Learning from…

…the corrupt Brits
The British High Commissioner was right up front with Clive Thomas in one of the silliest stunts in decades by a governmental entity: its corruption walk. After Thomas revealed his agency’s mandate is to go after State assets both locally and abroad, but he’d decided to start with the overseas cases, it made the march even sillier. Which foreign jurisdiction will even notice?
But the British have been up front not only on the march but also on the investigative end – albeit for SOCU, having lent them the Irish ex-Cop Sittlington. So, are we to assume they’ve sewn up the loose ends with the foreign banks where pilfered loot from Guyana has been supposedly secreted? This we’d like to see…cause they’ve certainly haven’t done squat about tightening up those banks with their own funds.
Take HSBC…the biggest bank in Britain. Back in 2012, it was fined a record US$1.9 billion for processing cash for Mexican drug lords and terrorists. Now if the FINE is US$1.9 billion, but can you imagine how much was processed?? No you can’t!! That’ll be hundreds of billions…and we just can’t get our Lilliputian minds around such sums. (Maybe this was why Trotman only asked for US$15 million??!) And imagine at the time HSBC was run by a former Minister of the British Government – and a minister of the Anglican Church to boot!!
Now don’t think the HSBC incident is an isolated one. The banks and commercial houses of the City of London launder fully 24 per cent of all the off-shore havens across the world!! And it’s no wonder HSBC didn’t even blink after their US$1.9 billion fine….they’ve just been fingered in the money trail of the Gupta’s corrupt practices in South Africa that brought down Zuma.
Dear reader…by now you’re probably scratching your head and asking how come Britain isn’t higher up on that list from TI about being the most corruption jurisdiction on the planet. The simple answer is its countries like Britain that make the rules about what practices are corrupt and what is not. And who should be prosecuted for corruption and who should not. Did you think anyone from HSBC went to jail?? Think again.
And think of the folks at the big British banks that rigged the globally-used LIBOR interest rates and cost the system some US$88 billion. Nobody was even charged!! The point of it all is that jurisdictions like us are made the SCAPEGOATS for carrying away the sins of the big financial sinners like Britain. And that’s why the British HC is so visible. His country is doing soooo much to stop corruption! Here!!
Our misdemeanour-like violations go on TI’s roster but their felonious ones don’t even get mentioned!!
…the man
Clive Thomas is a strange man. Here’s a fella who had so pontificated 50 years ago – when he was in the ivory tower of academia – about sugar that he named his black power group “Ratoon”. And yet he closed down the sugar industry in three years. Even the sugar cane gets at least five ratoons!! But then old people say “moutar different from guitar!!”
He also played a lot of “moutar” about how banks of the capitalist North had us in a “dependency” headlock that was literally strangling away our lifeblood. And the only answer for our survival was to cut all links to the North and create new ones among us starving guts in the “South”. And here he is being advised by “the man” on how to work with those same northern banks to stop local nickel-and-dime corruption while they still get away with the rape of the third world!!
For what shall it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?