[…] how many people won’t lift a finger to prevent it. A conspiracy of silence In Lobster 43 I reported on the case of the then breaking electoral fraud case in Birmingham, which has now come to fruition with the sacking of Labour councillors who rigged the city’s elections. Although warned repeatedly in advance (by […]
[…] orientation of that group, no one was surprised when they concluded that the CIA’s figures were too low. The ‘Team B’ estimate (little more than a crude fraud) then became ‘fact’ and the ‘dollar gap’ was born. The major mystery of this episode is not that the right-wing should attempt such a fraud, but […]
[…] heads are cheating?’, The Guardian 14 May 2002 and ‘Widespread cheating devalues school tests’, The Guardian 28 October 2002. One head teacher is to be charged with fraud. (The Guardian 9 November 2002). Targets unattainable? Lower the targets! ‘Significant changes are being made to national tests for 14 year-olds to make them more accessible […]
[…] Belgian count, Alain de Villegas, teamed up with an Italian inventor, Aldo Bonassoli, for the first of several crack-pot schemes that would climax with the notorious ‘sniffer-plane’ fraud in France. The actual extent of the criminality of this pair is difficult to determine, because they did exhibit a genuine eccentricity, professing interest in everything […]
[…] empire simply by means of smoke and mirrors. Alternatively, it was suggested that he was the victim of various plots. The alleged perpetrators ranged from the Serious Fraud Office, eager to justify themselves and make up for the near debacle of the Guinness trial by nailing a big fish, to the Greek government, in […]
[…] from terrorism, drug cartels and the rest, a job better done by the police – as well as internally. For this reason, the public is told: ‘….. fraud investigators from the Benefit Agency are being taught how to use surveillance techniques by former SAS and MI6 officers. The company, AMA Associates, a security agency, […]
[…] Belén Balanyá, Ann Doherty, Olivier Hoedeman, Adam Ma’anit and Erik Wessselius Pluto Press, London and Sterling (Virginia, USA) 2000, £14.99 Blowing the Whistle: one man’s fight against fraud in the European Commission Paul van Buitenen, London: Politicos, 2000, £12.99 In his memoir, In Office,(1) Norman Lamont describes meeting Wim Kok, the Dutch Finance Minister, […]
[…] this was the JFK case for the Internet generation. There are some obvious similarities; but there are obvious differences, too. For one thing, if this was a fraud, it is infinitely bigger than the killing of JFK. Kennedy was just a politician and killing politicians isn’t that unusual in American history. Another difference is […]
[…] for a while so that they will lead the police to the bigger fish). The target is ‘economic crime’ (a wonderful return to Soviet terminology) such as fraud and tax evasion. Identity cards are thus much more about managing identity in the context of fraud (including benefit fraud) than about any threat from terror […]
Paul Krugman London: Allen Lane, 2003, h/b, £18.99 I only caught up with this at Christmas. Krugman writes a column for the New York Times and this is a collection of those columns. Krugman is an academic economist at Princeton and saw pretty early that Enron and others similar were just frauds, and that … Read more
