Recent Articles

Corruption allegations: The Sun in deep trouble

by Sunny Hundal     February 27, 2012 at 5:44 pm

I said last week that Trevor Kavanagh’s attack on the police investigation into possible corruption at the Sun would force them to be even more diligent.

That fairly obvious prediction seems to have come true.

At the Leveson inquiry today this is what happened, as the NY Times reports:

The officer, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, said that e-mail records obtained by the police showed that there was a “culture at The Sun of illegal payments” that were authorized “at a very senior level within the newspaper” and involved “frequent and sometimes significant sums of money” paid to public officials in the Health Ministry and the prison service, among other places.
…
Ms. Akers said that the payments from The Sun went far beyond the occasional lunch or dinner, with one public official receiving more than $125,000 over several years, and a single journalist being allocated more than $238,000 in cash to pay sources, including government officials.

It was clear from references in the e-mails — to staff members’ “risking losing their pension or job” and to the need for “tradecraft” like keeping the payments secret or making payments to friends or relatives of the officials — that the journalists in question knew that the payments were illegal, Ms. Akers said.

Given that the Met is under immense pressure to get this right and justify their tough action on the Sun – they will pursue this aggressively.

It looks like Trevor Kavanagh shot himself and his paper in the foot with his angry editorial.

The Daily Mail summarises today’s events as:

- Payments to public officials were part of a ‘trade craft’ within the Sun
- One public employee ‘received £80,000 in return for stories’
- Member of the MOD and another from the armed forces have been arrested
- U.S. investigators could look at News Corporation activities in America
- ‘Revolving door’ between the Metropolitan Police and News International
- Lord Prescott says the police were ‘hiding things, not telling me the truth’
- Inquiry will become a ‘bloodbath’ as officers battle to defend their actions
- Sir Ian Blair defends decision not to expand original hacking probe

Bloodbath is the right word.

Rather than back down, the Met is left with no alternative but to justify their actions. Under Sue Akers it’s unlikely the Met will turn a blind eye as it did in the past.

The real divide in the jobs market

by Guest     February 27, 2012 at 3:58 pm

contribution by Faiza Shaheen

The last ten days have seen debate rage about unemployment. And with 2.64 million out of work it’s no surprise.

But with all the controversy surrounding workfare we’re at risk of ignoring the other great divide in the labour market – between graduates and non-graduates.

For people who don’t attend university, the jobs market is pretty bleak.
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These companies are still using Workfare – tell them it’s wrong

by Sunny Hundal     February 27, 2012 at 9:25 am

All last week, the govt used angry and whiny interviewsw in national newspapers to defend their exploitative Workfare programme. And why not – they don’t care whether people are paid for work or not, providing this gives the impression jobs are being created. They’ve failed to grow the economy so this works instead.

Companies free slave labour that can be discarded after a few weeks without penalty. Why would they complain?

But the A4E scandal has illustrated the scam of the back-to-work industry.

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Murdoch’s US troubles keep getting worse

by Tim Fenton     February 27, 2012 at 9:20 am

While Rupert Murdoch’s downmarket troops work on the Sun on Sunday, the news from the USA is not so good.

Following the suspicion of illegality about the story run by the Screws over Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s marriage breakdown, and the suggestion that Jude Law had his phone accessed on US soil, comes news of another potential victim, this time from the West Coast.

Deadline Hollywood has revealed that the Met has advised Hollywood music agent Julie Colbert that her phone may have been hacked. Ms Colbert may not have been of interest to Rupe’s troops, but one of her clients – singer Charlotte Church, who has just settled out of court for a sum rumoured to be not unadjacent to £500,000 – certainly was.

Ms Church had stayed at the Colbert house for some months as a means of putting some distance between herself and the pack of hacks and snappers that had been in constant pursuit back in the UK. Ms Colbert had travelled extensively between Los Angeles and London, so it’s possible that her phone was hacked in the UK.

But Mulcaire’s notes apparently contain several US numbers.

These include Ms Church’s publicist Kevin Chiaramonte, who works out of New York, and that of Ms Colbert. As Bloomberg has diplomatically put it, “The presence of the U.S. phone numbers in Mulcaire’s notes also may complicate the company’s effort there to contain lawsuits”.

As the latter report also notes, News Corp was not rushing to return calls on the subject.

These potentially new developments come on the back of the further revelation that the Murdoch empire could be hit with a case under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) which prohibits overseas corruption by US companies.

In addition to that, there is the potential for the Pitt and Aniston case to be the result of a wiretap. And the UK actions keep on coming

There are still around 800 victims of phone hacking to go, the weekday Sun is in the mire for allegedly bunging the police more than a few drinks, and the lid may be about to be prised off a new can of worms in the USA. It couldn’t happen to a nicer family.

Open letter to Boris over new buses cost

by Newswire     February 27, 2012 at 8:18 am

Labour MP David Lammy has written an open letter to London’s part-time Mayor Boris Johnson over the cost of the new bus.

Here it is in full.

Dear Boris,

I am writing to ask how you can justify the extraordinary cost and diversion of resources of procuring the ‘new bus’, which has come in at a price of £1.4 million per bus.

Why are you spending £1.4million on a single bus whilst raising bus fares by 50% across your term in office, cutting police and not even doing the job full-time, preferring to hold down a second job earning £250,000 from the Telegraph?

Somewhere along the line you seem to have lost touch. Four years and £11 million after your election, the new bus for London is exactly that, a single bus. All that effort and you have one bus to show for it.

Should the full number of these new buses finally reach the road, it will still only be eight buses out of a fleet of 7000 across London, at a cost of £1.4million per bus. That compares to the price of a conventional double-decker of around £190,000. Riding this bus is surely the most expensive bus ticket in history.

With 62 seats at a cost of £1.4million, the cost per seat is £22,580. At £22,695, you can buy a brand new 3 series BMW.

Perhaps, if you had devoted as many hours to holding down fares for every Londoner as you have spent on this bus, my constituents would be a lot better off.

Yours sincerely

David Lammy MP

Even Mail readers don’t buy Tory workfare spin

by Sunny Hundal     February 26, 2012 at 7:09 pm

The Daily Mail has this wonderfully whiny story today where frustrated Tory MPs lash out at everyone from the SWP and the BBC to Mumsnet and even Guardian reporter Shiv Malik for their collapsing Workfare scheme.

Headline: Tories order police to halt workfare demos as MP makes formal protest to BBC over bias in favour of hard-Left militants

Tory whiner Priti Patel has made a “formal protest” (not complaint) to the BBC, accusing it of “being biased in favour of the protest led by the Left-wing Right To Work organisation”.

Shiv Malik is accused of all sorts of things, and Mumsnet apparently are taking orders from the Guardian too.

You couldn’t possibly fit more whining and teeth-gnashing into the story.

—-

But very amusingly – even Daily Mail readers aren’t buying the Tory spin.

All the top-rated comments on the piece are against the idiotic Workfare scheme.

Nice try Tories but the Daily Mail audience isn’t buying your rubbish.

(ht @littlekeithy)

Richard Murphy Taxcast: are banks playing fair?

by Newswire     February 26, 2012 at 6:07 pm

The Taxcast is an upbeat 15 minute monthly podcast with the latest news, research and analysis of global events in tax evasion, tax avoidance and the shadow banking system.

It features headlines, analysis with economist Richard Murphy of The Courageous State and a mini-documentary.

In February’s Taxcast: Are City of London Police really serious about prosecuting financial crimes? Are bankers paying fair taxes on their bonuses? And how Facebook is saving billions in tax via Ireland and Bermuda.

Special focus this month: the tax haven of the City of London, semi-autonmous state within a state.

www.tackletaxhavens.com/taxcast
Producer: naomi@taxjustice.net

New figures show low level of benefit fraud

by Richard Exell     February 26, 2012 at 10:34 am

Friday’s DWP report on Fraud and Error in the Benefit System really ought to get more coverage.

With this publication we now have figures for the whole of the financial year 2010/11, and they show:

• 0.8 per cent of benefit spending is overpaid due to fraud, amounting to £1.2 billion, and
• This proportion is the same as in 2009/10.

If we look at the estimates for different benefits, they are:

• Retirement Pension 0.0 per cent;
• Incapacity Benefit 0.3 per cent;
• Disability Living Allowance 0.5 per cent;
• Council Tax Benefit 1.3 per cent;
• Housing Benefit 1.4 per cent;
• Pension Credit 1.6 per cent;
• Income Support 2.8 per cent;
• Jobseeker’s Allowance 3.4 per cent;
• Carer’s Allowance 3.9 per cent.

Look at the figures for disability benefits, see how low the figures are.

Remember them next time the BBC is running one of its 30 minute hate programmes, pushing the idea that every disabled person on benefits is a fraudster.

Workfare – it works if you want to drive more people to crime

by Flying Rodent     February 26, 2012 at 9:30 am

You have to admire the grand strategy on the Tories. If I was committed to producing an economy that can’t even come close to employing everyone who needs work, I’d encourage young people to take up careers in crime too.

Put simply, firing everyone you possibly can and forcing them to compete for scarce jobs while cracking down on unemployment benefits is a masterstroke, if your aim is to crush all hope out of your opponents’ electoral base and empower your own.

So their new workfare wheeze is a devastating victory.
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Let’s not make culture the scapegoat in sex selective abortion

by Guest     February 25, 2012 at 3:28 pm

contribution by Iman Qureshi

Since the Telegraph’s rather flimsy, inconclusive and suspiciously opportunistic investigation into sex-specific abortions at private health clinics, the pro-life brigade has been claiming that such atrocities are only occurring because of such free access to abortion.
 
Understandably, pro-choicers are on the defensive, but it is dismaying to see that they are flailing with their responses.
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