Crime

Properties burn as turf war rages in Edinburgh and Glasgow

Gang wars over the peat trade, d’ye see?

Sir Keir Starmer is facing a grassroots rebellion over his refusal to launch a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal.

The Prime Minister has rejected demands to launch a statutory inquiry into the historical sexual abuse of thousands of children by gangs of men, predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

On Thursday, Sir Keir denied that plans for up to five initial local inquiries had been scaled back after the Government said it would make the money available for councils but they could use it as they wished to tackle grooming.

And this is exactly the aspect of Third World politics that we don’t want to have here. But are getting.

That whether a crime is committed, a crime is investigated, depends upon the political power of those suspected. That is, the rule of law is subject to politics, the rule of law is not supreme.

That very idea, that rule of law, was one of our great innovations those centuries back. Sure, sure, breaches in it of course. But the ideal was there and often enough it did in fact retain that paramountcy.

We’ll miss it when it’s gone – we’re missing it already in fact.

And such things always do die because of that little bit of political expediency. We’ll do it this time, just a little, because elections, power, our people. And decades later everyone’s doing it because why not?

The tsunami is unprecedented. Retailers reported more than 20 million cases of theft in 2023-24. Violence and abuse are up by half to 2,000 incidents a day. Shoplifting is, says the British Retail Consortium, “out of control”. Now, with police unable to stem the tide,

Rather, police – and the CPS – won’t stem the tide. A few more Constables Wade Dooley having to forcefully restrain offenders who were attempting to resist arrest plus some decent dentences and we’re done.

When shoplifting gets punished then shoplifting will stop.

A prison governor began a relationship with a drug dealer who gave her a £12,000 Mercedes car after she released him on licence from jail, a court heard.

Kerri Pegg was seen as a “rising star” in the Prison Service, quickly climbing the career ladder from graduate entrant to prison governor in six years, Preston Crown Court heard.

But the 42-year-old “didn’t play by the rules” and while governor at HMP Kirkham in Lancashire began a relationship with inmate Anthony Saunderson, who gave her the coupé bought with drug money, it is alleged.

Quite what it is that led to this is unknown of course:

“Her downfall was two-fold, the first, despite having a good income, she lived beyond her means.

“She spent all her income and more, incurring debts and she had county court judgments made against her. As a consequence, she became vulnerable and open to exploitation.

“The second was that she became emotionally and personally involved with a serving prisoner, Anthony Saunderson, and later accepted an expensive car, a Mercedes C class, which was paid for by him out of his proceeds of criminal activity, i.e. trading in drugs.”

Given that no woman would ever just for a flash bit of rough we’ll never know the reason, will we?

Burrows boasted in emails of “living in paradise” while in Phuket province under the name of his friend Peter Leslie Smith, whose details he had used to fraudulently obtain a passport in 1997 and leave the country without detection.

Chester Crown Court heard how Burrows found work at an advertising company and even featured in the local news in 2019 after his retirement.

Police had launched four unsuccessful appeals on BBC’s Crimewatch UK to locate the serial child abuser.

On Monday he was found guilty of 54 sexual offences at Chester Crown Court, including indecent assault of boys, buggery, attempted buggery and indecency with a child.

So, buggery’s an offence. As it has been since H VIII’s time. It was a hanging offence until the 1860s and there’s – apparently, I did once track it down and it seemed true – a year in the 1830s (?) when England hanged more for buggery than for murder.

But, clearly, buggery’s not an offence after a cuddle and a Judy Garland movie.

So, we’ve a change in the meaning of the word – or the definition of the criminal offence perhaps. My guess – and it is a guess – is that buggery now means unwanted/imposed/forced, as in rape. My guess is also that this was true – in fact, if not wholly in definition – back into the past. Well, obviously, as this was true yesterday. But how many yesterdays?

When did buggery as a prosecutable offence become not the act between consenting adults (if indeed it ever was that in practice) but the violence of rape with the act?

My suspicion is that back under the Bloody Code there was very little hanging of people for a shared interest in interior decoration but that there would have been a certain frowning upon in the streets with violence……

Rishi Sunak: It’s our moral duty to seize Russian assets to help Ukraine
Kyiv needs more resources and extra pressure must be put on the Kremlin. The legal and practical objections to putting frozen assets to good use can be overcome

It’s theft. As here:

There is indeed a very nice pot of other peoples’ money there and very good use could be made of it too. Allowing our government(s) to help themselves to nice pots of other peoples’ money because they could make good use of it seems to us suboptimal for the long term health of the rule of law and our economy.

Work by the criminologist Dr Jane Monckton Smith has found that men do not kill women they know out of the blue: there is almost always a pattern to femicide that includes a pre-relationship history of stalking or abuse; a romance quickly developing into a serious relationship that becomes dominated by coercive control; a trigger that threatens the man’s control, such as a threat to leave the relationship or the relationship ending; and a resulting escalation in his control, such as stalking or threatening suicide.

These behaviour patterns mean that such killings should be preventable. Yet we still have a criminal justice system that – despite recent reforms – sometimes allows men who kill women to be treated lightly by pleading manslaughter on the basis of loss of control.

Femicide Census argues that this appears to constitute “a state-sanctioned means by which previously violent men can limit their liability for fatal violent acts”.

These are the same people who insist that women in a controlling relationship should not be charged with murder when they don’t leave but do kill.

These are also the people who insist that there must be strict equality between the sexes.

One or t’other, not both. Until you grasp that you c’n fuck off.

Eight jailed after posing as electricians to divert power to UK cannabis farms
Criminals dressed as utilities repair teams dug up roads to access cables to power industrial-scale drug production

Not clever enough, obviously, but at least some thought went into that.

When Jan Marsalek boarded a plane to Minsk, he left behind a €1.9 billion (£1.59 billion) black hole in his company’s finances and set the opening scenes of one of Germany’s biggest financial scandals.

He is now one of Europe’s most wanted men.

But on the night of June 19 2020, as the Wirecard chief operating officer handed over bags of cash for his escape from a tiny Austrian airfield, prosecutors were yet to issue an arrest warrant or disclose that all they had were suspicions about the businessman, despite years of allegations against him.

This Russian/Bulgarian spy ring was allegedly masterminded by the CTO of Wirecard?

Isn’t that fascinating and interesting. How that all worked is here.

If you’re a payment processor then you’re collecting the information from the retailer’s card machine and sending that on to the main card companies. They then charge the payment to the account of the cardholder. The main companies don’t run all the tendrils of the network, that’s something done by processors like Wirecard – and there are many others. You need to have local banking connections, a physical salesforce on the ground, things the big networks just don’t have nor want to have.

A crucial part of this is “chargebacks”. That is, no one does trust, entirely and wholly, all the statements of every retailer that sure, really, this guy came in and bought this thing on that card. If we think about it that would just be too big a hole in the system. Go buy some stolen card numbers on the dark web, charge stuff and collect the money. There has to be a control in this system somewhere.

That’s what chargebacks and deposits against them are. The payment processor keeps a certain percentage of the money flow from the retailer as a reserve. A deposit against any cardholder complaining that, actually, they didn’t use the card. Or that the goods or services weren’t up to scratch. As and when they do the chargeback is applied to that fraction of the cashflow that is being held in reserve. More technically this is called an escrow account, the pace where that fraction is being held.

The percentage of the likely cashflow from or to a particular retailer that is held as such a deposit against chargebacks varies. It’s up to the payment processor to decide what they want to do – and the retailer as to whether to accept that or look for a better deal elsewhere. This is the crucial part of the story. The chargeback provisions vary at the fancy or whim of the payment processor.

So, imagine
Imagine you were a payment processor looking to make the big time. You perhaps started out processing payments for a variety of pornographic sites, possibly some marginally legal gambling ones and the like. But you can see that the real world of fully legitimate business is far more lucrative than that because it’s very much larger. OK. So, off you go to try and scoop up that business.

There turns out to be a flaw in the plan though. You’re not actually very good at the business of picking up retailers who want their payments processed. Which is a bit of a problem because you’ve got costs, a network and all that, but your revenues come from a slice of the payment flow through your system. A low payment flow means you’re not making much money, or maybe a loss.

The temptation to inflate the business you’re doing, to exaggerate how many payments, from how many retailers, becomes too much to resist. So, the exaggeration starts. At which point there’s a problem.

If you’re overstating the payment flows across the network then you’re also, by definition, overstating the revenue you’re making from that payment flow. And one of the things about corporate accounts is that they’ve got to balance. If there’s income somewhere we’ve got to show where that has gone to. So, if you’re exaggerating your income then how do you deal with this? It can’t be just claimed that employing people is costing more or something because investors will start wondering why you’re paying them so much. The same is true of anything on your costs side of the ledger. If you say well, look how much we’ve got as revenue but also look how much it costs us to service it then that’s not a compelling investment case.

So, what’s needed is some manner of claiming that higher income from the larger revenue flow but also being able to park those non-existent revenues somewhere that no one will argue about.

Don’t forget, you’re making a loss here – why not, it’s part of the usual internet land grab rush so losses in getting to scale are fine to investors – but if you’ve that cash coming in from the traffic over the network then where is it?

The answer being to claim to have rather larger reserves against chargebacks than actually exist. If you can get a bank letter stating that the money exists in some account somewhere – and don’t forget that the trigger for the failure was that the bank said “What? We’ve not got that money, what are you talking about?” – then the rest of the books balance nicely.

Which is, I think, what did in fact happen. Which means that there is no €1.9 billion and never was. There is nowhere to go and get it from, it wasn’t stolen, mislaid, there’s no insurance policy anywhere, it just never did exist.

An Albanian criminal jailed for more than three years for running a cannabis factory will not be deported after judges ruled it would deprive his daughter of a “male role model”.

There’s me hopelessly out of date again. I thought that there was, buried somewhere in this concept of role model something to do with positive role model…..

Jailing a “very dangerous” asylum seeker who sexually assaulted a teenager could breach his human rights, a court heard.

Hassan Abou Hayleh, 39, attacked the 19 year-old after driving around at 3am looking for vulnerable drunk women.

He was due to be sentenced on Monday at Bournemouth Crown Court, but the hearing was adjourned after his defence barrister argued that sending him to prison might breach his human rights.

Graham Gilbert claimed that Hayleh was suffering from PTSD, having been tortured in a Syrian jail under the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian president.

The lawyer said that jail would make the defendant’s condition worse.

At this stage that’s a lawyer trying it on. Hopefully – Hah! – the judge isn’t a knob and will ignore it.

But the other bit – “looking for vulnerable drunk women”. Yes, yes, we all know, it shouldn;t be true that men take advantage. Now should anyone’s state or inebriation, the clothes they’re wearing or anything else make them more vulnerable. Note, “should”. But it does. And reality beats wishes, always.

Lucy Letby’s former boss has insisted that the former NHS nurse is not guilty of murdering newborn babies.

In her first public show of support for Letby since the allegations emerged, Karen Rees, a retired head of nursing at Countess of Chester Hospital, said: “If she was acting she deserves an Oscar”.

Narcissists and psycopaths often are v good at acting.

The advice from a wide range of witnesses, including medical professionals, lawyers, palliative care specialists, and experts in the fields of disability, coercive control and other disciplines, has been to introduce a multidisciplinary layer of protection. What they said to us makes sense, so later this week I’ll be proposing an amendment to create a voluntary assisted dying commission. It would be chaired by a high court judge or a former senior judge, thus retaining the judicial element in my bill. The commission would then authorise expert panels to look at every application for an assisted death. Those panels would have a legal chair, but also include a psychiatrist and a social worker, who will bring their own expertise in assessing mental capacity and identifying any risk of coercion. In short, I’m proposing what could be termed “Judge Plus”.

Two doctors sign off being what protects from abortions which don’t meet the standards of the law…..

Labour MP wants to scrap the need for High Court to approve assisted dying
MP Kim Leadbeater has instead proposed a panel, including a social worker and a psychiatrist, chaired by a senior lawyer or retired judge

Given what social workers can be made to believe then that’s bye bye early for Granny, ain’t it?

A teenager who was knocked off his e-bike by a police officer in his patrol car had more than 40 previous convictions, a court heard.

Mason McGarry, then 17,
…
convictions include robbery, theft, burglary, taking a car without consent, dangerous driving, driving without a licence, and assaulting an emergency worker,

And yet not inside. Hmm. Could it be that we’ve a problem here?

While one in five women over the age of 15 has been sexually assaulted in their lifetime,

Sure, I’ll believe that. I also want to see the definition of sexual assault. According to the most extreme sexual assault includes what most would classify as somewhere between a clumsy dating approach and a bout of ill manners. Using such a description we’d all expect more than one fifth of women to have been so assaulted.

On the other hand, rape, as in physically forced sex, is rather rarer.

Definitions matter.

According to Victoria’s Sentencing Advisory Council, there were 23,000 reports of rape to police between 2010 and 2019 but only 1,000 sentencings for rape offences. More recent data from New South Wales shows there were 9,138 sexual assaults reported to police in 2022 but only 1,016 convictions.

We also know what the problems are here. First, that the line between what is rape and or sexual assault is drawn, in hte minds of some – note some – accusers rather more toward the ill manners end of that spectrum than society in general draws it. So, some – again some – accusers end up with their definition meeting that of the jury. The other problem is that an awful lot of this is whoilly elgal activity with consent and wholly illegal without consent. It’s thus the consent, or not, which has to be proven, not the act or action. Proving consent, either way, is difficult. And yes, really, some do allege non-consent unfairly. There are people serving jail sentences for having done so too. The consent/non- has to be proven therefore and that’s difficult.

(Research suggests that no more than 5% of all reported allegations are false).

Quite. So, it’s necessary to sift 100% of allegations for the 19 that are true, the one that isn’t.

No real solution to this that I can think of either. Well, not unkless we’re to do away with that sifting that is…..

How a McDonald’s and a bread factory ended up employing slaves
Between 2012 and 2019, a gang trafficked at least 16 people from the Czech Republic and put them into forced labour in the UK. They called their victims ‘horses’, took away their passports and beat them. How did they get away with it for years?

OK, so, big report on two recent trials. OK. Looking at the source country and thinking for a moment – gyppos.

It’s paragraph 15 before we get this:

says Landa, who describes himself and his captors as Gypsy.

Took their time to get there, no?

And no, this is not just some random prejudice on my part. I have been there, do know.

Axel Rudakubana was sentenced to a minimum of 52 years in prison on Thursday, but the judge, Mr Justice Goose, expressed frustration that he could not impose a whole life order.

Rudakubana was nine days short of his 18th birthday when he murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on July 29.

It has provoked calls for a change in the law to allow those under 18 to be given whole life sentences in exceptional cases, including from Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, the victims’ families, Patrick Hurley, the Southport MP, and Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader.

“Exceptional cases” will become a political shouting match over sentences.

Either, 17 year olds can have whole life orders and leave it to the judge. Or they cannot. Whichever.

“It was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” he wrote. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”

Trump called Ulbricht’s prison sentence “ridiculous.”

That’s the Silk Road laddie.

And now the next and interesting question. How many of those prosecutors etc, back that far, should now be looking over their shoulders?