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Banana Republic Corruption

craigmurray.org.uk

19 pointsjules-jules19 comments

Craig Murray is prone to conspiracy theories. The first half of this article appears to be absolute nonsense primary "research" by Craig. The second half is the actual story which is much better reported elsewhere.

For example, this FT article is much better; https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/c0d439c8-18a...

It appears what happened is, during the height of the crisis, a bunch of amoral City spivs thought it was appropriate to speculate on PPE.

> It appears what happened is, during the height of the crisis, a bunch of amoral City spivs thought it was appropriate to speculate on PPE.

No, the story isn't that someone decided to speculate. The story is how someone who's a speculator got such a contract.

In fact, he says this explicitely

> The normal public procurement tendering process has pre-qualification criteria which companies have to meet. These will normally include so many years of experience in the specific sector, employment of suitably qualified staff, possession of the required physical infrastructure and a measure of financial stability. This is perhaps obvious – otherwise you or I could simply stick in a bid to build the HS2 railway that is £10 billion cheaper than anybody else, win the contract then go and look for a builder.

Yes but that was dropped across the board, it was nothing in particular to do with this firm which is just one of many that sought to profit from the chaos.

The government lifted the normal tending process in a panic, and numerous dodgy financial firms starting buying PPE to make money.

> Yes but that was dropped across the board, it was nothing in particular to do with this firm which is just one of many that sought to profit from the chaos.

Again, the story isn't that they sought to profit from chaos, it's that they got the contract. Can we focus on that? Instead of saying "they were trying to profit", can we start from "of course they were trying to profit, but why wasn't the tender made public, and who made the decision to give it to them?"

The CM article doesn't answer your questions at all and instead for some reason digs around in the public accounts of this company. Why?

The FT article goes into much more detail about the actual procurement process and the surroundings issues.

> ”Around 16,000 potential suppliers contacted a 500-person buying team set up by the Cabinet Office in March to offer to supply kit for hospital staff."

This is because one of them is actual journalism and one of them is a biased write-up of pointless open source research.

I read Murray's article and the FT article.

I don't see:

    (a) any disagreement between FT and Murray on basic facts
    (b) any overtly conspiratorial thinking from Murray
    (c) any clear reason to give deference to FT, or
    (d) any justification for labeling Murray's article as "absolute nonsense primary "research"".

I do see:

    (e) a few concrete criticisms of Murray's article, and
    (f) a few concrete criticisms of FT's article.

FT in agreement with Murray, via non-AMP link[1]:

> However, the process has been criticised for awarding large sums of taxpayer money to several companies that appear to have no record in supplying PPE and have small balance sheets or poor recent financial performance. It has prompted concern over the extent of due diligence that was conducted before the contract awards. […]

> So far the government has published about 80 of the PPE contracts. The largest was a £252.5m contract awarded to Ayanda Capital, a family investment firm that specialises in “currency trading, offshore property, private equity and trade financing”, according to its website. […]

> When contacted by the FT, Ayanda said it was a UK limited company that paid UK taxes and was “happy to confirm that the contract has been successfully fulfilled”.

Possible criticisms of Murray's article:

    1. Loginwalled and dead links.
    2. Speculation about the pricing of intangible assets under Ayanda Capital's management.
    3. Over-narrow emphasis on the one Ayanda contract.
    4. Opaque, charged title

Loginwalled links: he links to Wealth Manager magazine, which is loginwalled (but not paywalled).

This is not terribly worthy of criticism if that's the best source for this story. I have not read the Wealth Manager article.

Dead links: he also links directly to objects in an s3 bucket with expired access tokens.

Those are from the UK govt's Companies House. Not too hard to get fresh links.[2][3]

Speculation: Addressing the small balance sheet is of direct relevance. Bundling conjecture is a bit much.

But only a bit. He qualifies this passage well enough.

Narrow focus: This contract is the largest one. Murray claims it is symptomatic of a failing of the UK govt.

So focusing on the one contract doesn't stick out as particularly conspiratorial.

Title: The former criticism (opaque title) is an ok one but the latter (charged title) isn't.

____________________

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/c0d439c8-18ac-499b-8115-da2bc0f18...

[2a]: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11014884/filing-h... > Total exemption full accounts made up to 31 December 2019 > View PDF

[2b]: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11014884/filing-h... > Total exemption full accounts made up to 31 December 2018 > View PDF

[3a]: https://files.catbox.moe/234hjx.pdf

[3b]: https://files.catbox.moe/c92j8e.pdf

The section I labelled as nonsense research was the stuff about the £2m. What is the relevance of that?

This section is the only thing that CM has added, and he has missed all of the other firms that are covered in the FT article.

This article is not his worst offending (that would probably be his ludicrous claims regarding the Skripal poisonings) but it is HN policy to replace articles with more substantive and less emotive ones if possible.

> The section I labelled as nonsense research was the stuff about the £2m. What is the relevance of that?

>> Addressing the small balance sheet is of direct relevance.

> This article is not his worst offending

Your attitude toward the author isn't a critique of the article, which is short and easily verifiable in its claims.

Having preexisting beef is not a useful source criticism when the facts are so easy to check.

> but it is HN policy to replace articles with more substantive and less emotive ones if possible.

The FT article is not more substantive wrt the Ayanda Capital deal.

> "Addressing the small balance sheet is of direct relevance."

Could you explain the relevance...?

> "The FT article is not more substantive wrt the Ayanda Capital deal."

Firstly, it is, because it includes a response from Ayanda, which is a basic principle of journalism. Secondly, my entire point is that focusing on this one company is the problem. Anyway I don't want to argue this any more, the mods can make up their own mind with regards to which article is better and switch if they feel it is appropriate.

This is possible when the electorate is made of an average Joe and Jenny,who would fail to understand even half of what this articles writes about. I live in Britain and I like it here but boy the ignorance and 'can't be asked' culture is rife. But as in most countries, people do have the government they deserve,so it's all fine I suppose.

The same government that gave no bid contracts for shipping to companies setup a week earlier by their donors who didn't own or operate any ships?

Then got re elected?

The same PM who when Mayor of London lied, cheated, stole, took credit for others work, had several affairs and a love child all while too busy to actually fulfill his lackluster manifesto?

I am shocked, shocked I tell you!

That's 5£ per citizen. So I guess we can be glad about the competence of the Finnish authorities. They spent only one 1€ per citizen for ordering face masks that did not meet any quality standards from "business people" with earlier convictions for economic crime and unpaid taxes.

This is for me _the_ covid conspiracy theory.

The leeches have used this pandemic to make such huge piles of money all over the world that I do have to wonder how much of the panic spreading news has been for profit only as opposed to convincing people to stay safe.

Combined with WHO fluctuating to the extremes with "you need, you don't need a mask", Sweden no quarantine results vs rest of Europe, in general numbers not making much sense even for one country over periods of time (not comparing numbers from different countries), it's not hard to make a case that the current response to covid is for making money primarily and not caring about general population welfare.

> Combined with WHO fluctuating to the extremes with "you need, you don't need a mask", Sweden no quarantine results vs rest of Europe, in general numbers not making much sense even for one country over periods of time (not comparing numbers from different countries), it's not hard to make a case that the current response to covid is for making money primarily and not caring about general population welfare.

Are you suggesting that Sweden had good results by using no quarantine?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Sorting by deaths per capita, and excluding tiny countries, the countries with the highest death rate in the world were:

- UK - Spain - Italy - Sweden - France - USA

UK did a SHIT job (incompetent government, uneducated population; I know, I live here). Spain and Italy were the first countries to get mass infections before the world realized that covid wasn't just a China problem, of course they're gonna rank high. Then you have Sweden.

Excluding the ones you mentioned we also have comparable numbers for Belgium, France, Netherlands, Ireland. I expected no quarantine to have disastrous order of magnitude difference in results. Does not seem so.

Ofc this is comparing data between countries, which is more often than not apples to oranges. But we can ignore the numbers and just see the bodies did not pile up in Sweden streets. From this I can not say with certainty any more that quarantine was worth it considering it does not come without serious downsides.

> But we can ignore the numbers and just see the bodies did not pile up in Sweden streets. From this I can not say with certainty any more that quarantine was worth it considering it does not come without serious downsides.

I agree with you that naive comparison of numbers is difficult. That said, Yes, you've just showed what's problematic in ignoring the numbers and focusing only on what is evident. If your mind can only comprehend either "all hunky dorey" or "bodies piling up on the street", then I indeed Sweden is closer to the former. Bodies would never be piling up on the street in any concievable scenario with this virus, as this virus has a case fatality rate of about 0.1% average for the population and our society's infrastructure can easily handle 0.1% of its population bodies spread over a period of years. I hoped that the people in charge could be a bit more sophisticated, but apparently that's not the case in many countries (e.g. Sweden, UK)

Manner of speaking with the bodies in the street. I mean it is not signifincantly worse.

Again, I think you're not really looking at the numbers. You're just going "the world didn't end, lets move on". I would say it's very significantly different from countries that did it well.

Deaths per 1M for similar size countries in europe:

Belgium - 844 [1]

Sweden - 543

Netherlands - 358

Ireland - 352

Switzerland - 227

Portugal - 160

Denmark - 105

Romania - 94

Austria - 78

Hungary - 61

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/in-defense-of-belgium-corona...

If you still think Sweden did a good job, I'm not sure I can help you any more.

Brexit and Covid have been our very British "Iraq fund". In 10 years, everyone will wonder how "we" could ever allow this shocking lack of oversight.

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