I have found several links to reports on the effect of carousel fraud over the past 12 years or so. How interesting that whilst there is plenty of hot air about combating it, very little has been done to eradicate what is, on the surface, damaging to the UK exchequer.

The Guardian in 2002. Written by James Oliver.

The Economist in 2006, referring to 2002.

The Guardian in 2007. Laundering the proceeds of VAT Carousel Fraud in 2007.

Financial Times in 2009.

Carbon Trading Fraud in 2010.

Carbon Trading Fraud in 2012 in The Daily Mail.

BDO in 2013.

£28m Phone Fraud in 2014

As I have asked previously, where has all the money gone? Not the few millions for flashy cars and high living, but the real money? The billions. Why do all the trials involve such large number of Public Interest Immunity hearings? Why are so many of the individuals named in unused material still at large, still perpetuating frauds years after they were originally detected at lower levels of criminal activity?

Whilst conducting research into my forthcoming book on the murkier side of the VAT system, I came across this fascinating article from a US website. Currently, the US employs a system of purchase tax, levied on the retailer and appearing separately on till receipts. The writer is concerned about the introduction of VAT and the implications thereof. He is not wrong. I recall discussing this topic with an officer of Her Majesty’s Customs & Excise back in the late 1980s, who stated quite categorically that Customs wished to see a great reduction in the number of businesses operating within these borders. “It would be much easier for us if everyone shopped at Tesco,” he said. Wouldn’t do much for competition, though, would it?

The current system in the UK and Europe does seem to allow for fraud and the misappropriation of Government funds on a massive scale, yet precious little is ever done to counteract it. During the early 2000s, when figures were released more regularly, it would seem that upwards of £8 billion pounds per annum were being siphoned off from the UK economy, “…enough to build 200 hospitals…” Perhaps those hospitals would be needed to treat all the Whitehall staff trying to cope with the stress of losing all that money. VAT has existed within the UK for 40 years. During that time, how much money has actually disappeared? Each year, a few fraudsters are thrown into jail, serving anything from a few months to several years, yet the sums never seem to add up. The very nature of VAT means that each company in a chain is responsible for a portion of the 20% VAT profit element. A classic split in a VAT fraud would be 2.5% for the missing trader, 1% to 2% for the traders, 5% for the exporter and anything up to 6% for the overseas “handling company”. The full amount of VAT is never recovered by the authorities, nor indeed is it brought into question in trials. “Conspiracy” is always the mantra from the prosecuting QC, yet it would seem that all conspirators are not equal.

If it is so easy to extract VAT from the system, why is it so difficult to trace the money? With the increase in CCTV and ever more sophisticated banking software, why is it that so many of the companies and individuals involved in money laundering are simply ignored by the law enforcement agencies? Are they really that indifferent as to where the largest part of the cash has gone? Perhaps there is a darker, more sinister side to VAT after all.

More to come.

…or is it? Perhaps one of the most quoted tenets when matters legal come to the surface, yet does this apply universally or not?

I am moved to comment after both Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks have attempted to use this as some sort of defence in their current trial. I had assumed this to be the case and it was certainly something freely bandied about the court room during my 5 month trial back in 2005. There are a number of websites from the USA and the UK which refer to this belief, yet they all seem to have a particular axe to grind, without addressing the subject in a broader sense.  Several seem to draw attention to the, “one rule for them, one rule for us” approach, which can appear very attractive when one perceives oneself to have been wronged by the system and God save me if I resort to such tactics. I will, however, draw attention to this in my forthcoming autobiography as there is no doubt that if one knows where the, “bodies are buried”, one does tend to get off.

I very much hope that the rather spurious claim that they didn’t realise it was against the law to tap ‘phones is totally disregarded by the jury, for even if they didn’t realise it was illegal, for sure they knew it was morally reprehensible.

On a wider note, having spent some considerable time amongst the so-called “criminal classes”, another term I find rather hard to swallow having shared cells and rooms with MPs and city financiers whilst at Her Majesty’s Pleasure-who most certainly belong to that group, it would be wise for politicians to police themselves a little more thoroughly, as they must lead the way in showing a good example to the country. If one behaves without morals and thinks only of power and greed, then one cannot be surprised when those at the bottom of the economic heap adopt the same approach. Sauce, goose, gander.

I am currently working on two projects-one being Right to Live which I expect to publish in June and Greedier, the long-awaited sequel to Greed. During the past 9 years, I have undertaken extensive research to get the flavour of the UK prison system at first hand and certainly feel qualified to write about that aspect of the Bold family’s descent.

The book is over 50% complete and takes an unexpected turn in the second half, encompassing one of Essex’s remotest and  most inhospitable locations, bringing together old characters with one or two new ones. Watch this space.

This is all we need…

It would appear that the Pinochet school will teach according to the Third Reich and its promoter is actually happy to be associated with Nazism. It would appear that the influence of escaped Nazis in South America isn’t likely to die out soon.

Something along the lines of the Adolf Hitler schools and the Pfiff/Hitler Youth would appear to be emerging in Russia too. Will we ever escape the past?

 

Further to the earlier post, I have spent much of the past two weeks researching the Meredith Kercher case. (I recommend you check out the link. There are lots of fast balls for the Knox/Sollecito camp). I do wonder whether one of them will crack soon and try to blame the other. Knox has plenty of form on this tactic.

We must, of course, all await the outcome of the Supreme Court in Italy’s final hearing. Or not, as the case may be. For whatever is endorsed in that hearing is likely to be paid scant regard in the USA. Will the Americans accede to any legitimate request from the Italian Court to have her back and returned to jail in Europe? That may even become an election issue. Who knows? They seem keen to extradite almost anyone to face the courts over there. What will happen when the shoe is on the other bloody foot?

Perhaps when it is committed by representatives of a Government, rather than an individual. Witness the story of Lauri Love, a 28 year old man from Suffolk, told here on the BBC, versus today’s reports that GCHQ has been collecting Yahoo Messenger videos.

Naturally, one thinks of George Orwell. What prescience he showed back in 1948 when writing of “Big Brother”. If he wasn’t then, he sure is now.

This short trailer has proved too much for most audiences in the USA. Watch it with caution, but remember it and with luck, you might even watch the movie, which is available on Amazon and now on my Movies page. According to Klimov, the film was so shocking for audiences that ambulances were sometimes called in to take away particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. During one of the after-the-film discussions, an elderly German stood up and said: “I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren.” (Quote from Wikipedia)

Well worth a look during this month when I am going to finish the first novel in the Right to Live trilogy.

This was the real blog entry I wanted to get down today, but felt it appropriate to let you in on why I got around to this train of thought. Food poisoning plays awful tricks with the mind, which, on top of my self-pity and low moans of pain, seemed to take away any desire to do anything which would be deemed regular behaviour for a Sunday. I wrote about the Lithuanian government’s attempts to sanitise its countrymen’s involvement in the mass killings which took place right across that territory in 1941 and I thought back to my Open University Degree papers of 2007 and the set text, Christopher Browning’s 1992 book “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”. In it, for those of you who haven’t had the chance to read, this eminent US historian documents the activities of the Battalion behind the lines of advancing German troops in Eastern Poland in and after July 1941. In it, he attempts to offer an explanation of what happened and why. This, in itself, I have found to be one of the most difficult tasks ever to face a historian. For there is no simple, single solution to the question. There were hundreds of thousands of so-called ordinary Germans actively involved in the Holocaust machine, from the secretaries who processed the paperwork, to the local officials who directed forces to round up local Jews, to the rail authorities who transported them to their places of execution and the rest, which I do not intend to document here.

Yet no sooner was the ink dry on Browning’s book, than Daniel Jonah Goldhagen wrote “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, a very pointed, fascinating view of the whole of Germany at that time. I found both books riveting, though Goldhagen’s rather turgid, repetitive style detracted from what he was trying to say. It was, in a sense, an attempt to refute Browning’s assertion that ordinary Germans were not all bad. There was a lot of anger in the book, understandably, but that anger was directed far too much at Browning and not at the Germans themselves, millions of whom escaped the gallows and most certainly any form of justice after the war. The complicity of the US government is in no doubt in this, (see my previous entry about Operation Paperclip), and perhaps it was that which angered Goldhagen so much.

Why don’t historians ever agree? There is often their own, sometimes small minded prejudice which can get in the way, or more often a rigid political standpoint from which they will not be deviated. Surely they couldn’t both be right? After all, are they not both attempting to fit the facts around their own views, instead of trying to get to the truth, or is that something which is far closer to my own experiences of the past decade, (you know who you are!) The truth hurts. A lot. Sometimes, it fits our own Weltanschauung, sometimes it doesn’t, but we should all be big enough to see the other man’s point of view. Historians often make the most scurrilous criticisms of each other, doubting historical accuracy being one of the favourites, yet there is so much evidence available to support them both. What we must never do is to silence the discussion, nor allow the sanitisation and covering up of what was very clearly the most despicable regime of all time.