As the Guardian notes this morning:
Former PwC employees face trial over role in LuxLeaks scandal
But the scandal is it is the whistleblowers in court, at PWC's behest.
No one, in a million years, could describe this as justice.
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Isn’t this what fascism is, in a pure sense?
While they classify corporations as people and people as having less rights than corporations there will only ever be injustice.
Absolutely.
How an earth the Law can ignore the financial resources of such a ‘person’ to prosecute a case against real persons of more modest financial means is beyond any hint of natural justice IMHO.
While we can all have every sympathy with what they did and why they did it, surely they knew the law and the consequences of their actions if found out?
Always the totalitarian defence
“If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.”
Quote from Thomas Jefferson – see https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/if-law-unjustquotation
See also the reference, in the above site, to Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
The quotation bears a much closer resemblance to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s comment in his famous letter from Birmingham Jail: “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Anyone who has not read that marvellous expression of moral politics and the obligation to act ethically and justly, should read it. See:
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
Andrew
You provided my bed time reading this evening tonught wuth Martin Luther King Jr’s letter
And it was well worth the time, however tired I was
Richard
Thank you Andrew for this MLK letter, I have read some of his letters before but not this one. There is so much valuable advice in his words for modern day social struggles (including those relevant to this blog). For example:
“My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.”
“Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.”
“Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
Thank you Andrew for sharing that beautiful letter from Martin Luther King Jr.
Its length can be quite daunting, but I would pick out one line from the close which illustrates the tension that exists in successful direct action, between the impatience that demands immediate results, and the patience that turns a blind eye to injustice.
“If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”
Where is the middle road? For a theist such as Martin Luther, it’s a path that involves co-operation with the God who is love. And that could mean suffering prosecution, being imprisoned, or even crucified for telling the truth.
We could do with some whistle blowers to explain where the £25 million paid out to the new BHS owner in the last 13 months really went, and to shed some light on Philip Green, his wife and others who have extracted over £586 million out of BHS since May 2000 (no doubt all now sitting in several tax havens!)
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/25/bhs-owner-retail-acquisitions-25m-administration
Andrew, I had never read it before but I just have. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if not fanciful, if we had any politicians able, or willing, to set out his or her principles so brilliantly and fearlessly. And to the cynics who would say “it’ll never happen” perhaps MLK’s most famous words, “I have a dream”, would be the best riposte.
Thanks for bringing the letter to my attention; I feel more optimistic for having read it.
There’s a small connection to the recent prosecution of the 3 women who ran Louisa’s Health Club in Manchester. They broke the law, they knew they broke the law, but they argued the law violated their human rights and took it all the way.
The prosecution broke down, and after 4 years the prosecution gave up.
If you heroically and knowingly break a law that is maintained by an elected government, and don’t cover your tracks, then you have to be prepared to go all the way to trial by 12 of your peers, for that is the heroic bit, not the breaking of the law itself.
i wasnt aware the big 4 were able to bring private criminal prosecutions
They aren’t
But they can make the complaints that give rise to them
And did here
It will be good to see his defence team demanding that PWC provide mountains of confidential/secret client and internal correspondence as evidence which will further incriminate themselves. A positive could come out of this trial if the alleged criminality of a whistle blower is reversed into a full blown criminal trail of PWC themselves (or more specifically all of the PWC partners who had their grubby little fingers in anything to do with Luxembourg tax avoidance/evasion!). Sometimes forcing these matters into court can have unexpected results, especially if there is any evidence of perjury by PWC or others along the way.