Viking Supporters Co-operative
Viking Chat => Off Topic => Topic started by: BillyStubbsTears on August 10, 2021, 11:29:58 am
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£7.5m payment for two years of part-time work for a failing company which collapsed with £320m of Govt-backed loans, with thee and me being left to pick up the tab.
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Cameron’s cronies.
And one of the companies his cronies were propping up were linked to the steel industry with 4000 uk workers. And they knew the company could never afford to repay their debts.
They are all as bad as each other. Conservative or Labour. Money, power, influence, corruption.
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privileged, entitled and unaccountable.
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NR
If they are all as bad as each other, could you point out what Gordon Brown has done that matches this?
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Or for that matter, Theresa May.
Point being they are NOT all as bad as each other. But if you just let a glib nonsense idea like that take hold, there's no traction against the ones who really ARE amoral, pocket-stuffing Kitsons. Just like if you claim all politicians lie all the time, there's no defence against ending up with a PM or a President who truly DO lie all the time.
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NR
If they are all as bad as each other, could you point out what Gordon Brown has done that matches this?
Perhaps you should direct this question at his Downing Street spin doctor Damian McBride.
I do wonder why Brown, when he was Chancellor decided to sell off a large chunk of uk gold reserves at what has been estimated to be a loss of £7billion to the uk taxpayer. The official reason for selling the gold reserves was to reduce the portfolio risk of the UK's reserves by diversifying away from gold. We will never know the real reason, or maybe panorama may do some digging into this one day too.
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Wasn’t Theresa May accused of trying to bribe Labour MPs to back her Brexit deal after she announced a £1.6 billion fund for struggling communities.?
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The main reasons why your examples are not equivalent are that neither Brown nor May did of those things for personal benefit.
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The main reasons why your examples are not equivalent are that neither Brown nor May did of those things for personal benefit.
Well, you're expecting us to believe that Brown siphoned off money from the gold sale into his own pocket right under the noses of the whole Treasury. What makes you confident about that?
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The main reasons why your examples are not equivalent are that neither Brown nor May did of those things for personal benefit.
Well, you're expecting us to believe that Brown siphoned off money from the gold sale into his own pocket right under the noses of the whole Treasury. What makes you confident about that?
As you are making the accusation Glyn isn't it beholden upon yourself to show that he did?
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The main reasons why your examples are not equivalent are that neither Brown nor May did of those things for personal benefit.
Well, you're expecting us to believe that Brown siphoned off money from the gold sale into his own pocket right under the noses of the whole Treasury. What makes you confident about that?
As you are making the accusation Glyn isn't it beholden upon yourself to show that he did?
I'm not making an accusation, I'm showing how stupid the accusation is in the first place.
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It wasn't clear Glyn, my mistake.
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No, I've just noticed, it's my mistake. I intended to quote and reply to the post normal rules deleted while I was trying to quote it.
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Read my post again. I wonder. I make no allegation.
It is still seen as the biggest fiscal blunder this country has ever stumbled into in modern times.
The official reason for it is cited.
That huge sum of money from the gold sale would have been brokered through someone, some company. It would have generated vast sums of fees and commission somewhere. Or maybe it wasn’t for monetary benefit. Perhaps it was for a pecuniary advantage.
We will never know.
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What? You mean neither The Treasury nor The Bank Of England would have handled the sale of gold...the two largest financial institutions in the country?
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Read my post again. I wonder. I make no allegation.
It is still seen as the biggest fiscal blunder this country has ever stumbled into in modern times.
The official reason for it is cited.
That huge sum of money from the gold sale would have been brokered through someone, some company. It would have generated vast sums of fees and commission somewhere. Or maybe it wasn’t for monetary benefit. Perhaps it was for a pecuniary advantage.
We will never know.
NR bst challenged you to show how either Brown or May are the same as Cameron in the Greensill affair, all you have to do is show why they are the same, the examples you have shown are clearly not the same, Cameron did it for his own benefit out of office using the connections he made in office.
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NR
If they are all as bad as each other, could you point out what Gordon Brown has done that matches this?
Perhaps you should direct this question at his Downing Street spin doctor Damian McBride.
I do wonder why Brown, when he was Chancellor decided to sell off a large chunk of uk gold reserves at what has been estimated to be a loss of £7billion to the uk taxpayer. The official reason for selling the gold reserves was to reduce the portfolio risk of the UK's reserves by diversifying away from gold. We will never know the real reason, or maybe panorama may do some digging into this one day too.
Decisions made whilst a member of the UK government are the same as an ex-PM using his political influence for personal gain. In this instance with a company whose activities bordered on the illegal and whose actual knowledge of those remains 'vague'.
But you think that is 'the same'?
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I believe the gold was bought up by mainly China and Russia.
You don’t have to look too far to see Brown is quite happy to rub shoulders with the Russians.
Brown was paid more than £120,000 for appearing at a four-hour conference – a rate of £500 a minute for speaking to financiers in Russia in February 2012, although he was said not to have personally taken 'a penny'.
He was a guest speaker at the Russia Forum, Moscow's equivalent to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where Russian President Vladimir Putin was also speaking.
The event was jointly sponsored by the Kremlin-owned Sberbank and the country's oldest privately owned investment bank, Troika Dialog.
Mr Brown was given £124,494, as well as expenses of £4,000 for flights and accommodation for him and staff.
If you think corruption at the highest level is as simple as putting your hand in the till, then I waste my time in voicing my opinion on here.
It’s subtle. Very subtle. And it happens over time, so as it can be disguised and shrouded in what appear to be completely legitimate transactions.
Of course, it may be that Gordon Brown had just lost complete control of all his sense when he was in charge of the countries purse strings. And I’m deluded.
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With hindsight the sale of gold was a financial blunder, you are now in the process of hair splitting, Gordon Brown wasn't corrupt unless you have proof, which you can take to the police. If there was proof wouldn't you think the tory party would have been all over it like a rash?
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Proof? I have no proof of course. This is my personal feeling and opinion, but based on knowledge and experience of how this occurs at every level of business.
No smoke without fire……
Without boring you with my world, might I suggest you read up on placement, layering and integration, in the context of money laundering.
Money laundering is one of the most difficult aspects of crime to detect.
You know or believe or suspect it’s there. It’s just very, very difficult to prove.
Those that are involved at the highest level know this.
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Strange how these discussions go.
You have clear documented evidence of what Cameron has done, and a suggestion with absolutely zero evidence whatsoever of what Brown might theoretically have done being suggested as somehow being equal.
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At no point have I said these persons are equal in their actions. I merely opine on my thoughts about their possible conduct, in the way I see it, in relation to possible corruption. For their own benefit or not.
My comment about them all being the same was sweeping. “They are all as bad as each other” I admit, is an overused and generalised comment.
I generalised.
I trust none of them.
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But as I say NR, that is a highly dangerous approach, because it doesn't differentiate between scales of mendacity or avarice. and it effectively leads to a lack of control over politicians that are highly corrupt or totally disengaged from objective truth.
As with everything, there is a very broad spectrum of (for want of a better word) "misbehaviour". Some of it is honest mistakes. Some of it is wrong but minor. Some of it is basic incompetence. Some of it comes from fundamentally wrong understanding. Some of it is deliberately misleading. Some of it dangerously corrosive to society. I think it's very important that we differentiate and really hammer the transgressors at the later end of that list, not lump them all in the same pot.
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But as I say NR, that is a highly dangerous approach, because it doesn't differentiate between scales of mendacity or avarice. and it effectively leads to a lack of control over politicians that are highly corrupt or totally disengaged from objective truth.
As with everything, there is a very broad spectrum of (for want of a better word) "misbehaviour". Some of it is honest mistakes. Some of it is wrong but minor. Some of it is basic incompetence. Some of it comes from fundamentally wrong understanding. Some of it is deliberately misleading. Some of it dangerously corrosive to society. I think it's very important that we differentiate and really hammer the transgressors at the later end of that list, not lump them all in the same pot.
Are you still talking about politicians, or have you moved the discussion to posters on here?
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Cameron is a disgrace. From his Brexit campaign to this.
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You don’t have to look too far to see Brown is quite happy to rub shoulders with the Russians.
You are aware, that Boris Johnson appointed a Russian friend of his, (with connections to the KGB), to the House of Lords, aren't you?
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news/westminster-news/evgeny-lebedev-in-house-of-lords-6855550
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Ah yes, Baron Lebedev of Hampton in our London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation”.
Nepotism at its worst.
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I genuinely think Brown simply bought into the narrative at the time that gold was a barberous relic and wanted to get something for it before it was worth next to nothing.
He should have been smarter than that.
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Yeah but it was only a few million quid that you and me are now paying for.
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Yeah but it was only a few billion quid that you and me are now paying for.
Sorry, I don't want to make light of it. It was a stupid mistake. I thought so at the time.
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With hindsight the sale of gold was a financial blunder, you are now in the process of hair splitting, Gordon Brown wasn't corrupt unless you have proof, which you can take to the police. If there was proof wouldn't you think the tory party would have been all over it like a rash?
“With hindsight the sale of gold was a financial blunder.”
So it is ok to let Brown off for a massive blunder but had it been one of those nasty Tory people who had done it I am guessing that your line would have been simply “the sale of gold was a financial blunder”.
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Yeah but it was only a few billion quid that you and me are now paying for.
Sorry, I don't want to make light of it. It was a stupid mistake. I thought so at the time.
I read an article a few years ago that claimed there was some huge crisis coming in the financial markets that required the release of the Govt gold.
I've no idea if that's true. But it is totally irrelevant to the theme of this thread. If it WAS a mistake, it was a mistake. A pin prick compared to what we lost through Austerity or Brexit, but those were all clear political decisions. The OP was about an ex-PM filling his own pockets through graft at the country's expense. Something that, as far as I can see, is without precedence in living memory.
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Just to be clear on the scale of Cameron's graft, he was paid for his ability to call old chums in Govt and get them to offer his imploding company £400m of Govt underwritten loans. His imploding company then loaned that money out to their biggest debtor, who they knew was himself on the brink of collapse.
In any reasonable world, Cameron would be looking at a ten year stretch for fraud on an industrial scale.
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So if it is cut and dried that Cameron committed fraud, why isn’t he facing charges?
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So if it is cut and dried that Cameron committed fraud, why isn’t he facing charges?
Because, apparently, sometimes both sides of a story just aren’t necessary.
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The SFO is currently investigating Greensill. We'll see what happens, although I'm sure Cameron will have been savvy enough to be able to claim plausible deniability.
Fascinating that you can't bring yourself to utter a single syllable of criticism against Cameron though.
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Well, as you say, investigations are ongoing.
Let’s see what the outcome is before lynching him eh.
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''Mr Cameron's spokesman told Panorama he was neither a director of Greensill, nor involved in any lending decisions, and that he had no special insight into what ultimately happened.
The spokesman said: "It is also preposterous to suggest that he would work for any company if he was aware that it was behaving improperly, or was in any way seeking to mislead investors."
He's cleared himself ...................
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''Mr Cameron's spokesman told Panorama he was neither a director of Greensill, nor involved in any lending decisions, and that he had no special insight into what ultimately happened.
The spokesman said: "It is also preposterous to suggest that he would work for any company if he was aware that it was behaving improperly, or was in any way seeking to mislead investors."
He's cleared himself ...................
And that was precisely what I meant when I said Cameron will have a deniability defence. I suspect that will be enough to insulate him from legal charges.
Whether it is morally plausible is another matter. Consider this.
His defence appears to be that it never dawned on him to question why he was paid £7.5m for two years of part time work which involved repeatedly pestering Sunak and Johnson to give special treatment to his company to receive huge lashings of emergency public funds that it wasn't entitled to. It never dawned on him to ask his employer why that influence was so vital that they would pay him at a rate 150x that of a full time new nurse for part time work. An ex-PM, used to dealing with the most complex problems was happy to be dumbly ignorant of the context of what he was doing.
Stretches credulity just a tad, no?
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Influence is everything in top level politics and business.
Look no further than Theresa May Ltd’s website “weworkwithyou” and check out her registered business interests.
The amounts of money she gets for influential speeches around the world is eye watering. JP Morgan paid her £160,000 for a 4 hr speech!!!!
Also worthy of note is her overseas travel during obvious lockdowns to places like South Korea and Paris.
I’ve said it before. Power, money, influence - all the constituent ingredients for corruption to flourish. But not the sort that lands you in jail. Corruption that keeps you the right side of the law. Just. Influence peddling I believe it is called. Extremely difficult to prove of course. Then there is lobbying and interest representation. All of which would have been present during Cameron’s involvement with Greensill , I suspect.
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But just look how much better off the exchequer must be from all the tax they pay on it. (Why haven't we got a YEH, RIGHT emoji?).
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Seems Cameron may have been “influencing” elsewhere with a fresh allegation hitting the papers today.
David Cameron has denied lobbying the government on behalf of Illumina, a genetics company he worked for.
The denial comes after it emerged Mr Cameron encouraged Health Secretary Matt Hancock to speak at a conference co-hosted by the firm shortly before it won a £123m government contract. A contract that appears to have been without any competition whatsoever.
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I dread to think how many Donny Folk voted Tory because the thought Cameron would best represent their interests.