Category Archives: Law

Birds of a feather

I altered the expression to a more apt and more temporary version, it is ‘Birds of a feather intersect together’. This view is based on a few different and mostly unrelated pieces of information. To see the string on this loom, we need to make a few jumps.

The first string
The first string is seen with Reuters, who (at https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spies-lies-losses-credit-suisses-scandals-2021-11-04/) gives us ‘Spies, lies and losses: Credit Suisse’s scandals’. Here we see “Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to defrauding investors over an $850 million loan to Mozambique meant to pay for a tuna fishing fleet and is paying U.S. and British regulators $475 million to settle the case under a deal announced in October”, we see the news and we shrug. I did too, you see the people were caught, but that is not the real deal, the issue becomes all the people who get away with it and it is a massive amount of money. I recently write about about some convicted crypto scammer who when the way Victor Fleming did (a gone with the wind joke). So there is one and there are many more. 

The second string
The second string is given to us by the Dutch NOS, a string that makes me reconsider an earlier statement. They give us (at https://nos.nl/l/2404250) ‘‘Unprecedented fraud’ in Pels Rijcken case, civil-law notaries before disciplinary court’, a case with notaries is pretty unheard of, so when I saw “only one notary was responsible for the embezzlement of approximately 11 million euros. Still, several notaries of the office have to appear before the disciplinary court” I was slightly baffled and it opened a window, or a trap door to a third story, one from the past. You see, we are so set in some of our ways that the event of one is pretty amazing, it also gives us food for thought. This comes from my decades in customer service. You see, for every one complaint that makes it to our desks, there are 30 that didn’t. At times that makes sense. People do not bother, others hide the complaint, or paint over it. Yet the larger stage is there. So if one notary is seen as a culprit, how many get away with it? Now, if someone states that this is an unfair comparison, I will agree completely, but the thought remains and the thought still has merit, even if the one out of 30 is not correct. 

String number three
This takes us back, to a TV series that reigned from 1978-1986. It was the girl Dana Plato, and for many young man she was on many minds. She ended with a terrible ending, but in part it was due to an accountant, who was seen as a much larger culprit. We get “In desperation over these traumatic events, she signed over power of attorney to an accountant who disappeared with the majority of her money, leaving her with less than $150,000. She claimed the accountant was never found nor prosecuted, despite an exhaustive search, and that he had also stolen more than $11 million of other people’s money”, an issue around 1989, the culprit was never found, whether the FBI just couldn’t be bothered (because of case pressures and resources), or because the accountant was too slippery and too good. We can only guess on this part, but the larger stage is true. If numbers hold up, with the right economics degree you can become a more wealthy and more successful criminal than any cat burglar can and that is at the forefront here.

You see, the lack of regulation and proper registration is a stage whey that so called queen of Crypto got away with a massive scam, why we see victims like Dana Plato, the notary scam in the Netherlands and the events at Credit Suisse and those are but a few of a massive pool of events. Being a criminal in this day and age is too profitable and there is no turning the tide at present and seemingly not for a long time to come. The news on Crypto scams is making that clear all over the globe. A stage that was foreseen but the administrations are too busy looking at vague accusations and too often lacking clearly stated evidence and numbers by sources like the ICIJ (just an example). 

There is no present course of relieving dangers for anyone and if you do not do your homework you will lose your money with an ever decreasing chance of EVER getting. Penny back. I believe that in part the cutting corners stage that financial institutions have is part of that, it is only part and not all. There is no clear path towards solving it, because the larger players have all stretched their credit cards for too long and the larger banks see that they have a chance to make a few billions in the process, yet the resource limits that some governments have gives some players a chance to take that risk and that is the problem, birds of a feather intersect together. If three of them play individual games, one will get away and if the one makes a deal with the other two, they all go to their beach house whistling I will alway love you, you £1,000,000 voucher. And with that the financial future is close to secure. It is a setting that is unlikely to change any day soon, no matter what some fraud divisions and the FBI claim. 

A setting we are alas forced to live with, but feel free to find that one accountant the authorities missed and hang him from the highest lamp post on Wall Street as a sign of your frustration.

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The citizen model

We have seen the stage where governments all over the world started the wave of ‘Tax the rich’. The stage is wrong on two settings. In the first, we are a nation of laws, most nations are that and taxation is part of law. This results in two groups of people, the criminally inclined people who rely on Tax evasion, not paying the tax and the people relying on accountants and lawyers to set the stage of tax avoidance, which is paying the minimum they have to pay. One is criminal one is not. The tax avoidance people rely on black letter law, not the spirit of the law, but on what the lawmakers wrote down as the playing rules of a game. The rich use tax avoidance, it is not semantics, it is a state where they use the law as they can, as they are ALLOWED to do. 

So what happened to bring this to the surface? 

Well, the BBC gives us a long story and a decent recap (at https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-59062959) where we see ‘The Cryptoqueen’s £13.5m London penthouse’. Here we are introduced to the works of cryptocurrency scammer Dr Ruja Ignatova. 

We are given a lot of emotion, but some of the facts sipe through. There is “facing charges connected to the siphoning of millions of euros from Dr Ruja’s €4bn scam – which consisted of selling something that didn’t exist, a fake cryptocurrency she called OneCoin”, a seemingly clear case, or is it? We add “the lease was signed in August 2016, financial regulators in at least one European country had already issued a warning about OneCoin. A few months earlier, Dr Ruja had pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges in a German court, after bankrupting a metal factory she’d bought and leaving 150 people jobless in 2011”, so we see a stage that tarted in 2011, 11 years earlier. A lease was extended 5 years ago with at least one warning out in the open. Then we get “According to the property deed its owner is Abbots House Penthouse Limited. An anonymous Guernsey shell company – one of 12,000 such companies that own properties in England and Wales – meaning that Dr Ruja’s name would not have to appear on the UK deed, or in public records in the Channel Island.”

Apart from the stage of Fraud and scamming, she broke no laws, she was extremely careful not to break any. Then on 25 October that year she boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens, and vanished off the face of the Earth.

So we have an Oxford educated woman who knew hat strides to walk and she vanished with up to 4 billions and the existence of the current laws allows her to remain unfound until she is old, grey and still worth millions at that point. She won’t care what they call her. She will not care as she lives in her private golden cage, surrounded by walls of anonymous stages and staff (mostly lawyers). Consider if the law is useless to capture a criminal who knows the laws, what do you think will happen to a lawful obedient citizen with equal if not more wealth? What I stated again and again for 11 years is that tax laws need an overhaul. All these emotional people shouting ‘tax the rich’ is fun for TV, but useless in the stage of the law, until they are correctly adjusted. 

And the deceived investors? The ‘OneCoin Investors Entirely Dismiss Class Actions Lawsuit’ headline shows it. They no longer stand a decent chance of getting their money back. Het getting found and serving 90 years in prison is the best they can hope for. And those chances do not look good at present. Consider a wanted person named Ghislaine Maxwell. It took forever to arrest her in Bradford, New Hampshire by the FBI on 2 July 2020. It took them years to get a handle on her and she was wanted in plenty of places. The ultra rich are not breaking laws, the are not wanted and they are allowed to move what THEY own. The stage is laughable, the FBI and other parties required years to make a case, in case of one convicted fraudster 11 years and nothing was gained, not even an arrest. So do you still think I was blowing some horn? The flaccid politicians who claim and not deliver, they are part of the problem and them not overhauling the tax laws for well over a decade is a first sign of evidence. Inaction surpassing a decade, consider that evidence and see where that takes you.

The BBC article (beside the added emotions) is quite the revelation, you should take notice, because this helplessness will continue for at least another decade and I do understand it is too early to say, but when deforestation does not end in 8 years, you’ll know I am right and we both get to take that knowledge to our graves, that is where we are all heading anyway.

The model citizen in a citizen model is a joke, because if the law decides what a model citizen is, we also hold the first clear legal evidence that it pays to be a criminal, did you realise that when you read the BBC article?

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The blank stage

There is a stage, it remains blank. It is not a real stage, it is a stage in our minds. We all have one, there is no exclusion. Yet there is also a stage that we fill with assumptions, with presumptions and with unspoken accusations. We all do it, I do, and you do too. This all started during the night. I dreamt a new story, a dark one, for my doing a really dark one. It is set around the corrupt, a smitten hard burning love at first sight and the rage that follows. My mind is currently naming it ‘Wrath’, it is not merely the wrath of a person, it becomes an escalation when the people had enough, when they are pushed into a corner too hard, not unlike the main character and their response will be ‘interesting’. I need to do a little more research, but the law cases I saw in Australia seem to cover a lot, I reckon that if I look harder in the US I will have all the legal settings ready for the story (if I get around to it). I am still filling in the blanks in ‘Keno Diastima’ and I only have the smallest of basic foundations of ‘Vita Exhauriunt’. Most of ‘How to assassinate a politician’ is complete, but there I feel that more needs to be done, I need to add a cog, a need to add a few more parts. This is hardly a one hour story. But then, I never published an actual script before. Yet I reckon that ‘Wrath’ might open the doors to two of these solutions. So as I started to surf the internet to see if something could wake up my mind, I saw something else. Something I wrote about, something the media at large seems to ignore. So when we get to the story two days ago by the ICIJ ‘Pandora Papers journalists face government backlash for investigating financial secrecy’ (at https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/pandora-papers-journalists-face-government-backlash-for-investigating-financial-secrecy/) something stirred in me. It was the quote “The Pandora Papers is a global investigation led by ICIJ, published earlier this month, that included more than 600 journalists representing 150 partner media organisations from 117 countries and territories. Based on a leak of 11.9 million documents of 14 offshore services providers, the trove revealed the secret holdings of more than 330 politicians and high-level public officials in more than 90 countries and territories, including 35 country leaders. Ambassadors, mayors and ministers,  presidential advisers, generals and a central bank governor appear in the files”, I almost had forgotten about it. The station that this was a leak, it was not. When we see “14 offshore services providers” all whilst at least two of them have above average protection, this has not a leak. This was a hack, a hack by a government player (most likely the USA) the tax issue is setting the wrong steps, there was a delay, but that delay runs out in 8 weeks and in 6 weeks the ‘tax the rich’ BS starts all over again. In all this time the ICIJ NEVER gave anyone a top line summary. Things like nations involved, like nations with the amount of politicians involved. Not names, a mere tally. So far the ICIJ sounds as useless as the stories they give us and when it comes to stories, I am seemingly better then they could ever hope to be. 600 journalists and no one in all that time create a dashboard for the people to see the impact. We see accusations against Tony Blair, yet they also hid inside the story that he did not break any laws, so how useless is that. Apart from the screaming need to overhaul tax laws, something I have been advocating for well over a decade and the NSA hack (the most likely player) was not required. And the agreement, or better stated the quoted agreement that the ICIJ would not go after the source is even more lame. How stupid do 600 journalists need to get? In the end there is a chance that some of them will move ALL their wealth to Nassau, Dubai, or Riyadh giving the other nations ever more to worry about. There are options for Guernsey, Jersey and Monaco. The US and a few more places would lose out, Wall Street would suffer greatly (not the worst idea) and that is merely thee beginning, the EU would also suffer to a much larger degree, all because a few players would not clean their rooms when they were supposed to do that (2009-2011), it has been playing for well over a decade and as people are flim-flammed into looking at environmental issues, we see that the media still has not taken a hard look at the European Environmental Agency report that has been out now for almost a year. Why is that? Is a hard look into the mirror not sexy enough?

Now, we might all think of giving the ICIJ and their 600 journalists time, but they’ve had months, and so far the setting of a dashboard that gives us the stage of no laws broken (especially the billionaires that have pushed through legally available  means their fortune in zero tax havens) should cover well over 60% of these documents (a fictive number). The simplest setting that you all can see is the missing tally, the guardian gave us a tally of what to look through, but they had the 330 politicians, so that part could have been clearly given and a dashboard does not show criminal sides, it is merely that a tally, but I reckon that the tally shows that most of these people are in places the bulk of us do not give a hoot about, just like the billionaires. How many are people of royalty from some Arabian nation? Then we get to the remaining billionaires and we will see that they broke no laws, when you get to that point you get to the stage how useless the ICIJ was from day one and how they blow their own horn whilst these 600 people might be obsolete. I cannot guarantee that, but the assumption might not be far off. 

The blank stage is filled, and as assumption and presumption shake hands the stage goes from black and white to a malleable version of grey where we cannot see the difference between the black and the white. It was that from the very beginning, I pretty much predicted that in the first hour. 

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Baffled

I have that at times, don’t you? We see something, we see a statement and we go towards the ‘Are you for real?’ queue. This happened to me this morning. It was an article about the ‘Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ I had seen a few pass by on earlier occasions and for the most I do not care. There is nothing novel and news about someone blowing its own trumpet trying to be as important as they could never be, to be as innovative as they dream they are and as clever as they could hope to be. Even Google takes a gander as she is now seen as a ‘American former businesswoman’, former being the operative word. We see some papers throw ‘How Elizabeth Holmes lured rich VIPs like Rupert Murdoch to back Theranos’ at us, with the optional “to avoid the potential pressure from larger investment firms to go public, according to an investor at the DeVos family office who kicked in $US100 million for the blood-testing startup”, and there we have the first part, even if it is hidden between the lines. It is ‘to avoid the potential pressure’, and no one here beckons the thought that some (especially investment firms) going with ‘to avoid the gaze of scrutiny’. Then there is ‘Elizabeth Holmes trial hit by new concern: losing too many jurors’ for whatever reasons (one involving Sudoku), and I see no real interest, but in the first setting with what the BBC gives us now, I see a much larger flaw, a flaw of stupidity. You see the article (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59071205) gives us that one part, that one statement ‘Are you for real?’ It was not the headline ‘DeVos family ‘misled’ before investing $100m’, it was the quote “Lance Wade, suggested the DeVos family had not done proper due diligence, to which Ms Peterson replied: “We didn’t think we needed it.”” In this my personal view of Lisa Peterson, a representative of the DeVos family’s investment office, states that it was not needed? How blazingly stupid is this investment office? More important when we consider that Betsy Devos, a Republican, served as education secretary under Donald Trump. We need to wonder if the defendant shouldn’t be let off in line of the old expression of ‘A fool and his/her money are soon parted’. It is one of the reason that only three players are allowed onto my 5G IP, but to be honest, it was done for very different reasons, the idea that an investment firm is too stupid to be allowed anywhere near my IP is a novel idea and I have to admit that I never considered that. The idea that $100,000,000 does not require due diligence with the optional “We didn’t think we needed it” is the wet dream of any organised crime endeavour. So what on earth is the case here? In the setting of Elisabeth Holmes, if she gets nicked for her actions, fine! And in this case, if she is seen as a person who was delusional yet not guilty would be just as as fine as the first option. To be honest, I have no issues with people being delusional, at times we all are. Yet the idea that she might walk because the prosecution side didn’t think it was essential to have due diligence on investing $100,000,000 makes me giggle and if she is released because of that so much the better. To be honest, this is seemingly turning into a new version of war of the Roses, a stage of dumb and dumber part 3. Devos versus Holmes and the one more stupid gets the other one off the hook, a novel setting indeed.

Even as we all recognise that Fraud is a serious crime and a more serious accusation. I now wonder on the diligence that Wade Miquelon, the former chief financial officer of pharmacy chain Walgreens did. This is not an accusation, it is a question. I do not have access to an active case and I do not have insight into what happened before, hence I ask. There is now also the question on ‘Former Safeway boss Steve Burd said his company spent 100 hours doing due diligence on Theranos’ I am not doubting Steve Burd, I wonder how complete the cover-up was to get this man on board. And the less said about Sunil Dhawan the better, from what I gather, he seems to be the putz, an optional shield for Elisabeth Holmes to hide behind, one that didn’t pan out as far as I can see. 

And as I started today, I saw a side of a fraud case that had me baffled, for most of us (ever republicans) this is a case that is loaded with entertainment and that distinction would make me want to put down my game of Sudoku, it honestly would. 

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The petulant bully

Yes, we have met them before. The bully screaming ‘Foul, foul!’ Often enough we are nice enough to ignore them, yet not this time. It was the BBC who brought me ‘WikiLeaks founder’s extradition appeal explained’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-59053803) The setting has two sides. In the first it is a legal stage that the US has, an appeal is a legal right to any party. Yet in opposition, there was clearly established that Julian Assange did not do an act of treason, there are laws in those days (much stronger ones) that gave him the optional status of distributor. For those interested in a history lesson lets jump back to the age of Grunge (1991).

“the first websites to be sued for defamation based on the statements of others argued that they were merely distributors, and not publishers, of the content on their sites. One of the first such cases was Cubby v. CompuServe, Inc., 776 F.Supp. 135 (S.D.N.Y. 1991). CompuServe provided subscribers with access to over 150 specialty electronic “forums” that were run by third parties. When CompuServe was sued over allegedly defamatory statements that appeared in the “Rumorville” forum, it argued that it should be treated like a distributor because it did not review the contents of the bulletin board before it appeared on CompuServe’s site. The court agreed and dismissed the case against CompuServe”

Wikileaks can rely on that stage as well (as can Julian Assange). In the second degree, let’s take a look at an actual traitor (nor Dirk Benedict). So in those days Bradley, now Chelsea Manning betrayed the service, handed classified materials to people who should not have them and as such Manning was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Yet, then President Obama bowed to bleeding heart pinko’s and commuted the sentence after 7 years. Manning now gets speaking engagements whilst the US is still bleeding from the acts of Manning 12 years ago. As such, Julian Assange spend twice the amount in seclusion and imprisonment that Manning, an actual traitor did. 

Am I happy? No! Assange and Wikileaks did something stupid and massively dangerous, especially the diplomatic cables, it screwed up US interests on a near global scale. Yes, they lied, yet so does the bulk of all other governments (they call it denial), as such the US will be playing with a loaded deck for several more years to come. We can go into some deep version of she dais, she said but that is no progress. The critical stage is that the traitor got off (in more than one way) and for years the US government hunted and haunted Julian Assange and they keep on continuing to do so. As I personally see it it makes the US a petulant bully. Let’s not forget that they are entitled to do so, yet in all this what will it bring them? There would be a minimal case if Manning was still in Leavenworth, but that is not the case is it?

And to rely on the courts having a right to their day is also fake. Consider all the cases where the courts never had a chance (Epstein anyone?) and that happened all in the US of A. We cannot tell how the appeal will go and I do not have the legal insight for this, but there will be a lot of eyes on this case, not in the first for all those fearing extradition to the US, this appeal is important to the US too, I get that. Yet the reason behind it is no longer the larger limelight, especially as the traitor behind this was released years ago and is making a living (as I personally see it) in questionable ways. I always wanted to be the IT intelligence guy, they gave it to some traitor, two actually when you consider Edward Snowden, he at least had the common decency to defect to Russia. 

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The rule of guns

This is not new, this is not even novel. It is the continuation of something that has been going on for decades, I saw it with my own eyes in 1982, others saw it too. Some objected, others did not. And when Beirut had its fireworks party on August 5th 2020, so many voices were eager to give rise to a setting that could never be, and all rejoiced when the media forwarded those messages. They must have thought it was in the bag. But I knew a think or two and I gave the readers ‘Boom goes the dynamite’ that very same day (about 6 hours later, might have been 12). And I gave the readers “It is speculation, but consider the blast, according to some the blast was noticed well over 100Km away. I do have a point of reference, the Fireworks blast in the Netherlands (Enschede) had a similar effect, but nowhere near the size, the video’s I saw told a different story, one car on the highway with a distance of around 2000 meters away got its windows blown out and the rear view mirrors got blown off the car, and that is one of a few video’s that show me that this was no ordinary blast”, so there was a lager stage and the people who were behind it went under the rocks like cockroaches. I calculated that it took a massive amount of 40’ containers and the cargo, 125 40’ containers worth cannot go up like the way it did, not in one go. And I rote more than one article about that. So when we now see in the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/14/gunfire-beirut-protest-judge-leading-port-blast-inquiry), the setting of ‘Five dead as shooting breaks out at Beirut protests over port blast inquiry’, we now see “demanding end to judge’s investigation of huge blast last year”, all whilst we see Hezbollah types being brave behind their balaclava’s. So whilst we get the terrorist spokespeople Nabih Berri and Hassan Nasrallah make noise, we see the attacks on judge Tarek Bitar continue. I see no surprises, once a terrorist, always a terrorist. And when we see “However, demands that all aspects of the explosion be investigated seem almost impossible to deliver, with ministers summoned for investigation refusing to turn up”, something that I saw and I feel certain plenty of others saw that too, we wonder when Hezbollah will be held to account. So whilst these political chihuahua’s refuse to appear we see the stage changing, a stage where a lot of people are demanding that ALL HELP towards Lebanon will stop until someone correctly muzzles Hezbollah. And I see a reason to divert those aid funds to Israel (if needed). A larger stage erupts as the smaller (2020/8/5) subsides. This is not about local rights, this is about Hezbollah is showing itself as the bully it always was, it was that in 1982, it still is that now. In this I am not making judgement on judge Tarek Bitar, I know too little about him, but the stage that Hezbollah wants it stopped and they are happy to show themselves (often with balaclava’s) exercise that right wielding an RPG-7, or other hardware of the ‘firearms’ variety shows them to be the aggressor, to be the bad apples and now as the energy crises is pushing into winter, the stage of anger changes even more. Now there is a larger explosion and it could go on into its neighbouring places and one of them is Israel the other one is Syria and neither accepts the Hezbollah approach. I nice stage to set and the people of Lebanon do not get a choice in the matter, they let things slide with Hezbollah for too long and this will implode in all kinds of wrong settings. Even now we see all minds of media including Iran in this mess. I cannot follow that as I remain a follower of evidence, but it does make sense. And even in light of the humanitarian side of ‘Hezbollah-run oil shipments from Iran’, enough players were willing to let that slide, but it would not take long until Hezbollah thought it was in control (because to some degree they are) and now the world has had enough, some will stop funds, more will stop goods and Hezbollah will learn what war against hungry and cold fellow citizens look like, they will not give Hezbollah any consideration in all this and neither should we. There comes a time when enough is enough and too many have hit that point now, so as Hezbollah and Amar will seek ‘compensation’ (optionally for their lost explosives), the larger station is no what they want, it is what they were part of and that is what fears them. The Times of Israel gives us “Local commentators said Washington, worried about chaos in Lebanon amid raging, multiple crises, may have decided to look the other way”, but that is not the real deal. The slightly more real deal is “humanitarian assistance in Lebanon to more than $372 million in Fiscal Year 2021” and it has become time to stop that. Let the cancer die, let those people die. This in not inhumane, it is an essential part of stopping terrorism by Hezbollah. If there are no people to care, there are no recruits, there is no Hezbollah and the times and the economic pressure are growing in this direction. It would have been less of an issue if someone muzzled them, but no one did so we have a new stage to look forward to. In the first the UN trying to smooth things over, the other all the heart bleeding people who ache for the people of Lebanon, yet none of them are willing to hold Hezbollah to account, why is that?

To keep instability around? It is too late for that, Wall Street solved that problem for you all. 

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We are the tools

Yes, we are, you, me, we all are and the evidence is all out there. So let’s start with the global comic relieve that we call the ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists). We all see the headlines, global headlines and 600 secretaries (they call themselves journalists) are out there giving us what we think are the goods. To phrase an example we take a look at the Sydney Morning Herald (at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/australia-has-become-a-go-to-destination-for-dirty-money-leaks-reveal-nation-s-tax-weaknesses-20211007-p58y2i.html) it is a mere example what is going on out there. A collection of people no one head about, no one cared about. A collection of tits and dicks all striking their own ego, their own needs and the audience is gobbling it up. So when we are given phrases like “ALP senator Deborah O’Neill has launched an inquiry into Australia’s AML-CTF regime and is seeking industry feedback on the costs and benefits of broadening our laws to include accountants and lawyers to bring Australian laws into line with international standards to prevent financial crime” Yet here is the problem. It is ‘prevent financial crime’, in this that we also see from other sources “the line between tax avoidance and tax evasion has become so blurred we need to act against both” and there is the real problem, a stage I told people for well over a decade. Tax laws need overhaul on a global stage. And the setting too often is that there were no laws broken, these people might act against the spirit of the law, but they NEVER broke the law. And that is the stage, 600 typing tutors cannot give us the goods, because as I speculate, the real goods were never there. Yet someone in the ICIJ decided not to investigate the origins. Interesting not? So whilst we focus on “Avoidance meant arranging your affairs so tax wasn’t due”, whilst we consider that politicians have given the wealthy and rich a little too much leeway these politicians are now hiding under rocks and they do not want the limelight. And whilst some are considering “It isn’t illegal for the celebrity or a politician to move their money (so long as it is theirs to begin with). Assets within the trust are subject to local tax laws (sometimes zero tax) and local secrecy laws (sometimes complete secrecy)”, they will get the idea that places like Monaco, Cayman Islands and Dubai have appeal to many people with a piggy bank that holds an 8-figure number or more. So when we see all these papers give us “the documents were linked to more than 330 politicians and public officials, including 35 current and former national leaders, in more than 91 countries and territories”, as well as mentions of billionaires and no one gave us a clear top-line setting, I saw one, just one in a stage with dozens of papers and on less than 50% of the politicians involved. Yet none in the US, none in Canada, none in Australia or New Zealand, it is optionally possible, but 50% of that rundown was missing. And 600 secretaries had no time to look into it? As papers keep on handing us “a two-year effort to sift through 11.9 million confidential files leaked to it, aided in that effort by more than 600 journalists from 150 media outlets.” No one had the idea to give us a tally, a top-line? So far how many give us a list of ACTUAL criminal events? Tax Avoidance is not illegal, owning and residing in a zero tax nation is not illegal, so what is this about?

Now consider another station I made mention on. Consider the names Jacob A. Frenkel, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Guillermo Ortiz, Jean-Claude Trichet, Geoffrey Bell, Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., Arminio Fraga, Kenneth Rogoff, Janet Yellen, Zhou Xiaochuan, Domingo Cavallo, Mario Draghi, Yi Gang, Carmen Reinhart, Maria Ramos, Klaas Knot, Philipp Hildebrand and Kenneth Rogoff. All part of the G30 bankers list, no mention at all? These people move trillions, there is no way that there is no mention of them in any way, but the press seemingly avoided that small part, or the source data was stricken of them, making this an exercise of some sorts and no one caught on? How come?

And this is not in you, that is on the members of the media (including those who think that they are journalists, or got the degree and faked their way through life). 

A simple setting of bankrupt nations painting the wealthy as the criminals, all whilst the politicians were a lot more to blame in all of this, 2 decades of ignored overhauls and no one catches on? 

The sanctimonious BS that the media is feeding us sickens me, it really does.

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Reprising 39 steps

This is not about an alcoholic taking his 12 steps three times with 3 breaks. This is about a 1935 movie. An absolute masterpiece by Alfred Hitchcock. It is also one if the first exposures by Tinseltown of the use of industrial espionage. Over time there would be more cases and more events, yet the stage I saw today ‘Twitch confirms massive data breach’ (source: BBC) made me think of the earliest steps in that direction. Even as we are given “it comes at a time when competitors such as YouTube Gaming are offering huge salaries to snap up gaming talent, so the fallout could be significant.” This does not mean that Google was behind it, yet the larger stage is that Industrial espionage is at the seat of many corporations and these corporations have absolutely no idea what they are in for. There are no checks, no balances and at this point Twitch is in a stage where they could lose the bulk of their value overnight. So as I read “Twitch confirmed the breach and said it was “working with urgency” to understand the extent of it” I see a stage where a company was clueless and now less of a clue where their money will go in November 2021. 

Even as I think back to the 39 steps and the momentous line “The 39 Steps is an organization of spies, collecting information on behalf of the foreign office of…the design for a silent aircraft engine” but the one step they did not have in those days was the disgruntled employee. They can do in one hour more damage then Baker at MI-6 or Evans at MI-5 can do in a month, and companies are just not ready to take a larger setting of cyber and internal investigations serious. Fell free to doubt me and call +44 1242 221491 (GCHQ), they probably have a few leaflets and other information that will make any CTO cry like a little chihuahua. 

The problem how to go about it, as I see it it will be too late for Twitch, Microsoft was done for a long time ago and Google is one of the few who has a decent handle on cyber security. Yet the nightmare is actually a lot worse. To grasp this we merely need to take a look at ‘Industrial Espionage: Criminal or Civil Remedies’ by Gillian Dempsey (at https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/tandi106.pdf) the quote “Australian companies should be mindful that competitors, and nations which might be hosts to Australian investment, may have a strong interest in Australian trade secrets and other economic intelligence. Although its incidence and prevalence are unknowable, industrial espionage by governments and private sector institutions is a fact of contemporary commercial life. Recent developments in the technology of intercepting communications make such activities easier to undertake and more difficult to detect than in the past.” There are a few issues and the biggest one is partnerships, find in that partnership two disgruntled employees on both sides of the fence and that company is pretty much doomed. Even if the law becomes adequate, the rules of evidence will get in the way because the bulk of ALL companies have a lovely disregard of non-repudiation, and the third party exploiting the two angry people will laugh all the way to his zero tax haven (Cayman Islands anyone?) And that stage will grow and grow, because there is a board room believe that their company will not get into that, all whilst they cannot see the pie chart as the chunky blubbernaut in the room ate it. And the game gets to go from bad to nasty, with cryptocurrency the appeal for many increases whilst the ability to find the people involved goes from tiny to a number approximating zero and the law is not ready, it hasn’t been ready for several years and as sources give us “One of the reasons why corporations engage in industrial espionage is to save time as well as huge sums of money. After all, it can take years to bring products and services to market and the costs can add up.” This is true but it is the setting that several people who were dismissed ended up with huge starting bonuses whilst being as productive as the janitors paperweight in that new company. So when did you get $675,000 a year with a startup bonus of $3,500,000 plus a piece of real estate in the Cayman Islands for surfing Facebook all day long? That is the setting that some companies face and until they adjust the safety in their firms, they are the companies with huge neon lights and the neon phrase ‘sucker’ right next to it. I was taught about non-repudiation at Uni 14 years ago and so far the amount of companies taking it serious is just as close to zero as the people getting convicted of it.

So whilst the media is flaming the $13,000,000 total twitch payments, we are all looking in the wrong direction. We see one side, and this might have been by disgruntled people (my speculation) but it was an attack of a side that Amazon had decently solidified, so what comes next and when will it impact something that YOU depend on? There was a lesson and it was handed to the people in 1935, so why did the decision makers not take the essential steps?

Perhaps they were done in some places but there is at present no evidence that any were done. 

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Two items

Yes, there are two items that are on the mind of may people. One is directly on the mind of many and as I stated in ‘Utter insanity’ on October 4th a lot of impact will be seen and the poor will get the brunt of that impact. As I see it, there is a lot that will be going wrong and even as the US Democrats are hiding behind the media slogans like ‘Biden: Republicans playing ‘Russian roulette’ with US economy over debt ceiling’, we better catch on quick. This issue is not now, it has been going on for over a decade, too much spending, no exit strategy and upping the debt every time and this has been going on since the Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and President Joe Biden were in office. From 2001 the debt want from $6 trillion until now as it is $28 trillion. I will agree that President Biden got a really bad hand and he inherited the debt, but so did Obama and Trump. George W Bush had Afghanistan and Iraq in consequence to what happened in New York which was not on him, but ALL these presidents had the option to overhaul the Tax system and NONE of them did so, this pox is on BOTH the Republican and the Democrat houses. A budget that was there to enable big business and media but none acted over well over 20 years, so this is on more. In this Bill Clinton was the one who left the budget was in surplus so his inaction has a decent acceptable excuse. And now the Republicans say enough is enough, I cannot fault them for that. As I showed the Defence department wasted $30-$45 billion on TWO PROJECTS, two projects that does not meet the bare minimum but we go on paying those wasting the funds. Why is that? And the lack of adjusting Tax laws, not to tax the rich, but the setting of justly tax ALL. An optional setting that as offered to them in 1998, but they were eager to state that it was too hard. Now consider the Google Ads system that properly (and decently) charges the advertiser and not greedy grab the advertiser like the advertisement  agencies did for decades. So it was not that hard, was it?

And as we now see the need to ‘overhaul’ the Senate rules to end the amendment of the ‘filibuster’, a stage that has been there for a long time is now regarded by the Democrats as too hard to handle. I am not the voice for against that decision, yet consider that THEY TOO would not overhaul the tax system when it was in their administration, so is it fair? And in all this Wall Street is giving whatever ‘free’ advice the media is willing to listen to, they are so scared now. 

What was issue two?
It cones from a different corner. When the BBC gave us ‘Princess Haya: Dubai ruler had ex-wife’s phone hacked – UK court’ 8 hours ago (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-58814978) I saw “The High Court has found that the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, interfered with British justice by ordering the hacking of the phone of his ex-wife, Princess Haya of Jordan. The phones of her solicitors, Baroness Fiona Shackleton QC and Nick Manners, were also targeted during their divorce custody case, according to the court”, it took a few second (approximately 7.1) and my mind raced. You see the media is a nice source to use given information against them. You see, The Verge gave us on July 23rd (at https://www.theverge.com/22589942/nso-group-pegasus-project-amnesty-investigation-journalists-activists-targeted) ‘NSO’s Pegasus spyware: here’s what we know’. In that article we get “NSO Group’s CEO and co-founder Shalev Hulio broadly denied the allegations, claiming that the list of numbers had nothing to do with Pegasus or NSO. He argued that a list of phone numbers targeted by Pegasus (which NSO says it doesn’t keep, as it has “no insight” into what investigations are being carried out by its clients) would be much shorter”, It is the setting of “has “no insight” into what investigations are being carried out by its clients” against the setting that the BBC gives us which is “referred to the hacking as “serial breaches of (UK) domestic criminal law”, “in violation of fundamental common law and ECHR rights”, “interference with the process of this court and the mother’s access to justice” and “abuse of power” by a head of government”, we can agree with the point of view, but where is the evidence? The NSO stated that it does not keep any, so what is the source and the foundation of the evidence? The link the BBC gives us the judgment (at https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/al-maktoum-judgments/) yet there I see in the reference for the Hacking fact finding part:

i. The mobile phones of the mother, two of her solicitors (Baroness Shackleton and Nicholas Manners), her Personal Assistant and two members of her security staff have been the subject of unlawful surveillance during the course of the present proceedings and at a time of significant events in those proceedings.

ii. The surveillance has been carried out by using software licensed to the Emirate of Dubai or the UAE by the NSO Group.

iit. The surveillance has been carried out by servants or agents of the father, the Emirate of Dubai or the UAE.

iv. The software used for this surveillance included the capacity to track the target’s location, the reading of SMS and email messages and other messaging apps, listening to telephone calls and accessing the target’s contact lists, passwords, calendars and photographs. It would also allow recording of live activity and taking of screenshots and pictures.

Yet in all this, how was this evidence obtained? The findings rely on the setting stated by Baroness Hale, which is fair enough and she stated “In this country we do not require documentary proof. We rely heavily on oral evidence, especially from those who were present when the alleged events took place. Day after day, up and down the country, on issues large and small, judges are making up their minds whom to believe. They are guided by many things, including the inherent probabilities, any contemporaneous documentation or records, any circumstantial evidence tending to support one account rather than the other, and their overall impression of the characters and motivations of the witnesses.” Here I have a problem. Not the setting that Baroness Hale states, it applies for many cases and I would support this, yet in this technology the problem is that even those deep into this technology do not completely understand what they face. When we look at sources all over, we see a former intelligence officer from Germany who cannot state that Huawei is a danger, because their technology people do not comprehend it. We see source after source flaming the NSO group issues but they are flaming and even those sources are debated as it refers to sources from 2016, long before the Pegasus group had the software it deploys now. If we accept the words by Baroness Hale “We rely heavily on oral evidence, especially from those who were present when the alleged events took place” yet what happens when that witness the average normal person, how can that person give credibility to neural surgery? It is the same, a stage where the media relied on flaming and keeping people off balance, how can a person who does not comprehend technology be given the credibility that this court has? And should the court disregard the influence the media has, they merely need to see connected contributory manslaughter Martin Bashir was a part of, as I personally see it, his actions resulted in the path that led to the death of Lady Diana Spencer. 

In this I support “the court’s findings were based on evidence that was not disclosed to him, and that they were “made in a manner which was unfair””, I will take it one step further, if the submitted evidence is held to the cold light of day, its value will be debatable on a few levels. So when we consider “Dr William Marczak, who is based in California and is a senior research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which researches digital surveillance. He told the court he had no doubt the phones were hacked using NSO’s Pegasus software. He also concluded “with high confidence” that the phones were hacked by a single operator in a nation state. He concluded with medium confidence that it was most unlikely to be any state other than the UAE.” In this we saw the CIA with their “with high confidence” and I wonder hat it is based on. I am not attacking Dr William Marczak, there is no reason to, but when you consider “with medium confidence that it was most unlikely to be any state other than the UAE”, so he is not completely certain, he is decently certain that someone did it, but there is no evidence (aka he cannot swear) that it was the UAE, feel free to read the settings and the statements, it could have been anyone, if the evidence holds up to scrutiny and that pert is also a part I am not certain of. You see when we see “A senior member of NSO’s management team called Mrs Blair from Israel on 5 August 2020 to inform her that “it had come to their attention that their software may have been misused to monitor the mobile phones of Baroness Shackleton and HRH Princess Haya” and we hold it up to the interview in The Verge on July 23rd with Shalev Hulio we see conflicts, conflicts of optional evidence by the same source, why is that?

These are the two Items that were bugging me to some extent and as my mind is racing towards another TV series stage (it will be the third my mind designs) I wonder what the eager bored mind is able to contemplate. So as we wonder what drove the judgement (no negativity implied), I see too many strings going from one place to another and they might be just in my mind (the place between ones ears) but too much evidence does not make sense, in both stages offered and the media took centre stage to both, and the media is the weakest link of credibility, that has been personally proven a few times over.

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A disregarded shelter setting

The Guardian was at it again and they are not doing anything wrong (at least I think they aren’t) but the stage created is calling for a nice stage and it is getting close to immediate that we take a hard look at the meaning of hypocrisy. 

The article ‘Pandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/03/pandora-papers-biggest-ever-leak-of-offshore-data-exposes-financial-secrets-of-rich-and-powerful) gives us a few items and before you think we are digging into the air, lets take a look at a few essential parts. It starts with “companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands” first, this is not an illegal act, then we need to look at Monaco and Dubai. Monaco gives us over two sources “You can apply for a Carte de Residence once you have an address in Monaco (either bought or rented a property for a minimum of a year). You must also agree to live there for more than three months of the year. Resident individuals are not subject to personal income tax in the Principality of Monaco”, now this is not the easiest setting as decent apartments tend to start at €3,000,000 going up to €387,000,000. As such I wish you good luck finding something you like. In Dubai we see “There is currently no personal income tax in the United Arab Emirates. As such, there are no individual tax registration or reporting obligations.” These are called tax havens and they are perfectly legal. It is the way THAT nation operates and it works for them, so when we see the Guardian give us “But the secrecy offered by tax havens has at times proven attractive to tax evaders, fraudsters and money launderers, some of whom are exposed in the files”, which is a debatable setting. You see someone who takes effort in buying an apartment in Monaco or Dubai, or most of these places is not a tax evader, that person is involved with tax avoidance and it is not the same. Black letter lawyers found a setting where the rules work FOR their clients and they are allowed to do this. Yet the Guardian inserts ‘tax evader’ whilst knowingly adding “some of whom are exposed in the files”, some implying not all and some is seemingly inserted hoping that the people are flamed to the list of “more than 100 billionaires, 30 world leaders and 300 public officials” hoping that they are all painted by the flamed audience. And in light of this, did anyone take a long hard look at “the cache includes 11.9m files from companies hired by” what is not looked at is the source of that information and how that source got the information. A setting not dissimilar from my article ‘The same gramophone’ on September 16th (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/09/16/the-same-gramophone/) regarding Pegasus and in light of evidence given (lack thereof) to the people by the Washington Post an interesting repetition of flames lacking evidence. The article on tax issues does not once, NOT ONCE mention tax avoidance, or give the setting of tax evasion versus tax avoidance. One is illegal the other is not. In this the text “They also shine a light on the secret finances of more than 300 other public officials such as government ministers, judges, mayors and military generals in more than 90 countries” could be seen as “They also shine a light on the private finances of more than 300 other public officials such as government ministers, judges, mayors and military generals in more than 90 countries”, yet they chose to not use the word Private did they? Private and non evidence could be seen as intrusive and harassing, the media really does not like it when their actions are seen in that way. 

My view?
You see if there was clear ‘tax evasion’ we would be getting this, instead of “leaked data with select media partners including the Guardian, BBC Panorama, Le Monde and the Washington Post. More than 600 journalists have sifted through the files as part of a massive global investigation”, so are they incompetent or is there too little remaining? The price of 600 journalists cannot be cheap so the more they flame, the more they ‘earn’ back, but that part is not really given is it? There is no top-line, a flaw we have seen more than once before. If it was clear 300 people can be shown in a top-line like Nation, government, non government easily enough. That would take an hour, perhaps two, but we do not get to see that, do we? We also get all kinds of embossed examples, with the added text “This is the Panama papers on steroids, it’s broader, richer and has more detail”, my view would be, then give it Ryle you dumb fuck! Do not posture, present facts! The top-line, the setting of tax evasion versus tax avoidance and a few other facts, including the source of the data, but we do not get any of that, do we?

I see it as a mere approach to the upcoming US debt ceiling and someone flaming that if ‘they’ had paid their taxes, there would not be an issue. Well, my view “Well, you stupid fucks, if you had clearly focussed on the tax laws that needed an overhaul for THREE DECADES we might not be in this mess either!” So whilst we are given “The files include disclosures about major donors to the Conservative party, raising difficult questions for Boris Johnson as his party meets for its annual conference”, an anti-tory smear setting. No matter who donates and to what party, if these people are not proven criminals, there would be no issue and I wonder how far these 600 journalists got. So when we consider “Many use shell companies to hold luxury items such as property and yachts, as well as incognito bank accounts” we need to see whether laws were broken and let’s be clear, they stated that these are people in over 90 countries. So which have laws against these acts and if they have an address in Monaco or Dubai, are any laws broken? This took me 5 minutes and we see a lack of a lot in one article seemingly the source of 600 journalists. 

I personally see only one option for a person like Gerard Ryle. Either give us that top-line clearly or become an Uber driver. As I personally see it, someone posturing absent of evidence should be somewhere else, not be some director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, but that is merely my call on the matter we see here now.

Oh, and before I forget the meaning of Hypocrisy is “the practice of claiming to have higher standards or more noble beliefs than is the case”, a setting too many journalists fall into lately.

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