Jock's Place - Labour "Guinness Four" moment? - Comments

Also - since I was quite

Jock — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:47:32 +0000

Also - since I was quite strident at the time the first suspicions surfaced about the Michael Brown donation that someone's head should roll for it I have no compunction now about demanding the same rigour is applied to our political masters and their hangers on as was meted out to the Guinness Four case. Guinness Four was an important, cathartic moment in the evolution of the City of London from Old Boys Club to globally respected moderns centre of capital flows partly because the rules the Guinness Trial indirectly or directly created made it a more trustworthy place. Such change is now more than overdue in the political arena.

a. "not enough for the CPS'

Jock — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:42:51 +0000

a. "not enough for the CPS' does not equal 'totally exonerated' as the private prosecution will no doubt prove!
and
b. if that's how it came across it's not how it was intended. I am not at all relying on whether Brown was promised anything and Abrahams not promised something - I am only concerned about how much "due dilligence" was done. And when the donor tells you he's acting for someone else or acting through someone else there's not a lot of due dilligence necessary to work out that it's illegal. I don't know whether Abrahams was promised or had reason to expect some kind of added influence or preferment - he's clearly quite influential in any case - whereas Brown was a nobody and nobody wanted his influence. The police will no doubt tell us about any suspicions with planning consents or anything like that in these latest cases.

So, I don't really care whether either of them were for favours or not - the processes carried out or not carried out are what makes one legal and the other illegal. So far at least.

[also, your comments

john b — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:27:20 +0000

[also, your comments function eats the line breaks if you hit 'preview' before hitting 'post']

Hang on...

john b — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:25:13 +0000

"[Michael] Brown was never promised anything in return so far as we are aware" ...and there's no suggestion that anyone was with the current crop of Labour scandals either, it's all letter-of-the-law stuff about "were the right boxes ticked"? Now, it's quite possible that the LDs ticked the right boxes with Brown and Labour didn't with Abrahams, and - as any auditor or lawyer will tell you - not ticking the right boxes can and must sometimes have serious consequences. But you're dishonestly taking two "money from dubious sources" scandals, and trying to pretend that the one which doesn't involve your party is actually a "money for political favours" scandal (while citing as evidence the example of a previous case in which everyone accused of money-for-favours was exonerated by the legal process...)

First off I was at the time

Jock — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 03:00:32 +0000

First off I was at the time and remain quite ashamed of that donation. It never sat right with me for the party that claimed never to rely on fat cat or union money to take it. And it quickly became apparent not that we had broken any rules necessarily, but that we had only known this bloke for a short period and that he was not, it appeared, a terribly subtle or sophisticated operator.

However it does seem, prima facie, to be a different circumstance to any of these dodgy donors. Brown was never promised anything in return so far as we are aware. It seems in fact that he soon realized that he was not perhaps going to get the ifluence he might have thought he was getting and started bleating fairly quickly. The party did all the checks it could reasonably be expected to do - I don't think matching a months' long Police/SFA/FSA investigation and a subsequent court hearing that it took to prove the company hadn't traded in the UK or the additional year it took to prove the money hadn't been his to give is really within the remit or competence of a political party carrying out due dilligence.

I would put Michael Brown's donation into a category with Sir Jack Lyons' Tory (coincidentally for this story) or Robert Maxwell's Labour donations - almost certainly dirty money, probably fraudulently acquired but at the time of handing it over nothing to make that obvious and now beyond reparation except. As someone commented at the weekend in response to a similar dig by Iain Dale I think it was - would the courts go after everyone Michael Brown ever spent any of 'his' money to claim the purchase was illegal and the money ought to be refunded to the people he stole it from?

Donorgate

Mark Wadsworth — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:08:31 +0000

Good anecdote, good post.

Now, about that £2.4 million that the Lib Dems didn't have to forfeit ...

Labour "Guinness Four" moment?

Jock — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 17:10:08 +0000

...or maybe that should be "New Labour Years: Clause Four to Guinness Four"...

I remember it quite well; as a blue button on the floor of the Stock Exchange in early 1986, though my stock-jobbing firm did not deal in brewery stocks the partners were taking a great interest in the Guinness-Distillers takeover as their future sugar daddy, merchant bank Morgan Grenfell, were in the thick of it as corporate financiers to Guinness. Then (and maybe now for all I care) the "Takeover Panel" was a committee of senior city figures who acted as a sort of a referee to enforce rules on firms and advisers involved in take-overs of listed firms.