Unaoil raids Day Three (3)

Police raids and more revelations: the fallout of the Unaoil scandal Sydney Morning Herald (Richard Smith). Note:

Fairfax Media revealed on Thursday that the British police had teamed up with the Australian Federal Police, the US Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate the vast cache of leaked Unaoil emails on which our stories have been based.

_______________________ Financial Times

_______________________ Washington Post

_______________________ Bloomberg

_______________________ Agence France-Press

Federal police investigate Australian companies over foreign bribery allegations Guardian. So the Guardian has deigned to take notice, but is treating this strictly as an Australian story.

Unaoil Corruption Scandal: Monaco Raids Company Offices Amid Revelation Of Involvement Of Foreign Companies International Business Times.

As of this hour (6:10 AM), this is the sum total of non-Fairfax/HuffPo articles per Google News. Richard Smith found a minor Associated Press story that curiously fails to mention Halliburton that ran in the New York Times. There is also tiny Reuters story, but none of them by Google News. Bad algos or design

Unaoil Bribery Day NZ connection 
#The Bribe Factory Day Two ( 2 ) 
##[See also Unaoil The Bribe Factory Day One (1)]

*NZG may well be wishing they’d not just ignored early warnings of the scandal to come, back in 2012. The chickens, in the form of 11,000 NZ foreign trusts, are simply going to keep coming home to roost now.  There is going to be a large and noisy mess.

Naked Capitalism, March 18, 2016

 Millionaires’ 8 favourite places: Australia is top destination for the super-wealthy International Business Times (Dr. Kevin). Yours truly was ahead of the curve in wanting to move there in the early 2000s, but the flip side is this influx of the rich will accelerate the demise of its best features: the Aussies are (or at least were) insistently egalitarian and very community-minded

Big Banks Aided Firm At Center Of International Bribery Scandal HuffPo. Richard Smith: “Watch out for more big Mossack Fonseca stories next week – not from ME from the ICIJ.”

__________ FT

__________ BBC

Iraq to probe claims of Unaoil corruption against top officials Reuters 

CODA:

Stop Crying About the Size of Government. Start Caring About Who Controls It. 

Rome gave the world the prototype of private law based on the most absolute conception of several property. The decline and final collapse of this first extended order came only after central administration in Rome increasingly displaced free endeavor. This sequence has been repeated again and again: civilization might spread, but it is not likely to advance much further, under a government that takes over the direction of daily affairs from its citizens. It would seem that no advanced civilization has yet developed without a government which saw its chief aim in the protection of private property, but that again and again the further evolution and growth to which this gave rise was halted by a ‘strong’ government. Governments strong enough to protect individuals against the violence of their fellows make possible the evolution of an increasingly complex order of spontaneous and voluntary cooperation. Sooner or later, however, they tend to abuse that power and to suppress the freedom they had earlier secured in order to enforce their own presumably greater wisdom and not to allow ‘social institutions to develop in a haphazard manner’ (to take a characteristic expression that is found under the heading ‘social engineering’ in the Fontana/Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977) [Routledge edition p 32].

 Interviewing Acemoglu about the Post Office

 Wikileaks on the IMF and Greece.  No huge revelations, but lots of egg on face, and a caution looking forward around the time of the Brexit vote