Tag Archives: Tesco

August 1, 2017 · 14:49

How weird are these two?

I got confronted with the weirdest article in the Independent today, the article was 4 days old, but then, I do not frequent that paper so often, hence, I initially missed it. The article (at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/gaming/playstation-plus-price-date-details-sony-online-play-latest-expensive-cost-rise-hike-a7864351.html) gives us: “It’s about to get a lot more expensive to play PlayStation online“, which is an exaggeration to say the least. Now, for the longest time, the PlayStation plus has remained the same (as far as I remember), yet now we see a rate rise. The amount it rises with is £10 per year of £1 per month. It equates to 16% monthly, or 25% annually, yet the percentage increase is wrong, because it is £6.99 per month (new price), which comes to £83.88 per year, yet the full annual is a mere £49.99, which is only 59% of the monthly price on 12 months, so overall it remains a really good deal. So, as he whines on that event and how you can cancel the subscription. He also forgot to mention the fact that those with PlayStation Plus get 7 free games a month to play with, 3 PS4 games, 2 PS3 games and 2 Vita games, and the one subscription covers ALL three devices. Is it not interesting how that part got overlooked? The additional fact worth mentioning is that the list from June 2010 onwards has offered in total 493 games, 25 games had 90%+ ratings, which included games like Mass Effect (2+3), Bioshock Infinite, Batman Arkham City, Journey, Far Cry 3, God of War and a few others, So as we see the list offered, the £1 a month, or £10 a year does not add up to too much, when it amounts to 84 free games a year, which gets us an ‘enormous’ £0.11 increase per game (which makes it £0.59 per game in total) and in addition the access to multiplayer gaming, which we set at £0 for this exercise. So when Andrew Griffin writes that it is all about to get ‘a lot more expensive‘, I wonder if he has any clue on the gaming industry at all. Now, we know that there is hardship all over and that people can afford less and less, yet the option to get games at £0.59 per game remains a really good deal. In addition, you get them for the three devices without needing separate subscriptions. So I feel that Sony has always offered a really good deal for the gamers. Now, we might not always get the greatest games, yet 100+ titles had a higher than 80% rating and 25 games in addition had 90% or higher rating, so the people are getting really good games and they get a lot more than Microsoft offers and much better titles. The one part that the article does offer the reader is that if you try to renew the subscription now, you can get it for the ‘old’ price which is a pretty sweet deal, so you can delay the price increase for a year. In light of all this, not only is the description ‘a lot more expensive‘ a joke to say the least, the fact that the increase will not start until August 31^st is also a clean option to quickly get the renewal now whilst the games are a mere £0.47 per game.

So when I see the title part ‘As Sony makes it more expensive to play online‘ I do wonder where he got his insights. Factual he might be right, yet in the day and age where the price of a PlayStation Plus videogame is set at less than a 1 pint bottle of Tesco Organic British Whole Milk, the entire setting of ‘a lot more expensive‘ should keep you on the floor laughing for some time to come.

From my point of view my response to the Independent is ‘Bad form, Independent, bad form!’

Second place issue

The second issue shown is one that was given to us in both the World Finance site as well as the Wall Street Journal. The issue given is “America’s young men are increasingly giving up on work in order to slay virtual aliens and fight videogame wars, new research suggests”, which is more than merely a laughable joke. The original source US National Bureau of Economic Research, the part that calls out might be “Academics from Princeton University, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester say there’s ample evidence that since 2000, men who would otherwise be working are instead being drawn into immersive virtual worlds….”, yet what is this based on? You see, the data past 2008, a date many will remember, saw the Youth unemployment rate rise from 10% to 19%, after the beginning of 2011 those numbers have been declining steadily down to 9%, so the unemployment rate for the youth is now close on par with 1968, when it was the lowest in US History and only slightly better than 2003 which was the lowest at that point for close to 30 years. So when we consider those facts, it seems that the makers are giving us what some would regard a hatchet job. My title for that might be slightly too crass; yet when we see “Since 2004, time-use data show that younger men distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming and other recreational computer activities. We propose a framework to answer whether improved leisure technology played a role in reducing younger men’s labor supply”, so how idiotic is such a notion when we consider the 2004 and 2008 meltdowns that thrashed the economy in several ways, in that same timeline, US unemployment (all) was set to 10% in 2008, with a steady decline that follows roughly the same downward trend to a little over 4% at present, now we might agree, that whilst unemployed those youthful individuals would divert towards videogames it is a path that is still better than heading towards the streets trying to be gainfully and criminally active.

In this the quote used by world finance “While eight percent of younger men were not in work in 2000, this number rose to 15 percent in 2016”, is more than inaccurate, according to worldfinance.com it is an outright lie. Governing.com gives us some extra information that is actually useful. Their quote (at http://www.governing.com/gov-data/economy-finance/youth-employment-unemployment-rate-data-by-state.html) is “The employment-to-population ratio for younger workers had only recovered about halfway for its recession-era decline as of early 2017. Youth employment rates have returned to pre-recession averages in just four states”, which seems to fit the other sources. This is what could be regarded as something that pisses me off. With ‘Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men’ by Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst, I have a hard time just giving it too much consideration. The paper has additional flaws, the consideration that we see on page 4 with “We further exclude full-time students who are less than age 25” which is a chunk of undergrads and post grads that work at least part time to be able to afford food and other small issues like books. So the numbers are already skewed, in addition some sources give us that 80% of the full time students work part time, which marketwatch.com gives us, which was part of a Citigroup study. The UK has numbers on 1 out of 7 students work and study full time, this might not be reflective of US students, yet it should be to some extent reflective of students in some of the US metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco where the cost of living remains a rising burden. It is in section 6 on page 31 when my laughter explodes. The issue given “we can use time allocation data to infer the rate of technological progress for gaming and computer leisure since the early 2000s”, this a given? With two recessions and the non-working youth being a historic high in 2010, surpassing the recession of the early 80’s is more than just an issue, with numbers showing a steady decrease since then, the job market starting to open, whilst outliers have a stronger impact. In 2017 retail shed 60,000 jobs in the US, whilst Wal-Mart and Amazon seem to be in a strategic battle of realigning jobs towards online presence, all elements that impact the job market. So as jobs get realigned through strategy, where do the jobs end up? What will those people do when they are not working? The information Forbes gives us on this is even scarier when it reflects the need for consumer appeal via transferred initiatives. In all this, the paper does give some interesting premises, yet relies on certain parts, which are I light of the two recessions a little too much of a stretch, yet the fact on how the formulas were used is actually quite interesting. Another flaw is seen on page 32, now this is the flaw as I personally see it regarding the data as showed, yet without the actual questionnaire on view, there is a flaw in both the results and the way that I see it might be, so we need to be aware of that.

With “We stratify by three groups: younger men who spent zero time on computer leisure the prior day, those who spent 2 hours or less, and those who spent more than 2 hours”, the flaw is the ‘when’, I would spend well over 2 hours playing after a full day work, so when we consider the working population with or without full time study, we see that the graph is flawed. Even the other way round, part time students with a full time job, they could fall into the 2 hour plus gaming bracket. It is that flaw that calls even more doubt into question regarding this paper. A final ‘consideration’ needs to be given when I take a look at the ‘Leisure Engel Curve’. Here I also must admit that I will give doubt to my own thought as I might not have comprehended that part completely (apart from the formula), you see, they do state “With the leisure Engel curves, we can link shifts in time spent across activities to an implied change in the marginal utility of total leisure”, yet does this part correct for any hype (read: diversion through peer and social group pressure)? I doubt that very much, as evidence I call for the Pokémon Go wave that started in July 2016, which is clearly computer leisure (read: mobile gaming leisure), yet the paper has not taken mobile gaming in any of it and sets gaming as a static given, yet this wave suddenly pushed 60 million people to a hyped community in the same group as other gamers, whilst mobile gamers can be set into any part of an idle time setting (like travel time), this disjoints the entire exercise as I see it and gives a larger (read accelerated) gaming community in a shifted setting according to the settings as given, yet not corrected for any version of the definition of what constitutes a gamer.

Even as we can admire the formulated exercise, we need to concern that the raw data is not reliable as such and that there are additional issues that the data model and the questionnaires and requested data cannot correct for. In addition when we see the models, there seems to be no consideration for idle time and/or transit time and the consideration of handheld devices or smartphones which calls for even more questions on the gaming environment.

No matter how clever some will think the paper looks like, from the stage as I see it, there are too many unknowns or unanswered question marks and in reflection the conclusion and some of the media statements are not in line of the reality of the recessions the people lived through.

That is merely my setting where $0.02=C(1+r)^t

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Tagged as Amazon, Andrew Griffin, Batman Arkham City, Bioshock Infinite, Citigroup, Erik Hurst, Far Cry 3, Forbes, Games, gaming, God of War, Journey, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Leisure Engel Curve, Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men, Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, PayStation, PlayStation Plus, Pokemon GO, Sony, Tesco, The Independent, Wal-Mart, Wall Street Journal, World Finance

January 23, 2017 · 14:25

As the costs come

There is an issue that we see floating at Pressnet. Actually it’s an issue that started last week. I got the news from Retail Week (at https://www.retail-week.com/companies/bhs/bhs-admin-costs-spiral-as-mps-demand-answers/7017777.article), yet it came from several directions, so there is ample visibility. Yet, what is going on? This is an important part and even as there is great benefit to anyone’s soul to blame PwC for this, yet is that fair? The question becomes, is it in the books? When we look at the previous audits, was the quote “BHS administration costs have come in at £1.3m more than expected as MPs question a £35m ‘floating charge’ paid by Arcadia” a fair question? In all this, are these floating costs in the books? I actually do not know, yet I equally question why certain parties aren’t openly asking these questions at the PwC desk. Is that not equally odd?

The two quotes that matter are “If it was such a completely standard move, as Duff & Phelps claim, one wonders why it was reversed by the co-administrators as one of their first acts upon being appointed, and why the PPF seems to take a rather different view.” and “Meanwhile, Field questioned the transference of a “floating charge”, put in place at BHS by Green’s Arcadia Group. Duff & Phelps transferred the charge to Linklaters last October“, this now gives us the parts:

If we accept the bankruptcy announcements of April 2016, how come that this is done in October 2016?
If we accept that a floating charge is ‘a liability to a creditor which relates to the company’s assets as a whole‘, than the part that this is a credit to the Arcadia group should be in the books, and should have been in there for some time I gather, so why are there no questions asked at the address of PwC, in addition, why are MP’s not asking certain questions from Linklaters? Now, we should accept that Linklaters cannot divulge too much (read: any) information, yet when this was all set up could be seen as mere administration and that needs to be logged, which means that either Arcadia or BHS could release that information, if they choose not to do that, the question that follows should be a lot more serious and we need to wonder what else is in play.
When we look at the quote “If it was such a completely standard move, as Duff & Phelps claim, one wonders why it was reversed by the co-administrators as one of their first acts upon being appointed, and why the PPF seems to take a rather different view“. In that I look at another issue, the quote found in Professional Pensions gives us “A spokesman for FRP Advisory declined to comment, adding all that needs to be said is covered in creditor reports“, yet if it is there, should it not also be in the accountancy audit? That is an assumption from my side, and I could be wrong, yet the amount of £35m moved via Linklater in April 2016, if none of the audits has this on paper, questions should be asked, if it is there, questions should still be asked, yet it seems that questions are asked in such a late stage. In all this, City A.M. gives us: “Tension has been building between the PPF and Duff & Phelps throughout the administrative process. In November, the PPF voted against Duff & Phelps’ request to increase its fee. Malcolm Weir, head of restructuring at the PPF, said BHS pension scheme members deserved “value for money”“, which sounds fair enough, yet in all this, even if Arcadia hasn’t received the funds at present, the fact that we see “The £35m was never paid to Arcadia. It was always held in an account to our order. Our legal advisers have confirmed that the floating charge is valid. However, I understand that the liquidators and their legal advisers have made comments concerning its validity, but, I nor my legal advisers, have received any evidence to support their view.” In that regard, we now see that legal advisors are on opposite sides and both sides claim their version of validity, as legal advisors would. This is not in question at present, what is interesting is that the media at large have not included PwC in any of this, as they have been seen as the auditor of BHS. Oh, and there was a reason for me mentioning: “if none of the audits has this on paper, questions should be asked”, be aware that I have no experience on corporate taxation. However, would it not make sense that a £35m invoice would impact next year’s taxation significantly and as such, should it not be mentioned?

In this let me take you back to the previous article, where I discussed the Financial Times (at https://www.ft.com/content/4c3965f2-3c4e-11e6-9f2c-36b487ebd80a). Here we see “The Financial Reporting Council said its investigation related to PwC’s audit of BHS accounts in the year before the retailer was sold by Sir Philip Green’s Arcadia Group, in a deal that wrote off £215m of debts“, which is fair enough. In addition we see “At a committee session in May, PwC partner Steve Denison was asked by MPs to explain why the firm was prepared to sign off BHS as a “going concern” just days before its sale for £1“, which is fine too, yet where in all this is the £35m transfer to Linklater for the Arcadia group? If Duff & Phelps took control in April, would the accountant not have been aware of the thirty-five million, as such should PwC have been aware? (Read: not implied, yet questioned).

Let’s not forget that the Financial Times article was from June 27^th, which means that the £35m should have been on many minds at that time, yet for the longest time there was little to no mention. I would think that if a firm is sold for the price of a mere Tesco Sliced Wholemeal Batch Loaf, would a question not be ‘What else needs to be paid for?‘ at that point the entire £35m transfer should be on the top of everyone’s mind, especially as there was a decadent pension gap issue many times that size? Perhaps it is just me, but that would be on my ‘media’ mind. Not just the actual newspapers, a few other publications (like TV and morning shows) would have had a field day with the mention that pensions will remain short, but the bosses will get squared for that thirty-five million. Emotions would be running high that day, let me guarantee you that emotions will run high on that topic!

In that regard, some MP’s are starting to ask additional questions as we see a fees increase £500,000 for Duff & Phelps’s. I wonder how many additional man years of work have been spent that warrants a £500K increase. The week gave the quote: “When they were appointed last April, initially at the behest of Green and then approved by the BHS board, the company estimated its costs would be around £3.5m“, now I imagine that an insolvency comes with all kinds of complications, but how much work, how many months of full day activities warrants £3.5M? I do not know, I am merely asking, especially as the pensions have been for the most unpaid for years now. The site this is money gives additional connections in the shape of Goldman Sachs, where among the top earners at the investment bank’s London office will be the former co-chief Mike Sherwood, who faced questioning from MPs last year over the bank’s role in the BHS scandal. He landed a $21 million pay and bonus package last year, worth £15 million at the time (at http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-4120336/Now-bankers-bonus-Brexit-Goldman-staff-BHS-probe-donate-pension-fund-says-MP.html).

Now a lot of this news is between 1-2 weeks old and a few items are merely days old. Yet in all this we see a massive drain to less than a dozen people, where including Arcadia a syphoning through invoicing has surpassed £50M if we include the Arcadia bound payment, yet all is not well as several sources give large payments in their report, yet the exact part of what represents BHS is not given, but implied to be a large part. As such Mike Sherwood might have ended up with 21 million dollars, yet what part is though or because of BHS is not given, in his position, with his amount of accounts, the BHS part could be less than 1%, and as there is no clarity, the Week who gives us in addition “Huge payments to bankers who worked on the BHS deal could prove particularly controversial“, only if the bulk of these payments were regarding BHS, but that is not a given, I would add, it is exceptionally unlikely. By the way, those people did not really bother reporting that when Greece got back onto the markets In April 2014. In my article ‘Are we getting played?‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2014/05/18/are-we-getting-played/), where we saw the disastrous act of Greece getting back on the bonds field selling 5 billion in bonds. Yet the media at large was very very eager not to mention that the few bankers connected to this ended up with a total bonus of $50 million for what amounts to 3 days of work. So on one side they refuse to give the info, now we see incorrect (or at least incomplete info), with a reference of 21 million, the package of Mike Sherwood.

Yet there is more, the part I find hilarious is “Frank Field MP, chairman of the Work and Pensions Select Committee which quizzed the Goldman bankers on the deal, said: ‘This gives them an ideal opportunity to donate something to the pension funds, to make partial amends for the failure to give effective advice“, you see in that, he didn’t make any such reference to PwC. Pricewaterhouse Coopers, has been seen on the minds of a few as we see (in the Telegraph of all places) “select committees have also said that they have welcomed the Financial Reporting Council’s investigation into why PwC audited BHS’s accounts as a going concern when it was evident the high street chain was dependent on support from Arcadia Group, Sir Philip’s empire which includes Topshop, Dorothy Perkins, Miss Selfridge and Burton” in that the red flags of pension deficits we see a £571m pension deficit and kindly audited by PwC, so who else are they auditing in the Empire that is (or was) part of Philip Green?

Yet in all this, at present there is, just like with Tesco very little noise regarding the Financial Reporting Council and PwC, it seems like the press walks away when these two are mentioned in one sentence. After June 2016 there is abysmal little to see, which after Tesco and BHS that should be a little weird. Even when we look at the BHS elements now, overall the Auditor is left unseen in more serious ways, other than that Tesco is now hiring PwC again for other services, which after the shortfall and the DeLoitte results is a little bit weird to say the least.

You see, last year Aditya Chakrabortty in an opinion piece wrote: “Cameron warned of “the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations”. He was right. It’s just that it’s been led by those at the top – the ones at the boardroom tables, their expensive helpers – and their mates and supporters in politics using taxpayer money to wave them on” is not a wrong view, it comes three years after I made pretty much the same claim, so we can see that some players are a little late to the party. What is linked that when it comes to the matters as happened with BHS, crime literally does pay. It does for the auditor, the business men who own the place and sell it for £1 as well as the politicians who threaten with a £1,000,000,000 fine which will never happen (that pesky thing called the law gets in the way). You see, for many of us and for the victims it is a crime, yet from a legislation point of view that is not certain and it seems that no crime took place, because the people are not in jail, not in the dock and not in court. They are refurbishing their £10 million estates, whilst the working victims cannot make ends meet and where the auditor gets rehired by those they seemingly wronged for even more high priced consultancy.

As the costs are handed to the corporations in the shape of invoices, we see that crime seems to pay and it does so at a lower tax bracket than normal incomes. It can be stopped, you could be on the other side of the equation. You only have to be willing to do the one thing others did not anticipate and you have to be willing to be utterly ruthless. Basically you have to become a businessman like Sir Philip Nigel Ross Green and hire and firm like Pricewaterhouse Coopers to advice on your endeavour and audit it.

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Tagged as Aditya Chakrabortty, Arcadia, BHS, Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Duff & Phelps, Financial Reporting Council, Financial Times, Goldman Sachs, Greece, Linklater, Malcolm Weir, Mike Sherwood, Miss Selfridge, PPF, PwC, Retail Week, Sir Philip Green, Sir Philip Nigel Ross Green, Steve Denison, Tesco, the Guardian, the Week, This is Money, Topshop

January 15, 2017 · 14:43

The views we question

This is not a piece of me knowing, this is not a piece of me telling how it is. This is me questioning certain choices and certain actions. When we now see the actions as displayed by the press, is the press correct, was the press played or is the press playing us? To help to you in this, let’s start with two articles, both in the Guardian. The first (at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/14/nhs-crisis-my-frail-mum-was-forced-to-wait-on-the-floor-for-eight-hours), where we see the emotional start ‘My frail mum was forced to wait on the floor for eight hours‘, I myself have had to wait in triage twice. This happens. There is only so much a hospital can do, as for the wait on the floor? When we see the first story appear we see “It was another seven hours before he went upstairs for an angioplasty and a stent. The A&E staff were under immense pressure, having to deal with far too many patients, but they did an amazing job“, now this person was from Worcestershire, famous for its Lea and Perrin’s sauce. In another case we see “It took 30 minutes for the paramedics to get there but when they arrived they were brilliant“, as well as “I don’t want to blame the paramedics or any staff at the NHS. They do a wonderful job and do their best to take care of patients when they arrive. But the issue is with the government and the lack of funding to our healthcare services” from that same person. Finally the one that is important here is “Dr Liam Brennan, president, Royal College of Anaesthetists: ‘These are no longer winter pressures, but perennial pressures’” with the added quote “In my 34 years as a frontline doctor I have never seen the breadth and scale of the relentless demands across the whole health and social care system that I see today“, in all this, this is the part that is in the eye of the hurricane, because, when we look back to Baron Kerslake, or as he is called in the House of Lords ‘bobby’ (assumption from my side). You see, he came up in an earlier blog, appointed as the Chair of King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. On February 17^th 2016, in my blog article ‘Behind the smiling numbers‘, I wrote (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2016/02/17/behind-the-smiling-numbers/), “The title ‘Income tax must rise 3p to stop NHS ‘staggering from year to year’‘, which implies initially that the NHS needs £1.95m, which might be OK. Yet the truth is far from that, the text gives us that Lord Kerslake stated “Income tax will have to increase by at least 3p in the pound….”“, which is another story entirely (and first evidence that members of the House of Lords are gifted with a decent sense of humour)”, which came from a February article in the Guardian. Now when we consider The Royal College of Anaesthetists (www.rcoa.ac.uk), we see “Anaesthetists are qualified doctors who are registered with the General Medical Council (GMC). The first step towards a career as an anaesthetist is medical school. Undergraduate medical training normally lasts for five years and medical students normally graduate with a bachelor’s degree. After graduating, the newly qualified doctor enters foundation training in hospitals around the UK. Foundation training lasts two years and after the first year, trainees become fully registered medical practitioners. Through the second year of foundation year training, trainees apply for postgraduate training in one of the specialties, of which anaesthesia is one. Trainees can apply for the seven years anaesthesia programme or the eight years anaesthesia programme which includes two years of the Acute Care Common Stem (ACCS) programme. Trainees also have the option of completing dual Certificates of Completion of training (CCT) in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine. The dual CCT is similar in principle to achieving dual degrees and will normally take 8.5 years to complete“, so as we see staff shortages, as we see resource shortages, we also see something else, do we not? The quote from Lord Bobby, my apologies for this error, I meant Lord Kerslake, Baron Kerslake no less, it is my personal believe that harsher calls should have been made near a decade ago. In this former Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron should have made larger adjustments towards the NHS. Yes, we know that the Labour party bungled 11.2 billion pounds in that regard, but that was IT, staff is another matter and adjusting for those needs should have been done a long time ago. I have had an interest in becoming an anaesthetist a long time ago, if I had known the dire shortage then, I would have appealed and applied to Professor Peter Hutton in person in 2001. I might not have made it and unlikely I would have been able to do this, but I would have made the effort, a part I now see a failing Lord Kerslake with Lord Kerslake stated “Income tax will have to increase by at least 3p in the pound….“, I believe that if this is going to get saved, Prime Minister Theresa May will have to increase taxation to all working people by £1 every month as per January 1^st 2016 and all pensions by £0.50 as per that same date. The treasury coffers will need to make a larger change, yet if anyone in House of Commons, the House of Lords or Parliament has any serious consideration to keep the NHS alive, that action is now needed. It is not unlikely that we will see a 2018 judicial public inquiry regarding the actions, practices, responsibilities and funding of the NHS. There is no telling which Lord Justice would be chosen, yet in these levels of failure, in these levels of events and the inhumane pressures that the medical profession is now under, brings a pain to my heart a lot more severe than a heart attack (I had more than one of those, so I know). The reason for all this is that there is a similar atmosphere all over the Commonwealth and if we want to prevent such a disaster in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, something needs to be done now.

The second article I mentioned was ‘NHS in crisis as cancer operations cancelled due to lack of beds‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/14/health-service-in-crisis-cancer-ops-cancelled-nhs). The second line is the one that brings the beef to the table: ‘Hospital chief warns government must face the truth, as patients lose surgery dates with some only receiving one day’s notice‘, the question becomes how could this have come to such a dire place? You see, this is not just some refugee or illegal immigrant thing, this is what I personally see a categorical undermining of an essential support system. This is a basic view, but is my view incorrect? It can only be seen as such if there is a visible spike of 30%-45% of Cancer patients and I am fairly certain that actually newspapers did not make such a report. In this the quote “Today, writing for this newspaper, the chair of King’s College Hospital, London, Lord Kerslake, a former head of the civil service, suggests Theresa May’s government is not sufficiently in touch with the reality facing NHS hospitals and staff to appreciate the severity of the crisis“, in this I would respond is that Lord Kerslake left the needs of the NHS too shallow in his 3 pence required statement, perhaps I just got that wrong, but if I misread it, than who else did that very same thing? Yet there is another gem in this article and it is shown a little further down that piece. The quotes “Kerslake also sides with Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, who last week questioned the prime minister’s claim about NHS funding“, “Dr Sarah Wollaston, chair of the Commons health select committee, criticised the government for blaming GPs for the crisis” as well as “She said in a tweet: “Pretty dismal stuff for govt to scapegoat GPs for very serious NHS pressures. Failure to understand the complexity or own responsibility.”“. So we have a few political fires going on and the fact that Prime Minister May reacted poorly is just one facet. The one that does matter is “failure to understand the complexity“, you see, it seemed to me for the longest of time that there was too much politicisation with the NHS, which is why I am referring to the essential need of a judicial public inquiry of the NHS. Why on earth has the NHS become so complex? Is that not a valid question too? In this world, is medical care and health care the one item on everyone’s agenda to keep that as simple as possible? In that, we see another part, in advance I will apologise for the upcoming ‘less’ civil words, but why the fuck is anyone handing over £340,000 to PwC? The headline from the Coventry Telegraph ‘Coventry and Warwickshire NHS chiefs fork out £340,000 for advice on how to SAVE money‘ (at http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-warwickshire-nhs-chiefs-fork-12436466), there is in addition a small part if each forked that over, or if this was a total amount. The fact that PwC, you know the ‘idiots’ involved in fallen places like Tesco and BHS, now they are advising the NHS? How much is that going to cost the tax payers after the initial fee that equals 13 annual incomes for most UK working citizens? The quote “The document, released in December, aims to address the need to bridge the local NHS funding gap of £267 million which will exist by 2020 if services stay the same in the region” gives rise to even more worry. Not only is the NHS a quarter of a billion short in roughly 1080 days in Coventry and Warwickshire, to survive they have to move? How will that aid the people in Coventry and Warwickshire? Will they end up with any health care at all, or will the local Romani Gypsies with oils and herbals need to be relied on? You think that I am exaggerating? If so, please feel free to inform me on how those two places Coventry and Warwickshire, with 340,000 and 550,000 people end up coming up short by £267,000,000 in three years? Well if advice comes at £343,000 on private consultants, that shortage might be reached rather quickly, but that is not the story is it? The story is how funding has failed and how much more it will fail over the next three years. So, as such, is my view as I personally see it of an essential judicial public inquiry that far-fetched?

In that part, the PwC will have more to explain. When we see: “The sum cannot be broken down as you request as the work was undertaken on a fixed fee basis but please note that the work was commissioned in line with government framework rates.”, what else was done, how many hours and what data was the advice based on? In addition we see that the payment to PWC LLP, who were commissioned by the STP member bodies to help to develop the STP between July and September 2016 (as quoted), so this Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) gives a solution, which involves:

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust
South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust
George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust
Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust
NHS Coventry and Rugby Clinical Commissioning Group
NHS Warwickshire North Clinical Commissioning Group
NHS South Warwickshire Clinical Commissioning Group

It now becomes a question on where the trimming would need to be, more important if there is an upcoming shortage of a quarter of a billion, is there an oversight of what has been billed, what has been received and with three commissioning groups, should we fear what kind of a gravy train is running here. How many clinical commissioning groups are there in the West Midlands? If every county has one, how much in payments go into those clinical commissioning groups? These are all questions that are not heard by too many places. I think that there is an issue, I am not sure if what I am raising is an issue, but with only part of West Midlands, if they are short by a quarter of a billion, what shortages can we expect to see in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire? Consider that the West-Midlands is around 5.8 million at present. Implying a lot, that part you should realise when 15% of a West Midlands is cause for a quarter of a billion in shortage, where is the rest of West Midlands at? Is that such a weird question? Even as there is absolutely no fault to the medical practitioners themselves, there is a fair bit of uncertainty regarding the governance of the medical profession and the governance of the NHS trusts. It is the scent of silence. In this I equally blame the Labour party as they did not change direction funding the NHS as it should have. Now, we know that the financial crises has hit everyone, this is a fact of life, yet the issue we see when the Guardian quote “saying that the real amount of extra cash being given to the NHS in England between 2014-15 and 2020-21 is only £6bn and even that much smaller sum has only come from cutting spending on public health programmes and medical education and training by £3.5bn” was given on October 31^st 2016 also implies the partial pressure we see mounting. by cutting £3.5bn on medical education and training, we can see one headline, namely ‘NHS in crisis as cancer operations cancelled due to lack of beds‘ as it changes into ‘NHS in crisis as cancer operations cancelled due to lack of qualified surgical staff‘, when some of these specialists require 8 years of training, that view is not overly pessimistic, it is an actual reality that the UK could be facing from 2019 onwards, yet for how long cannot be predicted because the changes in policy are unknown and they will largely influence for how long this problem will continue, as well as it will continue to grow as a problem.

In light of this, perhaps a light hearted alternative? When we see the BBC (at http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35121632), how long until politicians will consider: “Nearly 1,500,000 people were killed this year as part of the government’s NHS sustainability cull“. You see, if we do it to the badgers, how long until people are on a similar list to create convenience?

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Tagged as Australia, Baron Kerslake, BHS, Canada, Coventry, Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust, Coventry Telegraph, David Cameron, Dr Sarah Wollaston, General Medical Council, George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust, Gordon Brown, Herefordshire, House of Commons, King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Lee&Perrins, Lord Kerslake, New Zealand, NHS, NHS Coventry and Rugby Clinical Commissioning Group, NHS South Warwickshire Clinical Commissioning Group, NHS Warwickshire North Clinical Commissioning Group, Parliament, Professor Peter Hutton, PwC, Shropshire, Simon Stevens, South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust, Staffordshire, STP, Sustainability and Transformation Plan, Tesco, the House of Lords, The Royal College of Anaesthetists, Theresa May, Tony Blair, UK, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, Worcestershire

September 3, 2016 · 13:32

Jack’s Place

Sometimes we wonder, what the long term effect would be if a baby is dropped on its head. At least, we should wonder about that! When we see that politicians are bending over backward to get their own way after elections, we have to wonder what we should do with politicians who have been dropped on their heads. In this case, when we see Tony Blair have a go in French (amazing quality French I tell you) on how ‘We have the right to change our minds on Brexit’ (at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2016/sep/01/tony-blair-we-have-the-right-to-change-our-minds-on-brexit-eu-referendum-video). He is going on ‘on how people may change their minds’. How the people decided to move house whilst they had no idea on where they were going to. In my view, the house they are in now had rot, the house had termites and the landlord was an idiot skimming its tenants. How is whatever we move to not a better place? Labour is still at it, still trying to undo the change the people in Britain moved to as political parties were flaccid, the politicians of the EC in general were incapable and bending over for the desperate need of the USA and Wall street, the people at large have lost 60%-75% of their quality of living. All because nobody showed any backbone against the greed of Wall Street.

So as the former British politician of some renown is chatting up the French in French about the dangers of Frexit (in very good French I must admit), he seems to have forgotten historic events. It comes in the form of a little cumulative tale. As such I will go to the last verse of it all as not to iterate it all in this article. A song based on the principle of Chad Gadya, published in 1590, I move to a 17th century edition which came with the approval of Nurse Truelove.

This is the horse and the hound and the horn
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn

This is about farmer who is sowing his fields, the farmer in the UK is being presented as the one now suffering ‘UK farmers wonder who’ll get the harvest in’ (at http://www.politico.eu/article/uk-farmers-wonder-wholl-get-the-harvest-in-agriculture-migration-brexit-labor/). The letter is not in question, there is no opposition that certain changes will have certain issues that need to be dealt with. “Richard Hirst, who farms 790 acres close to Norfolk’s blustery east coast. “They provide a fantastic service and potentially that’s all going to stop.”” the quote is fair enough, yet in that one player decided to remain quiet. I will get to that person later. What is also shown and raises questions is “Hirst relies on around 200 seasonal workers, most from Romania and Bulgaria, to plant and harvest the salad crop. Polish construction workers repair farm buildings. Polish truck drivers cart produce to market. That pattern is repeated across rural England“, how come that UK people aren’t coming to the sound of the horn of labour? Is it beneath them or is it not possible to get it done for normal UK wages? I am not stating that Richard Hirst is exploiting cheap labour, I am asking how come no one in the UK is willing to do it. We know that the farmers are hurting. When large corporations with governmental pressure options is milking the milk industry. Consider the average 2 litre milk bottle at £1.90. Whilst we see at http://dairy.ahdb.org.uk/market-information/milk-prices-contracts/farmgate-prices/uk,-gb-and-ni-farmgate-prices#.V8jC4vl96Uk that farmer gets 18.14 pence per litre, down from 20.77, which means that the dairy marketing engine gets 80%. There is something not right here! We know that there are costs, yet when the main ingredient is only 20% of the price, something is not right. I suggest that we increase milk minimum to £2.20 per 2 litre, meaning that a 1 litre bottle can only cost £1.10 and the increase is shipped 100% to the farmers. How long until the dairy industry tries to get their fingers on part of that increase? I am willing to bet that they make their first attempt before the ink dries on this agreement if it ever becomes a reality. Will it hurt some? A little, I cannot deny that some are in worst places than me, yet I am willing to pay that little extra to defend a milk legacy. Milk is essential, it is for some people essential to learn that the imbalance we see here is a massive imbalance that the EU brought. Here we see (at http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/milk/policy-instruments/index_en.htm), here we see that Regulation (EU) No 1308/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 December 2013 establishing a common organisation of the markets in agricultural products and repealing Council Regulations, is pretty much the initial death stroke to the farmers. Now, there is partially soundness and reasoning here. Consider that we see “establishing a common organisation of the markets in agricultural products) where the main market tools are set into 3 parts”

Market intervention
Rules concerning marketing and production
Trade with third countries

It is rules concerning marketing and production that is at hand. It was the introduction of quota’s that was some figment of someone’s imagination approach to fair trade. In actuality, it was truly an attempt to give an equal push for the small farmers and fishermen, but it ‘evolved’ into something quite differently. The larger supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, The Co-Op, Aldi, Waitrose and Lidl had no limits on quotas as they did not produce the dairy. You see, even as the fishermen were ‘obeying’ fish quotas, Japan, China and Russia went on a fishing spree (read: are still) so that people get their cheap fish, yet in milk there is another iteration. We see this in the Guardian of July 2012 (at https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/jul/27/dairy-farmers-milk) the following “Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer are all paying 30p a litre or more to dairy farmers, says the RABDF, which it says is the minimum survival threshold for farmers: ‘They are not so much the good guys, but they are at least paying 30p’“, which now gives us the issue that this year the price went down to 18.14 pence per litre. So if that is the average, how come the average price is currently 38% below the minimum survival threshold? How is that possible? If we accept that pricing is done on fairness and survivability, how come that this Economic Union is allowing for a supermarket situation where they squeeze the farmers out of a livelihood, all set to the allowance for a market, which they set is claiming to be for the fairness of all. Yet when we saw the Tesco debacle, not the PwC side, but the Tesco Executive side requires scrutiny too. Consider The Tesco Remuneration report (at https://www.tescoplc.com/media/1926/tescoar15_gov_remunerationreport.pdf). Consider that the CEO and CFO get CEO – £1,250,000, and the CFO gets £750,000. Also consider that the bonuses are CEO – maximum opportunity of 250% of base salary and for the local bookkeeper we see CFO – maximum opportunity of 225% of base salary. Consider that only 50% is set to sales and 30% is set to profit, how much money does Tesco need to make for these two people to have a really merry Christmas with family (or booze and hookers)? Now, even as the Guardian is stating that Tesco is not evil, yet they are matching the survival rate “all paying 30p a litre or more to dairy farmers“, so who is kidding who here?

That kept the rooster that crowed in the morn
That woke the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn

We get to the upcoming Bill of Rights. The Human Rights Act (HRA) will be dumped (read: scrapped enthusiastically). The Week published the following quote: “Scrapping the act will break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights and stop the act being “misinterpreted”, say the Conservatives. They argue foreign nationals who have committed serious crimes are able to use the freedoms guaranteed under the Human Rights Act to justify remaining in the UK“, the right to self-govern is here in jeopardy. We seem to be all over Strasbourg to guarantee the rights of criminals, yet there is too little for their victims. Whilst the quote from the Tories is “aim is to “restore common sense and tackle the misuse of the rights contained in the Convention”“, this actually makes sense. There have been one too many stories on how a Rapist was given leave to stay in the UK, now he is imprisoned for life Rapist Dahir Ibrahim decided to retry his penetrating event. His defending lawyer stated “No long term physical injury was sustained by the victims“, so why not send his daughters to Pakistan? There is every chance that the culprits will be acquitted. Even more so, the Lawyers daughter could become famous as in one case the transgressor filmed 280 events. So his daughter could become a Bollywood star. Wouldn’t that be great?

There is the danger that events get uplifted because of emotional factors. That is not a good thing, which is why I voiced it in this way, we need to try to keep as much emotion out of legal issues, yet this does not mean to be soft on hardened criminals. It is the right of the UK to allow people in, yet in equal measure, if these visitors resort to serious crimes, should the victims not be allowed to voice for them to be evicted (through a court of law of course)? Even more so, why should any government allow for those deciding to go for ‘serious criminal solutions’ to be allowed within their nation? It is my view that Strasbourg has been too academic, too focused on finding a ‘compromise’ that this path seems to highly favour the path of the criminal and less so on the victim. It is my personal believe that the Bill of Rights might be a solution, especially if the 15 freedoms are kept.

So before we go into the last part. We looked at the economy (well, sort of), we see that Laws in general have failed the people of the nation, we see that large corporations are given too much leeway and too much options, whilst the press reflects this as ‘but they pay more than average’, which holds no water when the fee paid is 38% below the survivability threshold. By trying to please a few hundred at the expense of millions of non-receiving victims of society. Consider the next part. If I, for the most a dedicated Conservative see this, when I noticed the victims that the EC has been creating, how come Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn cannot see this? They should be squarely on the side of the Dairy farmer and the milkman, a side they both neglected (read: ignored). There is a constitutional failing in play and the fact that the hardships of some are mere plays for politics is just sad.

That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

Well, we just dealt with the milk. Yet, what has been ignored is the play of Rat and Cat and Dog. The cat chases the rat, but who is rat and who is cat? It can be argued that the EC and the USA are either, the issue with an exploitative symbioses is that it becomes increasingly hard to differ between the parasite and the body he feeds of, the better the parasite, the harder it becomes to find the parasite in the body. The dog becomes the UK, on one side it howls against the moon waking us all up (read: for naught). At times it chases the wrong party (read: mailman), yet the dog has its shiny moments. It howls, barks and bites the burglar in your house, it alerts to the dangers coming to the door and it can scare off dangers. Any dog has good and bad moments. The fact that some laws have still not been updated is a concern and the Bill of Rights wasn’t the first one that needed to come. However, for the benefit of the European segregation it does make sense. My biggest issue is that the EU decided on too little and far too late that makes Brexit a fact not to ignore, the fact that people like Tony Blair are now making speeches in France, winking to the UK that people can change their minds is a larger issue. Especially as the events leading towards Brexit has never been dealt with.

Yet we are not done, you see, Mario Draghi is still having a go at it, his latest quote states: “The figures won’t come as a shock to ECB President Mario Draghi, who warned in July that inflation rates were likely to remain “very low” over coming months, before picking up toward the end of the year” (source: Wall Street Journal), you see, there is a truth there, especially as he is relying on the Christmas shopping spree to save him. Yet, in this, is that number corrected (for end of year uplift)? If not than the European economy is in an even less inspiring state than most are willing to admit to. This in light of conflicting numbers coming from America when we see positivity one day, negativity the next. We know on a global scale economies are in a slump and because there was a dire need to keep the Status Quo and move it from virtual to fictional. We can no longer afford that game, which is why Brexit made sense.

We can use the quote by CNBC we saw on September 2^nd (at http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/02/jobs-report-proves-janet-yellen-is-wrong-about-the-economy-commentary.html) where we see “The reported August job gains were also considerably below the gains in June and July. The unemployment rate was forecast to fall to 4.8 percent, but held steady at 4.9 percent. Both numbers are disappointing and make a September rate hike less likely“. We could agree that it means that the US is in a slow upwards momentum, which would be really good for the US government. Yet it is only half the picture. The other side we see quoted in the Business insider (at http://www.businessinsider.com.au/albert-edwards-consumer-crutch-holding-up-us-economy-kicked-away-2016-9). Here Edward claims what I have stated in other ways several times before. The quote “Albert Edwards doesn’t think that the consumer can keep the US economy afloat for very long” was only the start, but it boils down to the fact that the US consumer is stopping its spending’s on many levels. The US has a massive issue at that point, because it has relied on consumer spending for far too long (instead of corporate taxation). Even if spending goes up the smallest amount in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, the elections are on November 8^th, 2016 which means that the successor might enjoy those results, but the Democratic Party will only be able to rely on half-baked speculations at that point. Even if they would dare to go that distance, there is enough ‘evidence’ to see that their predictions would end up being overly optimistic. What is the issue is that the US now desperately requires a solution, which those in power, who require the status quo to continue will not allow for. In that light we see the remarks by Tony Blair. Trying to sway the people that they can change their minds and more important on downgrading the new house at any cost. You see, when the UK sees that the move was harsh, but slowly people are starting to see their new living room, different, likely a little smaller, but soon it will feel comfortable and it will come with the feel of comfort the people in the UK have not known for decades. It will not come in the wake of laziness as many will need to work really hard, but that money will now benefit the UK, which is why we need to pull together as a Commonwealth, we need to pull together a lot more than most of our politicians are comfortable with. Soon thereafter it will no longer be Jack’s place, it will be your home. One that is interconnected in many ways, some good, some bad and someone is always chasing you, just as you are always chasing something or someone. A lesson in coexistence that does not require the parasite approach, something they still don’t get on Wall Street. You see as we see in the Australian Financial Review quotes like “Richard Fontaine, a leading US foreign policy expert” on how Australia is so vulnerable on Chinese demands, he seems to forget that his government did whatever they could to ram the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) down our throats. And now that the US is realising that with Brexit the game is truly ending, in addition we see that President Hollande feels the coffin nail that the TTIP carries as well as the vision on how it seems to only propel the need for big business, whilst Google’s option to drive commerce is not yet ready, it could be the true new innovation for small corporations, where the corporations keep the power on a global scale. Three elements that show that not only will the US face an economic slump (read: I find the statement ‘recession’ too speculative). Yet, the playing parties in the final moments on a lame duck president on the way to the morgue is not a moment to put political weight to final acts of despair whilst the new president is not set and that agenda could unwind everything, so the players have too much to lose as the dealer is about to change, possible with new decks of cards.

In that regard the economic players are currently realising that until January: ‘The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket‘.

Not good news for President Barack Obama, Tony Blair or Strasbourg for that matter. Perhaps Mario Draghi will get it at some point, but I am not holding my breath on that achievement to happen any day soon.

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July 2, 2016 · 16:10

Remembering Facts!

The Guardian brings us an article. Not a news article, but an opinion article, that difference is relevant! The article ‘A warning to Gove and Johnson – we won’t forget what you did‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/01/boris-johnson-and-michael-gove-betrayed-britain-over-brexit) is a view. In this case a view by Jonathan Freedland. To get the goods, it is nice to add the by-line of Jonathan. It reads: “Jonathan Freedland is a weekly columnist and writer for the Guardian. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and presents BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View. In 2014 he was awarded the Orwell special prize for journalism. He has also published eight books including six bestselling thrillers, the latest being The 3rd Woman. He tweets @freedland“, so this is a person with knowledge and education. The fact that his bestsellers are thrillers could give rise to that notion that this is an artistic man, all fair enough!

So let’s take a look at his views here. I start with the quote “a distraction diverting us from the betrayal larger than any inflicted by one Tory bigwig on another. Now that the news cycle is measured in seconds, there’s a risk that 23 June might come to feel like history, that we might move on too soon. But there can be no moving on until we have reckoned with what exactly was done to the people of these islands – and by whom“. He has a point, yet only to a certain extent. Now we add “Gove, Nigel Farage and Gisela Stuart: they couldn’t have done it without the star power of Boris” and we have ourselves a game. You see, my view opposes this. Yes, Boris might be wealthy and have star power, but let’s be honest, how seriously should we take Boris? As Mayor of London, London grew and thrived and we should remember that Boris had an advantage, he was able to work of the momentum that Ken ‘Red’ Livingstone created. Yet none of that mattered, because Jonathan is going the same route that other members of the press are going. They are trivialising the events of Brexit, the events that drove most of the nation in a direction large corporation’s fear. None of them are addressing the paths of treason that EU politicians have been walking. A path of blind overspending, with no accounting for the acts that they empower. Jonathan, this is a massive part in all this. Did you actually forget about that? Have you seen the map of where Brexit people are? They are not in London, they are not in the large places, they are all over the UK, people who have been in hard places and have seen nothing from their political parties. I warned clearly for all that for 2 years and I was proven right! That is the first part of all this. People who lost their quality of life, whilst Greece gets bailout after bailout. Billions, whilst the political player’s responsible get a free pass, to enjoy the bonus that follows unmonitored spending by the hundreds of billions. That is a Europe no one wants and for the most, the people of the UK do not want to be a part of that any more. And a little surprise is that the people in France are feeling the same way.

Now, you can have a go at Boris for all you like, but making fun of the court jester tends to lose its feeling of humour soon after that.

Now let’s take a look at the quote that makes you lose the plot. When we see “He knew it was best for Britain to remain in the EU. But it served his ambition to argue otherwise. We just weren’t meant to fall for it. Once we had, he panicked, vanishing during a weekend of national crisis before hiding from parliament. He lit the spark then ran away – petrified at the blaze he started“, when exactly did he run away? The fact that you claim that he knew that it was best for Britain to remain in the EU is a first flaw, even if we do not consider his essay in the Independent, you seem to steer clear of overspending for the most of the article and in other articles you wrote earlier. Yet you add the one player to the entire issue that has been a true element of worry. When you state “The outlook for the economy is so bleak, the governor of the Bank of England talks of “economic post-traumatic stress disorder.” The Economist Intelligence Unit projects a 6% contraction by 2020, an 8% decline in investment, rising unemployment, falling tax revenues and public debt to reach 100% of our national output“, I wonder how this quote can trusted? You see, there are two parts in this, the first part is that Mark Carney is talking about a ‘economic post-traumatic stress disorder‘, which is fair enough, Brexit has a massive impact and people will be uncertain, doubtful and at times fearful about what comes next. Mark Carney himself spoke clearly at the House of Lords that there would be risks.

There I agreed wholeheartedly, Mark Carney could not predict the consequences, which I accept and respect, yet I leaned still the smallest part towards Brexit because I feared the blatant overspending of Mario Draghi a lot more than the downdraft that Brexit would cause within the UK.

After that first part Jonathan changes course and adds the speculations of the ‘The Economist Intelligence Unit‘ in the end I regard that to be a financial puppet, part of Schroeder plc, a British multinational asset management company. Schroeder needs Bremain (desperately), so it could maximise its profits. Did you, the reader consider that? Did you consider that we see speculations running into 2020, whilst there is absolutely no way to make any level of reliable predictions past 2017? In addition, if France does get its referendum, which is still realistic, it does not matter what President Hollande states today and last week. There are clear numbers showing that well over 60% of the French population is not in favour of the EU at present. I cannot tell how much of it is due to French National pride and how much of it is due to realisation that the EU is not bringing France any benefits and has not been doing so for some time now. There is a growing realisation that it was just to appease America and the need to counter with one currency (or at least a lot less than 7 major currencies).

All elements that can be read from many reliable news sources, all events that Jonathan Freedland seems to ignore (which is his right). I agree that there are issues with Brexit, there always would be and Boris Johnson was never the most serious party to listen to, but Michael Gove was a serious reason and even if we ignore Nigel Farage for the most, he started Brexit reasoning on sound issues, those issues were that the EU have become an administrative hindrance and not a gateway to opportunity for all, just for large corporations getting more and more loopholes, these parts he proved!

As stated, I remained on the fence for the longest of times and Mark Carney almost brought me back into the Bremain side, yet when we see the economic threats and fear mongering from elements like Peter Harrison (aka Big Cheese of Schroeder’s) we need to wonder who is serving who.

This is why I made sure that you realise that this was an opinion article in the Guardian. Jonathan writes up a good storm (6 bestsellers will give ample experience in this) and he is entitled to his vision and version of what he regards to be the facts. I need to get to the final part with the quote he offers “the appalling sight of Gove on Friday, proclaiming himself a proud believer in the UK even though it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that a leave vote would propel Scotland towards saying yes in a second independence referendum. The more honest leavers admit – as Melanie Phillips did when the two of us appeared on Newsnight this week – that they believe the break-up of the union is a price worth paying for the prize of sovereignty“, is a fair call, but I do not agree. You see, I have stated for around 2 years that we as a Commonwealth need to truly unite, especially in light of the utter idiotic acts by the US and its greed and need for whatever they do not have. First the US sets the stage of overspending and now that they are bankrupt they are trying to change the rules of the game by giving all rights to big business whilst drowning small innovators behind a high threshold. In that same light consider the ‘another Scottish independence referendum’. There is already ample evidence that Scotland cannot survive independence because they cannot set a proper budget. Making Scotland the next Greece to be. Is that fair? Well, it would be the result of short minded acts at present. It is even less clear why an independence would be pursued when you consider the quote “Its trade within the UK now makes up nearly two-thirds of its overall exports, worth £48.5bn, compared with only 15% with the EU” and until Scotland grows its opportunity to have a balanced budget without the oil, any option to survive will be a non-existing one. A united Commonwealth would better Scotland a lot more, especially if Scotland becomes India’s beachhead for growing its interest in Western-Europe and Scandinavia. I personally still believe that Scotland has options, but yes, it is speculative from my side. My question becomes, why is Scotland not growing its business options?

Now, there is a chance that Jonathan is right and the ‘Union’ will break up to some extent. I don’t believe it to be overly realistic, but I have learned to remain cautious when ‘national’ pride is in play and the Scots are proud beyond believe. I have been in favour of them growing independently but I was not in favour of the referendum. The reason was that Scotland cannot hold its budget and would grow only in debt from the moment it went it alone. Even if the oil would remain at the current price, that voice would not be good. The oil fields are producing a little less and only if Scotland could get a balanced budget without the oil would they stand a reasonable chance. That was not to be! Which is why my view is the way it is regarding Scotland.

So as we are remembering facts, we need to add another element, one that has been ignored by the press at large! That can be seen in an article (at https://www.cchdaily.co.uk/frc-look-pwc-audit-bhs). It is one side I have been on the hunt for, for some time now. You see, the issue with Tesco is one that makes me wonder why PwC is allowed to remain in business The quote “The regulator is already investigating PwC’s handling of another retailer’s accounts, after Tesco discovered a £263m ‘black hole’ related to the way supplier payments were booked. This FRC inquiry is looking at Tesco’s financial statements for the years ended 25 February 2012, 23 February 2013 and 22 February 2014 and the firm’s ‘conduct in relation to the matters reported in the company’s interim results for the 26 weeks ended 23 August 2014’” we should have a tidal wave of questions, not just towards the Guardian, but basically towards all newspapers who have been eagerly ignoring the issue past the initial events of 2014. We see part of this in a book called ‘Deep Integration: How Transatlantic Markets are Leading Globalization‘ (Daniel Sheldon Hamilton, Joseph P. Quinlan, 2005) we see on page 200 “the introduction of more stringent listing rules on national stock exchanges and the enforcement of the IFRA, enforcement of accounting rules in the EU is still national and there is no EU enforcement body“, in addition on that same page we get “even though the Committee of European Security Regulators (CESR) plays an important role, it does not have ‘EU enforcement leverages’ or the necessary authority to allow for accounting standards across both sides of the Atlantic offering equivalence“, now remember that this was published in 2005. The title ‘Aiming for Global Accounting Standards‘ by Kees Camfferman and Stephen A. Zeff released in 2015 show that this is still a hot potato not dealt with, so as we all know how important the issue is, my slightly less political correct question becomes “Why the fuck do we have an EU to begin with?” Does that question make sense?

You see, part of the facts are that any nation can grow when proper taxation is levied so that a nation can make sure that its citizens gets ample health care, education and support. Big business has been quite successful to avoid doing their bit and hiding behind globalisation and non-taxation. Wealth management, accounting firms and other players have been maximising their profits through the EU. They need their houses, cars, hookers and dope to remain ego-central (learnings from ‘Inside Job (2010)‘). I feel that the UK as a nation, no longer hindered by the EU can actually grow its nation and grow its national side, a side that most large corporations dread. Now, this latter part is speculative on my side. Yet, in light of what Jonathan Freedland writes, is it less valid, or is it incorrect?

I am asking you because you should do what is right, what is best for you and your family. So as you consider how ‘well’ you might be in an EU, consider how the large corporations are all about ‘what is best for business’, they are true, but their truth is about maximising profits for them, their board of directors and THEIR shareholders. Yet there are a few more parts to look at. In this regard and in light of what a few other European nations are doing, I would like to call for John Oliver (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh0ac5HUpDU). The UK most famous Ashton Villa fan known for ‘Last Week Tonight‘ seems to have mindset that is sharper than a scalpel. He gives good voice and brings comedy the way we can appreciate this.

At 0:21 we get the horse meat reference, which is nice as it is the EU rules that seems to have been central in getting cheap meat from places like Poland only to realise that some places regard Bovine and Equine as one and the same, which is interesting as only Scrabble should value Horsemeat and Equine above Bovine. At 1:08 he gives blame to David Cameron regarding the referendum, yet, he negates to mention that the public at large wanted one. At that point there was a threat that Brexit could happen, but there were no convincing numbers it would pass. Tactically David Cameron made a sound decision. The problem came from Italy in the shape of Mario Draghi as he decided to play Stimulus Claus spending trillions and 2 days before the elections he decided to voice his willingness to spend even more in the months to come. Spend it where? The UK? Not likely. So the EU, the ECB and financial Status Quo fans decided to spend money that they never had in the first place. The British population at large have had enough of that as do people all over Europe. Now we see scores of sore losers request a new referendum. Hoping that the initial bad news cycle, which would always happen, will scare the minimum 2% into the Bremain side. How is that democratic? So at 1:55 we get the Independence Day references, which is funny when you consider that the sequel launched on the same day as the referendum. Yet the truth is still in that part, many nations have been ‘hindered’ by EU rules on several fields, including immigrant rapists that cannot be evicted because they have a right to a family life. Which is an extreme example. What is more important is that the EU is unable and unwilling to hold overspending governments to account, the EU itself is overspending by trillions, so there is a common theme here. Money existing or not must flow, which is utterly unacceptable and it should be unacceptable to everyone. Still, John Oliver remains entertaining and he never lies to you. I agree that the quote on 350 million to the NHS is overstated, but not irrelevant, because the NHS surely needs it, yet the fact that all 100% went there is wishful thinking. Perhaps political wishful thinking, which tends to be not too realistic and Nigel Farage could never guarantee that. Fair call and an open opportunity for comedy, John Oliver took it. Yes, he is correct, the UK will be in for a rough EU, we all knew that this would happen and other questions remain. Yet the number one issue is not addressed, it is the overspending of a number of elements, one issue that too many people have. Just like PwC, issues not covered and all the media is now hiding behind comedians regarding ‘less educated voters‘. The truth is not given, the facts are not shown. Hiding behind the few that do not represent the populous. How are those facts looking?

Just remember that the Media at large seems to need large financial and large corporations, so how are we told the truth? I can only advice you to look around, learn the facts and question everything you read, including what I write here. I believe that I am honestly informing you, but you should not accept that premise as a given.

Only when you are critical of everything, will you possibly discover the truth of anything.

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Tagged as Aiming for Global Accounting Standards, Ashton Villa, Boris Johnson, Brexit, CESR, Daniel Sheldon Hamilton, David Cameron, Deep Integration: How Transatlantic Markets are Leading Globalization, ECB, Eu, France, Frexit, Gisela Stuart, Greece, House of lords, IFRA, John Oliver, Jonathan Freedland, Joseph P. Quinlan, Kees Camfferman, Last Week Tonight, Mario Draghi, Mark Carney, Melanie Phillips, Michael Gove, NHS, Nigel Farage, Peter Harrison, President Hollande, PwC, Schroeder plc, Stephen A. Zeff, Tesco, the economist, The Economist Intelligence Unit, the Guardian

April 4, 2016 · 21:21

Working for a new boss

This morning starts off with an entirely different wave of events. Brexit is turning out to the two teams misrepresenting issues as much as possible, many of these representations are about scaremongering. The NHS is going on and on and on and other views are given. In both cases I agree with some parts, I disagree with loads of it (from my point of view with decent evidence). Yet all this we would have overlooked almost half a dozen articles. The story is only the smallest part of it. What is massively interesting that there is for a chosen few a job available! It is not glamorous, you will be frowned upon, but consider a job that will get you a 7 figure income (after a while), a decent house, possible tropical views a few times a year. In this day and age? Who would not accept that? Perhaps the single ideological man or woman, but that leaves a few million people, all ready to accept a position with the glamorous firm of Mossack Fonseca, a panama based law firm, with services on a global scale. Clients like Russian President Vladimir Putin (allegedly). They operate in tax havens including Switzerland, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, and in the British crown dependencies Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. I would love a nice job on Guernsey, a nice house, retirement at some point. I am a Trade Marks attorney, one that would love to get an additional degree in finance if that gives me a good job with Mossack Fonseca, is that not what you saw?

The first article ‘What are the Panama Papers? A guide to the biggest leak in history‘ (at http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-panama-papers), assisting the rich and famous store their wealth in tax havens. You see, this is all legal, this is not FIFA screwing its soccer fans over breaking ethical boundaries. This is all thankful to a multitude of short-sighted politicians (or really clever ones depending on your point of view) who enabled options in their tax homes. The article ‘used lawfully to anonymously hold property and bank accounts, these companies were registered in a range of tax havens and this map shows the most popular locations among its clients. The British Virgin Islands held more than 100,000 companies‘, so you would not be breaking the law. You just have to accept that some people pay (a lot) less taxation. After 30 year I have clearly seen and learned that living morally correct will get you a one bedroom apartment in the suburbs, a place you will not be able to pay off before you die. So as morality is not a legal requirement, as all this work is perfectly legal, why not?

This is all coming to light because of a leak, someone (as stated by the Guardian) got a hold of 2.6 terabytes of data. The quote is literally “There are 11.5m documents and 2.6 terabytes of information drawn from Mossack Fonseca’s internal database“, which implies that the facts were discovered through criminal activities. This means that Mossack Fonseca might have a case against those perpetrators. Another interesting quote is “Using offshore structures is entirely legal. There are many legitimate reasons for doing so“, so why not become a service provider here?

On the other side there is the quote “In a speech last year in Singapore, David Cameron said “the corrupt, criminals and money launderers” take advantage of anonymous company structures. The government is trying to do something about this. It wants to set up a central register that will reveal the beneficial owners of offshore companies“, which is equally valid. Mossack Fonseca stated: “it complies with anti-money-laundering laws and carries out thorough due diligence on all its clients. It says it regrets any misuse of its services and tries actively to prevent it. The firm says it cannot be blamed for failings by intermediaries, who include banks, law firms and accountants“, this gives us another side too. When we consider banks we can consider Barclays (Libor 2012), Marcus Agius, former chairman of Barclays, resigned from his position over it. He’s sitting pretty being amongst others on the board of the BBC. Now, there is no evidence that he was directly involved, but it happened under his nose (so to speak), with a few exceptions most got out with their bonus intact and this was a legal transgression, so why would anyone not want to work for Mossack Fonseca, who is not breaking any laws?

When we consider law firms we should consider the news form the Independent in 2013 where we see: “The Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) knew six years ago that law firms, telecoms giants and insurance were hiring private investigators to break the law and further their commercial interests, the report reveals, yet the agency did next to nothing to disrupt the unlawful trade” (at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/the-other-hacking-scandal-suppressed-report-reveals-that-law-firms-telecoms-giants-and-insurance-8669148.html) and when we see the word ‘accountant’ I think Tesco and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. For example the quote I used “Tesco paid PwC £10.4m in the last financial year – plus another £3.6m for other consultancy work“ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2014/09/30/thriving-team-tesco/) in the article ‘Thriving Team Tesco?‘, where again the case of wrongdoing should be regarded as more likely than not, so why would we not consider perfectly legal work at Mossack Fonseca?

Let’s not forget that the governments on a global scale are enabling this to get some tax revenue. Consider that the British Virgin Islands have 100,000 companies, without them, how much taxation would have been collected? It is a mere case of need and availability.

For example, a fictive person goes to His Excellency John Duncan and states: “Sir, if you offer us a favourable tax option, the option would be open to bring industry and taxable revenue in access of $1,000,000,000. Would you be willing to consider a low taxation plan?” to this the governor would respond “My dear man, we have no profit tax and no corporation tax!”

So how long until the big boys move a few billion to a place like that?

We seem to find time to worry about ethical issues, when the installed governments in Europe have yet to show a mere accountable bone in their bodies for overspending trillions. We seem to be ignoring the obvious. Even if this was illegal, how many banker have gone to prison from 2004 onwards? This is not illegal, this is a mere application of true globalisation. In addition, consider that offshore companies and offshore trusts are in most cases taken out of the view of taxation to begin with, so why not employ this option?

You see, the part that is in the middle of all this is not answered, it is skated around. No one seems to care on HOW the information was gotten at. The quote “2.6 terabytes of information drawn from Mossack Fonseca’s internal database” implies hacking. This does not mean that it could not have been facilitated by internal sources. Such an amount of data does not just easily download, so either someone got access and mirrored a drive, which implies that the server was accessible, what is more likely (read: speculation), is that this is one of the first cloud hacks. To have such a large environment, so global gives the option that data was in the cloud and someone was able to access it. This morning IT Pro had the following quote (at http://www.itpro.co.uk/data-leakage/26293/panama-papers-leaked-through-server-hack-1). “it had opened an investigation after discovering that “unfortunately” it had suffered “an attack on its email server” and that it is taking “all necessary measures to prevent this from happening again“, which could be the case. My issue here is that from a server, getting access to that much data should either be noticed (bandwidth), or it was internal (read: facilitated). When we consider the e-mail data overall, there is nothing that raises flags. Oh yes, there is! That much data with a truckload of attachments gives food for thought. Even as we consider no criminal acts have been undertaken, one would try to secure that much data. Perhaps this was done, but how was so much data gained?

In my view, encrypted UNIX servers would have required massive amounts of time to access and a good IT team always keeps one eye on their servers. Fortune quoted “Mossack Fonseca is calling the 11.5 million leaked documents a “limited” breach” (at http://fortune.com/2016/04/04/panama-papers-law-firm/), which is also likely, yet in all that if that was limited, yet fortune gives us one quote the Guardian would be unlikely to state “It appears that you have had unauthorized access to proprietary documents and information taken from our company and have presented and interpreted them out of context“, now that part will be close to impossible to prove, because the Guardian clearly stated “Using offshore structures is entirely legal”

No matter how this plays out, it seems to me that politicians on a global scale will start playing their ‘hypocrisy card’. Which is another laughing matter altogether. I cannot predict how this will officially play out, but they do have a website at http://www.mossfon.com/ and they are also in Trade Marks, so I should see what my options are. For you the reader, especially those with a degree in wealth management. I suggest you send your resume to:

The MF Group
54th Street, Marbella
Panama, Rep. of Panama

You could also go to web page: http://www.mossfon.com/about_service/careers/, if you want to post your resume online!

Let’s not forget, these people have not broken any laws (at present).

Have a fun day and dream of a life without debt in a place you could never have afforded in any other legal way.

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Tagged as Barclays, BBC, Brexit, British Virgin Islands, IT Pro, John Duncan, LIBOR, Marcus Agius, Mossack Fonseca, NHS, offshore companies, offshore trusts, President Vladimir Putin, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Serious Organised Crime Agency, Soca, Tax havens, Tesco, the Guardian, The Independent

March 21, 2016 · 22:21

Is the truth out there?

That is the question that sprung to mind, when the article ‘Brexit could cost £100bn and nearly 1m jobs, CBI warns‘ (at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/21/brexit-could-cost-100bn-and-nearly-1m-jobs-cbi-warns) crossed my screen an hour ago. Of course it then continues with the subtitle ‘Report conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the CBI‘, perhaps you remember that firm named PwC? The people behind the books kept for Tesco. The firm the press avoids like the plague (especially when digging into Tesco issues). A report for the CBI no less. When we look at wiki we get ‘Confederation of British Industry is a UK business organisation, which in total speaks for 190,000 businesses’, so basically, because businesses are afraid to export their articles, we get this level of scaremongering. And let’s be honest, when Lehman Brothers is not available, PwC is all that remains. The Wiki reference will be explained shortly.

The first paragraph states “Leaving the European Union would cause a serious shock to the UK economy that could lead to 950,000 job losses and leave the average household £3,700 worse off by 2020, a report commissioned by the CBI business lobby group has warned“, I personally consider this to be a blatant lie!

There is NO WAY that there is any clear data on this event. The reason is simple. This situation has never happened before so there are questions, that is a given, yet what they predict is that 2 times 100% of exports that the UK ships to the USA becomes lost revenue. This is just ludicrous. Leave it to the place that embellished 110 million in revenue for Tesco will be able to lose 1000 times that amount in goods and services for the CBI. I am merely speculating here. I wish I could give you more, but the press is very engaged into not confronting PricewaterhouseCoopers on their actions.

The second paragraph “an analysis conducted by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for the CBI said that Brexit could cost the UK economy £100bn – the equivalent of 5% of GDP – by 2020 and would cause long-lasting economic damage from which it would never recover“, let take a look at the parts PwC (as I see it) hides behind ‘could cost‘ meaning that it might, it is not a given. the second part ‘would cause‘, means that if they lose 100 billion then it would impact the economy, which we can all agree with, but that level of loss is NOT a given. Lastly there is ‘long-lasting economic damage from which it would never recover’, ‘would never’ is also not a given, consider that thanks to British Labour, who caused a massive part of the fourteen hundred billion in debt, on that part 100 billion will have an impact, the economy will recover, yet in all fairness, at what speed? We all agree that this massive extra level of debt is not a good thing, but it all began with ‘could cost‘ so it is not a given! The CBI, like frightened little sissies are trying to sway voters through fear. You see, if these businesses have an actual product to share, people will buy it.

They then continue to push more fear that people would lose between £175 and £300 a month. I would be shocked, we all would be shocked. Yet again there is ‘could be lower‘, meaning it is not a given. When I read “Carolyn Fairbairn, the CBI’s director general, said: “This analysis shows very clearly why leaving the European Union would be a real blow for living standards, jobs and growth“, my response would be ‘Carolyn Fairbairn, we know you are high and mighty with previous position at the Competition and Markets Authority, Lloyds Banking Group and the UK Statistics Authority, so if you truly stand behind these analyses you will give us all (in open data) the raw data, the analyses and the conclusions with data connections‘.

I feel certain that we will see all kinds of weighting, forecasting and predictive modelling. As I see them, they will be utterly useless, for the mere reason I gave at the start of my blog “This situation has never happened before“, there will be turmoil, there will be a time of flux, but this forecast of utter blackness on non-given facts and shady forecasts is just completely out of bounds.

You see, I went to Wiki for a reason, when we go to their website we get a few issues (and initially their website was unreachable for about 15 minutes). The first one is from 15^th of March (at http://news.cbi.org.uk/news/cbi-to-make-economic-case-to-remain-in-eu-after-reaffirming-strong-member-mandate/), here we get the quote “80% of CBI members think being in EU is best for their business – ComRes survey“, now, consider the following two elements, first is the ‘given’ fact on their site “CBI’s relationship with 190,000 businesses of all sizes across the UK“, now consider that survey where 80% wants to stay within had the following quote: “The survey had 773 responses among small, medium and large firms across the whole of the UK. It reveals 80% of CBI members, when weighted to reflect its membership – including 71% of small and mid-sized business members – believe that the UK remaining a member of the EU would be best for their business. Overall, 5% say it is in their firms’ best interests for the UK to leave the EU, with 15% unsure“, So out of 773 responses, 116 were not sure, so only 658 were certain one way or another, so the 80% comes from that group?

In addition, the fact that I, in 24 years have never seen ANY survey been answered for 100%, so how many answered it, how were the numbers given and how can any of the numbers have ANY level of reliability? That is even before we start looking into the questionnaires some people tend to make, which is often enough not that neutral to begin with.

All these thoughts took 45 seconds to form, after which I needed 30 minutes to look into some of the known givens whilst Graham Norton was playing in the background. The biggest fun I had was considering the part where the CBI is basically stating between the lines that “UK products are so shaite, that it can only be sold under EU membership“, is that not so Mrs Fairbairn? I believe that UK produce is high, high enough that there will always be a demand and high enough that people will go out of their way to get it. The gaming column last week that had a go at Brexit earlier was eager to ignore the fact that some of the better games developers are British, there is British Beef, British Lamb, the UK foundation in vegetables and fruits. The United Kingdom has always had a good stock and a proud tradition. I think that these traditional times can return the UK to better times.

That is also a speculation on my side. You see, this is the one time that the Telegraph has a fair point (yes, this rare occurrence happened on February 23^rd 2016), There is the quote “The only appalling part is that we import so much poor quality foreign food at the expense of our own farmers“, I believe that there is a deeper truth. Obesity comes from junk food and from bad quality food. Yes, produce might rise a little in price, yet when you get the same quality ingredients from eating only 50% of the amount of junk goods you used to eat because it was cheaper, I believe that the overall health of the British population would also go up (read: lowering obesity). Mrs Fairbairn could have given that information too, you see the CBI site claimed to be connected to 190,000 businesses, so how many of them are farms?

This is no longer the age of Tesco (thanks to PwC to some extent), in addition, it stops being the place for Aldi and Lidl, it will slowly return to being the place of the neighbourhood grocery and butcher. I have nothing against Aldi and Lidl, yet their models do not run on the small local farms, their margins (low margins mind you) comes from bulk retail from big portion purchasers to deliver to all stores. It is a fair model, yet after Brexit there will be a change, their margins will fall, that is a reality, but if this opts for small business owners to rise from the ashes, the Brits in general will all win, we would see a need for jobs, not a loss of jobs. Again, this is speculative on my side, yet I do not go about scaring you readers like the CBI is doing through PricewaterhouseCoopers.

So, how about my own statement: “I personally consider this to be a blatant lie“?

As I see it, this report has issues, possibly a whole lot of them and if that is not the case, Carolyn Fairbairn would (read: should) have all the data ready for us all. When we see this level of incomplete information, giving rise to the possibility of misinformation the reference to ‘blatant lie’ is a fair given one, as I see it of course.

Now, mind you, the CBI page has the full report ready (at http://news.cbi.org.uk/news/leaving-eu-would-cause-a-serious-shock-to-uk-economy-new-pwc-analysis/leaving-the-eu-implications-for-the-uk-economy/), a 79 page document, so what does that give us and why was that not in the Guardian (as far as I could tell)?

We see the following under the key findings:

We have assessed the potential economic impacts of a UK exit from the EU under two possible scenarios
We estimate that total UK GDP in 2020 could be between around 3% and 5.5% lower under the FTA and WTO scenarios respectively than if the UK remains in the EU (interesting is how ‘we estimate that’ was not in bold)
The negative impact represents a reduction of around £55-100 billion in UK GDP, at 2015 values

And the final bullet point was “As with any economic modelling exercise, our estimates are subject to many uncertainties“, which is actually the core of it all, too many uncertainties, which gives additional weight to my statement.

Yet how were these numbers derived?

You see, when we see ‘Table 2.1: Exit scenario results – percentage difference in real UK GDP from levels in counterfactual scenario‘, we think we have something here, but on what core business is this founded? Is this on raw data sets? On aggregated data? You see, PwC have done all kinds of reports where they were overly optimistic, is the idea that they are intensely overly conservative on any of these numbers (by request of the CBI) and that the negative numbers are actually quite too negative? The fact that they are making predictions until 2030, whilst so far many firms resorting to analyses have been unable to make any decent prediction 3 years into the future, they ended to be overly optimistic again and again by more than one percent (try remembering Greece and Cyprus). Then there is: “A vote to leave the EU would create economic and political uncertainty that could last for several years while the UK Government negotiates the terms of its exit from the EU as well as new trade arrangements with non-EU countries“. Here is the kicker: the report did not once, I say again not once properly discuss the option of growing economies by promoting a growth interaction between Commonwealth nations. The UK stands not alone! Her siblings Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India et al, still need goods too. Whilst we see the ‘BS’ (Belonius Substance) from America regarding how the UK must stay within the EU, the UK can decide to collaborate with India on Generic medication. Now suddenly we get some individual in a white condo going on how friends should remain friends (that individual tends to be addressed as President of the United States), so here is one side of commerce that would ‘suddenly’ open doors for all kinds of trade.

The bibliography has a fair amount of theory references, and even though their existence, or their academic value is not in question, what is in question is the PDF we are looking at, especially when we see ‘Figure D.5: Working age population projections under the WTO and FTA scenarios and counterfactual‘, we see these numbers and graphs, but from what dataset? Where do we see any reference to the data population used, especially when we see a collection of graphs from various sources but with no clear reference to the numbers that these predictions are based on? In one example starting on page 47, we see ‘C.1 Economic context and key issues‘, with a reference to three graphs from two different suppliers. This gives me a few additional question marks (and it should leave you with even more questions). You see, if 80% wants to stay in Europe as stated by the CBI, whilst they had less than 800 responses, how does that hold any weight to the fact that they, on their own site state “the CBI’s relationship with 190,000 businesses of all sizes across the UK gives us a unique insight into what the result will mean for UK prosperity“, which means that 80% of the 0.4% of the businesses that decided to answer the call of the survey. I think I have raised enough questions for you the reader to be a lot less worried in this case!

Now, I am not stating that there will not be any issues, because the UK will face issues, but in equal measure the UK will stop making massive donations to a system that does not hold some of its members properly to account. It is like carrying buckets of water to the sea, an empty gesture that is a clear waste of time and money.

By the way, that report has a very interesting by-line which is shown at the very end (page 79): “This publication has been prepared for general guidance on matters of interest only, and does not constitute professional advice“, so if that is the moment of non-accountability than my final words are towards the writer of the article Julia Kollewe and especially her boss (or the boss of her boss, Katharine Viner): ‘How could you have been so stupid to go with this article. From my point of view, as a blogger tends to be a subjective one, it is a hack job, nothing more than mere anti Brexit material‘. As a newspaper you should have known a lot better! The fact that Julia writes “By taking a clear stance on Brexit, the CBI differs from the smaller business lobby group the British Chambers of Commerce, which is trying to be impartial. It recently suspended its director general, John Longworth, from his post after he suggested that Britain would be better off outside the EU“, yes, they might have done this, and they did it in what I regard a shady and shoddy way!

The article in the Guardian and the report leaves us with a few questions regarding Carolyn Fairbairn, the CBI as well as a few questions regarding the editorial of the Guardian. I hope that at the very least that part has been brought to the surface by me writing this article.

To all a lovely evening and whether you believe in Brexit or Bremain, make sure that you go towards the referendum properly informed!

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Tagged as Aldi, Australia, Bremain, Brexit, Canada, Carolyn Fairbairn, CBI., Competition and Markets Authority, ComRes, Cyprus, Greece, India, John Longworth, Julia Kollewe, Katharine Viner, Lidl, Lloyds Banking Group, New Zealand, President of the United States, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, Tesco, UK Statistics Authority

October 4, 2015 · 12:00

CISA and Privacy are not opposites

There is a view that many hold, this view is not educated. A view which was given to us from the moment we spawned as a living person. Some got this knowledge as they went to their church or temple. They were told about good and evil. When we started to go to school we got to learn about order and chaos. This last one matters, you see, the opposite that order and chaos represent has been used in books, in videogames, in TV shows and in movies. In the Avengers movie ‘Age of Ultron’, near the end of the film we hear a quote from Vision, played by Paul Bettany that matters: “Humans are odd. They think order and chaos are somehow opposites“.

You might not realise it but the gem that we have here is in the foundations of many issues that have been plaguing us in several ways. Let’s take a look at this in two parts. The first is a Guardian article (at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/01/blackphone-release-data-protection-privacy-surveillance) called ‘Blackphone: privacy-obsessed smartphone aims to broaden its appeal‘. The very first paragraph is a quote that shows issues on more than one side “Privacy company Silent Circle has released a second version of its signature handheld, a smartphone designed to quell the data scraping and web tracking that’s become such an integral part of the digital economy in the last few years (and whose results might well end up with the NSA, if the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passes)“, now I have no issue with the data scraping part and for the most the term ‘whose results might well end up with the NSA’ is less of an issue, but the overall taste is about privacy, I have no issue with this. The next quote is an interesting one, which will matter soon enough “In the beginning, Janke said, the Blackphone project was just a way for people working for his security firm SOC, since sold, to call home without having their communications intercepted“.

You see, there is no issue with the message shown here, but what is linked to all this is the message that is not shown here. You see, this device should now be regarded as the most excellent tool for hedge funds managers, organised crimes and all other kinds of non-mentioned criminals, who will now get to do with ease and freedom the things they had to steeplechase around the block for. This device will allow financial advisors to take certain steps that they were too scared to do, all out of fear of getting caught. This device will be opening doors.

There is no issue with the approach Janke had, he was submerged (read: drowning) in a world where any slip up could mean the death of him, his comrades and perhaps even his family. So his need for security was a given. There is a need for such a device. I have written about the need for this device as early as 2009, so the fact that someone picks this up is not a surprise, so why are we looking at this?

You see, it is the mention of CISA that is part of all this. CISA or better stated the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is sponsored by Republican Senator Richard Burr (North-Carolina). Why would anyone oppose ‘the bill makes it easier for companies to share cyber threat information with the government‘? Let’s be clear this is about dealing with Cyber Threats!

So what is a Cyber Threat? A Cyber threat is defined as ‘a malicious attempt to damage or disrupt a computer network or system‘, so we have the fact that this is about malicious attempts! So why would there be an issue? Well, there is because people and as it seems to be especially criminals, terrorists and Organised Crime seem to be allowed a lot more privacy than their victims, so in all this I see little issues pop up all over the place. This sounds all emotional, but what does the official text state? Well, the complete text is at https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/754, so let’s take a look at some parts.

“Permits state, tribal, or local agencies to use shared indicators (with the consent of the entity sharing the indicators) to prevent, investigate, or prosecute offenses relating to: (1) an imminent threat of death, serious bodily harm, or serious economic harm, including a terrorist act or a use of a weapon of mass destruction; or (2) crimes involving serious violent felonies, fraud and identity theft, espionage and censorship, or trade secrets“, How can we be opposed to this? Is this not the foundation of growing fair play?

Well, that is partially the question. You see, the issue is in part the language. Consider this paraphrase which remains correct in light of the previous statement: “Permits local agencies to use shared indicators (with the consent of the entity sharing the indicators) to prosecute offenses relating to serious economic harm“. Which is now the floodlight of all this.

Now we get to the second part in all this, which is offenses relating to serious economic harm. Serious economic harm tends to be seen as pure economic loss, but it is not limited to that. For this we can look at the element ‘Loss of production suffered by an enterprise whose electricity supply is interrupted by a contractor excavating a public utility‘, which we see in Spartan Steel & Alloys Ltd v Martin & Co (Contractors) Ltd. In here the legislatively famous Lord Denning raised the issue of ‘Duty to mitigate loss’. Yet today, in the world of data and digital media, how can we measure that element? Let me show this through an exaggerated fictive example.

Microsoft raises the issue that as they required an investigation into acts that are causing serious economic harm to Microsoft. Unique software has been released that directly negatively impacts they trademarked business. The CISA could now be in effect to investigate data and data sources, but who minds that store? Who has that knowledge? Now consider that the person investigated would be Markus Persson, because his program ‘Minecraft’ is now stopping all people who are part of the Microsoft Gaming brand to continue.

So who will make that call? You might think that this is a ludicrous example, but is that so? Microsoft ended up paying more than 2 billion for it, so someone implying ‘Serious Economic Harm’ is not that far-fetched. This now becomes an issue for a timeline. What timeline is in effect here? With an imminent threat of death this is a simple matter, with serious economic harm that matter is far from simple, moreover will the claim be valid? I used the ludicrous Minecraft and Microsoft Games brand. Yet what happens when this is a lot more ‘grey’, what happens when this is Raytheon versus the Belgium based TTN Verhaert? A Technology Transfer Network (TTN) that has innovated the latest classified satellite navigation systems. Is it still a clear call as to what constitutes serious economic harm?

This act opens up a can of intellectual property, the one can everyone wants to swim in and the elected official channels do not even have a fraction of the minimum required insight to make such a call.

Section 9 gives us “Directs the DNI to report to Congress regarding cybersecurity threats, including cyber-attacks, theft, and data breaches. Requires such report to include: (1) an assessment of current U.S. intelligence sharing and cooperation relationships with other countries regarding cybersecurity threats to the U.S. national security interests, economy, and intellectual property; (2) a list of countries and non-state actors that are primary threats; (3) a description of the U.S. government’s response and prevention capabilities; and (4) an assessment of additional technologies that would enhance U.S. capabilities, including private sector technologies that could be rapidly fielded to assist the intelligence community”

When we consider both A and B, we should look at ‘U.S. SEC drops Onyx insider trading lawsuit against Dubai men’ (at http://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-sec-drops-onyx-insider-230111643.html) from September 15^th. The quote here is “Smith said the Newman decision was ‘helpful,’ but that the SEC ‘never had a tipper’ or evidence that his clients received inside information”, one would think that this is where CISA could now step in. Alas, apart from the side that is implied by the CISA text: ‘assessment of additional technologies that would enhance U.S. capabilities, including private sector technologies that could be rapidly fielded to assist the intelligence community’, which according to Blackphone is not an option, we now see that this opens a door to ‘patsy management’ on how two unsecured parties, could be set-up through the use of Blackphone through encrypted conversations and when the two unsecured parties talk, they could be setting each other up thanks to the other two parties that were using a Blackphone. Blackphone here has no blame whatsoever, they would be offering the one part criminals desperately want, a secured phone. This now sets a dangerous precedence, not a legal one, because Blackphone is behaving itself as it should, the provider of secure communications, it is what people do with it that matters that part cannot be guaranteed by the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. In addition, S. 754 has one additional flaw. That flaw is seen in the definitions, where we see that the earlier mentioned definition ‘serious economic harm’ is not specified in the definitions at all, so what definition applies?

Beyond that, we see the definition of a cybersecurity threat. In here it is important to take a look at part A and part B.

part a gives us: “IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in subparagraph (B), the term “cybersecurity threat” means an action, not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, on or through an information system that may result in an unauthorized effort to adversely impact the security, availability, confidentiality, or integrity of an information system or information that is stored on, processed by, or transiting an information system” and part B gives us “EXCLUSION.—The term “cybersecurity threat” does not include any action that solely involves a violation of a consumer term of service or a consumer licensing agreement“, which sounds nice, yet how does it help stem cybersecurity threats?

You see, when you consider the letter send by UCLA to Chairman Dianne Feinstein in June last year, we see: “CISA’s inadequate use limitations risk turning the bill into a backdoor for warrantless use of information the government receives for investigations and prosecutions of crimes unrelated to cybersecurity“, which could be regarded as the biggest failure, but it is not, it is the part we see in “CISA requires that cyber threat indicators shared from the private sector with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) be immediately disseminated to the Department of Defense, which includes the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command. This new flow of private communications information to NSA is deeply troubling given the past year’s revelations of overbroad NSA surveillance“. It is the ‘be immediately disseminated to the Department of Defense’ that comes into play now. When we consider ‘Overbroad Liability Protection‘, which can now hide by giving that function to an intern so that “good faith” reliance remains is a potential risk that could be pushed by big business to hide behind the ‘dope’ who acts in ‘good faith’.

Is that truly the blackness we face? Well, that is hard to say, the fact that this act relies on ambiguity and is lacking certain rules of restraint, or at least certain safeguards so that data cannot leave the intelligence office is reasons enough to have a few more discussions on this topic. What is interesting is that CISA would create a fear, which Black phone addresses, yet in similar method other players will now receive an option allowing them to play large dangerous games whilst not becoming accountable, that new Blackphone could address several issues the shady commercial interest guy is very happy to exploit.

The question becomes, how does any of this make us any safer?

So now we get back to the Age of Ultron line. As we see that crime is becoming an orderly event, the fact that we tend to hide in chaos the issues that should be open for all is part of the dilemma we now face. Again we are confronted with laws that remain inadequate to deal with the issues that needed to be dealt with. CISA takes in my view a chaotic approach to keep a level of order that was delusional from the very start, from missing definitions to application of methodology. It is a cog not linked to any machine, proclaiming soon to be of use to all machines and in the end, as I see it will only hinder progress on many levels, mainly because it tries to circumvent the accountability of some. And this is not just an American issue. In that regard laws and the protection of the victims have been an issue for a longer time. We only need to look to the Tesco grocery store on the corner to comprehend that part of the equation.

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Tagged as Blackphone, Chairman Dianne Feinstein, CISA, Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, Dianne Feinstein, DNI, Lord Denning, Markus Persson, Microsoft, Mike Janke, NSA, Onyx insider trading lawsuit, Paul Bettany, Raytheon, S.754, SEC, Senator Richard Burr, Silent Circle, Spartan Steel & Alloys Ltd v Martin & Co (Contractors) Ltd, Technology Transfer Network, Tesco, TTN, UCLA, US Congress, Verhaert

September 27, 2015 · 00:26

What news is news?

There are several pieces, not just in the Guardian, the BBC, the Independent or the Times. They all tell us that they have news, but do they have any actual news? The Guardian shows us a tech article (in the Tech section) called: ‘the node pole: inside Facebook’s Swedish hub near the Arctic Circle‘, all innocent news, one could surmise that it is just a space filler. Or was it done to give extra view to the article ‘Facebook is making more and more money from you. Should you be paid for it?‘, or perhaps to give extra light to ‘Facebook case may force European firms to change data storage practices‘, which I gave my views on in my previous blog. You decide!

In the business section we see VW to get some centre stage, which makes perfect sense and that is just the Guardian. The independent also has a go at Facebook, but now has a go at its users, well, actually it is not the Independent, but the employee tribunal. Now the article shows all kind of signs of bullying, which is never OK and in that regard Rachael Roberts has a real case, but in light of the events, Mrs Bird does not seem to be a friend of Mrs Roberts, so why is the act of unfriending on Facebook the killer? Yet it is the quote “But employment lawyer Josh Bornstein told ABC news the unfriending incident was found to be workplace bullying in the context of several other issues“, which baffles me, if they are not friends, one or the other could unfriend the other party, that part seems clear cut to me, not bullying. So out of the 18 allegations of bullying in total, the unfriending in Facebook took the cake? It does not add up to me!

In addition we see two whole articles on Facebook being down and oh yes, the new iPhone is for sale! Let’s not forget the fact that the iPhone now allows for sextracking. So, parents buy your boy or girl on of these bad boys so you can find new ways on how you are about to become a grandparent! Really? You need to keep scores on your phone now? Didn’t Ashley Maddison teach you anything regarding sex that is on the internet, everyone will know soon thereafter?

Finally they also gave visibility to ‘Hospital apologises for removing RAF sergeant from A&E because uniform could ‘upset’ patients‘, which is a can of worms in its own right. In that light I expect the NHS to move all drug and binge drink casualties to their basement as not to invoke bad thoughts from the Presbyterian community. How insane was the idea to move a wounded RAF sergeant in the first place!

All these events, some are actually news, but no one seems to have any balls. No one is looking at Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Which of course ties in nicely with the words of the Dalai Lama ‘Dalai Lama on Britain’s policy towards China: ‘Where is morality?’’, the answer might not be such a high moral one, it goes a little like “Who is willing to suck the smallest extremity for the good of one’s career?”

To some extent we can accept that the SFO is silent, only to the smallest extent. You see Tesco is dealing with a write-off of £6.4bn, which of course is massive. We have seen all the news on how some former Tesco entities are getting grilled (as they should) but the press on many levels in many nations keep on rehashing the old news and no one is digging into PwC. No one is digging there. Does that not sound awfully weird? Yet here is the kicker, we see more and more messages like ‘Multinational tax avoiders targeted’, with quotes like “while the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia warned about throwing up new hurdles in what is already a high-cost economy. The chamber’s board includes representatives from ConocoPhillips, GE, Boeing, PwC and Exxon Mobile“, yes it seems it is never a good time to go after tax avoiders (not to mention the impact it has on the bonus benefits for those working in that part of the financial branch).

Before you whisk this away as mere banter (which you are of course allowed to do), take a look at this article that is a little over a week old. It is from the Wall Street Journal, which I do not look into too often. The article (at http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/09/15/the-morning-download-identity-theft-key-to-attack-on-cisco-routers/) called ‘The Morning Download: Identity Theft Key to Attack on Cisco Routers‘, starts with: “Good morning. The international attacks on Cisco Systems Inc. routers, disclosed earlier today by security firm FireEye Inc.’s Mandiant unit, began with the theft of legitimate network credentials. Securing and managing the identity of network users continues to be a massive challenge for CIOs and CISOs and ultimately, the CEO and the board. The attacks have been named ‘SYNful’ because of how the malicious software moves across routers using their syndication functions “Cisco said SYNful did not take advantage of any vulnerability in its own software. Instead it stole valid network administration credentials from organizations targeted in the attacks or by gaining physical access to their routers,” Reuters reports today. Mandiant said in a blog post that it had found 14 instances of router implants, which replace Cisco’s operating system”

Now, to complement that statement, I will add the following. On June 5^th (more than 3 months before the WSJ article), I wrote ‘In reference to the router‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2015/06/05/in-reference-to-the-router/) , here I stated: “Soon thereafter no more firewall, no more routers, just the bliss of cloud servers and data, so much data!“, which reflected on the article I wrote on February 8^th (more than 7 months before the WSJ), there I wrote “I think that ‘hackers’ have created a new level (as I mentioned before). I think that Cisco IOS was invisibly patched“, (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2015/02/08/the-next-cyber-wave/). I was literally accused by some to be insane, there was no way that this would EVER happen. Now we see in the Wall Street Journal: “Mandiant said in a blog post that it had found 14 instances of router implants, which replace Cisco’s operating system“, interesting how I am now proven correct. Are the members of the Baboon family (usually found in the FBI) reconsidering their North-Korean option? Let’s face it, this took top level skills, we can (as I pointed out in the past) find those boffins in the US, UK, FR, the FSB and Chinese Intelligence, however in North Korea not that much!

The Reuters article shows a lot more (at http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/16/us-cybersecurity-routers-cisco-systems-idUSKCN0RF0N420150916), however, they are just rehashing something I stated for almost a year, the quote ““That feat is only able to be obtained by a handful of nation-state actors,” DeWalt said, while declining to name which countries he suspected might be behind the Cisco router attacks” adds to my view that I was correct all along (finally another ‘I told you so!’ opportunity). The only difference is, is that DeWalt includes Israel, I have no real quality data on the Israeli cyber capabilities, so I am willing to give him that one. Finally we should consider the quote “Infected hardware devices include Cisco routers 1841, 2811 and 3825“, which is fair enough, yet in my article I offer the option that the CF unit found in nearly EVERY router could also open doors, so the danger could in theory go far beyond those three routers.

I also stated that my thoughts were based on sound speculation. You might wonder what sound speculation is. Basically, it means that even as I might not have them skills to program, I do understand that my solution is viable, the fact that routers are getting programmed with a new OS is clear evidence of that. In addition, it also gives weight to two infestation systems I speculated on as well as the weakness that those believing in the cloud are not realising at present. I was willing to look beyond the veil, a side everyone ignored. Yet when a router can be reprogrammed to the extent it was, also clearly means that data in motion is no longer safe, which means that pretty much any cloud data can be gotten too, the user only has to access the file to make that happen.

I even had a thought on dealing with the Iranian glow in the dark power plants when the time is there, just by thinking out of the box. It does involve a Piranha valve (which actually already exists in name, but mine is so much cooler). None of this is newsworthy, speculative opinion one might state. Yet in my speculation, I have shown solutions to be real in several occasions and in addition to that I also clearly outlined long before the press decided to show the minimalistic amount of balls (read testicles), that a look into Pricewaterhouse Coopers was adamant. It seems that apart from a December 2014 message from the SFO (rehashed by nearly all papers) not much happened, apart from that news, the press at large stayed clear of mentioning PwC and Tesco in one sentence. Is that not utterly weird?

Of course the luggage of someone’s mum in Tenerife (shipping at £122) gets front seat exposure, yet, the issue on £6.4bn getting lost due to assistance (better stated too weak opposition) by Pricewaterhouse Coopers seems too trivial to keep pressure on. Way to go Consumer Champions, Money! I actually mean that! They did do a good job and they have done so in the past, yet I fear that a letter by Dave Lewis on how his firm lost £6.4bn as the keeper of his books was not prudent, or is that tenacious enough to ring that bell very loudly when things looked too odd. Will Consumer Champions find that money? Will they write “Pricewaterhouse Coopers must accept responsibility for the signing off on books as the “accountant”?” Consumer Champions might not get this done, which is fair enough. It should not be on their plate, but the parties this should be very visible on are also not doing anything as far as we can tell, they remain silent, they remain this silent after 9 months.

Yet in all this there is one part both the Guardian and the Independent are getting right. It is the news on the NHS, there are massive problems and knowing them all is essential in finding a solution. In this matter the press has played a good role. In my view exposing former and current politicians a little more on the political game they play, so that we all understand that a proper solution is needed and taking the politicians out of that equation might not be the worst idea, the end result stays the same, the NHS is now too close on the edge of collapse to be acceptable, yet where lies the solution? Although I understand the issue the Independent shows, I partially disagree. The headline ‘New NHS junior doctor contract would discriminate against women, senior medics warn‘ is not incorrect (at http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/new-nhs-junior-doctor-contract-would-discriminate-against-women-senior-medics-warn-10516885.html), yet in all fairness, the quote “Under the new contract, trainees who decide to work part-time would see their pay increase more slowly than their colleagues” is a can of worms! Why would my co-worker doing 32 hours get the same raise as myself working 60 hours? (Remember, I am not a doctor). A choice was made! Yet, there is a level of fairness here too. Which means that to tackle it should be done in another way. Even as there is a shortage, the burnout of physicians is a known issue and making a maximum of 40 hours a week a mandatory status could be close to the only solution. Perhaps we have been too indulged, perhaps some options should only be there during the week. Perhaps the change to healthcare is essential (like hiring 40% more staff), but we also accept that at current not one government remains to afford that change (well perhaps Easter Island where there are less than 10 doctors). In the end the system has been ignored for too long. Too many politicians are on the ‘let’s get the computers up and running‘ whilst they know that staff will remains a problem for a long time.

That is news! That is what matters, but too many papers and too many news broadcasts are about the emotions and not the actual news that matters. That might be an incorrect view and a very biased view. It might be that some news is more important than other news parts, I will instantly agree, yet in all that the complete silence from pretty much all the papers regarding Tesco and some involved book keeping parties remains a mystery to me, how is that part not news? We will see more events that will not get the proper light in newspapers, both in paper as well as online, I’ll let you decide how that measurement applies to an involved party to events that started a £6.4bn downgrade.

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August 30, 2015 · 11:54

Medici decided to do Shakespear

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances. This is what went through my mind when I saw ‘Phone hacking: CPS may bring corporate charges against Murdoch publisher‘ (at http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/28/phone-hacking-cps-may-bring-corporate-charges-rupert-murdoch-publisher) this morning. You see, the phone hacking scandal is not new, this started in 2011, and now, 4 years later the CPS decides to get a clue (or was that gives a toss?). It matters not where they are at, the news as given seems to be the aftermath to the party someone seemed to have missed. The question becomes, who is the mad hatter? Is it the one giving the party? Perhaps that label is attached to a notion, a gimmick or even an organisation. It does not seem to be an individual. Let’s take a look at the story, you see, this is the fact of writing on the mad hatter “The Hatter explains to Alice that he and the March Hare are trapped in a never-ending tea party because, when he tried to sing for the Queen of Hearts at a celebration, she sentenced him to death for ‘murdering the time’. He escaped this fate, but Time, out of anger at his attempted to ‘murder’, has halted himself for the Hatter, keeping him and the March Hare at 6:00 pm forever“. If we paraphrase ‘murdering time’, we could get ‘wasting time’. But whose time was wasted? Is one of the players really a mad hatter? We no longer use Mercury in the fabrication of hats, but the issue remains, this article reads like it is something else entirely. I could go on with the March hare, but I think I am already getting through to you. The question becomes, who is Alice and why is she at this party?

There are two quotes, one following the other that gives way to my thoughts “The Metropolitan police handed over a file of evidence on News International – now renamed News UK – to the CPS for consideration after an investigation stretching back to 2011, when the News of the World was closed at the height of the scandal“, which gives us, why is the CPS only now taking a ‘better’ look? 4 years later, is that not odd? Then we get “We have received a full file of evidence for consideration of corporate liability charges relating to the Operation Weeting phone-hacking investigation”, which implies that the CPS and other players never looked at corporate liability charges the way it should have been looked at. This now gives us loads of questions and it should leave you with the question ‘What exactly was behind the looking glass?’ Who was looking, or better stated, who was NOT looking.

The quote “The CPS decision comes six months after the US department of justice told Murdoch’s company it would not face charges in the US” leaves the impression that the actions of the CPS have been in very bad taste, the rights of the people had been violated with impunity and only after the press at large felt the impending dangers that their time of abuse was over (due to the Levison report) did they dress up like debutantes, eager to take whatever was ‘thrusted’ into them to avoid losing ‘their’ power base. All the efforts in how they claimed that they would be worthy of self-administration, worthy to remain ‘unaccountable’. The ink had not even dried on the verdict when we got to read about the ‘suicide mission’ of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

Only now do we see that Murdoch’s company ‘could’ be prosecuted (that does not mean it will be successful) regarding corporate liability. I am not buying it. When we consider the subtitle ‘The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is set to interview former Tesco chief executive Philip Clarke as part of its criminal investigation into the supermarket chain‘ (at http://economia.icaew.com/news/august-2015/sfo-questions-former-tesco-ceo), whilst the news remains massively silence regarding linked party Pricewaterhouse Coopers, we have to start asking a few very serious questions. Yet, the article also tells us: “the Financial Reporting Council launched a probe into the roles of PwC and various members of the accountancy profession involved in the preparation, approval and audit of its accounts“, we should worry if any of this will go anywhere. The entire Tesco matter was a six billion plus pound drop on the economy. Not the smallest of events, yet no serious investigations, or if there is, the press is steering clear of all this, which is another oddity entirely.

Yet 10 days ago, we see “The FCA has dropped its probe into Quindell after the Serious Fraud Office launched a criminal investigation into the business and accounting practices at the insurance technology firm” with the added “In May Quindell announced that PricewaterhouseCoopers had completed an independent review of a number of its accounting policies”, as well as “PwC also identified that some policies were not appropriate. Quindell’s own review confirmed PwC’s findings“. Are the involved players playing footsie (the use of involved is intentional, this game had more than two players), or are we seeing the start of a new dance, one where in the end, no one goes to jail and no one loses anything, other than a few slapping of the wrists.

So how does this all links? Well, it doesn’t link, they are separate entities, but the given is that we are watching several plays where pretty much all the actors will get away with murder and as the cadavers on stage are real, the people go home reflecting on how realistic it all looked, not realising that we watched games with actual casualties.

Are we facing the beginning of a new Machiavellian play here?

The quote “A source familiar with the original investigation said there could be an element of politics in the transfer of the file. “My best guess is because nobody in the police has the bottle to draw the line under this, they have just passed the buck on the CPS” gives us something to ponder. The CPS website gives us this: “The statutory role of the Crown Prosecution Service is to advise the police in certain circumstances, and to conduct criminal prosecutions. The police provide evidence and information to enable the CPS to carry out these statutory functions“, which gives us the thought ‘if it is statutory, why was this not done sooner?‘ So why did this happen after such a long time, why was the CPS not chomping at the bits on day one that there was a clear issue with the news of the world? In my view, we need to consider that there are more elements in play. Political elements. It is merely a speculation from my side. I would think that cases like Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile prosecution elements would have learned their lesson, but that does not seem to be the case and face it, this is about money, nothing sexual sexy about it, so the press does not seem to care.

The only question becomes is this truly about going after Murdoch, or is this about tying down resources so that they do not have to go after PricewaterhouseCoopers? My side on this is purely speculative, but consider the fact that the CPS has 8000 man and the fact that the SFO would be (read should be) looking at PwC, the fact that the press steers clear of it is weird to say the least. The Tesco mess will take a long time to unravel, the fact that it is kept away from everywhere is a matter of concern to all.

That is where we are at. So there was no typo at the start, we are watching certain people wield a spear, it is thrust at certain players who will most likely survive and it seems to be for the benefit of theatrics and ‘non-convictions’. Even now, as we see PwC named in linking to Quindell, the press steers clear form PwC regarding Tesco. So in all this, what is wrong with the picture we see, moreover, why is there ‘suddenly’ (implied it is sudden, it is not a given) an investigation 4 years later, one that seems to have been activated as the Americans pull away, which beckons the question why the CPS waited for the American parts in the first place.

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Tagged as Alice in Wonderland, CPS, Crown Prosecution Service, DPP, FCA, Jimmy Savile, Machiavelli, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Murdoch publisher, Operation Weeting, Philip Clarke, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC, Quindell, Rolf Harris, Rupert Murdoch, Serious Fraud Office, SFO, Tesco, Through the looking glass

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