Who guards the guardians ?

Shyam

As you know, the UK Serious Fraud Office has (so far) refused to investigate the obvious closed-market swindle and related-advance fee frauds which lurked behind the fake 'Direct Selling' company known as 'Amway UK Ltd.,' and which generated hundreds of millions of tax-free dollars for a gang of US-based racketeers during 34 years.

Amazingly, despite him being clearly informed as to what he was involved in, the former Deputy Director of the UK SFO, Peter Kiernan, was one of the echelon of amoral attorneys who managed to obstruct justice by preventing 'Amway UK Ltd'from being bankrupted and closed, after a public interest petition was filed against it by the UK government in 2006-07 (as a result of years of complaints lodged by myself and others). Mr. Kiernan is now a 'partner' in the UK law firm, Crowell and Moring LLP, http://www.crowell.com/Professionals/Peter-Kiernan . However, this firm is linked to the billionaire bosses of the 'Amway' mob in the USA via the the billionaire boss of what used to be known as 'Blackwater' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Worldwide . After working for UK tax-payers for 17 years, Mr. Kiernan's current annual salary (including profit shares) in the private sector, is probably around $1 million.

To give some idea of the true scale of the global problem that Corporate Frauds Watch is trying to highlight, I thought your readers might like to take a look at the latest annual report published by the UK government agency where Mr. Kiernan learnt his trade as an expert in 'high value and highly sensitive domestic and international investigations, fraud, international corruption, corporate crime, and regulation.'

http://www.sfo.gov.uk/media/112684/sfo%20annual%20report%202009-2010.pdf

The UK SFO's impressive-looking (26 page) 2009-2010 brochure which was proudly presented by its current Director, Richard Alderman, to Parliament July 26th. 2010, is one of the most absurd, but nonetheless disturbing, documents I have read for a long time. Once you ignore all the Orwellian images, mystifying technical diagrams and reality-inverting SFO-speak, and simply read the bottom lines, you discover that the almost total lack of quantifiable performance of this agency cannot be preventing economic crime in the UK. On the contrary, it must be encouraging it. Indeed, if the SFO was a public company, then these shameful balance sheets would be the equivalent of the declaration to its share-holders of a massive net-annual loss by its corporate officers, who are self-evidently more interested in justifying their annual salaries ($200 000 - $300 000), and protecting their jobs (and future jobs), than explaining their dismal failure as law enforcement agents.

The UK SFO currently accepts that fraud is costing the UK economy a massive £30 billions annually, but the same agency, with 307 staff and an annual budget in excess of £34 millions, only prosecuted 13 cases of fraud (involving a grand total of less than £34 millions of stolen funds) and convicted 22 individuals (17 of whom pleaded guilty) during 2009-2010. The derisory amount of money which the UK SFO actually managed to recover to compensate victims of fraud in the UK during 2009-2010, represents only a fraction of a fraction of 1% of the total amount which the UK SFO accepts was stolen by fraud in the UK during the same period. Laughably, compensation payments to the victims of fraud in the UK during 2009-2010, didn't even add up to the SFO's own annual budget during the same period. In plain language, it cost UK tax-payers more than £34 millions to recover less than £5 millions for victims. Yet this costly failure to protect the British public from racketeers, is what the current Chief Executive Officer of the UK SFO, Phillipa Williamson, proudly describes as:

'...continuously improving to deliver better outcomes for victims and society as a whole...'

If the Director and the Chief Executive Officer of the UK SFO really were the corporate officers of a public company (who were accountable to their share-holders), then they would both now be looking for new jobs (possibly at Crowell and Moring LLP).

David Brear (copyright 2010)