deterred them. As one of their number, Gareth Newnham, told me: "If we go to prison we'll just come back … I'm not saying that this is the only way. But at least we're creating an opportunity for young people to step out of the system."

To be young in the post-industrial nations today is to be excluded. Excluded from the comforts enjoyed by preceding generations; excluded from jobs; excluded from hopes of a better world; excluded from self-ownership.

Those with degrees are owned by the banks before they leave college. Housing benefit is being choked off. Landlords now demand rents so high that only those with the better jobs can pay. Work has been sliced up and outsourced into a series of mindless repetitive tasks, whose practitioners are interchangeable. Through globalisation and standardisation, through unemployment and the erosion of collective bargaining and employment laws, big business now asserts a control over its workforce almost unprecedented in the age of universal suffrage.

The promise the old hold out to the young is a lifetime of rent, debt and insecurity. A rentier class holds the nation's children to ransom. Faced with these conditions, who can blame people for seeking an alternative?

But the alternatives have also been shut down: you are excluded yet you cannot opt out. The land – even disused land – is guarded as fiercely as the rest of the economy. Its ownership is scarcely less concentrated than it was when the Magna Carta was written. But today there is no Charter of the Forest (the document appended to the Magna Carta in 1217, granting the common people rights to use the royal estates). As Simon Moore, an articulate, well-read 27-year-old, explained, "those who control the land have enjoyed massive economic and political privileges. The relationship between land and democracy is a strong one, which is not widely understood."

As we sat in the wooden house the diggers have built, listening to the rain dripping from the eaves, the latest attempt to reform the House of Lords was collapsing in parliament. Almost 800 years after the Magna Carta was approved, unrepresentative power of the kind familiar to King John and his barons still holds sway. Even in the House of Commons, most seats are pocket boroughs, controlled by those who fund the major parties and establish the limits of political action.

Through such ancient powers, our illegitimate rulers sustain a system of ancient injustices, which curtail alternatives and lock the poor into rent and debt. This spring, the government dropped a clause into an unrelated bill so late that it could not be properly scrutinised by the House of Commons, criminalising the squatting of abandoned residential buildings.

The House of Lords, among whom the landowning class is still well-represented, approved the measure. Thousands of people who have solved their own housing crises will now be evicted, just as housing benefit payments are being cut back. I remember a political postcard from the early 1990s titled "Britain in 2020", which depicted the police rounding up some scruffy-looking people with the words, "you're under arrest for not owning or renting property". It was funny then; it's less funny today.

The young men and women camping at Runnymede are trying to revive a different tradition, largely forgotten in the new age of robber barons. They are seeking, in the words of the Diggers of 1649, to make "the Earth a common treasury for all … not one lording over another, but all looking upon each other as equals in the creation". The tradition of resistance, the assertion of independence from the laws devised to protect the landlords' ill-gotten property, long pre-date and long post-date the Magna Carta. But today they scarcely feature in national consciousness.

I set off in lashing rain to catch a train home from Egham, on the other side of the hill. As I walked into the town, I found the pavements packed with people. The rain bounced off their umbrellas, forming a silver mist. The front passed and the sun came out, and a few minutes later everyone began to cheer and wave their flags as the Olympic torch was carried down the road. The sense of common purpose was tangible, the readiness for sacrifice (in the form of a thorough soaking) just as evident. Half of what we need is here already. Now how do we recruit it to the fight for democracy?

Degree classifications are extremely crude - and pretty useless

When they graduate, students should simply be given a transcript of their marks as a record their study, says Jonathan Wolff

• 
• • Jonathan Wolff
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 July 2012 18.45 BST

Universities themselves do not find the classifications useful. Any student applying for further study will be asked for a transcript of all their marks, in addition to their degree result. Photograph: tomas del amo /Alamy

In Geneva a few weeks ago, as the American and European participants were discussing which insect repellent to use on their post-conference hikes, I had to leave in order to attend yet another meeting of an exam board. This year, I've been chair of several of our boards, "faculty observer" on others, and external examiner elsewhere, and so my desk has been littered with exam scripts and spreadsheets. My head is full of rules for dealing with classification and borderline cases. Degree schemes are like snowflakes: no two are alike.

North Americans rarely understand the expression "exam board" unless they have worked or studied in the UK. Of course, they grade their papers, often with substantial help from their teaching assistants. But once the marks are settled, that is it as far as the department is concerned. Marks go off to the university administration, and in due course find their way on to student transcripts.

Here, by contrast, at least two academics assess or moderate each paper. The mark then exists in a form of limbo until ratified by the exam board, the external examiner and the university examinations section. In some cases, a single essay will be read by three different people, and the mark adjusted twice, although this is rare. Marking in the UK is a process of handicraft, not mass production.

And what do we do with these finally tuned judgments? We put them into a computer that weights them for year of study, ignores some of the bad ones, and produces a number through some form of averaging process. That number will assign the candidate either to a clear degree class, or to a twilight borderline zone. If borderline, we then use another set of rules, apparently too complex for any computer, taking account of such things as "exit velocity", "spread of marks" and any extenuating conditions, in turn graded A, B, C, and X. In such discussions a score of academics can spend a couple of happy hours for each degree programme trying to detect whiffs of high-class performance. Inevitably, and tragically, some students will be consigned to a lower classification by a hair's breadth.

And after all of this, what do we end up with? Given that many students now regard a 2:2 as hugely disappointing, the great majority find a way to do what they need to achieve at least an upper second. Some, with talent and hard work, will do even better and will be awarded a first. Those who in the old days would have performed weakly are likely to have failed at an earlier stage, and so just won't be there in the graduating class. I haven't seen a third in years. Averaging between a 2:2 and a fail is a real challenge. Hence after all this work, we assign perhaps 20% of students to the first-class category and most of the rest to the upper second-class group, with a sprinkling of lower seconds.

In other words, the job of an exam board is to spend a huge amount of effort taking a rich profile of information – how students have done over a wide range of assessments – and turn it into extremely crude classification. And it is classification that we find useless for our own purposes. Any student who applies for further study will be asked for a transcript of all their marks, in addition to their degree result. Universities apparently don't think the degree classification conveys very much useful information, and so why should anyone else?

I'm coming to the conclusion that we should simply issue students with transcripts to record their study, and leave it at that. There are proposals to replace degree classifications with grade point averages, as in the US. That's a move in the right direction, but why have a summary measure at all? School achievement isn't summarised into a single number, and why should it be any different at university? If a student on a German and geography degree did brilliantly in German and miserably in geography what purpose is served by reducing it all to a single score? And so my plea: No more classifications. No more algorithms. No more borderlines. And, most heartfelt of all, no more exam boards.

• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London

Free access to British scientific research within two years

Radical shakeup of academic publishing will allow papers to be put online and be accessed by universities, firms and individuals

• Ian Sample, science correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 July 2012 19.53 BST

Professor Dame Janet Finch's recommendations on open access publishing prompted the government's decision.

 

The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet.

Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

In an interview with the Guardian before Monday's announcement David Willetts, the universities and science minister, said he expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two years.

The move reflects a groundswell of support for "open access" publishing among academics who have long protested that journal publishers make large profits by locking research behind online paywalls. "If the taxpayer has paid for this research to happen, that work shouldn't be put behind a paywall before a British citizen can read it," Willetts said.

"This will take time to build up, but within a couple of years we should see this fully feeding through."

He said he thought there would be "massive" economic benefits to making research open to everyone.
Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article.

Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have risen steeply in recent months as researchers have baulked at journal subscription charges their libraries were asked to pay.

More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has been called the "academic spring".

The government's decision is outlined in a formal response to recommendations made in a major report into open access publishing led by Professor Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at Manchester University. Willetts said the government accepted all the proposals, except for a specific point on VAT that was under consideration at the Treasury.

Further impetus to open access is expected in coming days or weeks when the Higher Education Funding Council for England emphasises the need for research articles to be freely available when they are submitted for the Research Excellence Framework, which is used to determine how much research funding universities receive.

The Finch report strongly recommended so-called "gold" open access, which ensures the financial security of the journal publishers by essentially swapping their revenue from library budgets to science budgets. One alternative favoured by many academics, called "green" open access, allows researchers to make their papers freely available online after they have been accepted by journals. It is likely this would be fatal for publishers and also Britain's learned societies, which survive through selling journal subscriptions.

"There is a genuine value in academic publishing which has to be reflected and we think that is the case for gold open access, which includes APCs," Willetts told the Guardian. "There is a transitional cost to go through, but it's overall of benefit to our research community and there's general acceptance it's the right thing to do.

"We accept that some of this cost will fall on the ring-fenced science budget, which is £4.6bn. In Finch's highest estimation that will be 1% of the science budget going to pay for gold open access, at least before we get to a new steady state, when we hope competition will bring down author charges and universities will make savings as they don't have to pay so much in journal subscriptions," he added.

"The real economic impact is we are throwing open, to academics, researchers, businesses and lay people, all the high quality research that is publicly funded. I think there's a massive net economic benefit here way beyond any £50m from the science budget," Willetts said.

In making such a concerted move towards open access before other countries, Britain will be giving its research away free while still paying for access to articles from other countries.

Willetts said he hoped the EU would soon take the same path when it announced the next tranche of Horizon 2020 grants, which are available for projects that run from 2014. The US already makes research funded by its National Institutes of Health open access, and is expected to make more of its publicly funded research freely available online.

Professor Adam Tickell, pro-vice chancellor of research and knowledge transfer at Birmingham University, and a member of the Finch working group, said he was glad the government had endorsed the recommendations, but warned there was a danger of Britain losing research projects in the uncertain transition to open access publishing.

"If the EU and the US go in for open access in a big way, then we'll move into this open access world with no doubt at all, and I strongly believe that in a decade that's where we'll be. But it's the period of transition that's the worry. The UK publishes only 6% of global research, and the rest will remain behind a paywall, so we'll still have to pay for a subscription," Tickell said.

"I am very concerned that there are not any additional funds to pay for the transition, because the costs will fall disproportionately on the research intensive universities. There isn't the fat in the system that we can easily pay for that." The costs would lead to "a reduction in research grants, or an effective charge on our income" he said.

Another consequence of the shift could be a "rationing" of research papers from universities as competition for funds to publish papers intensifies. This could be harmful, Tickell said. For example, a study that finds no beneficial effect of a drug might be seen as negative results and go unpublished, he said.

Stevan Harnad, professor of electronics and computer science at Southampton University, said the government was facing an expensive bill in supporting gold open access over the green open access model.

He said UK universities and research funders had been leading the world in the movement towards "green" open access that requires researchers to self-archive their journal articles on the web, and make them free for all.

"The Finch committee's recommendations look superficially as if they are supporting open access, but in reality they are strongly biased in favour of the interests of the publishing industry over the interests of UK research," he said.

"Instead of recommending that the UK build on its historic lead in providing cost-free green open access, the committee has recommended spending a great deal of extra money — scarce research money — to pay publishers for "gold open access publishing. If the Finch committee recommendations are heeded, as David Willetts now proposes, the UK will lose both its global lead in open access and a great deal of public money — and worldwide open access will be set back at least a decade," he said.

Was the Petrol Price rigged too?

By Rowena Mason, Emma Rowley in The Telegraph

9:00PM BST 15 Jul 2012

Concerns are growing about the reliability of oil prices, after a report for the G20 found the market is wide open to “manipulation or distortion”.

Traders from banks, oil companies or hedge funds have an “incentive” to distort the market and are likely to try to report false prices, it said.

Politicians and fuel campaigners last night urged the Government to expand its inquiry into the Libor scandal to see whether oil prices have also been falsely pushed up.

They warned any efforts to rig the oil price would affect how much drivers pay at the pump, which soared to a record high of 137p per litre of unleaded earlier this year.

Robert Halfon, who led a group of 100 MPs calling for lower fuel prices, said the matter “needs to be looked at by the Bank of England urgently”

“We need to know whether the oil price has been manipulated in a similar way to Libor,” the MP for Harlow said. “This impacts on millions of people all round the country concerned about the price of petrol at the pumps.”

Petrol retailers use oil price “benchmarks” to decide how much to pay for future supplies.

The rate is calculated by data companies based on submissions from firms which trade oil on a daily basis – such as banks, hedge funds and energy companies.

However, like Libor – the interest rate measure that Barclays was earlier this month found to have rigged – the market is unregulated and relies on the honesty of the firms to submit accurate data about all their trades.

This is one of the major concerns raised in the G20 report, published last month by the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).

In the study for global finance ministers, including George Osborne, the regulator warns that traders have opportunities to influence oil prices for their own profit.

It points out that the whole market is “voluntary”, meaning banks and energy companies can choose which trades to make public.

IOSCO says this “creates opportunity for a trader to submit a partial picture in order to influence the [price] to the trader’s advantage”.

In an earlier report, the regulator concluded: “It is open to companies to report only those deals that are in their own best interests for the rest of the market to see.”

The price reporting agencies, Platts and Argus, argue they employ journalists to weed out false data submitted by oil traders.

IOSCO says reporters are “well-aware that traders have an incentive to push the market one way or another and do not generally believe everything they are told”.

However it points out this system is heavily reliant on the “experience and training” of journalists to make a judgement about what the oil price should be.

Further alarm bells are being sounded by US regulators, who have already pointed out the rate-rigging scandal could spread to the oil market.

Scott O’Malia, a top official at the US Commodities Futures Commission, has drawn attention to the “striking similarity” between the potential for manipulating oil and Libor.

British regulators carrying out the Wheatley Review into the Libor scandal have this week signalled they will look into whether other markets were skewed.

Paul Tucker, the Bank of England’s deputy governor, told MPs that Barclays’ abuse of the Libor system may be only one part of the banks’ dishonesty over crucial financial information.

Politicians last night called on the Bank of England and the Government to take heed of IOSCO’S finding about the oil market to prevent another crisis of confidence in the banks.

Lord Oakeshott, the former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the oil price system ought to be examined in the wake of the Libor scandal.

“Clearly it’s right we must shine a light on how other crucial benchmark prices are reported, especially when they affect the cost of living for millions of motorists,” he said.

Brian Madderson, chairman of the Petrol Retailers’ Association, also called for an investigation into the “alarming” conclusions of the G20 report.

“All the petrol retailers buy their products based on Platts prices,” he said. “If IOSCO thinks the price is open to manipulation it could well be and that would affect prices on the forecourts.”

Banks are also calling for reform of the oil price system, amid fears that it is open to abuse by a minority of traders.

Simon Lewis, chief executive of the Global Financial Markets Association, has raised concerns about the “opaque” way the oil price is worked out.

In a letter to IOSCO, he said price reporting agencies may not be as impartial as they claim, because they take fees from banks and oil companies to provide information.

“Incentives may arise to favour those who pay greater subscriber fees or provide greater access to market information,” he said.

Some experts, such as Raymond Learsy, a former commodities trader and author of Oil and Finance, have been warning for years that the oil market is open to corruption.

“Given how important Libor is, if that can be manipulated, then why can’t oil be manipulated?” he said. “The price lends itself to manipulation. The oil price is not a true reflection of supply and demand.”

The reporting agencies have hit back at claims their prices are open to distortion. In a joint statement, Platts and Argus said there are “fundamental differences” in the way Libor and oil prices are reported.

“Independent price reporting organisations are independent of and have no vested interest in the oil and energy markets,” they said. “Their ownership is transparent, and strict internal governance separates editorial and commercial functions. Independent price reporting organisations are not market participants, nor providers of transaction execution, clearing or settlement services.”

Platts added that there are four main differences between oil prices and Libor – the quality of its data, its independence, competition between reporting agencies and the transparency of its methodology.

Rausing's death shows not how similar, but how different, rich and poor are

Eva Rausing's story is part of the white noise of the age

The law bows to wealth, and is vicious to the ordinary. 

• 
• • Tanya Gold
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 July 2012 20.00 BST

'If a drug user from anywhere other than Belgravia were caught with 52g of cocaine, prison would be a likely outcome. But not for ­Rausing.' Illustration: Joe Magee

Eva Rausing, a rich, attractive and insatiable drug addict, died in mysterious circumstances in a wedding cake mansion in Belgravia, like a Tatler story gone wrong. Two things are interesting, beyond the natural cognitive dissonance of a "woman with everything" being exposed, in the end, as having nothing. Her death thwarts the populist fantasy of what great wealth should do – that is, bring joy: those photographs of Rausing in Barbados, haunted in a synthetic paradise, shake the basic assumptions of an acquisitive society. These assumptions are a fiction created by the fiction pedlars of advertising – products bring happiness, therefore the ability to amass them must bring happiness too – and they are all junk.

First were her donations to Mentor, a charity that, among other things, assists the parents of drug addicts in caring for their grandchildren. With her husband and heir to the Tetra Pak packaging fortune, Hans Kristian Rausing, being treated in hospital for alcohol withdrawal following his arrest on suspicion of her murder, this is presumably what will happen to her children, and so it was a gift of extraordinary prescience and wistfulness.

Whether drug charities should accept financial aid from active drug addicts – Rausing was, for a time, on the board of Clouds, a rehabilitation centre in Wiltshire – which may "enable" the fantasy that their lives are purposeful and functional, is a complex question, but it is easily answered by the woeful underfunding of drug treatment in Britain. If I were the chief executive of a drug rehabilitation charity when Eva Rausing walked in with her golden money, I would take it.

Then there was her arrest, in 2008, for trying to take drugs (10g of crack cocaine; 2.5g of heroin; 2.35g of diethylpropion) into the US embassy in London's Grosvenor Square, where she was going, of all things, to a party. The police then searched her car and mansion, where they found 220mg of diazepam, 5.63g of crack cocaine, 2.9g of heroin and 52g of cocaine. And this, in public terms, is where the narrative of Eva Rausing swerves off into something more tragic and depraved than a solitary death.

If an obsessive drug user from anywhere other than Belgravia – or Knightsbridge, or Mayfair – were caught with 52g of cocaine, prison would be a likely outcome. But not for Rausing. Her lawyer corresponded with the Crown Prosecution Service, and Prince Charles, a global expert in the magical power of prestige to soothe any practical problem, said she deserved a second chance. The judiciary bowed to wealth: no charges were brought against the Rausings. Sir Ian Blair, then the Metropolitan police commissioner, was furious, and said the decision not to prosecute "reminds me of the 19th-century legal comment often attributed to Sir James Mathew: 'In England justice is open to all – just like the Ritz.'"

But compared with the protestations of the Rausings' expensive lawyers and the foolish belief in the inherent goodness of wealth, Blair's complaints were a feather on the wind.

No one should go to prison for drug possession. The criminalisation of drug addiction is infantile and, no matter where you stand on the exhausting weakness v disease debate, it does not work. This month the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, told the Commons home affairs select committee that we are losing the "war" on drugs, that we are even going "backwards" – but none of this evidence of 30 years, he says, is an argument to change the law, and he will not, luckily for drug addicts, "despair".

His bouncy politician's optimism aside, he did not address the dramatic cuts in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and charities' grave doubts over the viability of the government's new total-recovery-or-bust strategy, at all. Drug addiction is a criminal matter (for most) and there it is – more junk.

The government's lack of understanding of the reality of drug addiction, its wonky road of false dawns and thwarted hopes, can be summed up in the following quote from its strategy document. The government seeks a "transformation from a system that has concentrated on engaging and retaining people in treatment to one that is capable of delivering recovery outcomes … we must go further than merely reducing the harms caused by drug misuse, and offer every opportunity for people to choose recovery as a way out of dependency". It is another beard for cuts and privatisation, and another feather on the wind.

So this is the oldest story – of the law's viciousness towards the ordinary, and its polite reticence towards the wealthy, and it feels like the white noise of the age. The dialogue against the poor, the unemployed and recipients of welfare is rising to a scream under this coalition government, and it is producing a criminal justice system to match: with so many feckless you need at least the appearance of muscular punishment.

I read again yesterday of Nicholas Robinson, the student jailed for six months for "looting" a £3.50 bottle of water during the riots last year, and the evening and weekend courts planned for the Olympics, so justice can be swiftly meted out. We are segueing, in all the details, towards a darker age. Eva Rausing was unlucky, but her death tells not how similar the rich and poor are in essence, but how different.