Dilip Simeon's blog

Sajid Javid, the health secretary, followed shortly by Rishi Sunak , the chancellor, posted their letters of resignation on Twitter, criticising the competence of the government. Neither explicitly mentioned the sexual misconduct and Partygate scandals that have dogged the government for months. Sunak in particular claimed the prompt for his resignation was his differing approach on the economy. But the backdrop to both resignations was Johnson’s catastrophic handling of the Chris Pincher affair, after he admitted appointing his ally as deputy chief whip despite having been told of misconduct allegations against him. Just seconds earlier, Johnson had told the cameras that he was sorry for his mistakes in appointing Pincher , and he had toured the House of Commons tearoom saying that “everyone deserves a second chance”. The problem is that Johnson is not on his second chance but a number much higher than that after scandals such as Partygate, Tory donors funding his flat renova...

Justice H.P. Sandesh, judge of the High Court of Karnataka, on Monday orally disclosed in the court hall that there was a “threat” to him after he raised questions about the functioning of the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB). The judge revealed this during the hearing of a petition filed by Mahesh P.S, deputy tahsildar, who is an accused in the ₹5 lakh bribery case involving J. Manjunath, an IAS officer and the then Deputy Commissioner of Bengaluru Urban district. Justice Sandesh, during earlier hearings of the petition last week, had questioned why ACB had not acted against Mr. Manjunath. Though the judge neither disclosed the source from whom he received the threat nor the nature of threat, he asked ACB’s counsel whether ACB’s Additional Director-General of Police [Seemant Kumar Singh] was so powerful. However, Justice Sandesh revealed that another judge of the High Court came to him and told him that there was a threat from some person, who is said to have referred to an earli...

NB : Our autonomous institutions and elected authorities are blatantly liars. Maybe the Headquarters of Patriotism stationed in Nagpur can tell us why. When secret societies take over the reins of power, they conspire in broad daylight.   DS The Election Commission’s sealed-cover submissions in 2020 to the Supreme Court - which has not heard the case in two years - on electoral bonds named 105 political parties, creating an impression that a large number of parties received donations... But only 19 parties in India received donations through bonds; 17 of these are on the EC list, according to interviews with 54 political parties and a review of audit data and letters they submitted to the Commission. The BJP received 68% or Rs 4,216 crore of these funds. Investigative reports published in 2019 by The Collective showed how the union government ignored objections to the bonds from the Reserve Bank of India , lied in Parliament about the EC’s comments, broke the law by allowing an il...

Two wealthy Indian-born business brothers who were allegedly at the centre of a massive web of state corruption in South Africa have been arrested in Dubai, Pretoria announced on Monday. The arrests came as an investigation was concluded into massive plundering of state institutions during former president Jacob Zuma ’s era. South Africa’s justice ministry “confirms that it has received information from law enforcement authorities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that fugitives of justice, namely, Rajesh and Atul Gupta have been arrested,” it said. The brothers are allegedly at the centre of a corruption scandal that dogged Zuma’s nine-year administration until 2018. They were accused of paying bribes in exchange for lucrative state contracts and influence over ministerial appointments.... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/06/gupta-brothers-arrested-in-dubai-over-alleged-corruption-in-south-africa Book Review: The Republic of Gupta - post-apartheid South Africa S...

The Union government’s auctions to provide pulses to the poor and armed forces, worth more than Rs 4,600 crore, were rigged to benefit a few big millers, findings from the National Productivity Council, headed by commerce minister Piyush Goyal, have revealed. The council presented its preliminary findings on October 11, 2021, to a committee overseeing the price stabilisation of pulses and other commodities in India. The  Reporters’ Collective  accessed this presentation. The council is an autonomous government research agency that studied the auctions held to pick millers who turn raw pulses into their ready-to-cook form and distribute them. The council found that the terms of these auctions allowed the millers to fleece the government of tonnes of pulses and sell them at a profit in the open market, as well as allowing them to supply poor quality pulses. The National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation (NAFED), under the Union agriculture ministry, developed the...

How do the banks continue to get away with it? The  latest revelations  about Credit Suisse provide yet another glimpse into the corrosive nexus of banks, corporations, accountants, lawyers and financial intermediaries that enables the wealthy and political elites to profit from illicit practices. The bank itself is no stranger to predatory practices. Since 2001 it has been  fined at least 47 times  by the US authorities and paid fines totalling $10.7bn. Since 2010, it has also been fined on at least six occasions by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and paid fines  totalling  more than £300m. The fines have become just another cost of doing business, and are passed on to customers. Credit Suisse is not alone. The roll of dishonour shown by the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Pandora Papers, HSBC leaks, Luxembourg leaks and others shows that virtually every major bank is involved in predatory practices. All these leaks have provoked a public deba...

Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction. Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No.  It happens routinely  and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon. The most widely publicized threat to the Amazonian rainforest is deforestation. Less well understood is that public lands are being converted to private holdings in a land grab  we’ve   been   studying  for the past decade. Much of this land is cleared for cattle ranches and soybean farms,  threatening biodiversity and the Earth’s climate . Prior research has quantified how much public land has been grabbed, but only for one type of public land called “ undesignated public forests .” Our research provides a complete account across all classes of public land. We looked at Amazonia’s most active deforesta...

The Mafia hires good accountants ( permalink )    High-profile leaks like the Pandora Papers and financial collapses like Carillion have shone a spotlight on the role that "the professions" play in enabling international finance crimes, which include both money-laundering and the underlying (ghastly, violent) crimes that produce the money to be laundered. For example, the Sackler family knowingly and deliberately created the opioid epidemic that has killed more than 800,000 Americans so far, and then used the best, most respectable, highest price bankruptcy lawyers in the country to secure a deal that let them keep billions and deny justice to their victims. https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers High-priced, ultra-respectable firms of economists generate millions in billing every year ginning up plausible-seeming, opaquely complex "analyses" that monopolistic firms use to bamboozle regulators into allowing them to undertake anticompet...

Johnson is no grotesque interloper: his behaviour and attitudes are emblematic of the British establishment. If our ruling institutions have a shared culture, it’s entitlement and shamelessness, a conviction that wrongdoing should meet consequences only if you are poor and powerless. When Johnson solemnly lectured the nation to abide by the rules while presiding over illicit parties in his Haçienda-on-Thames, his thought process is not hard to imagine. He must have believed that the rules had to accommodate his needs, rather than vice versa.... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/03/boris-johnson-hypocrisy-lies-british-establishment The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell Jonathan Freedland: This scandal reveals a Conservative party corrupted by Boris Johnson – and by Brexit / Rory Stewart: Britain needs a new era of serious leaders

The origin of all this – a Conservative party happily trampling on the union, the monarchy and the cultural organisation that binds these islands together like no other – is not hard to fathom, though it has become impolite to mention it. It’s  Brexit  that transformed the Conservative party. Where once Tories revered tradition, Brexit filled them with revolutionary zeal. Suddenly, and in a reversal of the teaching of the  conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott , they preferred the unknown to the familiar, the untried to the tried, the possible to the actual, utopian bliss to present laughter. Brexit saw the Tories succumb to the lure of abstract nouns – Freedom! Sovereignty! – and supposedly creative destruction. One minister can’t shake the image of Dominic Cummings, minutes after the referendum result came through, leaping on a table at Vote Leave headquarters, giving a speech and then  punching a hole  in the ceiling: “Destructive fervour in his moment of...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1938 message to Congress  warned that when private power becomes stronger than the democratic state itself, we have Fascism. There are many ways to witness the intensifying domination toward a corporate state. One way is to compare  exposé   books  in the 1960s and the present. Within a span of five years, there were three books in the sixties that put forces in motion leading to significant reordering of our society’s priorities. They were  Silent Spring  by Rachel Carson (1962), my  Unsafe at Any Speed  (1965), and  The Other America  by Michael Harrington (1962). The message of these bestselling books was expanded by authors going on national TV and radio shows. They spoke around the country, before large audiences at colleges/universities and even high schools. An aroused citizenry prompted congressional hearings, legislation, and the establishment of federal agencies to deal with the problems of toxi...