16 November 2005

Patrick Hosking and Stewart Tendler (Extracted from "Warning over 'mafia' gangs infiltrating British banks". The Times, 16 November 2005)

"Gangs of organised criminals have infiltrated Britain's leading banks to commit fraud, the City's most senior financial regulator cautioned yesterday. Callum McCarthy, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, said that criminals were getting jobs in the financial services industry to gain knowledge and sidestep anti-fraud systems."

[Ed: Of course, they are! Whenever nation-states -- or those establishment institutions close to them -- try to control systems that are too grandiose and complicated, then more imaginative people enter the scene and find short-cuts. Various Mafia organisations already control two major economic sectors of the world -- hard drugs and illegal immigration -- and no doubt several more that we're not aware of. The Mafia are probably already deeply involved in the huge hedge fund industry. Also, astronomical sums of foreign exchange money of questionable origin flow backwards and forwards across the frontiers of the world in encrypted digital form every day which governments can't possibly investigate. The same applies to the formal taxable economies of developed countries which economists measure and the "grey" untaxable economies in the same countries which they cannot measure but can only guess at. The same "unknowingness" applies to vast quantities of adequately counterfeited paper money, particularly American dollars, which circulate widely. Yet Mafia-gained money doesn't go under the mattress. It only takes a short walk before inevitably ending up as investments in the formal economy and in money that we all use. There are far more serious things to worry about in the modern world -- such as the H5N1 virus or the devastation of our natural ecosystems.]