As the FT has reported this morning:
Pakistan's supreme court has ordered Nawaz Sharif, the country's prime minister, to stand down from his office in a dramatic culmination of long-running scandal over his family's wealth. In a judgement likely to roil Pakistani politics, the supreme court upheld the findings of a special investigation team that Mr Sharif's family assets — including several flats overlooking London's Hyde Park — could not be clearly accounted for and had been deliberately hidden from tax authorities.
The more often this happens the better. The curse of abuse of the world's tax systems that threatens an epidemic of corruption and scandal as well as untold loss of revenues has to be ended wherever it occurs.
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We must get Blair in court for Iraq.
And then we need to get Cameron and Osbourne on charges for destroying the economy.
But a lot more financiers need to be made accountable too.
Every corrupt politician needs someone to corrupt them…they are the people who need to be brought to justice, and imprisoned.
Something the UK is extremely bad at.
And again, prime London property is used as a safe haven’ for the wealth apparently acquired through corruption all around the world. I assume these flats are part of the One Hyde Park development the Candy brothers built for the super-rich. The Candy brothers themselves, of course, having become very wealthy through luxury property development.
Meanwhile, social housing tenants get burned alive in Grenfell Tower because of the penny pinching and corner cutting of Kensington and Chelsea borough, we have rising levels of evictions from rented property, and essential public services are starved of funds.
Aren’t you proud to be British?
The planners seem to need to allow high end housing to be built, like One Hyde Park. Yet social housing doesnt seem to get the same need. If they wanted to they can easily force any builder to make significant provision for social housing on any new development.
As well as Hyde park financed by Bank of Scotland he has three flats at 17 Avenfield House, 118 Park Lane alone are worth around 12 million pounds
Yup, we can provide any amount of luxury developments for the really wealthy, but not much for the poor. Nice. Still, I see that Sahrif has been forced to resign, so that’s some consolation.
Presumably he’ll soon decamp to his des res in London.
Is it possible that morals, standards, ethics, codes of practice, behaviour, etc vary between countries?
Is it possible that those of one country differ from those of another country?
Yes
But there are some principles that should always apply
Which is what laws are.
Things that sufficient people agree are unacceptable.
Things that society used to deem unacceptable were illegal. Divorce for example. But then society agreed that divorce was an acceptable escape from a tedious marriage.
So when Alistair talks of it being impossible to pin down the affect of different modalities on different societies I think he is wrong. One needs only to look at the laws of that land.
Gareth, though it’s a point it’s nigh on impossible to pin anything down, for example I don’t even need to ask if you condone punishment rape, but that could be described in the same way.
What we can do though is stop facilitating these things by offering a safe haven for ill gotten gains. Judgmental on our part? absolutely, but with no judgement then nothing ever happens.
Moral relativism. It’s a conundrum. How do we judge historical issues, for example? We are trapped within our own ethnocentrism.
Gareth
Not only possible, but certain.
BUT Mr Sharif, almost certainly, will not have owned the flats in his name. They will be held by an offshore company which, itself, I suspect, will be owned through an offshore trust. I might be wrong but I doubt that Mr Sharif set up either the trust or the company himself. It is much more probable that it was done for him by one of what Prem Sikka so wisely calls the “pinstripe mafia”.
So, yes, Mr Sharif’s wholesale theft of Pakistani state assets was partly abetted by the cultural mores of Pakistan but it was also facilitated by the actions of accountants &/or lawyers in this country.
Whereas I fully agree with Richard’s comment regarding the removal from public office of corrupt politicians this is surely only half the story. I am not aware of the circumstances in Pakistan but there must be some personal penalty as well? We often get the public and private domains confused and action needs to be taken in both. In a similar vein, taking up sickoftaxdodgers point, a Corporate Manslaughter charge will be a poor form of sanction for the culprits of the Grenfell disaster if there is enough evidence to prosecute individuals.
True they should but I would argue that in some countries they do not.
It’s very difficult to give examples without being accused of being something that I am not.
But, here is one that comes to mind.
The BMA recently reported that doctors that were not trained in the UK were far more likely to appear before the BMAs disciplinary committees, Banglaseshi doctors being in excess of 10 times as likely to be disciplined by the BMA.
If you look at ICAEW disciplinary reports, it’s possible that those with non UK surnames are more likely to appear than those with UK surnames. I have contacted the ICAEW and offered to undertake research of their records to produce a similar report to that if the BMA but to date my offer has fallen on deaf ears
May I send your details to Prof Atul Shah at University of Suffolk who would be very interested in that?
The preponderance of non-whites in various disciplinary proceedings, for want of a better term, such as courts of law, is well attested, I believe. But is it possible to disentangle the various factors which may lead to this apparent “bias”?
Not to mention senior police officers, male and female.
How long would a surname have to be in use in the UK to be a “UK surname” in your study? How many generations? Would your survey differentiate between a 6th UK generation Singh, a chap called Smith who has arrived from Australia 2 years earlier and a woman called Wu who had been a Johnson until she married her husband and took his name?
In other words, what exactly would your survey be looking to show. That some accounting bodies have appallingly lax standards when handing out accreditation? Don’t we know this already from recent events?
Anyone interested in the virtues of holding corrupt politicians accountable simultaneously in their own countries and in those which enable them – and the ways in which a conflicted UK and US policy record has resulted in a conflicted endgame – might like to consult Sarah Chayes’ book ‘Thieves of State”, and follow her work at the Carnegie Endowment.