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Eva Joly - Corruption crusader
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Eva Joly
One of the most arresting statements made by Eva Joly at the Business Breakfast organised for her by the Royal African Society was her trenchant criticism of the British government for its disappointing performance in the international fight against corruption.
The suspension of the inquiry into the Saudi arms contract in December 2006, was, she said, an ominous signal, that portended other reversals in the international fight against corruption, in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, for example. She was speaking in support of her long held view that "corruption is one of the biggest obstacles to democratic development and the fight against global poverty". It was ironic that she spoke in London the day President Sarkozy began his State Visit, as Eva Joly made her name as a fierce anti-corruption investigating magistrate in France. She, more than anyone, was responsible for exposing the scandal at the giant state oil company ELF-Aquitaine.
In the heyday of what is now referred to mockingly as Françafrique (the unduly special relationship between France and its former territories in black Africa), particularly from the oil boom of the '70s to the early 1990s, ELF played the role not just of a parallel embassy, but sometimes something approaching a parallel government (complete with a large slush fund) to those in power in oil producing countries where it held sway such as Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville and Angola, the three countries she specifically mentioned.
Death threats and protection
The battle Mme Joly waged in the courts is told in one of her books Justice Under Siege, published in 2006, but at the breakfast she rather modestly did not want to talk very much of her own achievements. She is actually Norwegian by birth, and went to France as an au pair aged 20, ending up entering the legal profession. Taking advantage of the fact that the magistrature in France has a unique independence where the public prosecutor is under the control of the Ministry of Justice, she initiated a series of historic prosecutions and led to the fall not just of the top men in ELF such as Alfred Sirvan and Joel Le Floch Prigent but also indirectly encompassed the undoing of former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. Hers was an extraordinary story. She didn't mention that she received regular death threats, her private and public telephones were illegally tapped her home and offices burgled several times, and four policemen guarded her round the clock for the six years of her investigation. Asked how she had managed to survive she acknowledged that she had been protected by a woman judge who had deferred her own promotion to ensure the success of the ELF prosecution. Now still only aged fifty, Joly is special adviser to the Norwegian Government on corruption and money laundering, and seems to have lost none of the fire that led her to become a celebrated and much feared figure in France.
Overpricing-imports, under-pricing exports
What she wanted to do in London, however, was to state publicly how much she deplored that Britain had last year stopped the Serious Fraud Office from investigating British Aerospace's £43bn Al Yamamah fighter contract with Saudi Arabia. It was, she said, a serious let down at a time when progress had been made internationally towards creating rules to limit corruption, and it was in flagrant violation of Article Five of the OECD Convention on Corruption. "What kind of a signal is it sending?" she asked. She made a point of adding that her remarks were definitely on the record, and repeated the charge at a meeting at the House of Commons, where she specifically spoke about anti-corruption in the UK, She had written an article about it at the time in the Independent. She also drew attention to the great abuse by the business community in the overpricing of imports and the under-pricing of exports, quoting a recent study by two US academics Simon J Pak and John S Zdanowicz that estimates that corporations manipulated international trade to shave in one year $53.1m from their tax bills. As reported in The Washington Post, they cite "razor blades imported from Britain for $113 a piece; tweezers from Japan for $4,896 each; cut rubies from Burma for $38,192 per carat. And for US trading partners, the deals of the century: car seats exported to Belgium for $1.66 each, missile launchers to Israel for $52 a shot, wristwatches encased in precious metals to Colombia for $8.68 a pop". Thousands of trades like these lurking in trade data "may hint at corporate tax evasion and criminal money laundering on a grand scale". All this bemused the breakfast audience over their scrambled eggs, black pudding and bacon at Simpsons in the Strand. There was a mixed bag of questions and statements - a sparky intervention from Transparency International, and from one or two unhappy businessmen, some hand-wringing, but also one doubter, who provoked some tut-tutting by suggesting that corruption was simply a question of "When in Rome do as the Romans do".
British Indian billionaires
It is a certainly coincidental but there a number of events that point up how India is big and getting bigger. There is the first China-India summit this week, and the arrival at the Commonwealth Secretariat of the new Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma at the beginning of April. The peg for massive British newspaper coverage of India, however, was the surprise purchase from Ford of those two icons of Britain's one-time engineering supremacy, Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata, the Mumbai-based conglomerate that produces the new Nano mini-car, headed by Ratan Tata.
This seemed really to touch the British national psyche. Let me take two articles - one in The Sunday Times was called "The Reverse Raj", with the catch-line "Britain took commercial and cultural advantage of India as its imperial master. Now a new generation of Indians is turning the roles around".
The story, by Dean Nelson, focused on a group of Indian businessmen sometimes called the Indian Billionaire's Club meeting at Grosvenor House in Mayfair, hosted by Subodh Agrawal, "dealmaker for some of India's tycoons", and including the Hinduja brothers (fourth on the Rich List); an aide to Lakshmi Mittal the "world's wealthiest steel baron"; the Birlas and Jindals, "representing India's oldest industrial families", and members of Britain's new business aristocracy such as Mike Jatania who bought Yardley's cosmetics. They were all celebrating the Tata take-over, seen as "the most symbolic takeover in Indian history (even if at £1.15bn it was only a quarter of the amount paid by Mittal for Corus), expressing the sentiment that, as The Times of India said "it took a former colony to come to the rescue of a beleaguered British brand." The article says "the new found wealth in India and the power over its old colonial masters bring "a sense of a natural order being re-established", quoting one businessman as saying that the Indian-British community is uniquely well placed to play a bigger role in Britain.
Reversing colonisation of the mind
A retired diplomat is also quoted: "When the first British envoy came to meet Emperor Jahangir in the 17th century, he was not allowed to sit in the royal presence, he had to stand. Then India controlled 24 per cent of the world's gross domestic product and a quarter of international trade….The biggest success of colonisation was the colonisation of our minds. It takes a great deal of time to reverse that, but there is a reversal."
The second article, from The Guardian is titled "Is This the Indian century?" Written by an Indian Aditya Chakrabortty, it takes the theme further, with the thesis that the Tata takeover heralds a new era of dominance by the world's most populous country and Europe and the US ought to be worried".
Not that any of these thoughts will be uttered by Sharma in Marlborough House, representing as he does all the Commonwealth, and not his own country, but the unspoken thoughts will be around, especially if there is any early sign that India is going to step up the financing of the Secretariat's development effort through the currently extremely modestly-funded Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation. A theme to return to when the new man has settled in, perhaps?
In the heyday of what is now referred to mockingly as Françafrique (the unduly special relationship between France and its former territories in black Africa), particularly from the oil boom of the '70s to the early 1990s, ELF played the role not just of a parallel embassy, but sometimes something approaching a parallel government (complete with a large slush fund) to those in power in oil producing countries where it held sway such as Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville and Angola, the three countries she specifically mentioned.
Death threats and protection
The battle Mme Joly waged in the courts is told in one of her books Justice Under Siege, published in 2006, but at the breakfast she rather modestly did not want to talk very much of her own achievements. She is actually Norwegian by birth, and went to France as an au pair aged 20, ending up entering the legal profession. Taking advantage of the fact that the magistrature in France has a unique independence where the public prosecutor is under the control of the Ministry of Justice, she initiated a series of historic prosecutions and led to the fall not just of the top men in ELF such as Alfred Sirvan and Joel Le Floch Prigent but also indirectly encompassed the undoing of former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. Hers was an extraordinary story. She didn't mention that she received regular death threats, her private and public telephones were illegally tapped her home and offices burgled several times, and four policemen guarded her round the clock for the six years of her investigation. Asked how she had managed to survive she acknowledged that she had been protected by a woman judge who had deferred her own promotion to ensure the success of the ELF prosecution. Now still only aged fifty, Joly is special adviser to the Norwegian Government on corruption and money laundering, and seems to have lost none of the fire that led her to become a celebrated and much feared figure in France.
Overpricing-imports, under-pricing exports
What she wanted to do in London, however, was to state publicly how much she deplored that Britain had last year stopped the Serious Fraud Office from investigating British Aerospace's £43bn Al Yamamah fighter contract with Saudi Arabia. It was, she said, a serious let down at a time when progress had been made internationally towards creating rules to limit corruption, and it was in flagrant violation of Article Five of the OECD Convention on Corruption. "What kind of a signal is it sending?" she asked. She made a point of adding that her remarks were definitely on the record, and repeated the charge at a meeting at the House of Commons, where she specifically spoke about anti-corruption in the UK, She had written an article about it at the time in the Independent. She also drew attention to the great abuse by the business community in the overpricing of imports and the under-pricing of exports, quoting a recent study by two US academics Simon J Pak and John S Zdanowicz that estimates that corporations manipulated international trade to shave in one year $53.1m from their tax bills. As reported in The Washington Post, they cite "razor blades imported from Britain for $113 a piece; tweezers from Japan for $4,896 each; cut rubies from Burma for $38,192 per carat. And for US trading partners, the deals of the century: car seats exported to Belgium for $1.66 each, missile launchers to Israel for $52 a shot, wristwatches encased in precious metals to Colombia for $8.68 a pop". Thousands of trades like these lurking in trade data "may hint at corporate tax evasion and criminal money laundering on a grand scale". All this bemused the breakfast audience over their scrambled eggs, black pudding and bacon at Simpsons in the Strand. There was a mixed bag of questions and statements - a sparky intervention from Transparency International, and from one or two unhappy businessmen, some hand-wringing, but also one doubter, who provoked some tut-tutting by suggesting that corruption was simply a question of "When in Rome do as the Romans do".
British Indian billionaires
It is a certainly coincidental but there a number of events that point up how India is big and getting bigger. There is the first China-India summit this week, and the arrival at the Commonwealth Secretariat of the new Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma at the beginning of April. The peg for massive British newspaper coverage of India, however, was the surprise purchase from Ford of those two icons of Britain's one-time engineering supremacy, Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata, the Mumbai-based conglomerate that produces the new Nano mini-car, headed by Ratan Tata.
This seemed really to touch the British national psyche. Let me take two articles - one in The Sunday Times was called "The Reverse Raj", with the catch-line "Britain took commercial and cultural advantage of India as its imperial master. Now a new generation of Indians is turning the roles around".
The story, by Dean Nelson, focused on a group of Indian businessmen sometimes called the Indian Billionaire's Club meeting at Grosvenor House in Mayfair, hosted by Subodh Agrawal, "dealmaker for some of India's tycoons", and including the Hinduja brothers (fourth on the Rich List); an aide to Lakshmi Mittal the "world's wealthiest steel baron"; the Birlas and Jindals, "representing India's oldest industrial families", and members of Britain's new business aristocracy such as Mike Jatania who bought Yardley's cosmetics. They were all celebrating the Tata take-over, seen as "the most symbolic takeover in Indian history (even if at £1.15bn it was only a quarter of the amount paid by Mittal for Corus), expressing the sentiment that, as The Times of India said "it took a former colony to come to the rescue of a beleaguered British brand." The article says "the new found wealth in India and the power over its old colonial masters bring "a sense of a natural order being re-established", quoting one businessman as saying that the Indian-British community is uniquely well placed to play a bigger role in Britain.
Reversing colonisation of the mind
A retired diplomat is also quoted: "When the first British envoy came to meet Emperor Jahangir in the 17th century, he was not allowed to sit in the royal presence, he had to stand. Then India controlled 24 per cent of the world's gross domestic product and a quarter of international trade….The biggest success of colonisation was the colonisation of our minds. It takes a great deal of time to reverse that, but there is a reversal."
The second article, from The Guardian is titled "Is This the Indian century?" Written by an Indian Aditya Chakrabortty, it takes the theme further, with the thesis that the Tata takeover heralds a new era of dominance by the world's most populous country and Europe and the US ought to be worried".
Not that any of these thoughts will be uttered by Sharma in Marlborough House, representing as he does all the Commonwealth, and not his own country, but the unspoken thoughts will be around, especially if there is any early sign that India is going to step up the financing of the Secretariat's development effort through the currently extremely modestly-funded Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation. A theme to return to when the new man has settled in, perhaps?
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