Labour Arch Hypocrites Over Lansley 122


Andrew Lansley could be an improvement on Baroness Amos as UN humanitarian chief. That is not saying much. For Labour to complain about “cronyism” is breathtaking hypocrisy as Amos is the ultimate Blair crony. She rose to the top of UK politics – a full Cabinet minister – despite the fact that not one citizen has had the chance to vote for or against her, ever. At least Lansley had the guts to face the electorate. My two campaigns to stand as an Independent for parliament were failures, but the 3,000 votes I received were 3,000 more than Amos has ever got. Amos is the very symbol of the corruption of the UK political system. She is Red Tory through and through, so it is unsurprising that when Cameron became PM with her nomination process still in train, he was quite happy for it to continue to go through.

At the UN, Amos’ attention to humanitarian disaster differed according to where they stood on the neo-con agenda. When the BBC was in the midst of their campaign to promote war against Assad on behalf of the jihadists, she was continually all over the BBC saying something needed urgently to be done. When the Israelis were slaughtering innocents in Gaza, she was notably less prominent.

Her unelected career has been very lucrative. She has a web of company interests which have been significantly furthered by the positions she has held. And while at the UN, she has claimed exemption from declaring her business interests on the House of Lords register.

The following extract from my book The Catholic Orangemen of Togo may open some eyes about the way the senior levels of the Labour Party operate:

The concierge opened the door and the Nigerian detached himself from the rich leather upholstery of the sleek, silver, range-topping Mercedes. He stalked into the lounge of the Sheraton, as glossy as the sheen on his Italian silk suit and as smooth as the mirrored lenses of his designer spectacles. My heart sank as he headed towards our little group. I had taken on the chairmanship of a Ghanaian energy company to help out some Ghanaian friends. Our little venture had prospered and we were looking to expand across West Africa. In doing so I was determined to steer well clear of capital tainted with corruption or drugs. My surest guide to doing that was to avoid people who looked and dressed like this man whom my colleagues had arranged to talk with us.

West Africa is now the third largest centre in the World for money laundering and narcotics capital formation. But in terms of the percentage of total capital formation which drugs money forms, it is far ahead. Money laundering is the raison d’etre of many West African financial institutions. In Accra in March 2008 a World Bank sponsored conference held in Accra on money laundering heard an estimate that over 60% of the capital of the mushrooming private banking sector in Nigeria could be drugs money. Recently Nigerian banks have started taking out huge poster adverts all over the UK’s major airports. That is drugs money.

One consequence of this is that I have found it too easy to attract the wrong kind of capital to a legitimate business proposal in West Africa. These investors from West African banks and private equity firms are not even expecting the kind of high returns that a high risk market normally demands. With anti money-laundering regulations now so tight in the US and EU, their investors are looking to launder the money in the region before sending it to Europe. The proceeds of a legitimate energy company are accountable and clean; so we attract those wishing to put dirty money in to get clean money out. The actual bank executives and fund managers are of course not themselves necessarily involved in narcotics; they just fail to query adequately the source of their investor’s cash.

So when the new arrival introduced himself as a manager of a Nigerian private equity firm, I mentally switched off. I giggled inwardly as he named his company as “Travant”, because I thought he said “Trabant”, which given the car out of which he had just stepped, would have been wildly inappropriate. But I came to with a start when he said that his Nigerian private equity firm had access to DFID funds because Baroness Amos was a Director. To be clear, I asked whether Travant was an NGO or a governmental investment agency. He replied that it was not; it was a private, for-profit fund management company.

Baroness Amos was of course the Secretary of State for DFID until 2003 and until 2007 was Leader of the House of Lords. I though that it was impossible that DFID money would be given to a company of which she was Director. On the face of it, nobody could look further removed from the development aid ethos than the man in the designer suit. I went back to writing him off, deciding he was simply making it up about Baroness Amos and his access to DFID money. In West Africa among people who wear silk suits and are driven in Mercedes, the standards of truthfulness sadly leave in general a great deal to be desired.

I would have forgotten the incident, but in December 2008 I found myself sitting next to Baroness Amos on an airport bus heading for the plane to Accra. Once on board she moved to Business class while due to overbooking I was downgraded to Economy Plus. Baroness Amos was going out to Accra to head the Commonwealth monitoring team for the first round of the 2008 Ghanaian elections, as John Kufuor retired. Sending Baroness Amos to monitor an election seemed to me another tremendous example of British arrogance. Valerie Amos is the very antithesis of a democratic politician. One of the Blair inner circle, she rose to Cabinet rank despite never having faced the electorate. Never, ever, at any level of politics. Her entire career was based upon New Labour internal patronage after making a very good living out of complaining about discrimination against minorities in the UK. She opened up a substantial income gap between herself and those on whose behalf she was claiming to work, from a very early stage, and that gap has widened ever since.

All this came back to me as I looked at Baroness Amos quaffing champagne on that plane. So I did a bit of digging. Valerie Amos is indeed listed on their website as a non-executive director of Travant Private Equity, one of only five directors. There is nothing about developmental goals, ethics, or the environment on the website. There is a lot about real estate opportunities in West Africa (by which they do not mean housing for the urban poor), and a boast that they have “the largest fundraising from domestic investors in sub-Saharan Africa”. Remember what I said about the sources of local capital formation? Now Travant may have the most rigorous procedures for scrutinising the origin of the domestic money deposited with them. But if they do, they do not mention it on their website. Rather they emphasise that “we are deeply immersed in the business communities in which we invest”. Mmmm.

But have Travant received DFID money? On the face of it, Travant shouldn’t even want public money ? They are aggressive proponents of the capitalist ethos: “We believe that the private sector, with appropriate oversight and governance, is the best shepherd of Africa’s resources. We seek to empower entrepreneurs to pursue opportunities that they have identified, creating returns for investors, jobs and economic growth.” Yet in 2007 the British Government financed Travant with £15 million of funds, provided through CDC, the investment arm of DFID. CDC is owned 100% by DFID. At launch over one third of Travant’s first equity fund came from DFID. A few months afterwards Baroness Amos, ex minister in charge of DFID, joined the board of this profit-making firm.

It says everything about New Labour that CDC, which as the Commonwealth Development Corporation used to run agricultural projects to benefit the rural poor, was rebranded as CDC with a new remit to provide most of its funds to the financial services industry. It says even more about New Labour’s lack of the understanding of fundamental personal ethics, of their embrace of greed, that they see no reason why one of their former senior ministers should not move to benefit personally from the DFID money – even if through a 100% owned satellite – thus invested.

To turn this story full circle, let us turn back to Sierra Leone. 65% of the measured exports of this country come from its rutile mines. These were under guard by Sandline at the start of this memoir. Following the British invasion of Sierra Leone, it returned to its normal state of extreme corruption. Life is hard for most of its inhabitants, and UN donated food and pharmaceuticals, clearly marked “not for sale”, are only available to the local population for cash they do not have, as the result of collusion between corrupt UN officials, government officials, and mostly Lebanese traders. But the rutile mines are working full out, and extremely profitable, with armed white men again in charge of security. A major rutile miner, Titanium Resources Group of Sierra Leone says in its 2008 interim report: “the long term future of our markets is sound and the quality and scale of our mineral reserves underline our future prospects.” The Chairman of Titanium Resources Group is Walter Kansteiner III, George Bush’s former Assistant Secretary of Sate for Africa and a founding partner of the Scowcroft Group, led by Brent Scowcroft, George Bush’s National Security Adviser and architect of the CIA’s re-introduction of torture. The Scowcroft Group advisory consultancy did huge harm in Africa in the 1990s with their advocacy of privatisation and deregulation, particularly in the forestry sector, and with some influence advocated policies worldwide which contributed to the credit bubble and collapse of recent years.

But none of that prevented Kansteiner and Scowcroft from making money out of it, and Blair’s invasion secured Sierra Leone’s mineral resources to the neo-cons. Not everyone benefits. Titanium Resources’ Interim Report 2008 mentions the disruption in production as a result of the collapse of a dredger, without feeling the need even to mention the two Sierra Leoneans who died in the incident.

But New Labour believes in profit, especially for themselves, so it was no surprise to me when Titanium Resources announced in March 2008 the appointment of Baroness Amos as a non-executive director. For me that appointment [though she later resigned] sums up the cosiness of the alliance between Bush, Blair and their acolytes. It was an alliance based on the acquisition of mineral resources by any means possible. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most infamous example. I saw it close up operating by war in Sierra Leone, and by the diplomacy of repression in Uzbekistan.


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122 thoughts on “Labour Arch Hypocrites Over Lansley

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  • Ba'al Zevul

    The Eichmann Show. BBC 2

    Jesus. Christ.

    Well, anyway. 28 February marks the 610th anniversary of Timur’s death. He’s estimated to have killed 17 million people – 5% of the world population of the time. Let’s hear it from the BBC for Timur.

    The Timur Leng Show. With Ant and Dec.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    “Ref Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January, did you know that the BBC are running a ‘Holocaust Season’? They keep trailing it using that phrase. It would appear to be in bad taste as if they are advertising entertainment.”
    _________________

    The above is a c**tishly sly little remark.

    The author of the above “would appear to be” unaware that the BBC is not running its Holocaust season as “entertainment”. Therefore “it would appear to be” not in bad taste for the BBC to be running it.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Nous sommes….

    1. Hamid Abdullah Shehab – “Media 24″company.
    2. Najla Mahmoud Haj – media activist.
    3 Khalid Hamad – the “Kontnao” Media Production company.
    4. Ziad Abdul Rahman Abu Hin – al-Ketab satellite channel.
    5. Ezzat Duheir – Prisoners Radio.
    6. Bahauddin Gharib – Palestine TV.
    7 Ahed Zaqqout – veteran sports journalist.
    8 Ryan Rami – Palestinian Media Network.
    9 Sameh Al-Arian – Al-Aqsa TV.
    10 Mohammed Daher – Editor in al-Resala paper.
    11. Abdullah Vhjan – sports journalist.
    12 journalist Khaled Hamada Mqat- Director of Saja news website.
    13. freelance journalist Shadi Hamdi Ayyad.
    14 photojournalist Mohammed Nur al-Din al-Dairi – works in the Palestinian Network.
    15. journalist Ali Abu Afesh – Doha Center for Media.
    16 Italian journalist Simone Camille – photographer in the Associated Press.
    17. Abdullah fadel Murtaja.

    All killed by the IDF in Gaza during last year’s atrocity.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    “Bevin”

    “It is easy to understand why posters such as Habba wish to conflate anti-semitism with anti-zionism”
    _________________

    Doesn’t need any conflating from me, boyo.

    It is a fact – and clear from this blog – that anti-Zionism is frequently a disguise for anti-semitism. It is frequently a pose adopted by those who don’t have to balls to openly state their hatred for the Jew.

  • OldMark

    ‘Those Africans who have survived the trauma of proto-colonisation will remember that Africa was predominantly Muslim before colonisation and that many African slaves arriving in the Americas were also Muslim. The purpose of that era of colonisation , like the present one in the war on Islam, was to ethnically cleanse the Muslims. A proto-zionist project if ever there was one.’

    The single word Habba used whilst triumphantly correcting my slip up re UN pensions is even more applicable here. This is bollocks on stilts.

  • Mary

    @12.04pm

    Strange that the words ‘show’ and ‘season’ are used by the BBC isn’t it?

    Perhaps that it is ‘a c**tishly sly little’ ploy on their part to bring the subject into the mainstream.

    Is the poster @ 12.04pm taking a cue from the BBC’s Director of TV who is adding to the hype for anti-semitism and islamophobia?

    ‘Speaking at the launch of The Eichmann Show, the story of the televising of the 1961 trail of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the Holocaust, Mr Cohen said it was vital to “bear witness” to atrocities that have come before.

    Related Articles

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    British anti-Semitism set to hit record high
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    15 Jan 2015
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    15 Jan 2015

    He has now launched a season of programmes to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau including a 90-minute documentary entitled Touched by Auschwitz, testimony from survivors and the extraordinary story of 93-year-old Freddie Knoller.

    Mr Cohen said: “Today, we witness the murder of Jewish citizens in France and Belgium, the desperate search for refuge of the Yazidis in the face of the ISIS onslaught and the continuing threats to the Christian community in Iraq and elsewhere.

    “All around us we continue to feel the dark shadow of genocidal, religious and racial hatred, whether through testimonies from the past or tragedies in the present.

    “Despite the Holocaust, anti-Semitic attacks continue in Europe – and indeed have increased in the last year.

    “In recent days we have mourned the victims of the Paris kosher supermarket atrocity. In Germany, France, Britain and elsewhere, Jewish men and women have been attacked and synagogues and cemeteries desecrated.

    “Here on the streets of London, swastikas have been displayed at anti-Israel rallies.

    “Centuries-old forms of abuse have found new homes on the internet.

    “Never has it seemed more important to remind the world of what can happen when racial and ethnic hatred warps the minds and souls of people of any nation or creed.”

    The Eichmann Show, /strong>starring Martin Freeman, Anthony LaPaglia and Rebecca Front, will air on the BBC as part of plans to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.’

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/11356022/BBCs-Danny-Cohen-on-rise-of-anti-Semitic-attacks-Old-abuse-has-found-a-new-home-on-the-internet.html

  • OldMark

    A bit of alright? According to Wikipedia: “Baroness Amos has never married and has no children.

    Perhaps she is overcompensating. The girls who attend her old school are known locally as ‘Townley tarts’.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    Is the poster @1204 still griping away? Bile or spleen this time? I infer that it buys into the notion of Britain as the new Munich, where no Jew is now safe from the knock in the middle of the night and yellow stars are now compulsory…David Conn (who is, as he makes very clear, Jewish) doesn’t:

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/antisemitic-britain-jewish-experience-1930s

    Neither does the Community Security Trust, set up to defend the Jewish community from antisemitic activities:

    Yet the situation in Britain is not the same as in France. The antisemitic incidents recorded last summer, though large in number, were mostly not violent. Riot police were not needed to keep mobs from burning down synagogues in London, as they were in Sarcelles.

    When the new grassroots group the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) took a non-Jewish journalist to spend an entire day last month walking the streets of London wearing a kippah (skullcap) and a hidden camera, hoping to expose the dark underbelly of British antisemitism, he failed to elicit a single hostile comment from passers-by.

    Now CAA has released a YouGov poll about British attitudes towards Jews that essentially repeats the findings of last year’s ADL Global 100 Survey: a stubborn minority of British people – between 10 per cent and 20 per cent – clings onto stereotypical ways of thinking about Jews.

    This does not necessarily translate into conscious or active dislike of Jews. The same ADL survey found that just five per cent of British people said they have an unfavourable attitude towards Jews (the same as towards Christians, and less than towards Muslims and Hindus

    http://blog.thecst.org.uk/?p=5218

    Whipping up hysteria among the diaspora is just what poster @1204’s chums in Tel Aviv like to see. But it needs to be seen here for what it is.

  • @homeneara*

    Being a total noob in my younger days I didn’t get it while travelling in Wales. I was only asking directions but the distinction between me being English and British was critically important. Upon short reflection I was made quite aware of the importance when I answered wrongly. I took me about 5 minuets while walking away to realise my thoughtless mistake.

    This was deep in the valleys also. One of the many (now ghostly) mining towns.

    To be fair we have not done to bad in England vs some, with a low bar, but while living in Wales it seemed integration is really not an issue, night and day vs England in some ways.

    There are a lot of ramifications in considering yourself British isn’t there? I don’t know that I can actually.

  • Mary

    The quality of mercy is not strained…
    It droppeth as the dew from heaven….

    Israeli Soldiers Weld Shut Doors of Palestinian Woman in Hebron

    January 20, 2015

    One of Last Remaining Palestinian Houses on Shuhada Street Sealed

    Israeli soldiers arrived at the home of Amal Hashem Dundeis on Monday afternoon with orders to weld her doors shut. Soldiers claim a molotov cocktail had been thrown from nearby into an illegal Israeli settlement.

    Amal Hashem Dundeis sits crying as Israeli soldiers weld shut her door (Image Credit: Christian Peacemaker Teams Palestine)

    Two adjoining houses on Shuhada Street in Hebron (also known as Al-Khalil) were welded shut Monday by Israeli soldiers. The houses belonging to elderly Palestinian woman, Amal Hashem Dundeis, have been in her family for centuries.

    Christian Peacemaker Teams of Palestine, a nonviolent advocacy group headquartered in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, along with members of the International Solidarity Movement were present at the time. CPT reports that the elderly Mrs. Dundeis sat in a chair in front of her door before soldiers forced her to move.

    The soldiers used flux welders and soldering guns to seal shut the doors to the houses. While international and Palestinian observers were at the scene along with Mrs. Dundeis and her children, the soldiers moved them back to the street, according to reports from the International Solidarity Movement.

    /..
    http://www.imemc.org/article/70301

  • Mary

    ! S/be

    The quality of mercy is not strained;
    It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
    Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
    It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
    ‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
    The throned monarch better than his crown:
    His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
    The attribute to awe and majesty,
    Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
    But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
    It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
    It is an attribute to God himself;
    And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
    When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
    Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
    That, in the course of justice, none of us
    Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
    And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
    The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
    To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
    Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
    Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

  • @homeneara*

    Racist ideology embedded in the state. I wonder, like many people in England, if they are even aware of it.

  • nevermind

    Ba’al, thanks for the low down on Ms. Asato, the New labour candidate with child, I hope she will not get elected then she can carry on serving champagne to her friendly,. if she has got friends, Blair babes.

    Thanks for that link to Mondoweiss Brian and all the other posts that so engage our Zionist apologist here.

    Ba’al, should you be anywhere near Norwich on Wed.28th. next week, why don’t you join our clarion call for PR in front of the Forum, a feature of our 30th wedding anniversary, we have a few speakers lined up who will speak on the subject, on why our MP’s are unrepresentative and what coalition forming is all about.
    10am-12 noon, with a beer/juice to follow?

    everyone who is pro PR is invited, well that is, those who are just pretending and don’t mention it when they talk about devolution of powers, are not welcome.

  • Robert Crawford

    Craig.

    Yesterday 38 Degrees asked me to set up a meeting in Falkirk. Why me? I stopped supporting all those groups with money and my signature after the debacle of 18th. September 2014. I “unsubscribed”. I only signed another Petition the other day at the request of one of your subscribers.

    I received a reply to-day from the Scottish Government which reminded me of the answers you were receiving in Uzbekistan from politicians and their minions. “TROUGHERS”.

    It is MURDER here trying to get justice for oneself.

    I think I know why the SNP rejected you.

    YOU WOULD HAVE HELPED OTHERS WHO HAVE BEEN WRONGED.

    One cannot deviate from the “status quo” even though they and their minor colleagues are doing wrong. They will of course tell us the opposite, as usual.

    Falkirk and Scotland has an Occupational Therapist as MSP and Justice Minister and a barber in the running for Westminster. Fuck!

    That is me finished voting.

    A broken bottle up all their arses might change their minds as to what is torture and what is not. Even if it is done abroad by another. At their request.

    We are in the grip of a bad lot world wide.

  • Mary

    Ref the Shakespeare above.

    Wikipedia – Critical commentary

    The speech is regarded as one of the great speeches in Shakespeare and is made by a cross-dressing Portia, disguised as young lawyer Balthazar, who speaks with heightened eloquence to beg Shylock for mercy after traveling from the fictional town of Belmont to Venice.[5]

    Mercy and forgiveness are enduring themes that pervade Shakespeare’s works.[6][4] The quote is an example of the esteem Shakespeare held for those who showed mercy as expressed in his poetry. Shakespeare presented mercy as a quality most valuable to the most powerful, strongest and highest people in society.[7]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_quality_of_mercy_(Shakespeare_quote)

  • Johnstone

    on RT Today
    1. Extracts from Mohamedou Ould Slahi diary
    2. Footage from Donetsk showing Ukrainian gov destruction of homes and killing of civilians
    3. Wonderful speech for Martin Luther King calling for a stop to American government killing abroad (Vietnam) and a whole new set of values

  • fool

    Mercy balanced v clinical application of law / contract. It is always a difficult balance e.g. Denning as an advocate for discretionary interpretation and Lady Justice Hale as advocate for justice by doing no more and no less than applying the law. Some would say that Denning’s discretionary justice might allow the Judge’s ego and subjective baggage too great a role whereas Baroness Hale’s approach might be thought more careful to leave her personality out. As a Judge is allowed more discretion to show mercy how hard it is for him to be even. It is a matter of preference and for eg do you prefer a charismatic preacher with a beguiling sermon or one who follows the ritual and leaves his ego out of that ritual?

    BTW I think Shakespeare was not unaware of the oppression suffered by Jews in Venice being obligated to return to the ghetto at dusk; when you consider the apparent hardness of Shylock that must be borne in mind. Of course some might say that the situation is now reversed.

  • N_

    “Recently Nigerian banks have started taking out huge poster adverts all over the UK’s major airports. That is drugs money.

    Ditto HSBC at Heathrow. ‘The world’s bank’.

    Talking of 60% of the capital in West African banks being drug money, have you seen just how arrogant the crooks who run Cambridge University are about laundering ‘informal’ money for Chinese oligarchs?

    “Calls are growing for an independent audit”, says the Torygraph!

    Money is paid to Cambridge from offshore accounts in places such as Bermuda, and then the Chinese oligarchs dole out Cambridge University places in the Far East. No prizes for working out that they make a profit on the arrangement.

    Again from the Torygraph:

    “Cambridge University said that there was “no link between this private foundation and the Chinese government.”

    “They had to say that,” said Professor Cushman. “They can’t say ‘yes, we are being corrupted.’”

    When asked whether the university’s claim was wilful deception rather than ignorance, he said: “Yes. They know.””

    (Cushman is in Boston, US, by the way. No-one rocks the boat at Cambridge. They wouldn’t want to upset the public-school secret police. Almost the same in Whitehall, the English and Scottish judiciary, etc.)

    See also this article:

    The donation from the Chong Hua Foundation in January 2012 raises serious questions over whether Beijing is buying influence at one of Britain’s most important universities, with one academic accusing it of allowing the Chinese government “to appoint a professor at Cambridge”.

    “It would seem that a foreign government appointed a professor of politics at Cambridge,” said one academic.

    This is all damage-limitation PR. In reality, it’s about much more than one professorial chair. We’re talking about maybe 1000 undergraduate places a year at one of the top universities in the world.

    Cambridge professor Peter Nolan’s book Is China Buying the World? is also damage limitation. His chair was openly paid for with Chinese money. And yet he writes a book about…Chinese money. Get it? He’s co-written another book with a former Chinese PM’s son-in-law. Meanwhile, drug addicts die on the street.

    Still, MI6 must recruit new generations of foreigners to Anglophilia, eh?

    Much of world finance, and more besides, runs on drug money.

    Yet another Torygraph piece:

    The most charitable interpretation is that Cambridge has misunderstood how China’s autocratic state functions; less charitably, the university has been disingenuous about its links to the highest echelons of the Chinese government in order to snare a lucrative endowment.”

    Irregular verbs again: I’m disingenuous; he’s a lying crook.

    (Another one I heard today: he’s a jihadist who took training in a terror camp; I’m a private military contractor.)

    And marvel at the breathtaking arrogance in this:

    Dame Alison Richard, who spearheaded a billion-pound fundraising campaign as Cambridge vice-chancellor from 2003 to 2010, told The Telegraph in a telephone interview that she remained satisfied that the Wen Ruchun donation had been properly scrutinised.

    Dame Alison added that the key donors like Wen Ruchun brought much more than money to universities like Cambridge and would be expected to “open doors” to their world.

    (She means MI6.)

    “Their money is just a quite modest part of what they do for you because these are smart, successful people who care about the institution. They can help you in all kinds of ways, with their ideas, mentoring students, opening doors, connecting you to the rest of the world,” she said.

    She means…you get the picture.

    And here’s how she dignifies money-laundering, Brit posh style:

    She described as “pathetic” British newspaper headlines following the launch of one fundraising campaign which claimed that dons were “getting their begging bowls out”, adding that whether money came from Eastern Europe, the Middle East or China it often had government connections.

    She said that such money often occupied a “grey area” between having outright criminal origins and transparently clean sources, and required “philosophical judgments” to ensure that Universities did not suffer reputational damage for accepting them.

    “There is an argument, which is that universities take, perhaps, funds that have been raised in the grey area and put it to extremely good purposes. You can say that the universities are providing salvation for, you know, gifts raised in this grey area,” she said.

    In anyone else’s world, that’s MONEY-LAUNDERING FOR BIG-TIME CRIMINALS, and she fucking knows it. Now what are the chances she’s going to end up in Holloway?

  • craig Post author

    Robert Crawford,

    In general, you seem a very sensible chap. But I can’t share your disdain for barbers and occupational therapists – people are not their jobs. My grandfather was a coalman his entire life. I have never met anyone who would have been a better MP, myself included.

  • Robert Crawford

    Craig Murray.

    ” In general you seem a very sensible chap”.

    How patronising of you.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    I thought Amos was bad until I started looking at the Pritzker family (one of whom, Penny, is the US Secretary of Commerce, and may be the one even now winging its way in the direction of Zurich in a company Gulfstream, for Davos.) Penny has $2.4 billion to her name, some of the other half-dozen have more, and one is the 15th richest person in the world.

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