The piece of land down below … Lidl doesn’t own it: it’s the property of an offshore company based in the Caribbean … This structure can reduce tax bills. It’s exposed by secret files belonging to a large law firm in Panama. The firm specialises in offshore companies. A whistleblower has leaked over 11 million documents to journalists. Among them are 4.5 million emails … It also involves politicians and those close to them. Panama Papers: The Shady World of Offshore Companies, Das Erste 2016
Mossack Fonseca in Panama: with 48 branches around the world it is one of the very biggest. The law firm has established more than 200,000 offshore companies. ibid.
Members of the Italian Mafia are also among Mossack Fonseca’s clients. There are also several Southern American drug barons. ibid.
Winnipeg 1941 … Dude to delivery boy: Ross Johnson, you can sell ice to an eskimo.
Ross: I’d sure give it a try. Barbarians at the Gate: The Story of Ross Johnson, starring Tom Aldredge & Graham Beckel & Joanna Cassidy & Matt Clark & Jeffrey DeMunn & Petre Dvorsky & James Garner & Mark Harelik & Joseph Kell & Jonathan Pryce et al, director Glenn Jordan, HBO 1993
Bankers and lawyers work it all out. ibid. Ross
Debt can be an asset. Debt tightens a company.’ ibid.
Tastes like shit and smells like a fart. We got ourselves a real winner here … Who the hell would sneak into a john to smoke one of these? ibid. the safer cigarette
If we shift toward a model in which we are determining the onset of disease in time for therapy to be effective we will change outcomes. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes, 2019
Elizabeth has raised more than $400 million; the company is valued at $9 billion. ibid. observer
Nestled in the foothills above Silicon Valley there is a 700-acre plot of land called the Stanford Research Park … In the fall of 2014 she [Holmes] moved her bio-tech start-up Theranos to the research park. The company employed 800 people and was valued at nearly $10 billion: 4 years later it was worth less than zero. ibid. commentary
The value of the story: this compelling tale of divining hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood. ibid.
She had a policy of controlling demonstrations and tightly guarding access to the Edison prototypes. ibid.
It was a mess inside. ibid. company worker on machine
Then after a while people became paranoid of one another. ibid. worker
With the Walgreens’ rollout, the problems at Therenos were magnifying. ibid.
Their downfall was when they started giving us results that were not matching up with other labs. ibid. woman
Internally, we had so little faith in these tests but were still resulting them on patients. ibid. lab technician
Nothing works. We’re on a sinking ship. It’s a lie. ibid. worker
I knew that most of their blood tests were run on commercial analysers. ibid. John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal
In 2018 Theranos dissolved. Elizabeth and Sunny were charged with conspiracy and fraud. They pleaded not guilty. ibid.
I think what’s happened is they’ve finally figured out that I don’t even know what this company does. What We Do in the Shadows s2e5: Colin’s Promotion, Colin Robinson summoned to boss’s office
Japan’s government will start paying its companies to move factories out of China. Japan to pay at least $536 million for companies to leave China. Bloomberg online, cited Keiser Report 2020
Banking’s dirty secrets: leaked documents reveal how our banks helped criminals. They show the real cost of a banking system that is open to anyone. The leak exposes the Russian cash in British public life. The £10m Brexit backer with two names. And the secret deals at the heart of UK football. Panorama: Banking Secrets of the Rich & Powerful, BBC 2020, Richard Bilton reporting
An extraordinary leak of files from within the US Treasury … The City of London is at the heart of global money laundering. ibid.
‘There business is to take the dirty money and make it look clean. The City of London floats on a vast cushion of dirty money.’ ibid. Edward Lucas, Centre for European Policy Analysis
The banks fail to stop even the most serious criminals … The system has failed to stop criminals from laundering their cash. There’s never been a leak like it before. ibid.
Criminals can still hide billions of pounds behind anonymous companies. All of us are harmed by that. ibid.
In the 1950s Britain was dominated by a small group of men – the captains of industry. They were eminent industrialists and bankers who met together at the court of the Bank of England. Men like these were powerful because of the vast industrial empire they controlled. They worked in partnership with the politicians to shape the future of the nation. What these men did not realise was that within fifteen years their whole world would be destroyed. Their power would be taken away from them and their factories torn down and sold off. And the man who began their destruction was a suburban accountant called Jim Slater. To do it Slater awoke a force that had been dormant since before the war: the Stock Market. And as he grew powerful, Slater became an ally of politicians, but what neither he nor they realised was that the force he had awoken would overwhelm all of them. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set II: Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V ***** BBC 1999
The stock market was something that frightened both the politicians and industrialists because it was unpredictable and threatened their control over the economy. Both lived with the terrible memory of the crash of 1929 and the unemployment it had caused. And as the boom continued to grow and excite the public interest, the Bank of England became worried. ibid.
He [Jim Slater] decided to try and work out a way of predicting which shares would go up and which would go down. ibid.
In 1964 Slater formed a company with a young Tory MP called Peter Walker. Slater-Walker was an investment company, and as the market continued to boom, Slater became rich managing other people’s money. ibid.
Jim Slater had discovered that the Coote family no longer had a majority shareholding [Cork Manufacturing]. And he decided to try and take the company over. He [Slater] made a hostile takeover. ibid.
He [Slater] immediately sold off large parts of the land the factories: they were demolished for property development. Slater had invented a formula which he now repeated. The sales of assets from each takeaway were then used to fund the next and bigger one. ibid.
A group of takeover men grew up who began to break up the old paternalist world that had dominated British industry. The social centre for the takeover men was the Clermont Club, a gambling club in Berkeley Square in Mayfair. It was run by a right-wing aristocrat called John Aspinall; he was ferocious professional gambler, and those he admired and let into his club were those he described as risk takers. ibid.
Goldsmith now became a close friend of Slater’s. Goldsmith’s specialised in targeting food companies. ibid.
To the establishment the Clermont set were a group of destructive gamblers. They were tearing up British industry and fuelling a dangerous boom in the stock market … ibid.
But Jim Slater was to stop being a despised outsider. Politicians were going to turn to him for help and make him an influential force in British politics. ibid.
In 1964 a Labour government had been elected. They came to power promising to create a modern prosperous Britain. But almost immediately they were faced with a crisis: the boom the Tories had begun five years before had gone out of control. British industry simply couldn’t cope with the demand created by the boom. A new government faced growing inflation and a balance of payments crisis. They had to cancel many of their election promises and cut spending. ibid.
What Slater argued was that he was using the stock market as a tool to reshape industry. He sold off any part of a company that didn’t make a healthy profit. What remained automatically became more efficient. And he pointed to his phenomenal growth in profits to prove this. ibid.
The Labour government copied Slater’s methods. Under Tony Benn’s guidance they masterminded massive takeovers and mergers in British industry. Old companies were forced together to make new conglomerates. Upper Clyde shipbuilders was created on Clydeside. And in the process, as with Slater’s takeovers, thousands of workers were sacked. It wasn’t just shipbuilding. Britain Leyland was formed by the forced merger of old car companies. ibid.
Slater and the other takeover men were not the saviours of industry they pretended to be. ibid.
The wave of takeovers created by the Labour government had little or no effect on productivity. The British economy stubbornly refused to grow. But the takeovers were having a hidden revolutionary effect on the structure of power in Britain. Both Slater and now the politicians were liquidating many of the assets of industry. They were feeding them as cash into an ever booming stock market. In future it would be the millions of small shareholders who would decided where that money would go. The market was now increasingly shaping the future of the economy, not the politicians. ibid.
Tiny Rowland now became a close friend of Jim Slater and the other takeover tycoons. They dined together at the Clermont and sold each other companies. All of these new tycoons were making fortunes by tearing up an old system of industrial power that had dominated Britain and its empire for over 100 years. ibid.