Thursday, November 08, 2012

Government officials under investigation


While I'm on the subject I'm listing all the current politicians and their staff who are on the cusp of lawsuits and their progress I can think of. Please help me add to the list of any others you may have come across:

Michael Mann: IPCC lead contributor, creator of the official IPCC hockey stick world temperature diagram. Currently involved in two libel suits, one in the US and one in Canada. However both have requested disclosure of his secret methods to create the hockey stick, and is currently deciding whether to give them or pull out of the cases. Either way he loses.

Julia Gillard: Currently is fighting claims of financial fraud from her previous legal career. There is no solid evidence for a case but the more she denies any wrongdoing more details are coming out. Could go either way.

Chris Huhne: UK energy minister, his charge may only be perverting the course of justice over a speeding fine, but can we trust anyone if convicted of not generally running their lives that way? I wouldn't.

Rebecca Brooks: News of the World editor, up for bribing police or somesuch charges over the phone hacking in her paper. Main point is she couldn't have done it alone, it would have needed police cooperation at a very high level so if she goes down many others will follow.

Yorkshire Police: 23 years after the event, they have been exposed altering evidence. No prosecutions are pending so far but the alleged (or admitted?) crimes are a very high level of fraud and break most rules of the profession. Like Brooks, the conspiracy is bad enough, but if the orders are proved to have come from the top as claimed, then what will it say about our police?

Libor fixing: Barclay's admitted fixing interest rates for many years, and supposedly not just with the consent of the Bank of England but under their orders to suppress the market rate and reduce the rate the banks themselves borrowed at. Insiders trace the orders to the very top, and despite breaking the 1968 Theft Act of obtaining financial services by deception, the government claim it was not a criminal act. That alone would require a separate act of parliament removing interest rate fixing from the act. No such clause is known.

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