The Tories in Government but perhaps not in power, a Prime Minister talked up incessantly by the right-leaning press but not universally popular with the party’s MPs, divisions over Europe being barely papered over, and a steady drip-drip-drip of sleaze. Are we back in the 1990s already? As the doubts emerge over Theresa May’s leadership, and the Brexiteers continue to demand their own version of reality, it seems we are.
And into this already fluid situation has wandered Home Secretary Amber Rudd, or rather the deeply subversive Guardian has caused her to wander into it, as the paper has revealed “UK home secretary named as having been director of two Bahamas firms, while a co-director at another company was jailed over a false statement”. There was more.
“A fresh leak of tax haven data names the home secretary as having been a director of two companies in the Bahamas - a fact she did not refer to earlier this year when defending David Cameron over his father’s investment fund in the same country … The Guardian has also discovered new details about her previous career in venture capital during the boom and bust 1990s. One enterprise led her to become a co-director of Monticello, a company that was at the centre of a share ramping investigation”.
Share ramping? Here’s the Wiki definition: “also known as 'pump and dump' or 'book ramping', is where criminals influence the share price of a company and then take advantage of it. It is commonly perpetrated by bringing a company to the market with false expectations of its profitability or, alternatively, by buying shares in a company when the price is low and then starting a rumour that the company is being taken over. When the share price then rises, the shares are sold at a profit”.
Note the use of the word “criminals”. So what happened with Monticello? “[The company] became the centre of an investigation into share ramping after one of her co-directors, Mark O’Hanlon, gave an interview in January 2000 in which he made false claims about the company’s prospects … Monticello’s share price subsequently skyrocketed and trading on its shares was suspended”. Ms Rudd resigned her directorship five months later.
But her fellow director was rather less fortunate: “The episode led the Department of Trade and Industry to investigate, and in 2007 O’Hanlon was convicted of making a false statement and sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment. He was jailed again in June 2013 following an unrelated fraud conviction”. This is all most unfortunate.
Amber Rudd may have done nothing wrong. But she was a director of Monticello at the time when one of her co-directors’ actions led to him, at a later date, obtaining a criminal conviction. Moreover, she did not resign her directorship at the time O’Hanlon made his false statement. This may be in the category of “looks bad”, and no more. But Labour is already on her case, and even the most craven of the right-wing press will be too.
Back To The Future was, it seems, not just a movie franchise. More on this one later.
It was "Tory Sleaze" which greatly helped the election of Blair in 1997. It had got so bad a monkey would have won that election. The immediate relief of being rid of the far right tory gang was understandable, but it also disguised what New Labour was up to. Which was, essentially, continuation of more of the same - worse, in fact, when tuition fees (read: indebtedness for most of your working life) were introduced, and then war visited on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and then intensification of the PFI robbery. To say little of savage cutbacks in social housing and continuing attacks on our most vulnerable citizens.
ReplyDeleteIn this country sleaze has become institutionalised, even legalised and encouraged, mainstream media nothing more than a glove puppet-fronted far right propaganda machine. Crooks and insane war-mongering politicians are now the norm.
Sure, the tories are corrupt, mean-spirited, tenth rate thieves, racists and hypocrites. But they've never been anything else, and they will never change. Once upon a time even the social democratic Labour Party could have been relied on to put up at least a token fight against them. Then along came New Labour, Blair-Brown, and all the other political traitors selling their collective arse for......what? The price of their souls?
Make no mistake, this country is addled with sleaze at every level, thoroughly rotten-to-the-core and due sooner or later for socioeconomic disaster whether in or out of the EU.
And all because the political class wanted to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
You can't say we haven't had it coming. Now we are presented with the inevitable invoice. Which will be paid by us, but not them.
*Read all about it*
ReplyDeleteMy exclusive on my marriage to Britains most controversial businessman.
You can learn about our life between the sheets and the things he expected me to do in bed.
Coming soon.
Of course the business in the Bahamas may be a legit business organising holidays for tax consultants, solicitors and accountants who in turn may be blindly taking their clients interests on trust.
ReplyDelete