when it's trying to fry Ed Milliband. Ed doesn't have the
power to censor anyone.
I wonder what the Telegraph think of government censorship,
then. Well, the UK government is going quite far to
hide a story about impending charges regarding the Libor
scandal, to protect British bankers, and has gone to the trouble
to threaten the WALL STREET JOURNAL(!) for an article
that it has already published. They, in their Orwellian splendour,
want history expunged.
And if that doesn't work, they've also stitched up the Libel
laws to ensnare anybody who's unable to pay the millions
to fight the case in the courts. One such potential victim is
Ian Hislop (owner of the only real UK news-paper, Private Eye)
who is explaining the UK libel law below:
Here's something that may help the Private Eye get in libel
trouble; the truth about the Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere's
shady tax deals: [private eye 1351 p29]
"under the absurd rules governning non-dom status, when
Rothermere fils was born in 1967 he immediately acquired
France as his domicile of birth"
"so in 2008 HM Revenue & Customs were poised to investigate
whether- based on such evidence as building a sprawling neo-
Palladian family home, Ferne House, in 240 acres of grounds
in Wiltshire and his position as a freeman of the City of London
-Rothermere had surrendered his non-dom status. Following the
intervention of the then HMRC tax boss Dave Hartnett, however,
the investigation was pulled"
"in this way a non-dom brings non-taxable returns of capital rather
than income back into the UK, although offshore secrecy..."
"for a non dom, even land deep in the English countryside ultimately
escapes inheritance tax if held through offshore trusts"
Read 'em: Techdirt
UK Continues To Censor The Press: Orders Wall Street Journal
To Pull Details From Already Published Story
from the no-freedom-of-the-press dept
The UK's issue broad injunctions that try to silence the
press from naming names of people accused of crimes. Given that, a court
apparently ordered the Wall Street Journal to remove the names of bankers the
WSJ had noted were expected to be named as being involved in the criminal
manipulation of the LIBOR rate:
A British judge
ordered the Journal and David Enrich, the newspaper's European banking editor,
to comply with a request by the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office prohibiting the
newspaper from publishing names of individuals not yet made public in the
government's ongoing investigation into alleged manipulation of the London
interbank offered rate, or Libor.
The order, which
applies to publication in England and Wales, also demanded that the Journal
remove "any existing Internet publication" divulging the details. It
threatened Mr. Enrich and "any third party" with penalties including
a fine, imprisonment and asset seizure.
Except, as the Journal notes, it had already published the
story out on the wire, and while it took down its own web story, and is
protesting the injunction, it's not at all difficult to find other stories that
published the names:
In Friday’s U.S.
edition of the newspaper, 11 names were printed, including former UBS AG
(NYSE:UBS) and Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) trader Tom Hayes; his former boss at
UBS, Michael Pieri; and two former brokers at R.P. Martin Holdings Ltd., Terry
Farr and James Gilmour.
And, of course, anyone who got the print version, which had
already gone to press, could see the names as well:
And, in the end, all this has really done is draw that much
more attention to the names.
