.
.
.
They
are wooed and pursued by big British realtors eager to sell
them multi-million dollar estates, trophy properties and
landmark mansions.
Pompous and pretentious British academics
convince them to send their progeny to six digit private
schools, promising them that when they graduate they will be
speaking English through their nasal cavities, rolling their
r’s and mastering the art of eloquent but vacuous elocution.
(The children of many a Third World elites are finished and polished in the UK....which is what the USA also does, which is also what empires with ambitious foreign policies do. PM Manmohan Singh of India was "finished" in the UK, as are Zardari's children, Imran Khan and all the rest)
British governments, Labor Liberal and Conservative, in the
best and most hypocritical legal traditions, fashion the
legal loopholes to attract the biggest and wealthiest CRIMINALS of the world.
Crime Wave Sweeps City of London
A
veritable crime wave has invaded the City of London,
where millionaire investment bankers cook the books for
billionaire clients and bilk the Treasury to pay their fines
and flout the Law.
Courses in business ethics are obligatory
at Oxford and Cambridge since it has become standard
operating procedure for mega-swindlers to plead guilty ,to
pay a fine and avoid jail and to solemnly promise to never,
ever, flout the law….. until the next mega-deal.
London
has become the center of global financial capital by
engaging in long term large scale active collaboration
with multi-billion pound drug, arms, people smuggling and
sex-slave cartels.
The “Brits” specialize in laundering
funds from the Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian, Russian,
Polish, Czech, Nigerian narco-kings.
(Erm bit of history prof......since the days of the East India Company drug peddling Internationally has been an integral part of the London economy, for at least 250 years)
Albanian white slavers
have their ‘private bankers’ at prestigious City banks with
a preference for graduates of the London School of
Economics. Bi-lingual Greek kleptocrats, lifelong billion
dollar tax evaders, fleeing from their pillaged homeland
have their favorite real estate brokers, who never engage in
any sort of naughty ‘due diligence’ which might uncover
improper tax returns.
The City Boys with verve and positive
initiative, aided and abetted by the hyper-kinetic “Tony”
Blair’s open door policy to swindlers and saints of all
colors and creeds, welcomed each and every Russian
gangster-oligarch-democrat, especially those who paid cash
for multi-pound ‘Olde English’ landmark estates’.
The
London Sanctuary for the world’s richest plunderers and
parasites offers unprecedented services, especially
protection from extradition and criminal prosecution at the
site of their crimes.
Impartial British legal and judicial
officials are experts in citing constitutional precedents
that, in strict regard for the established legal order,
uphold the denial of extradition, denying the legal and
justice systems of every pillaged country and the cries of
justice of the impoverished Irish, Russians, Greeks and
Spaniards.
Real
and feigned indignation among the highly moralistic City
Boys and cynical grins among the experienced senior
partners, greet the unruly victims of their guest
billionaires. The impoverished masses demand that the
British creditor banks should collect their debt payments
from the accounts of the swindlers who received the loans,
passed their debt to the public treasury and recycled their
ill-gotten gains into their British accounts.
When
the Saville dressed, swashbuckling swindlers cross swords
with their counterparts, as when the venerable and
respectable, Barclays Bank fixed the Libor to profit on the
interest rate differentials, at the expense of other banks,
the bankers all agreed the solution was to pay a 290 million
pound fine, admit the crime and try to save a system which
should “only” bilk the public treasury, retail investors and
‘market takers’. Barclay’s “crime” was, of course, poisoning
the trough from which their peers and partners prosper.
The
Barclay Boys of both sexes, outraged by the indecent finger
pointing by the other City Boys, raised an issue which
nobody could deny: they were not alone. HSBC, Standard
Charter, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds of London and
many other bankers of equal or lesser assets across the
Atlantic were engaged in similar unethical, (daresay
criminal) or at least questionable undertakings.
They also
paid fines and were duly chastised. The older and more
experienced senior officers of the City sent internal memos
to their brash PR underlings to stop this unseemly washing
of soiled silk shirts in public; mutual denunciations
created the false image that there was a crime wave running
through the suites of the City of London.
Unfortunately, the British legal system is not merely
protective of overseas billionaire swindlers, it is also
accommodative, supremely vindictive and bending over
frontward when it comes to requests for extradition from its
“Special Partner” in Washington. Let it be an Islamic
religious figure or an Australian whistleblower (Assange)
and, in due haste, with the extradition papers in hand, “the
bobbies” are ready to break embassy doors to facilitate
compliance.
(He he he)
London: Pimping for International Criminals:
The
global economic crisis is a boon for London’s high end real
estate corporations, as overseas millionaires and
billionaires, tax evaders, political raiders of the public
treasury, abandon pillaged economies and pour billions into
mansions and penthouses.
Super-rich rentier monarchists from
the despotic Gulf States join Russian commodity speculators,
and new rich Chinese sweatshop owners in bidding up London
properties in prestigious postal codes in Belgravia (Ebury
Street, Eton Place, and Eton Square) Knightbridge, Mayfair
(Park Street).
Corpulent Russian oligarchs and pious Saudi
royalty loll in country estates in, Hertfordshire,
Herefordshire and Cheshire overlooking their elegant English
gardens and enjoy the purring and caresses of their very
upscale British courtesans, in one or another of the two
dozen bedrooms.
The British government’s tolerance and open
minded attitude to Russian and Albanian gangster oligarchs,
whose bloody ascent to wealth can match any Sicilian
godfathers, greases the wheels for the rise of what the
Financial Times chooses to call, the real estate
‘industry’, bankrolled by the financial ‘community’ and
aligned with the insurance ‘investors’.
The
predators international, take their afternoon tea at 4 p.m.,
sherry at 6:30 p.m. They are entertained by the gossip of
Her Majesty’s Court and the Queen’s Anniversary Celebration
and indulge in the sporting life (soccer teams over polo
horses). They cultivate a taste for culture. Accompanied by
Oxbridge experts they shop for “collectibles” – paintings at
Ordovas on Saville Row, Richard Nagy on Old Bond Street,
Frank Auerbach at the Malborough, sculpture in Jean & Luc
Baroni at St. James and jewelry shops for a Vacheron
Constatin.
The
Gulf oil oligarchs, who gouge exorbitant rents from energy
poor African and Asian countries and Chinese and Indian
billionaires who exploit hundreds of millions of Asian
female factory workers and deny migrant workers residence,
rest and health insurance, spent $9 billion pounds ($14.4
billion dollars) on central London houses in 2010-2011.
Between 2011 and mid-2012, 60 percent of the buyers in the
prime central London market were foreign millionaires and
billionaires.
The
Cameron-Clegg regime demands sacrifice, austerity and belt
tightening in Greece, condemning millions to destitution,
suicide and desolation, even as it encourages the top 1% of
Greek kleptocrats to “invest” and reside in central London’s
exclusive neighborhoods. According to the IMF 56,000 Greek
plutocrats are tax evaders.
According to a US study of
their annual income, $28 billion Euros ($36 billion USD) is
unreported.
Most of which is deposited in London banks or
‘invested’ in luxury property in Mayfair, Belgravia or
thereabouts. If the illegal accounts were taxed or better
still used to pay for the foreign debt, it would conform to
Greek law, reduce the deficit and social cuts and perhaps
revive the economy. But respecting Greek tax laws would mean
fewer commissions for the real estate moguls at Savells,
Marsh and Parsons, Knight Frank; less private accounts for
HSBC and Barclay’s; less sales at the upscale art galleries;
fewer patrons for the high end ‘escort’ agencies of both
sexes.
Crime
pays. FIRE plays.
Public hospitals close. Tuition rises.
Private clinics and schools catering to the overseas
oligarchs and their British partners flourish. Where’s “the
crises”? Not to be found in central London, nor in the City;
nor in the legal system; nor in the Special Forces. Bank
swindlers flourish. Judicial litigation among oligarchs
pays. Dirty mercenary wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and
elsewhere provide lucrative contracts for retired Colonel
Blimps– in the best traditions of empire.
The
crises? That’s for the other England outside of the City,
with the wrong postal codes. Where workers crowd emergency
rooms, where the poor await evictions in what were once
council houses and where those who study and work can look
forward to debt and dead end jobs.
_______________________________________
James Petras, a former Professor of
Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year
membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the
landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is
co-author of Globalization
Unmasked (Zed Books).
