ICYMI: Whistleblower Amjad Rihan has won $10.8m damages from his former employer EY 6yrs after being pushed out for exposing a multi-billion-dollar cover-up in EY’s audit of Dubai gold refiner Kaloti.
Here's some highlights from the judgment ⚖️👇🔥THREAD - 1/8
The 133-page decision is a HUGE victory for whistleblowing. 😇🍾🎺🎉
Perhaps EY imagined dragging Rihan & his family through a miserable legal claim would placate powerful figures in Dubai, or serve as a warning to other potential WBs.
If so, the plan has backfired 2/8
In court, EY claimed Rihan was a liar and a fantasist, a self-publicist and a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
The judge did not agree. ⚖️🎉 He found that the more Rihan was attacked, the clearer it became that the whistleblower was “truthful and honest”. 3/8
Meanwhile, the more the judge heard from EY, the more he found the firm’s top partners & lawyers were “intimidatory”🔥, “unreliable”🔥, “lacking in candor”🔥, “insincere”🔥 and “uninterested in questions of professional ethics”🔥🔥🔥 4/8
The judge picked out testimony from Mark Otty, EY’s London-based head of the EMEIA region.
Otty's words were “calculating and given in search of legal advantage, without regard for objective truth or accurate recollection” 🔥 And there was more👇 5/8
As well as shredding EY’s reputation for truthfulness in court, the judge went to the heart of whistleblower allegations concerning EY’s audit work for the Dubai gold firm. He fully believed Rihan’s claims of a cover-up, finding EY acted without integrity or objectivity. 6/8
According to EY’s website, Otty has been reassigned to work in EY’s emerging markets division from the firm’s offices in Dubai.
Perhaps EY figures his approach to objectivity, truthfulness & integrity will be better appreciated in Dubai than in the UK courts.7/8
For the backstory on Rihan’s revelations about the Dubai gold industry, please see this thread:
Exactly 2yrs ago, the UK promised "new legislation to tackle economic crime following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”
“...Reforms to bear down on the use of 🇬🇧LIMITED PARTNERSHIPS for money laundering, including ILLICIT RUSSIAN FINANCE”
But it's *not* working ⛔️Why?
( 🧵 1/)
To recap: Boris Johnson promised the UK would “open up the matryoshka dolls🪆of Russian-owned entities to find the ultimate beneficiaries within.”
(He’s right: it's often Russians who hide beneath layers of anonymity inside 🇬🇧PARTNERSHIPS) 2/
In truth, 🇬🇧's corporate register has been an enabler platform for Russia-linked kleptocracy, corruption, foreign influence, disinformation & organised crime since the 2000s. Thousands of anonymous PARTNERSHIPS were set up —including 💯s involved in laundering mega-scandals👇3/
#FinCENFiles showed 3,267 UK shell companies🇬🇧🐚 linked to suspicious bank transactions🕵️💰 — far more than companies from better known secrecy havens
@ICIJorg analyzed them and found 75% had been set up & maintained by just nine company formation agencies 2/7
When we looked closer at company formation agencies, we found:
▶️ Financial statements being signed without any checks
▶️ False financial statements omitting $$ 💯s millions (a criminal offense)
▶️ Allegations of forgery
▶️ Straw men/women controlled by overseas puppeteers 3/7
This thread gives some highlights from our #FinCENFiles reporting on shell-company formation agencies, their close ties to Baltic banks & the role they play in money laundering schemes.
Ta-da: #FinCENFiles - a major collaborative journalism investigation!📢📢📢
“Wait, the FinCEN what?”
OK, here’s a quick bit of context….
(THREAD 🧵1/8)
The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, forced U.S. banks - much against their will - to secretly rat on their own customers, and on those with whom their customers did business, when they thought they were up to no good. (2/8)
By 1996, this mandatory snitching had become a vital intelligence-gathering tool (not least in the "war on drugs") and was formalized into Suspicious Activity Reports. After 9/11, SARs were firmly part of the "war on terror", too. (3/8)
@TimmermansEU@VDombrovskis 4 yrs ago, after @ICIJorg, @SZ & other media published #panamapapers🏝️, the EU admitted its efforts to catch those using anonymous companies to commit crimes🕵️♀️ & hide assets👑💍🏆💰 (AMLD4) were not working. 2/8
@TimmermansEU@VDombrovskis@ICIJorg@SZ The EU’s response was a new directive, AMLD5, requiring countries to publish registers of ownership🗂️by 10 Jan 2020 (i.e. last Friday)
Back then, @TimmermansEU said the EU was "proud"😇of its new "urgent counter-measures"💪against tax evaders & other criminals. 3/8