The firm in question, Saradha Group, had risen to become a financial empire over the past eight years under boss and owner Sudipta Sen. The company has business interests ranging from construction to travel to exports and agriculture. When the “chit fund” scandal came to light — with an estimated loss of $4-6 billion (US) to investors — Sen fled to Jammu and Kashmir, where he was ultimately arrested.

A chit-fund scandal, or “cheat fund” as some sections of the media are calling it, operates like a ponzi scheme. Sen duped many small and middle class investors into giving him their life savings, with promises of great returns. He managed to evade the regulators by using a nexus of companies to launder the money. The money collected was used to recklessly invest in a range of industries — including a mismanaged media empire. The government of West Bengal has had to set up a $2.5 million fund to ensure that the small investors are not bankrupted.

In a letter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Sen claims to have been misled by a group of individuals who cheated investors by using his name, unbeknownst to him. However, the letter also shows how political patronage is obtained through acquiring media houses.

Saradha Group owns 18 newspapers and TV channels in West Bengal and Assam. These include Bengal Post, Sakalbela, Kalam, Paroma, Azad Hind, Prabhat Varta, Seven Sisters Post – and the TV channels, Tara Musik, Tara Newz, South Asia TV, and Channel 10, all under the umbrella of Saradha Printing and Publishing Pvt Ltd.

As Indian media blog the Hoot reports, “many senior journalists then suspected that media ownership was a matter of business strategy to establish the company’s credentials and also a bid to emerge as the mouthpiece of the major political party and perhaps get benefits in return.”

This view is supported by BBC journalist Sudhir Bhowmik, who says he left a job with the Saradha Group after he was told to “go soft on some leaders.”

It appears that Sen bought and built a media empire, allegedly on the behest of politicians of the ruling Trinamool Congress party, to play the part of a proganda-spinning machine for the government. This is no small feat – the net worth requirement of an applicant seeking to launch a news channel had been raised by the government from approximately $555,500 to $3,703,000, ostensibly to keep away “fly by night” operators away. But since Sen had already raised his financial portfolio, by dubious financial practises as we know now, he was able to take this step to becoming a media baron.

The curious case of the Saradha Group media empire gets murkier as the story unravels. In his letter to the CBI, Sen also claims to have been regularly blackmailed by Kunal Ghosh and Srinjoy Bose — two sitting Trinamool Congress members of the Upper House — into setting up his news channels. He also says he paid Ghosh $28,000 USD a month. Ghosh, now on the back foot, claims that he was simply a “salaried employee” and that he had “no authority to sign cheques.”

Sen’s use of the media empire to build political clout and protection is now being outlined by the national media. Influential members of West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress party have been closely aligned with the media group. But some politicians are now distancing themselves from the group, despite having benefited from positive propaganda from its media outlets.

In India, which now has over 800 private satellite channels, media houses often favour particular political parties, and many are actually directed owned by politicians themselves. Amid growing unease, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has asked all channels to furnish details of their shareholding patterns and equity share. Both the ministry and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have been looking to ways to ensure pluralism and diversity in the Indian media, and curbing monopolistic growth. They feel tracking ownership patterns might be one way of finding out which groups and individuals are involved in unethical behaviour like corporate and political lobbying, biased analysis and forecast in the political arena and sensationalism of news. The ministry has made it clear that if it finds any media group in violation of its license agreement – including shareholding patterns – it is ready to cancel licenses.

Meanwhile, another unfortunate result of the scandal is that more than 1,400 journalists are out of jobs, while some of Sen’s Channel 10 employees have filed a complaint with the police over non-payment of salaries by Sen and Ghosh.

The post Saradha Group scandal exposes ties between India’s media, politicians appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Twenty-seven years after the Chernobyl disaster a whole generation of Belarusians has grown with no memories of the incident of 26 April 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded in north-east Ukraine, just on the border with Belarus. Settlements that had been abandoned after the disaster almost disappeared: some of them were razed to the ground, others were inhabited again. The Belarusian media usually remind us of Chernobyl and its aftermath once a year, on the anniversary of the explosion.

Activists participated in last year’s annual Chernobyl Way remembrance rally in Minsk. Photo: Alexander Mazurkevich/Demotix

There are almost no significant memorials of the Chernobyl disaster in Belarus; just a small church in Friendship of Nations Park in Minsk and tiny monuments in southern districts of the country that were affected by radiation. This is why it is quite difficult to communicate the feelings about that “invisible catastrophe” to people who don’t remember.

“The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is now perceived by people as some kind of shared heritage or even national achievement. Just as ‘We survived the war’ Belarusians think ‘We survived Chernobyl’, says Yahor Lebiadok, a deputy of a local council from Smaliavichy. “It feels like a part of a national message of pride: nothing or nobody can take us bare-handed, we can survive anything. So, Chernobyl nowadays is perceived as just a cliché of a threat.”

The authorities are quite good at using state media and propaganda to change the focus of public attention.

“It is not in their interest to put this focus on the issue of Chernobyl, because in this case they would have had to change their policy. If the government admits the problem of the Chernobyl aftermaths still exists, they would have put additional efforts into solving it, and spend additional funds,” says Piotr Kuzniatsou, a blogger and a human rights activist.“This means state media are allowed to mention Chernobyl only once a year, and are silent about the issues of radiation pollution and the affected areas,” Nastassia Zianko, a Belarusian journalist, admits. “Chernobyl media coverage is rarely investigative and deep — usually it is just reportage from the area, local villages or small towns. But the issue as a whole is very complicated; to do a good story one has to spend months researching and looking for information.”

As a result public opinion sees the topic of Chernobyl as less and less important; current social and economic issues push it into the media background. To avoid spending money on the elimination of outcomes of the disaster and rehabilitation of affected areas, the authorities try to persuade the Belarusians not to think of Chernobyl as something dangerous.

This strategy seems to work — despite cases when practical interests of particular people are at stake. For instance, inhabitants of several areas whose status had been changed from “polluted” to “clean” were unhappy to lose state benefits they received as compensation for living in districts affected by radiation.

“Chernobyl-affected regions have cheap labour forces, so it is profitable to run enterprises there. For instance, Belarusian agriculture inherited Soviet ‘extensive approach’; it means increasing production by mere expansion of cultivation areas instead of increasing the quality, breeding new varieties of products or crops or adopting new technologies. So, nowadays previously abandoned fields in polluted areas are being cultivated, and agricultural products from affected districts are being distributed around the country,” Piotr Kuzniatsou says.

Research done by Yury Bandazheuski, PhD, in Homiel Medical University proved that radionuclides affect organs of the human body when they penetrate an organism with polluted food. They cause so-called “inner radioactive irradiation”, which is more harmful than background exposure, but this is not included into estimates of influence of radiation on people.

Every year Belarusian sanitary and health services register the facts of radioactive pollution of food people bring from their farms to markets or in mushrooms they pick in forests. There is a question why such a vivid threat Chernobyl still poses to the country and its population doesn’t make it into a burning topic for Belarusians.

Time makes people forget, Natallia Alifirovich, a psychologist, says: “Psychological mechanisms of suppression and denial are quite powerful. Suppression means memories of an unpleasant event are placed in parts of the brain where they are inaccessible for a mind; denial helps people believe an unpleasant event won’t happen for the second time.”

But the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011 showed catastrophes happen again and again — despite any level of safety.

Another important reason for the authorities not to talk about Chernobyl is their plans to build a nuclear power station in Belarus.

Civil society groups remain alarmed by the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the prospects of building a nuclear power plant in Belarus. The issue is addressed by ecological and humanitarian NGOs, but due to the political situation they lack effective mechanisms of raising it to the level of decision-making.

“People who live in polluted areas know radiation is dangerous, but in practice they don’t do much to protect themselves. There is no special policy on health care for people who live in the polluted areas. Although some activities aimed at decreasing the impact of the catastrophe have been carried out, the state refuses to admit the real extent of the problem and finance recovery and rehabilitation from the Chernobyl aftermaths,” Andrei Yahorau says.

As the authorities push for building of a new nuclear plant in Belarus, they should be responsible for informing people about nuclear safety and behaviour in case of an emergency situation. But the government of Belarus can actually build the station without telling people about safety, Yahorau admits.

“This is exactly what is happening right now. The nuclear plant is being built near Astravets, close to the Lithuanian border; the local population has no information about the real threats a new plant can contain. The state propaganda machine works to convey a message that the plant is absolutely safe, that new technologies are used while building it, and that nothing can go wrong,” the expert says.

According to Yahor Lebiadok, the topic of Chernobyl in Belarus has always been political, as “both the authorities and the opposition have used it in their own interests”: “It is quite difficult for people who are not experts to actually differentiate between a real threat and mere politicking.”

In the case of nuclear power, access to information can become a question of life and death – or at least a question of personal safety and health.

Aliaksandr Zianchuk is a Belarusian journalist

The post Chernobyl disaster is invisible to many Belarusians appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Are you passionate about freedom of expression? Do you want to write for an award-winning, internationally renowned magazine and website, which has published the works of Aung San Suu Kyi, Salman Rushdie and Arthur Miller? Then enter Index on Censorship’s student blogging competition!

The winning entry will be published in Index on Censorship magazine, a celebrated, agenda-setting international affairs publication. It will be posted on our popular and influential website, which attracts contributors and readers from around the world. Index is one of the leading international go-to sources for hard-hitting coverage of the biggest threats and challenges to freedom of expression today. This competition is a fantastic opportunity for any aspiring writer to reach a global, diverse and informed audience.

The winner will also be awarded £100, be invited to attend the launch party of our latest magazine in London, get to network with leading figures from international media and human rights organisations, and will receive a one-year subscription to Index on Censorship magazine.

To be in with a chance of winning, send your thoughts on the vital human right that guides our work across the world, from the UK to Brazil to Azerbaijan. Write a 500-word blog post on the following topic:

“What is the biggest challenge facing freedom of expression in the world today?

This can cover old-fashioned repression, threats to digital freedom, religious clampdown or barriers to access to freedom of expression, focusing on any region or country around the world.”

The competition is open to all first year undergraduate students in the UK, and the winning entry will be determined by a panel of distinguished judges including Index Chair Jonathan Dimbleby. To enter, submit your blog post to competiton@indexoncensorship.org by 31 May 2013.

The post Index on Censorship Student Blogging Competition appeared first on Index on Censorship.

2012 has been a very challenging year for press freedom in Taiwan. The challenge comes not from a repressive government — Taiwan is a young democracy in contrast with its mainland brother China on the other side of the Taiwan Strait — but from business tycoons who aim to control the media market.

On 27 November, Hong Kong entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, the owner of Next Media, Taiwan’s most popular and independent media group, announced that he would sell his print and television operation to a consortium for 600 million US dollars.

The buyers include William Wang, the chairman of Formosa Plastic Group, a notorious target for Taiwan’s environmental activists, and Jeffrey Koo Junior, sentenced to nine years in jail by Taipei District Court for a financial scam in 2010. But the most controversial buyer in this pending deal is Tsai Eng-meng, whose Want Want China Times Group already controls major print media operations, television stations as well as cable systems in Taiwan.

The deal still requires approval from Taiwan’s Investment Commission of the Ministry of the Economic Affairs, Fair Trade Commission, National Communications Commission, and Financial Supervisory Commission. If it is approved, the media monopoly resulting from the buyout will be a disaster for the free flow of information and freedom of press in Taiwan.

Even prior to this deal, Tsai — one of Taiwan’s richest men, according to Forbes — caused a great wave of opposition when he planned to buy cable television services owned by China Network Systems earlier this year. Tsai’s acquisition of China Network Systems triggered fear of a media monopoly, and tens of thousands of students, journalists, academics and social activists took to the Taipai streets last September to protest the approval of the acquisition. If Tsai successfully acquires now a 32 per cent share of the Next Media’s daily newspaper and magazine businesses, together with the two newspapers and several magazines he already controls, his media kingdom will expand to dominate almost 50 per cent of Taiwan’s print market.

September 2012, March held against Want Want China Times acquisition plans – Taiwan (Craig Ferguson | Demotix)

Those who support the deal say that Taiwan’s media is a free sector and, even if Want Want China Times Group controls 50 per cent of the market, Taiwanese readers still have other choices of unfiltered information.

However, the media sector is unique. Media, as gatekeepers, have the power to filter or even distort information, and decide what their audiences or readers should know or not. Opinions expressed via media outlets influence people’s thinking and judgments, and impact social and political decision-making. Therefore, it is sensible to demand that government regulators take the public interest seriously, and pay particular attention to the potential problem of captive audience in the Next Media merger case.

A big concern is the possibility of self-censorship. All of the buyers in the Next Media deal are pro-China defenders, and they have big investment stakes in the Chinese market.

During a event held for the Formosa Plastic Group’s employees, journalists asked William Wang about the takeover. He candidly responded that he believed China’s government would appreciate their acquisition of Next Media’s Taiwan operations.

When seniors editors at Apple Daily — part of Next Media — asked in a joint conference with the future new owners of the group whether they would censor content in order to avoid irritating China, Koo and Wang said they would respect journalists’ professional judgment. But Tsai warned them: “You two shareholders [referring to Koo and Wang] should give it a second thought, because you’re going to do business in China. It’s hard to say what will happen. If something happens to you, don’t blame me for not warning you.” [The quote comes a report of the event published by United Daily News, in Chinese].

Tsai is also notorious for denying the Tiananmen massacre in an interview with Washington Post’s Andrew Higgins earlier this year.

One of the golden principles of freedom of the press is independence. It is therefore important to protect journalists from any interference. If what journalists deliver to the public is filtered or distorted by personal interest of media owners, the public can never get to know the facts, which is the basis for democratic dialogue and decision-making. Tsai’s warning has sent out a clear message that legitimises the worries shared by different sectors of Taiwan society.

Currently the Next Media buyout has met with fierce opposition from people who care about the future of free speech and democracy of Taiwan, including expat Taiwanese all around the world. Students, journalists, academics and social activists have launched a series of protests against the deal and called for Taiwan government agencies that oversee the media industry and market competition to look into the merger carefully. More protests are being planned.

It is still too early to predict whether Taiwan’s government will act to protect freedom of speech and the public interest. But it is not too late to demand that regulators listen to the public’s appeal and reconsider a decision pivotal to the future of a free press in Taiwan’s democracy.

Ching-Yi Liu is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School (2012-13 Fulbright Senior Scholar), and Professor of Law at the National Taiwan University. Weiping Li is a contributor at Global Voices Advocacy

The post “Horrible disaster” brewing in Taiwanese media sector appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Index on Censorship – Leveson Report Policy Note – December 2012

The post Leveson: The way ahead for a free press in the UK appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Guidelines issued by the Crown Prosecution Service today could give greater weight to free speech online by establishing a high threshold for prosecutions for offensive or abusive comments made on social networking sites.

Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has expressed concern over “the potential for a chilling effect on free speech” for prosecuting people who send communications that are “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing.”

Starmer said that a prosecution was unlikely to be necessary, proportionate or in the public interest if the communication were “swiftly removed, blocked, not intended for a wide audience or not obviously beyond what could conceivably be tolerable or acceptable in a diverse society which upholds and respects freedom of expression.”

Prosecutors will now be required to differentiate between such messages and communications that amount to credible threats of violence, a targeted campaign of harassment or those which breach court orders.

The age and maturity of a suspect will also need to be taken into consideration, particularly if they are under 18. The guidelines state that prosecutions of children would rarely be in the public interest, as children may not appreciate the potential harm of their communications.

“We welcome these guidelines and hope that they will be used to end the excessive prosecutions that we have seen in recent years,” said Index CEO, Kirsty Hughes. “In a plural society that respects free expression, there is no right not to be offended, and these guidelines acknowledge that.”

The UK has seen a recent rise in social media prosecutions. In October, Lancashire man Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison for making “despicable” jokes about missing five-year-old April Jones on Facebook, having pleaded guilty to “sending by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive” (section 127 (1)a of the Communications Act 2003). Also in October, Azhar Ahmed, who posted on Facebook that British soldiers should “die and go to hell”, was given a community order and a fine.

Paul Chambers, the man at the centre of the Twitter Joke Trial who was convicted in 2010 of sending a “menacing communication” after jokingly tweeting that he would blow an airport “sky high”, told Index: “I’m far more heartened than I expected to be. All the noises coming out of the early discussions suggested that lessons had not been learned, but it appears the DPP has finally taken a step in the right direction.”

He added:

I’d like to know, however, are how this is to be applied to arrests, given that this is more geared towards prosecutions. Users shouldn’t face arrest for the same reasons they shouldn’t face prosecutions in these situations. Secondly, given that the guidelines make mention of users who immediately take down the posts and show genuine remorse, where does this leave Azhar Ahmed, who did exactly that yet still finds himself with a criminal conviction. There should be moves to rescind this immediately.

The guidelines are open to public consultation, which is available on the CPS website and closes on 13 March 2013.

More on this story:

Read the guidelines in full here

Graham Linehan on the Twitter Joke Trial

Padraig Reidy: We cannot keep prosecuting jokes

The post High threshold set for social media prosecutions appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Index opposed the proposals on the basis they would have led to the filtering legal material by default; ergo censorship. Index also had serious concerns that child safety would be used as a criteria to filter a range of content beyond pornographic material. Under the Daily Mail’s proposal, only consumers over the age of 18 who had completed a “strict age verification check” would be able to remove such a block.

The news came in the government’s response to a consultation  into internet child safety and parental controls run by the Home Office and the Department of Education. The results were emphatic; parents rejected the default block.

The report says that rather than automatic filtering, most parents “want information about internet safety risks and what to do about them. There was no great appetite among parents for the introduction of default filtering of the internet by their ISP: only 35 per cent of the parents who responded favoured that approach.”

Internet filtering solutions are imperfect, they are easy to circumvent and frequently block legitimate content and legitimate sites. Sites such as those of sexual health clinics or even Essex Council are illegitimately blocked and it can be difficult and time consuming to get such errors fixed. Index’s own website has found itself a victim of such over-blocking in the past.

A 2012 study by the Open Rights Group in conjunction with the London School of Economics revealed that child protection filters “block many more sites than they should.” One of the report’s authors, campaigner Peter Bradwell, said: “These blunt blocks effectively add up to a system of censorship across UK networks.”

Last year after government consultation the major ISPs, BT, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Sky Broadband agreed a code of practice, and will offer parental internet controls nicknamed ActiveChoice. Many internet service providers are already offer options to parents who want to block adult content.

TalkTalk began offering a Home Choice solution that protect an entire home internet connection rather than a single device earlier this year, but only one in three TalkTalk broadband customers have enabled it.

On Saturday Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Harriet Harman, expressed anger at the government’s response to the consultation, writing in the Daily Mail that:

The horrifying truth is that while parents are watching Downton Abbey downstairs, their children are upstairs watching degrading images of sex and violence. We need to grasp this painful reality.

Harman expressed common fears about the dark side of the web, where “pornography, bullying, violence and websites promoting suicide and eating disorders are only a few clicks away.”

Yes all of the above can be found on the web, but Harman and her allies need to recognise that no filter will ever be able to successfully block all such material, and a network filter is no match for an educated, alert parent monitoring their children’s internet use. And no filter will ever be able to help and advise a child on how to deal with a cyberbully, children’s number one concern, according to the consultation report.

Emily Butselaar is online editor at Index

The post “Porn filters” fail parents and children appeared first on Index on Censorship.

This article was originally published in Press Gazette

As newspaper editors are put under pressure by David Cameron to conjure up rapidly a Leveson-like press regulator that doesn’t require legislation, there is still much confusion around what Lord Justice Leveson’s voluminous report actually means.

Does it cross the Rubicon of statutory involvement in the press? Or does it really set out the path to an independent, voluntary and self-regulatory approach?

While the power and behaviour of large media corporations have rightly been under an intense spotlight, little attention has been paid to questions of political power and the reasons why politicians around the world can so easily be tempted to pressurise or even control the press. Leveson’s report is also remarkably easygoing on the misjudgements of politicians and police in their relations with the media, allowing for good faith even where bad decisions have been taken, especially by the police.

Yet part of what Leveson — and others — exposed so effectively to the world was an extraordinary cronyism in some media-political-police networking. Coming so quickly after the expenses scandal, it is surprising that so many people — hacking victims, politicians, academics, celebrities — are ready to say the answer to the phone-hacking scandal is to let politicians vote on regulating newspapers.

Leveson’s so-called “statutory underpinning” of a press regulator would mean MPs voting on the characteristics such a regulator should have, set out in 24 paragraphs that Leveson says would form the core of the definition of an acceptable regulator. This breaches the vital principle for a free press and freedom of expression — that state, politicians, and government should not have any sway over newspapers beyond general laws that apply to all citizens and organisations.

It is hardly new to point out that politicians care about their media image and how the press report on them, and do what they can to spin good coverage. Good coverage can help to keep them in power, impacting on what voters think and how they vote. And so we need journalists and politicians to be independent of each other if we want our democracy to function as it should.

A vote by MPs to establish the characteristics of a press regulator means that body would not be independent. Nor, if it follows his principles for an “independent” board with no current editors, is it ‘self-regulation’ either. Is it at least voluntary, like the Irish model, which is set up by statute but voluntary to join? Here confusions reigns. Leveson says it is. But one characteristic he insists a press council must meet is that “all significant news publishers” join.

So if anyone exercises their voluntary right not to join, the press council fails.

Leveson suggests (as a view not a recommendation) that if it fails, Ofcom should act as a statutory backstop. Catch 22: the press council fails if anyone chooses voluntarily not to join; but if the body fails, compulsory backstop regulation steps in. Joseph Heller would be proud of him — but it’s no way to protect press freedom.

Kirsty Hughes is Chief Executive of Index on Censorship. She tweets at @Kirsty_Index

Background

Press Release: Index on Censorship’s response to the Leveson report

Index Policy Note: Freedom of the Press, Governance and Press Standards: Key Challenges for the Leveson Inquiry

Index Magazine: Leveson must protect press freedom

The post Why journalism and politics should remain independent appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Offshore alerts specialises in reporting about offshore financial centres (known as OFCs), with an emphasis on fraud investigations, and also holds an annual conference on OFCs focusing on financial products and services, tax, money laundering, fraud, asset recovery and investigations. It caters to financial services providers and other financial institutions.

Marchant talks to INDEX — ahead of the OffshoreAlert Conference Europe: Investigations & Intelligence, 26 – 27 November — about the importance of free expression and the peculiarities of his trade.

INDEX: As investors continue to pour millions of pounds each month into offshore bank accounts, the Western world is in economic disarray, demanding much more from law-abiding taxpayers to bailout banks. What is your view on the economic crisis, and has it had any effect on the type of investigative journalism you practice?

DAVID MARCHANT: It is unfair to blame the global economic crisis on offshore financial centres. It is, essentially, a people-problem, the majority of whom live in the world’s major countries.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the crisis is that it confirmed what I already knew, i.e. many of the world’s major banks and financial services firms are not well managed. A significant part of the problem is that offering huge short-term financial incentives invites your personnel to act in a manner that is not in the long-term interests of a company. It encourages risk-taking and the concealment of losses to create the appearance of success, as opposed to actual success. It seems that few, if any, material changes have been made to the system, that you can’t change human nature overnight and that history is destined to repeat itself in the future. Other than the crisis causing more schemes to collapse early and there being more to write about, it has had no effect on OffshoreAlert’s investigative reporting.

INDEX: Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis was arrested a few days ago in Athens for publishing the “Lagarde List” —containing the names of more than 2,000 people who hold accounts with HSBC in Switzerland (one imagines, hoping to escape the taxman). The list remained unused for two years after Christine Lagarde passed it onto then Finance Minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou. What do you think about it?

DM: It would not surprise me if the Greek authorities had indeed sat on this information. Governments and corruption or incompetence go hand in hand.

INDEX: Tax evasion is not considered money laundering in some jurisdictions, and it looks less frightening than laundering drug or criminal proceeds. Do you hold any views on this subject?

DM: Money laundering is a criminal offence in its own right. The predicate crimes vary country by country and, in some countries, tax evasion is not among them or was not among them now at one time. In the Cayman Islands, for example, fiscal offences were initially omitted from the jurisdiction’s money laundering laws but the jurisdiction was forced — screaming and kicking — into adding them at a later date. Tax evasion clearly should be a predicate crime. Paying taxes is a price we must pay to live in a civilised society. Who wants to live in an uncivilised society? Certainly not me.

INDEX: How do you balance the need for privacy with the need for transparency in the offshore world?

DM: As a journalist, the more transparency the better but information must be handled responsibly. The word “privacy” is a soft word for secrecy and people have secrets for a reason, i.e. they are typically trying to conceal something that is illegal, immoral or otherwise shameful.

INDEX: You receive sponsorship from security companies like Kroll Advisory Solutions. The global intelligence industry caters for crooks and corrupt, repressive governments alongside corporate clients. Twenty years ago, the value of this sector was negligible — today it is estimated to be worth around $3bn. Any thoughts on this?

DM: To be clear, OffshoreAlert is an independent organisation, not beholden to anyone or anything other than accuracy and fairness. We have limited advertising on our web-site but we do have sponsors for our financial due diligence conferences, which is a commercial necessity. The global intelligence industry is like any other. Companies aren’t particularly choosy about who they will accept as clients. It’s all about making money. I have no idea whether the global intelligence industry has become more prevalent or not over the last 20 years. If it has grown significantly, however, I would guess that much of such growth would be fuelled by banks and other financial firms having to comply with tougher anti-money laundering laws.

INDEX: How do you compare your work with that of, for example, Wikileaks?

DM: I have little or no respect for WikiLeaks. In my limited dealings with the organisation, I have found Wikileaks to be amateurish and fundamentally dishonest. In its very early days, it was clear to me that, in one action at federal court in the United States, Wikileaks clearly misled the court. It is not trustworthy. I consider Julian Assange to be an irresponsible, hypocritical, over-hyped poseur. His major talent seems to be self-publicity. I cringe when I see him described as a journalist. It denigrates the entire profession. Fortunately, there are few, if any, similarities between Wikileaks and OffshoreAlert. We’re not in the same business or market and there is a gulf of difference in the level of professionalism between the two.

INDEX: You actually own 100 per cent of OffshoreAlert and I understand that you are not insured against libel and other legal risks in order to avoid “lawyering” your exposes. Is this correct? Is it necessary in order to safeguard your journalistic independence?

Former accountant and self-styled “offshore asset protection guru”,Marc Harris was convicted of money laundering and tax evasion by the US in 2004

DM: I do indeed beneficially own OffshoreAlert in its entirety. Prior to launch in 1997, I looked into purchasing libel insurance. The premiums were reasonable but the problem was that every article would need to be pre-approved by a recognised libel attorney. That would have been costly and would have inevitably led to the attorney recommending that stories be watered down, which would have defeated the primary purpose of OffshoreAlert, which is to expose serious financial crime while it is in progress. I have an even better de facto insurance policy: If someone sues me for libel, I will take all of my incriminating evidence to law enforcement, and do everything in my power to ensure that the plaintiff is held criminally accountable for their actions. This is no idle promise. The first person to sue me for libel (self-proclaimed “King of the Offshore World” Marc Harris) thought he could put me out of business. Instead, he is currently serving 17 years in prison for fraud and money laundering.

INDEX: However, you have been taken to court for libel on many occasions and always won. So the objective behind these law suits seems to be to intimidate or drain you dry. How do you about surviving suing threats?

DM: OffshoreAlert has been sued for libel multiple times in different countries and jurisdictions. [He was sued in the USA (state and federal court), Cayman Islands, Canada (Toronto), Grenada (by then Prime Minister Keith Mitchell), and Panama]. We’ve never lost a libel action, never published a correction or apology to any plaintiffs and never paid — or been required to pay — them one cent in costs or damages. It is a record of which I am very proud. I know how the game is played, I am extremely resourceful, and I am not intimidated easily. This might come across as conceited, but my attitude towards plaintiffs is that I am brighter, tougher and more talented than you and your attorneys and that, if you want to sue me, I will do everything in my power to ensure that you pay the ultimate price of being criminally prosecuted for your actions.

INDEX: According to organisations such as ours, English libel law has been shown to have a chilling effect on free speech around the world. Especially worrying is “libel tourism”, where foreign claimants have brought libel actions to the English courts against defendants who are neither British nor resident in this country. What do you think about it?

DM: British libel law, generally, is among the most repulsive pieces of legislation that exists in the civilised world. It is a reprobate’s best friend and protects the reputations of people who don’t deserve to have their reputations protected. I couldn’t operate OffshoreAlert in the UK or in any country or jurisdiction that has adopted similar laws because OffshoreAlert would be sued out of existence. British libel law is considered to be so repugnant that, in 2010, the United States passed The SPEECH Act that renders British libel judgments unenforceable in the US there is no de facto free speech in Britain because of its libel laws. I find the entire British legal system to be terrible in dispensing justice. In that regard, it is light years behind the legal system that exists in the US, where OffshoreAlert is based.

Miren Gutierrez is Editorial Director of Index

The post INDEX INTERVIEW: ‘I’ve never published a correction or apology’ appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Will a new Director General be enough to save the BBC asks Index’s Kirsty Hughes

In a nutshell, the BBC first spiked what by all accounts was a piece of very serious journalism on alleged child abuse by a leading national figure, Jimmy Savile — leaving rivals ITV to broadcast the story first — and then it let through a piece of shoddy journalism on child abuse wrongly implicating, albeit anonymously (’til Twitter got to work), another national figure. While some have suggested the second, lax editorial signoff two weeks ago may actually show that caution over the Savile story was appropriate, this looks like the wrong conclusion.

Only some insiders know the full story of both process and content. But we do know that in the Savile case substantial evidence had been gathered, and five women were interviewed on camera about their allegations. Whether there was pressure from above, fear of libel, a casual attitude to child abuse involving young teenage girls or all these and more, the decision not to broadcast looks wrong — and has led to a storm of criticism since the story broke at the start of October. The BBC’s subsequent crisis management was inept — Entwistle sounding inadequately informed and turning in a weak performance before MPs, while Newsnight editor Peter Rippon, who shelved the programme, had to amend his blog post on how the decision was taken to correct inaccuracies.

A month after the Saville fiasco broke, Newsnight then broadcast its programme interviewing Steve Messham who alleged child abuse at a North Wales home in the 1970s by a senior Conservative politician. On Monday evening, the BBC issued a summary of its internal report confirming that Newsnight neither showed Messham a photo of the politician — nor put the allegations to that politician.  Lord McAlpine – mentioned in a series of tweets by a range of people after the Newsnight broadcast — has threatened legal action. Messham came out publicly after the programme and said McAlpine was not the person whose photo the police had shown him in the 1990s, and apologised. The BBC also apologised. Entwistle resigned, as did the director of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Iain Overton, the Bureau having been involved in making the programme.  As the summary BBC report says some “basic journalistic checks were not completed.”

Some suggest a libel action from McAlpine against Newsnight may fail, as the peer was not named in the programme. But wherever the legal case goes, the journalism looks shoddy and the editorial judgement in broadcasting the programme a bad call.

Perhaps one of the few brighter points of this dismal tale is that the most senior people in the two organisations resigned so fast — a lesson that ought not to be lost on hesitant politicians, heads of banks and others in recent years who have failed to step up and take responsibility for failures on their watch, or only reluctantly, slowly and after continuous pressure. But the large pay-off announced for Entwistle has rather diminished some of the impact of the honourable rapid resignation.

In a trenchant statement, Newsnight’s leading presenter, Jeremy Paxman blamed the post-Hutton inquiry BBC culture of appointing “biddable” people and “bloating” management at the expense of programme budgets. This sounds like the NHS, that other British icon, where years of changing reforms have repeatedly seemed to prioritise managers over medical staff. But if biddable managers is the problem, that can explain the Savile case — not taking a risk — but not the McAlpine case — taking a risk in spite of inadequate journalistic output. And it is how the BBC learns the lessons of these two opposite failures that will determine the eventual outcome of this crisis.

In the short term, the BBC will surely ride the crisis out. Chris Patten, heading up the BBC Trust, is right to be moving quickly to appoint what will have to be a top quality, credible new Director General.

But the BBC cannot afford another scandal of this sort soon. And the danger must be that serious, high quality, challenging journalism will be held back. If a battered, bruised and risk-averse BBC chooses to avoid any repetition of the second Newsnight weak journalism scandal, or holds back on anything risky as a second line of defence, then the crisis will have done real damage. If the BBC loses its courage on decent investigative journalism, this might create a false sense of calm for a while, but at the cost of undermining its reputation in the longer term. Steering between the twin hazards of weak editorial control and risk averse editorial control will be the test for the BBC and its next Director General.

Kirsty Hughes is Index’s chief executive

The post BBC stumbles, but will it fall? appeared first on Index on Censorship.