Laws are for “little people” – the Mandelson mortgage fraud cover-up
RH
The present furore should have disabused those of the public who still
believed the law and rules such as codes of conduct apply to the
powerful as they do to the ordinary person. At present we are seeing
how widespread-hacking by the media and the bribing of police by the
media to gain information could go on uninterrupted by politicians
doing anything about and the police failing to prosecute either their
own people or the media people paying the bribes. (The most telling
fact about the payment of police bribes is that no policeman or woman
has come forward to say they reported such an attempt to their
superiors).
The story below is another graphic example of how elites can get away
with murder. It was published in the magazine The Individual in July
1999 under the title of ‘Elite Mischief’ (http://individualist.org.uk/
pdf/1999julindiv_em.pdf.) It deals with Peter Mandelson’s gaining of a
mortgage by making a false declaration to his mortgage provider and
his taking of a £373,000 loan from a fellow minister in the Blair
Government Geoffrey Robinson, a loan he failed to publicly declare as
required by the Commons’ own rules.
The story exemplifies the way in those with power, wealth and
influence manage to live outside the rules and laws which supposedly
bind them. For elites laws and rules are for the “little people”, not
them. In this instance politicians in the Government, the Labour
Party and the Commons’ committee with responsible for disciplining MPs
all failed to wholeheartedly condemn Mandelson, investigate his
misbehaviour properly (especially the mortgage fraud) or impose
appropriate penalties. The civil servant responsible for investigating
complaints about MPs, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, refused to press
the most damaging parts of the complaints (the mortgage fraud and the
failure to declare the Robinson loan) and the police refused to open
an investigation. To close the circle, the media also failed to press
the matter of criminal charges and tellingly I could get none of the
mainstream media to take up the story of the police’s refusal to
investigate.
The outcome of the protection of Mandelson is that went on to twice
return to the Cabinet, received a peerage and got an EU sinecure as
one of Britain’s Brussels commissioners. He is now a wealthy man,
having benefited from the capital gains on the property he obtained
through the mortgage fraud and Robinson’s loan, the considerable
salaries drawn from his return to a Cabinet position under Blair; his
remuneration as an EU Commissioner and the considerable returns from
his autobiography. Those are the wages of elite sin.
Robert Henderson
7 July 2011
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Elite Mischief
The report of the Standards and Privileges Committee (henceforth “the
Committee) on three complaints laid against Peter Mandelson is best
described as incongruous. The complaints concerned irregularities
involving more than £500,000 and the report’s content is damming. Two
of the three complaints were found to have substance. Yet the
Committee treated Mandelson’s serious misbehaviour as essentially
trivial and concluded smugly ”We recommend that no further action be
taken”. The report is above all a classic example of how an elite
controls matters for its own advantage.
White Spirit
> Laws are for �little people�
Tell it to Tony Blair. After all, it went so swimmingly last time.