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Now there’s someone I haven’t listened to in ages! I only have Kite and Titanic Days, I believe… I’ve not heard Tropical Brainstorm.
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It’s a great record. It came out shortly before (after?) she was killed by a speed boat.
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Yikes. I feel like I was briefly re-acquainted with an old friend who then suddenly died.
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You’ll get nowhere with ‘Basic’ Accounting. Get a few drinks in you and see if you can’t talk it into some dirty accounting, the sort which starts with filth, depravity and disgrace, but ends in squeaky clean money invested in legitimate enterprises, after a few go-arounds of faux loan contracts and Benelux bank transfers by Caribbean companies domiciled in jurisdictions which don’t require disclosure of the ultimate beneficial owner.
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Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett - can’t tell you what number re-read this is, but it’s just as enjoyable as the previous times.
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Pratchett is always good for a repeat read (or 10)
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My economics degree had a module on basic accounting. Which was about 10% actual accounting and 90% means of misrepresentation that were at the time still legal. (How to use German accounting rules to make your flash-in-the-pan one-off idea look like a viable company, for example, by writing off “provision for future losses” and effectively spreading your one burst of income over several years.)
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I think it’s his best book.
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So the opposite of Enron where you pull all the future cash flow into year 1 as income and then have to write that contract over again with a new related party each year
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Yeah, basically you take your one-off 3 million revenue and book it as 1 million per year for three years. Then you say to some sucker “look, we’ve been doing this for three years, we’re a stable business, time to invest in/buy us” and hope they don’t do their due diligence.
(I believe this doesn’t work under the current rules.)
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Here’s my version I use in the occasional board meeting when I need an analogy:
the balance sheet is the gas tank. You know what’s there to burn
the income statement is the speedometer. It tells you how fast you’re heading for where you want to go
the statement of cash flows is the tachometer. It tells you if your engine is about to burst into flames at its current speed
In this case it’s important to ask how the vehicle is going 40 miles per hour at 20,000 rpm in 5th gear
None of the statements actually tell you if you are going somewhere you want to go, somewhere you can survive, or somewhere that is not jail. You need a good board and good attorneys for that
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Is this really the name for this? That would be… embarrassing. But I admit it sounds very much like what it is in Germany. Oh yikes.
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Full disclosure, while I’ve seen nefarious shenanigans from banks in numerous countries, an unnamed (because I’m not sure whether anyone has been convicted there yet) German bank has been involved in the largest number of illegal transactions designed to launder money and evade taxes of which I’ve personally seen evidence. Bankers in private wealth management divisions of the bank suggested incorporation of offshore companies in jurisdictions where the ultimate beneficial owner could be concealed and connected the clients to right people on tropical islands, as well as setting up bank accounts for such offshore companies.
If it is any consolation, it is likely to be a statistical fluke, because so many of the cases I have been involved in have concerned the same time frame. There are fads in money laundering as with other things and at different times, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Cayman Islands, the Channel islands and the British Virgin Islands have been the fashionable way to go. Really, in the modern era, most schemes combine several jurisdictions, with the client not even needing to visit any of them, because the bankers can do all of it through power of attorney, proxy voting and people who make a living as the only registered corporate officers for hundreds of offshore companies. I just happened to see evidence from several cases where the bank which handled everything was German, but I know about similar practices in many other countries. For that matter, the German bank employed bankers from multiple countries, including Iceland.
Good accountants and tax lawyers are supposed to find ways that minimize the amount of money the state can extort from you as protection money, without triggering retaliation from the state. They often do this by making use of the way different jurisdictions have different rules and by choosing jurisdictions for incorporation, bank accounts and where companies file their tax statements in ways that allow them to legally protect as much money as possible.
There is frequently a temptation for ‘legally’ to become ‘they haven’t proven it yet’. This is not helped by the fact that all experts in any field which involves complex legislation are aware that everyone is technically breaking some law all the time, because we’ve long since passed the point where following (or even knowing about) every law is impossible. Laws keep getting more complex and depend on the arbitrary interpretation of tax authorities and prosecutors. It’s easy to make the case that if everyone is guilty by the letter of the law, the law loses any normative value it might have had, and breaking it is not inherently bad.
All sorts of pro forma legal compliance paperwork are technically falsified, by public and private entities, because actually carrying out everything the letter of the law requires is physically impossible. There isn’t enough time for everyone to actually read everything they should read before signing or check everything they certify, instead of trusting their colleagues or employees to ensure things are legal enough so they probably don’t get into trouble unless they happen to make an enemy of someone with the power to use arbitrary interpretations against them.
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I’m sure they had a more formal name, but this was the standard for what was allowable in accounts filed in Germany (just barely not West Germany) at the time. As I mentioned, pretty sure they’ve changed now.
Icelander - I’m surprised, various insiders I know point out that all the legitimate money has left London since 2016 and all that’'s left is the dodgy transactions.
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Oh, yes. London is reputedly a hotbed of financial crimes; especially laundering Russian money to avoid sanctions. However, any such cases are less likely to be prosecuted in an Icelandic court or even involve an Icelandic company, so I have never personally gone through the evidence in such a case.
I’ve just not been involved many criminal cases where London has featured in any significant way. Granted, a client happened to be in London when his German banker called him to propose a dodgy scheme, but London otherwise featured only as a place where money passed through, not as the terminus, origin point or the jurisdiction in which the alleged criminal activity took place.
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Been on a bit of an X-Men/Marvel kick recently, so I re-read the Supernovas, Blinded by the Light and Endangered Species TPB and am now re-reading Messiah Complex.
The kick was not satisfied however, so I ordered the X-Men Decimation omnibus and the SHIELD (by Jonathan Hickman) one.
I might just plunge into the House of X/Power of X and Dawn of X era after.
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