> The premise is that because corruption involves money and money involves banks and London has lots of banks, transitively, London is very corrupt.
I thought it was based on the premise that:
London is the drug money laundering capital
of the world
and:
90 per cent of drug cash ends up in
the US and Europe via London
and:
criminal corporate activities within the City of
London which have dominated the headlines
over the past decade
and:
an alternative metric for financial corruption
[puts Britain and its dependencies] top of the list
and:
the four companies in line to buy [from the Government]
the UK Land Registry [which tracks the (often foreign)
ownership of UK properties] are all based in or have
close links to the offshore tax havens of Jersey,
Cayman Islands or Delaware
> career issue
AKA:
powerful financial firms will destroy the lives
and reputations of whistleblowers [claiming] a
100% success rate
From the BBC page linked to under 100% success rate:
The BBC spoke to one such whistleblower who wrote
to the FSA [UK financial services regulator] on
numerous occasions with his concerns about
behaviour at his then-investment bank.
The FSA refused to act on the information
and even requested that the whistleblower
never contact them again.
If the British Prime Minister is happy to defame other countries by name, then the UK should be prepared to have its own monumental corruption problems put under the spotlight.
This is about financial corruption; corruption in other spheres - police, judiciary and politics - is rife in the UK too.
The only question about whether the UK is the "worst" is whether other so-called open, accountable democracies are any better, which I doubt.
But it's about time we started putting our own house in order, instead of blindly pointing the finger at the usual suspects, poor developing countries, who can only dream of having corruption so established that it's not even referred to as such; and when someone does call it what it is, people instinctively write it off as "idiotic".