Wirecard - German corruption comes to bursting point

There's a magnificent lightning storm outside and thunder is roiling in the valley, I have a packed and frantic day ahead anyway and last night at about 9pm to cap it all the crew who had been working since dawn to get the hay in were standing abjectly at my front door. When wrapping the vast hay-balls in the flat field above my back meadow, one of the bales had taken off down the hill and smashed a corner off my barn roof. OK. I'll deal with that as dawn comes. But with regard to the Wirecard fraud story, I hope you'll forgive me for re-posting a 2019 post -

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30th April 2019
The stench of corruption from Germany's businesses

Back in April 2018 we ran a fairly lengthy piece on German corruption. The German government had in effect encouraged widespread business corruption with law changes that made it easy to get away with - and for the past decade, it has been pervasive, deep and substantial. We quoted a report that found

A staggering 43 percent of German business executives polled by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) think bribery and corruption are fairly commonplace in Europe's economic powerhouse. That's a big jump from just 26 percent in 2015.

So who cares if most of German business is bent, the nation's judicial system ranks with Greece in terms of probity, shareholder protection is amongst the lowest in the developed world and there is little creditor protection? Who cares that courts and lawyers are beyond the reach of most victims, who must passively take the hits from German corrupt dealing?  Well, we wrote

This deep and endogenous German economic corruption will not play well in the rest of Europe. The UK, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations, with low levels of corruption and high scoring of commercial rectitude and probity, will be feeling fouled by contact with German corruption - and will now be adding up the commercial losses that German crookedness has cost them. The southern nations will be aggrieved that they have been bullied, coerced and hectored by a deeply crooked nation wearing a false disguise of moral superiority. And eastern nations such as Poland and Bulgaria, countries Germany has robbed of billions of Euros in corrupt complicity with Gazprom, will be looking at concrete measures to get their money back.

Yesterday Matthew Lynn broke yet another tale of German corruption in the Telegraph. The latest scandal is fraud at Wirecard - a rapidly ascending start-up that replaced the moribund Commerzbank in Germany's DAX index. The Telegraph and the FT are reluctant to be too specific; one suspects m'learned friends are hovering, and even the linked piece in the Anti-Corruption Digest is careful. Lynn writes

We have an image of Germany as a very law-abiding country, and on one level that is certainly true. The streets are safe, and no one can pay a bribe to get out of a parking fine.... yet right at the top of the country’s biggest companies it is starting to look painfully obvious there is an honesty issue.

The Germans are fond of portraying themselves as the exemplars of responsible, socially conscious capitalism. In truth, however, the hypocrisy is starting to become nauseating. There is clearly something rotten within Germany’s business culture – and even worse, no one seems to want to do anything about it.

It is the sort of casual, 'who cares?' corruption that saw Martin Selmayr's crooked appointment to EU capo shrugged off and Germany's biggest industrial names reduced to international gutter reputations no better than bootlegging prohibition gangsters.

So don't be surprised that when the downturn begins to bite, the entire German commercial edifice comes tumbling down - and the German economy proves as much of a paper tiger as did Soviet military might in 1989.
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Ends

Siemens, VW, DB and all the other past disgraces and now Wirecard. But why has it taken 14 months since Matthew Lynn broke the story (carefully) in the 'graph? Germany's business culture stinks like week-old Mackerel, and the Autumn will see an overflowing of the German bent business cesspit as the Covid recession bites far deeper than the bubble-bursting I was expecting when I penned that piece. You'll need your facemasks - the stench will reach every corner of Europe.

'Fatou Bensouda of the ICC is corrupt' says US AG

The International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded with the best of intentions, but like the UN has been turned into an instrument funded by the West and misused against us by the third world and the dags of the anti-western powers. The ICC has been weaponised. The President of the ICC is a Nigerian barrister, Chile Eboe-Osuji, 57, but the weaponised bit of the ICC is the Office of the Prosecutor, which has treaty authority to conduct investigations into a wide range of human rights offences. The current Prosecutor is Fatou Bensouda of Gambia, 58, who qualified as a Nigerian barrister.

Fatou Bensouda 'corrupt' says US Attorney General Barr

As with other international institutions such as the WHO, there are suspicions that both Russia and China, neither of which are full members, have been responsible for using the ICC Prosecutor to launch an investigation into US military activity in Afghanistan. In response, the US has imposed sanctions on the ICC's senior players, and visa restrictions on their family members. US Attorney General William Barr is reported in the Guardian as saying "The US government has reason to doubt the honesty of the ICC. The Department of Justice has received substantial credible information that raises serious concerns about a long history of financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor". In other words, Bensouda is as bent as Geller's spoon and has been bribed to start the investigation.

The ICC Prosecutor has power to investigate a wide range of abuses, including slavery, bondage and sex slavery - areas of investigation high on political agendas across the globe, including in the West. Modern slavery is a curse, and so widespread that it requires international action to confront it. Why, then, is the ICC ignoring it in favour of poking a stick at the US? This may give a clue -

Nigeria is #7 and the Gambia #9 in the league table of Slavery offenders

Embarrasing. Both the President of the ICC and the Prosecutor are from nations in the top 10 of the world's worst modern slavery offenders.

Dirty Rotten Bastards

Over a career spent handling hundreds of millions of other people's money, the one key constant that has always allowed me to sleep at night is not once, ever, having stolen a penny of it, never having taken a bribe and never having succumbed to corruption. I have turned down everything from Wimbledon centre court tickets, cruises, hampers, Glasto tickets to thinly veiled offers of brown envelopes. My philosophy is don't even admit the thin end of the wedge; I was always clear with tenderers and subbies - the limit was an inexpensive working lunch. Not that I wasn't up for a drink - but when they put the company card behind the bar I'd add £20 of my own to the pot. Yes, scoff all you like - but I have a reputation for the very highest standards of stewardship of my clients' money, and I'm proud of it.

So reading today that Austrian government officials took bribes of £55m from Airbus simply disgusts me. The levels of public corruption here are very much greater than in the UK - every political and public actor from the Burgermeister upwards is suspect. Partly it's being in a half-beer half-wine country, partly it's the deeply corrupt culture of the EU. I now regard all public officials in Austria as potentially corrupt and deal with them accordingly.

The Austrian corrupt payments were the largest amongst Airbus' campaign of bribery, fraud and filthy money - all of which has now been swept under the carpet with no prosecutions for a €3.6bn payoff to the even more corrupt EU.

It stinks like week-old Mackerel. Dirty corrupt bastards.

Brigands, Buccaneers, BT and Statutory Undertakers

There has been an impassioned plea in the media today by BT - begging the government to give them greater powers to dig up the streets. Or that's how the numpty media are reporting it. In reality the issues are more nuanced, and the public benefits far less tangible. As the Telegraph reports

One industry source said telecoms companies were hoping "to be afford the same rights of access that the energy and water companies have - to make it easier to dig up the roads to lay fibre". Often telecom companies are unable to lay fibre broadband if the landlord of a property is unresponsive.

Did you see what they did there?

You see it's not about rights to 'dig up the roads' at all - telecoms companies are already what's termed Statutory Undertakers and have exactly the same powers as energy and water companies. They can already run their cables under or alongside every public road and by-way in the Kingdom.

Some years ago in a remote area of south London my contractor was completing an upscale public realm job, high class stone paving over ruinously expensive Steintec cementitious bases. To site the stainless steel bollards, we diamond drilled 35cm deep - just beyond the depth of the formation, an existing footway, beneath. Mid afternoon BT vehicles started to arrive and by knocking-off time we had an entire fleet of emergency trucks, mobile workshops, satellite transceivers, generator trucks, mobile light towers, a flotilla of personnel carriers and about 100 blokes in BT vests there. My diamond driller had grazed - just grazed, mind you - a fibre optic bundle 450mm closer to the surface than it should ever have been. Their fault, not ours. But the reason for the panic was that we'd taken out the private high-speed feeds for both LHR T5 and Reuters. For which BT charges the big corporates an absolute arm and a leg.

BT is increasingly losing the consumer final connection to many competitors in a very competitive environment, so is relying more on providing private fibre to wealthy commercial bodies. For this, it does not have the legal rights to lay its private cables across your garden, digging a bloody great trench in your lawn to do so. That water and gas companies do have this right is reasonable given that they don't install private end-to-end gas mains for HSBC Towers, or an exclusive end-to-end water supply for the hanging gardens of Bloomberg. BT's plea is a con - they want the right to invade private property to lay wholly commercial, exclusive and private fibre optic feeds.

And the grasping bastards are trying to con us that national high-speed PUBLIC broadband depends on giving them free rein for private brigandage.  

Selmayr OUT - VdL squeaks in by 9 votes

Rejoice - Selmayr is OUT. The Telegraph, having the wool pulled over its eyes, reports 

Martin Selmayr, the German controversial secretary general of the commission, announced he would resign in accordance with Brussels tradition that dictates no two people of the same nationality can hold the EU’s executive’s most powerful posts.

It's rubbish of course. No such restriction applies to the head of the EU's 30,000 strong civil service - a permanent job normally awarded through competition - rather than the undemocratic political appointments of the five Presidents, fourteen Vice-Presidents and scores of Commissioners and their assistants.  The truth is that Selmayr's corrupt appointment by Juncker stuck in the craw of even the EU, so mired itself in corruption that such things normally go almost unnoticed. Politico EU has the true story

The procedure by which Selmayr and his boss, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, engineered his transfer from chief of Juncker’s cabinet to head of the entire Commission secretariat was an act of such chicanery and skulduggery that it stains the record of the entire Commission.

That Selmayr is, like von der Leyen, a German Christian Democrat, made the prospect of his continuing in office a provocation to those of other parties whose support she sought. But it was the nature of his ascent and his argument that the post is a political one that made his departure inevitable.

VdL herself was humiliated by the European Parliament, barely scraping in with just a 9 vote majority. Her 383 fell far short of the minimum of 400 that demonstrates the EP's confidence in the senior unelected functionary. Since she scored only 51% of the vote, we should expect the Remain lobby to call for a second vote - but of course this hypocrisy applies only to the Referendum result.

So the EU have lost a ruthless Machiavelli and gained a semi-competent duffer stained with a record of failure and corruption. Can't be bad.

More Corruption

Zero Hedge reports, in relation to the circumstances that have led to the relentless climb of gold (my emphasis)

Ultimately you are witnessing a massive expropriation of wealth from the middle classes to the wealthiest - 40% of the bank of England's money printing programme benefited the top 5%. These flows obfuscate the real demand and supply dynamics of the market - central banks are the baddest of bad actors. Using printed money to bid up the assets of the rich in order to manage outcomes is an utter perversion of capitalism. It blinds us to the opportunity cost of economic participation - real cost of borrowing, real expected returns. Worse still is that the money they use is created by devaluing taxpayers after tax savings - is effectively like a second tax. What happens when the market starts to fall, will these feckless un-elected central bankers be buying falling stocks? How will taxpayers react to their money being printed to buy assets that are falling? How would taxpayers like if they received a statement indicating how much money has been printed and the amount they have personally provided. This is not a victim-less crime.

There you have it. Not only are most of us victims of Globalism that has left median incomes in the UK still worth less than in 2008, a Globalism that benefits only the 1%, but the whole of QE, carried out in our name and at our cost, has acted mainly to the benefit of that same 1% by inflating asset values. A reckoning will come - and they have been the authors of their own destruction.

Eurosnouts head for the trough

European Parliament election results are greeted here with a shrug and the familiar maxim "same trough different snouts". The low-level Eurosnouts can look forward to bloated untaxed salaries, expenses beyond the dreams of avarice for which they need to render no account, a corrupt EU that forces even the smallest companies under GDPR to onerous disclosure but absolutely refuses to itself reveal how Europe's taxpayers' cash has been squandered, misused, stolen, misappropriated, defrauded and peculated by the myriad snouts in the Brussels trough. They therefore have free rein to be as dirty, crooked and squalid as they wish, safe from the wrath of their electors.

This time around though the scramble for the EP trough is as nothing in comparison to the vicious in-fighting for a chance at the elite swill; several of the EU's unelected capos are up for rotation. On his way out is Juncker the Druncker, dismissed from his post in Luxembourg for tax fraud and whose appointment to Brussels possibly saved him from jail time. Those in the running for his replacement include Christine Lagarde, convicted in 2015 for her part in a $400m fraud but astonishingly not jailed by a corrupt French political establishment.

Various other Presidents and top jobs are up for replacement by unelected nomenklatura candidates and the field is filled with twitching bristly snouts all eager to bury themselves in the Euroswill.

We've written previously on the deep links between organised crime and EU funding HERE and on the involvement of EU funds / organised crime in the murder of journalists HERE. The Brussels trough is not a joke; the filth of the EU's corruption pollutes Europe and destroys lives.

Ten Years On ..

NB - Blogger / feedburner is acting funny at this end. Anyone else having problems please let me know via email (RH column). Ta.
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 The Telegraph is rightly celebrating a decade since the Parliamentary expenses scandal was uncovered, after a hard fight against both the Speaker Gorbals Mick and the Parliamentary watchdogs, who used every trick and turn available to stop us getting the information. That wasn't all that was going on - in London, albeit a year earlier, we were getting ready to elect Boris. Forgive me for recycling that post; it has echoes.

It's strange, I can't wait to cast my votes on Thursday. My ballot card is pinned ready on the notice board and I'm eager for the off. I can't recall when I've ever enjoyed an election so much - perhaps 1979 was the last time. Then, after nearly a decade of Vic Feather and Len Murray and shots of Congress House in virtually every news report the same feeling for a need for change was in the air.

In retrospect, the 70s and the Thatcher years were where the rot started. In 1974 Anthony Crosland told local government 'The party's over' - meaning the expansionist Client State fuelled by the economic boom of the 60s was over, a theme echoes by Keith Joseph in the years that followed. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, the central State expanded its powers beyond levels that had not even been seen during the dark days of the war, at the time the only measure to rein in the trots in the town halls, but ironically the foundation for Zanu Labour's Centralist control freakery from 1997.

Gordon Brown is even less capable than Jim Callaghan of steering the ship of state. As he attempts to tighten his grip on every aspect of citizens' lives, as he tries to convince his dying party and an angry nation that he's in control, the more control slips from his chewed fingers. Damned with faint praise by his own backbenchers, held on his back foot by the media, it's not now a question of if he goes but when. In fact, his Jonah abilities are so acute that I'm convinced every high-profile appearance he'll make between now and Thursday will knock points off the Labour votes - Livingstone must be praying he'll stay out of London.

Oh, and as for Parliament - we only jailed three. It wasn't enough.

Europe - Organised crime bosses back the EU

Europe's organised crims and mafiosi clearly believe that contrary to EUphile scare stories, they would be better off under the EU than under the security regimes of individual states. Sinn Fein's Remainer stance comes not only from legitimate political concerns but, one suspects, a certain sympathy for IRA members now deply involved in organised crime. Before the referendum, Irish courts seized €28m from ex-PIRA organised crime bosses, much of which, it is thought, originated from EU grant scams which are funded in part by UK taxpayers. The amount seized is only the tip of the iceburg - perhaps only 5% of the proceeds of ex-terrorist organised crime in Ireland.

We have posted before on the murder of journalists working on organised crime stories throughout Europe, many of which involved serious fraud and corruption of EU funds. From Veronica Guerin in 1996 to Daphne Caruana Galizia, blown apart by a mafia car bomb in Malta in 2017, dirty EU money attracts the worst and most vile criminal elements in our society. Unused airports and motorways going nowhere in the Mezzogiorno to the fouling of Loch Corrib in Galway with raw sewage from crooked developers snouting the EU grant trough all bear the hand of organised crime. And it's unstoppable by EU-wide security and police action.

Indeed, some professional UK police officers have deep suspicions as to the integrity of many of those working for both Europol and Frontex, and there have been persistent rumours of deep and embedded organised crime representation in both organisations. These suspicions also extend to the EU itself. Despite the most committed efforts of the governments of many member states, and of individual MEPs, the EU has failed over many years to introduce an effective set of measures to counter organised crime in Europe. Both in terms of a concerted pursuit of organised crime, and an agreed framework for confiscation of the proceeds of crime, the EU has failed to act. In a 2017 EU Observer article entitled "Mafia money pollutes the EU economy", the authors conclude

On 7 October 2016, the EU parliament approved the report on the fight against corruption, prepared by an Italian MEP, Laura Ferrara, which partially adopts the work of Alfano's special committee. The report's 35 pages echoes the same wish-list to the EU commission, that the offence of "criminal association regardless of consummation of criminal ends" should be punishable.

And yet, there has still been very little progress. It's like a broken record.

In the light of the evidence it seems that there is an almost symbiotic relationship between the capos of the EU and Europe's crime bosses. Make no mistake, the UK's fight against crime will be more effective, safer and more secure from criminal infiltration after Brexit than now - and that may also be part of the reason why some Irish factions are exhibiting such sustained opposition to Brexit.

Journalists murdered working on EU / mafia corruption investigations

June 1996, when Veronica Guerin was murdered by Ireland's drug barons, seems an age ago, but it shows just how long-lived have been the links between official corruption, EU money, organised crime and drugs.  

More recently, in February this year, Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak, 27, together with his innocent partner, were gunned down in his home. At the time he was working on a story on the links between EU money, bent Slovak businessmen, and the Prime Minister's assistant's links to corruption and a mafia crime figure. 

And last month in Bulgaria Victoria Marinova ws found murdered in Ruse. She had been working on a story about corruption involving EU funds. The second Bulgarian journalist murdered in a decade, the gunning down in Sofia of radio presenter Bobi Tsankov in 2010 being a grisly precursor.

In 2010 Investigative journalist Sokratis Giolias was gunned down in Athens. And just over a year ago, in October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia was blown apart by a mafia car bomb in Malta. A 53 year old mother of three, her investigations into political and EU corruption on the island and the links between EU funding and crime figures offended scores of bent Maltese politicians. In Poland in 2015 Investigative journalist Łukasz Masiak was beaten to death in Mlawa.

Dead journalists make the news. But it's reasonable to suppose that for every stubborn and tenacious reporter who refused to be intimidated, a score or more will have been cowed into silence by a bullet in the post, a beating, their family or children approached, their windows broken, their cars dripping in bloody paint.

The EU uses money taken from Europe's taxpayers to buy political loyalty and to corrupt politicians across Europe, under the pretence of aid and development. But building up a cabal of loyal bent politicians comes at a price - they frequently come attached to organised crime gangs. And although the EU would rather play down the links between EU favour and funding and the mafias, at times the links are so blatant, the passage of cash from EU taxpayer purses to mafia pockets so conspicuous, that even the EU are forced to act;

In an unprecedented move, the EU has withheld funds from new member Bulgaria because the ineffective measures it’s taken against organized crime. Killings, frauds and corruption all seem to go unprosecuted and unpunished. The European Union’s (EU) dramatic action in suspending aid to Bulgaria came after ample warnings that mere commitment to judicial reform was not enough.

But of course the EU can't act too harshly; the foul and noisome compact between the EU, Europe's criminal mobs and her bent politicians is vital to Berlaymont's interests. And a carpet of journalists' corpses is the cost.

Selmayr's crooked appointment

Well, it's official. We all knew that the EU Commission was nothing more than a cabal of unelected officials trampling democracy, conniving with organised crime, losing billions to theft, fraud, nepotism, corruption and incompetence, and that Martin Selmayr's appointment as consigliere to the capo of capos was as bent as a 90p piece, but now the EU have confirmed it themselves.

Selmayr claims to be a clever lawyer, which doesn't say much. So does Blair. But even he must know that the knowing and wilful beneficiary of a crooked act is as crooked as the crooked scrotes who actually did it. Anyone with half a conscience would be humiliated to hell at holding a post gained so corruptly that the appointment would disgrace the equal ops policy of the Klan.

But with his capo reported as being increasingly out of action earlier and earlier in the day due to 'sciatica', the bent cabal from the Berlaymont increasingly need leadership, and Germany is happy to lend this consigliere.

Good luck to them. At least Britain doesn't have to stomach the cesspit stench for much longer.

EU prepared to bleed 27 nations dry in order to hurt UK

Herr Barnier, an unelected EU apparatchik, declared yesterday that the EU will teach the UK the consequences of leaving the single market - irrespective of the cost to the 27 remaining members. Our pain, he said, will serve as a good lesson to any other nations thinking of leaving. This level of Euro-fanaticism, in which the good of the EU institutions and their unelected officials rides roughshod over the people, businesses and nations of Europe, has been exposed by Herr Barnier's own very poor performance leading the Brussels team.

That this is indeed, incredibly, the self-obsessed position of the EU is substantiated by their obsession with the UK 'divorce bill' - money which will benefit only the behemoth in Brussels and its bloated bureaucrats in their corrupt, tax-free Nirvana. The good of the people of Europe, of national economies, of trade and citizens' welfare comes very low on the EU's agenda. 

Indeed, the EU's pressure on the UK and Irish governments to reintroduce a border - against the natural wishes and inclination of both nations - is motivated solely by a concern for EU tax revenue and the maintenance of protectionist and restrictive trade barriers that cost the people of Europe billions in higher food costs. 

All of which are of no concern to the EU's unelected officials. They are prepared to bleed their 27 member nations dry to preserve their own corrupt privilege.

PPERA: The third leg of the stool

Keeping Labour out of power since 2010 has allowed our democracy a chance at correcting the deep corruption of our democratic systems that had crept-in during Labour government. I put it no more strongly than that; under Labour, democratic systems tend to corruption whilst under Tory government some healing and maintenance take place. 

Two legs of the stool - voter registration and the Electoral Quotient - have already undergone or are undergoing substantial correction. The 2022 election will be fought on new mostly equal constituency boundaries with mostly real voters within them. The third leg - party finance - remains a running sore, to mix my metaphors. Quite how Labour, who vaunt such pretence at 'equality, ' could allow such unequal, discriminatory and inequitable errors to pollute our democratic system is beyond my understanding.  

Party finance is a sod. Today's announcement that the CPS will not be proceeding against 14 constituencies in which the cost of the Tory battlebus was not accounted against the candidate's £30k spend limit is probably right. When Soros is deploying millions in a secret, unaccountable campaign in his own interests that undermines the British people the operating costs of an old coach really do seem trivial. I harbour faint hopes that the intelligence services will serve up Soros like a roast turkey when they are ready.

Labour won't cap donations because it would restrict Union funding. Both parties now want to fight campaigns as central, metropolitan advertising campaigns using slick voter targeting and marketing tools. A million unpaid supporters of their own views (including of course we bloggers) pump out words and memes over the social channels at our own cost. Technology and secret money, together with the peerages for loans scandal of the Blair years which Cameron continued without shame, bent commercial and trade deals, promises to the Bruvvers and other corrupting influences all make a nonsense of the PPERA provisions as they stand. Voters roundly (and rightly) reject State funding - the idiotic proposals from both Hayden Phillips and Christopher Kelly would have preserved the wealth of the LibDems but would also have brought UKIP £12m a year whilst Mr Carswell was sitting for the party and Zero when he wasn't. 

I do therefore look forward to a vigorous debate amongst those that care on how we may best reform this third leg of our democratic stool.  

Who will get the taxpayer's grapefruit bowls?

Gerald Kaufman was one of the most egregious expenses cheats exposed by the Telegraph in 2009. Amongst the misuse of tax funds for his London gaff was £220 for a pair of crystal grapefruit bowls, items Kaufman claimed were 'essential' for him to perform his work as an MP.

No hypocritical encomiums here today I'm afraid. Kaufman and those like him did more to devalue and befoul our ancient Parliament than those for centuries past. Here's a litany of his tax-theft;

The former environment minister was asked to attend a meeting with officials from the parliamentary fees office to discuss details of another claim relating to £28,834 of work on the kitchen and bathroom at his London flat. He told them that the work was necessary because he was “living in a slum”, though his second home, off Regent’s Park, is in one of the most fashionable areas of the capital. He was eventually reimbursed for £15,329. 

On one occasion he asked a civil servant “why are you querying these expenses?” and on another threatened to make a complaint unless a dispute was settled by noon on the day in question. In one document, an official in the fees office noted that invoices Sir Gerald had submitted took him to “within 6p” of his annual limit. He also claimed £1,262 for a gas bill that was £1,055 in credit.

Between 2001 and 2008 the Manchester Gorton MP, one of the Labour party’s longest-serving members, claimed a total of £115,109 in additional costs allowances on his London flat, which he owns outright. In June 2006, he submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen Beovision 40in LCD television. The maximum amount MPs are allowed to claim for TVs is £750.

On July 7, 2006 the fees office wrote to Sir Gerald to say: “I regret to inform you that this item falls within the not allowable category of luxurious furnishings, and as such has been rejected.” He was paid £750. In March 2007 Sir Gerald submitted a claim for £1,461.83 for a “second-hand rug replacing 24-year-old carpet”, with an additional £389.91 for “customs duty on rug”, which was paid. The receipt showed that Sir Gerald bought the rug from the Showplace Antique Centre on West 25th Street in Manhattan for $2,750. The Green Book strictly forbids “antique, luxury or premium grade” furnishings. Later that year, on Dec 29, Sir Gerald, who was knighted in 2004, submitted an invoice from ABC Carpets in Harrods for £598, which was also paid.

A note of a telephone conversation between Sir Gerald, 78, and an official in the fees office, states that his reasons for claiming £28,834 for home improvements between 2005 and 2007 were: “Old flat, facilities out of date, decrepit, health reasons, update, living in slum.” Sir Gerald added that he had “not carried out any repairs/maintenance for 32 years”.Sir Gerald was also challenged over regular claims for “odd jobs” which he submitted without receipts at a rate of £245 every month — £5 below the then limit for unreceipted expenses. He replied: “Why are you querying these expenses?” On May 18, a senior official in the fees office noted details of another conversation about the kitchen and bathroom, saying: “MP believes that I have seen a detailed breakdown of the £12,416.51 claim he has submitted [for that financial year]… MP is becoming agitated and will be making an official complaint against me, if this matter is not resolved by 12 noon today.” When detailed invoices were submitted, they included £575 for undertile heating in the shower room and £2,695 for Bosch and Miele kitchen appliances. Sir Gerald was asked to attend a meeting with officials on the matter and the fees office eventually agreed to pay him £15,329 of the £28,834. Sir Gerald accepted, saying that he wanted to “draw a line under the issue”.

In June last year Sir Gerald submitted a £1,262 claim for his gas bill, covering the period March 2006 to May 2008. The fees office pointed out that his gas account was £1,055.60 in credit, and only agreed to pay £122.46. A note in the file on July 10, 2008 quotes Sir Gerald as saying: “I received a letter from [official] saying not pay as is credit. I paid £1,252 THIS year so want reimbursing!!!”
The fees office wrote to him on July 14 to say: “You might wish to ask British Gas to repay you the credit.”

Sir Gerald’s claims between 2004 and June 2008 also included £19,200 for food — close to the maximum — and £4,692 for cleaning.

Last night Sir Gerald offered to repay the money for the rug and admitted that his claim for the £8,000 television was “a bit daft”. He said that his flat had been in need of complete refurbishment because he had “neglected” it over the years and he had overclaimed for the gas bill because he “misunderstood” the invoice. He said that his odd jobs bill was actually more than £245 a month, so he had claimed close to the limit. His food claim was “appropriate” because his job meant he often had to “spend a lot of money” eating out, he added.

Corrupt EU Nomenklatura miffed at Romanian justice win

Political corruption is endemic throughout Europe, and Britain can only boast that our populist checks and balances make it harder here for bent politicians to cheat, steal and defraud than elsewhere. Despite a Parliament-wide expenses fraud scandal in the UK, jut a handful of the most egregious thieves were jailed. The political establishment rapidly realised that the Commons green benches would be empty if all the crooked MPs were acted against. The rest remain on probation, watched by the hawks of a free press that they yearn to muzzle. 

Elsewhere, auditors simply refuse to consider the EU's risible offerings of accounts. So mired by fraud and corruption, so deeply infiltrated by organised criminal networks, so abused by bent and hungry power-seekers are the Federation's finances that no one in Europe regards seriously their fatuous offers of financial records. The EU is corrupt to its core. 

I must admit that my previous confident prediction that François Fillon would walk the French Presidential election looks somewhat shaky now. It emerges that he fraudulently bunged his family members hundreds of thousands of crooked stolen Euros on the pretence that they worked for him - much on the same basis that our MPs claim their young nieces are qualified parliamentary assistants worthy of a £30k salary. It's just theft. Just not the sort of theft that earned a young rioter who stole three bottles of water six months banged up in a Victorian cell with a Muslim rapist and a bucket to shit in. 

So when Romania passed a decree legalising theft, fraud and crookedness by politicians and public officials provided the sums stolen came to less than £38k, bent little ears pricked up all over Europe. This may be small beer in the UK, where £38k is just a year's worth of flipping homes by our MPs, but in Romania it will build you a tasteless vulgar palace with gold taps and individual stables for the goats. I'll bet the EU nomenklatura were particularly interested; if they exempted all transactions of less than €0.5m from accounting transparency, they might just be able to find a bent auditor somewhere in Europe to sign off their accounts. All seemed well and establishment politicians and public officials were rubbing their hands.

Then the people of Romania took to the streets. The politicians remembered what happened the last time they did so, and rapidly backed down. The thieves decree was rescinded. All over Europe one could almost hear the gentle hiss as miffed politicians abandoned dreams of new scams and frauds and let the air out of the hubristic pomposity that criminal immunity confers. Little tear-soaked tissues were flushed from the cloaca of the Berlaymont. Empty Sancerre bottles crashed inverted into Westminster ice buckets. We, the people, have won this round - but the price of a Parliament free from corruption is eternal vigilance.