... and yet he still looks cleaner than Trump. Selling early access to White House decisions to the highest bidder for (minimum) $100k/month is now responsible for about 40% of Trumps' wealth.
And that's a lower bound, assuming his commercial real estate hasn't dropped further, which is a BIG assumption given that everyone else's has ...
Do not assume people downvoting stuff about Trump because they support him. I downvoted it because I am sick of American politics being dragged into every discussion - in this case the evasion of UK taxes by a Russian oligarch being facilitated by Cypriot accountants.
I am interests in learning more about the oligarchs involved, and the accounts, and the tax evasion, but I am not interested in reading the same comments about Trump I have heard countless times before. If anyone has something new to say about Trump I am happy to read about it where it is relevant to the topic being discussed.
I did not assume that. In this case Trump felt quite off-topic so I almost downvoted myself but I have seen many other threads where Trump supporters were plentiful, both in downvoting and posting comments.
Many people will assume you like trump if you are sick of hearing about him and avoid the topic. İt seems to be a shibboleth with some ppl that you must spit a curse at the demon or you secretly like him.
Or if you dare critique any corruption on the opposite team as well. Binary thinking is fairly standard in all sectors of society.
I hate Trump, but I don't see how Trump's corruption is relevant to this discussion. Are we supposed to comment on every story about someone doing something bad with "Trump's even worse"?
It's relevant to every motherfucking discussion right now, and should be until that wanker and his cancerous tribe are gone.
And that should be your, and our, number one priority.
Unless you like flirting and passively sleeping next to a pseudo-fascist dictator and hoping your frog-in-a-simmering pot act will be enough to get you through this.
Politically, get rid of Trump is my top priority, but hopping into discussions that aren't about American politics with "hey, did you know Trump is bad?" doesn't advance getting rid of Trump.
Maybe because it's not true? Selling early access to posts through Truth Social is worth $10-20 million a year (most estimates are they have 10-20 subscribers at 60-100k/month). And obviously no one is valuing that revenue stream at 50x or 100x earnings: it's expected to go away when Trump does, which, actuarially speaking, should be in the next ten years.
Also real estate prices in London at the top of the market are going down and down now that the money pump of corrupt Russian money has been switched off.
Reddit changed recently to deter AI scraping so that to use "old", you needed to log in sometime in the past 6 months. The "old" lets you see all the comments while the 'new improved version' only lets you read comments to a shallow depth while inserting ads everywhere.
Deloitte has, I've heard (!), in their training material a section about integrity and how important it is to act ethically correct. Deloitte also does sh*t like this and - again, I've heard (!) - asks its employees to bill hours on projects they are not working on so that they can maximize profits at their clients expenses. Also elephants are pink.
How this company can proceed to exist is beyond me.
For legal reasons I must emphasize that this is hear-say and should not be trusted as facts. At least one statement is a lie. What you believe is true is up to you.
Its a bit more complex. its a network of national firms, and each member firm is a separate legal entity> in this case it was the Cypriot member firm.
From the footer on (the Uk section) of their website:
> Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”), its global network of member firms, and their related entities (collectively, the “Deloitte organisation”). DTTL (also referred to as “Deloitte Global”) and each of its member firms and related entities are legally separate and independent entities, which cannot obligate or bind each other in respect of third parties.
Yes, that link was trivial to find. But it does not expound on how the decision making process works. Each nation’s Deloitte organization is presumably able to avoid blame for actions done in any other nation, so the question is are they all operated completely independently? Is there no hierarchy above the national level?
They also exist to transfer wealth to workers with the right pedigree (much like the tech industry for many years). If you go to the right school, but graduate without actually being able to do anything, you apply to a consultancy. You'll at least make enough to afford your apartment and groceries while you make the connections to get paid 6-7 figures doing nothing someplace else.
KPMG, E&Y, PWC, they're all the same because they have to compete with each other's dishonesty in order to both maximise profits and maximise cough tax savings cough for their customers.
There have been a couple of scandals in Australia, and yet they all remain part of 'the big four'. They're all tainted as fuck.
I see their work product with some regularity. To say I'm not impressed would be a severe understatement and I really don't understand why companies keep hiring them.
They did a 'cloud strategy' for a previous client. There was a 'partner', numerous 'consultants', 7 figures US$ AFAIK.
It was mostly regurgitating the AWS published best practices on Deloitte letterhead. We all grumbled how "this was not a good use of money", but one of the senior folks from the line of business side said "you guys were going to basically do this anyway...now noone can say you picked the wrong strategy". Which, to be fair, was true.
So that's probably why companies keep hiring them.
It's also a great "telephone" between the low-ranks and the C-suite if the comms are broken on a company.
meaning: If your boss won't bother to ask it's own employees or trust their feedback, he might choose a well kept, well presented third party to gather that feedback from their employees, and then package it nicely with some cool logos and slides and decks, and charge you a shit ton of money out of it.
I'm sure the seniors had a blast producing that material. "...and then I told them - get this (*wheezes between laughs*) - we have to be honest ! Hah!"
Deloitte operates much more like a franchise network than a single multinational corporation. It's technically a network of independent, locally owned professional-services partnerships.
This one appears to be Cyprus - clearly the center of ethical business operations...
Most corporations probably have those. They also have similar training about security, and yet. Software corporations have similar training about software engineering practices, and yet.
Every bank has exactly same stuff. Any new scandal adds another 1..X mandatory trainings for much of / all staff, usually quaterly recurring ones.
Things like escalate problems to correct teams, even where to (supposedly anonymously) whistleblow, but thats most probably 1 way ticket to unemployment office with a sife effect of appearing on some industry-wide even if local blacklist.
They are so predicrable I dont read accompanying materials anymore and usually just 1-shot final tests, maybe apart from stuff that I never touched nor heard of, that sometimes requires second go.
To sum it up - those trainings are not ultimate business guidelines. The more they veer on what to do in case of something bad/spicy happens, the more they are some court ordered result of some long legal battle and settlement&fine.
I worked for Siemens, which was fined for bribing foreign officials to secure orders (which was undoubtedly SOP for all businesses in those countries, but Siemens got caught).
As a result of Siemen's execs bribing various Nigerian princes et al, new employees at the lowest levels were required to take training to teach them that bribing government officials is Bad, mmkay?
The execs did not do time, and AFAIK were not fired. But the secretaries now know they shouldn't do that!
The goal is not to train you, but to limit their liability. They can say they have a track record of ethical training, and then off the track have incentives to do unethical stuff.
To be fair, this is Deloitte Cyprus. Not that other partnerships wouldn’t do the same, but one that is set up in a renowned tax haven is likely to come across some interesting work.
I"m sure you're not taking corporate CYA training at face value are you? They do these trainings so they can have some liability coverage despite the fact that they hire people to explicitly do these unethical things. Then when shit goes sideways they can say this isn't our culture or policy and point to the training. We provided training against these actions. Limited liability means zero accountability.
> Deloitte Cyprus said it could not comment on the specific allegations because the documents were more than 20 years old and no longer accessible.
That's convenient.
Also, I received a similar response when inquiring about a financial account that had been overlooked (there are reasons, I'm not getting into it) for a couple of decades. "Can't help you. Too old for us to have records." Well, my records are printed documents. Why can't you tell me anything? Reminds me of when the USA government stole my money from a bank transfer claiming suspicion of whatever (my landlord had a Middle Eastern sounding name and it was the 2000s) and then said they had no record of it when I provided all the required documentation to recover it.
In both cases, unfortunately, I concluded that the odds are so stacked against me that I gave up. Convenient system if you're fabulously wealthy or a massive org (such as corporations and government).
Most institutions (especially financial) have strict document retention policies to protect themselves from situations like this. It's not shady – just a way of limiting liability.
At my first job I made the mistake of discovering a cache of old documents, documents that were far older than the company's seven-year document retention policy. The cache, being my discovery, meant I became the one responsible for destroying it. It was dozens on dozes of bankers boxes filled with documents that I de-spine before shredding.
You would have thought that the process was a chore but for me it was exhilarating. The slowness of the process gave me the opportunity to speed read through it all. There was nothing scandalous in there, but I became somewhat of a historian over those many quiet nights.
Organizations are not run by a single person. Imagine yourself as an investor into a large organization. Or you are invited to work as a CEO. You would definitely want to limit your own responsibility (in terms of financial losses or legal costs) when there are hundreds or thousands of people working together and anyone can make a mistake.
Of course you'd have compliance department to look over the processes to minimize the risk of mistakes and correct them ASAP (if you don't, you'd be liable for negligence and open yourself to a higher chance of failures). But since mistakes and miscommunication is inevitable anyway, you'd require hard limits in every obligation - in terms of time, money, scope etc.
Organizations that are not protecting themselves do not live long. And this principle has nothing to do with the nature of their activity.
I wouldn't go that far. If it's a legal practice, it's a legal practice. I can understand why a company would want to limit their liability over something that happened seven years in the past, even when they are confident that their procedures are both rigorous and in compliance with the law.
On the whole, I would say the problem isn't so much using language to whitewash the practice as the troublesome tendency to turn a blind eye until someone becomes persona non grata.
Look, if you want better behavior lobby for longer retention, simple as that, laws will be passed if there is enough will behind. Or some centralized store, whatever. Eveeybody will align if things are clear and legally required by date xyz.
Dont blame any private company that its not overstepping its legal requirements and adding risks and costs to their business. Its like blaming a guy, any guy, heck all HN we dont pay more taxes than we have to pay, it goes to good things and is moral no?
We can do both, it's not hard to advocate for change while calling out bad actors as bad actors. Many companies openly degrade society while following the law. That still doesn't make it right. These are just excuses to allow authoritarians to degrade our lives and society unabated.
I don't think anyone is claiming that the destruction of evidence is right or good for society. On the other hand, do we really want to live in a world where everyone needs to be paperwork pack rats? One thing that I can assure you is requiring the retention of documents that provide evidence of a crime, while allowing for the destruction of everything else after seven years, wouldn't have the desired outcome. (Though it would be amusing to see which corporations have the largest indefinite data retention warehouses if it did work!)
I also think the right and good for society means addressing crimes in a timely manner, which likely means more auditing by independent bodies. Punishing someone for a crime that happened 7+ years ago may feel good, but it is meaningless for a couple of reasons. Should we be punishing people who have reformed? And for those who don't reform, should we be letting criminal behaviour occur across multiple decades?
In most jurisdictions there are retention policies defined in law. Companies, like almost anyone else in the world, will do the bare minimum necessary to meet the legal requirements because it doesn’t make sense to do more. They only incur expenses while exposing themselves to all kinds of liability.
> Most institutions (especially financial) have strict document retention policies to protect themselves from situations like this. It's not shady – just a way of limiting liability.
Yup. With every data breach, HN is full of (correct, imo) comments about how tech companies should treat private data as a liability and prune it aggressively.
You go look at mature businesses and you'll find that they do exactly this.
And less mature businesses that are in highly regulated industries, since they know nobody will fund them if they can’t prove they aren’t a legal timebomb. I’ve worked across clients in edtech, fintech, healthtech, aerospace, and in all of them making sure they didn’t die by regulation was present from early on. (Granted, places that don’t care about things like that don’t work with people like me.)
Edtech in particular tends to be pretty conscious of just never having the data in the first place. PII for minors is radioactive.
Nope, they destroy digital records as well, at least banks do. If you ever work for a financial institution, you’ll have mandatory training about data retention timelines.
Oh, come on. HN complains about excessive data hoarding all the time. Now it's wrong to not hoard data? This is just another damned if you do, damned it you don't situation and, predictably, the outrage option is voted to the top.
Because the legal requirement is to keep those financial records for a maximum of 10 years? I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, and the type of the document, but financial records generally 10 years in Europe.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In the US, each state has escheatment[0] laws governing how untouched accounts are retired and how they may be subsequently claimed by their original owner. That process typically happens through a government agency rather than through the original company that held the account. But other parts of the world have other processes.
That doesn't seem logically related (though that doesn't mean it legally isn't). If there's a statement from last year saying that the account has x amount of money in it, then that's a document within the 10 year retention even if the last deposit was more than 10 years ago, so there's still a record that the account exists.
Don't worry, if they think they can extract more money out of you, you can be sure they still keep the documents. Case in point my HSBC account which is officially closed since 2014 and they still contact me illegally.
There should be a limit. You can’t expect me to keep a client’s records for two decades. For software development, I think 2 years is reasonable. Many industries already have proper (and mandatory) limits, usually somewhere in the 3-7 year range depending on the field (finance tends to be higher) and the country. Some countries, especially developing ones, have no bookkeeping rules at all.
But after 2 decades for a financial account, I'd assume any recovery as a gift rather than a right.
Document retention policies are often constructed to require documents be discarded after a certain date.
Having a universal rule is about the only way to ensure decisions aren’t being made for other reasons and that they comply with your privacy standards.
If that account was truely forgotten about, there is no way it wasn't closed and simply sent to the relevant state Unclaimed Funds group of the state treasury where it waits to be claimed for quite indefinitely.
20 years is a very long time. It's a good thing there's a limit: not to protect the fraudsters billionaires but to protect the little guys, like me, versus the basically limitless power of local IRSes/judges/etc.
In several EU countries the limit is about 6 to 7 years. Which coincides with what many banks allow to go back in time to fetch the statements (at least without additional costs).
I think that is fair. The question though is: why are my taxpayers dollars paying for incompetent public servants that only realize more than 20 years after the facts that documents were falsified? I don't want my public servants to be crybabies after they fucked up: instead I want them to discover fraudsters in a reasonable timeframe.
I thought this article was a parody for the first few paragraphs... that's how times have changed, I guess.
I couldn't agree with the guy more, when he says:
>> when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees
But that seems to be exactly the sane logic that old Jeff Bezos is spending his life and his billions trying to find a hack around. I'm still not clear who Amazon's customers will be if everyone's unemployed and AI and robots have taken all the middle class jobs... oppressive governments, I guess.
The Big Four really like back-dating things to help their clients. But lying is difficult because the facts come with built-in consistency. Mother Nature ensures all her arithmetic lines up properly every single time like clockwork, but when you try to make stuff up you have to do all that work and not make any mistakes.
And so it's actually easier to spot this fraud than to conduct it. What you need is people willing to go look and people willing to prosecute it even though that's uncomfortable because these crooks always have powerful friends.
Ultimately the bigger problem is the Big Four themselves. They are obviously Too Big To Fail and three of them are based in a single place, London. I believe that the Paris MOU provides us a model for how to fix this in the medium term but I've seen no political will to even look at the problem, much less address it.
>paying your taxes, if you can afford them is patriotic.
The billionaire class made patriotism right-wing coded, thus dirty. They treat the borders as fluid as the millions of migrants they push through them.
I just know this will be thoroughly investigated, all responsible parties held accountable, and the proper countermeasures and applicable laws will be updated to punish and disincentivise this behaviour in the future. Just kidding.
Things change when the cost-benefit analysis moves. If you apply the law strictly and effectively, the behaviour will adjust.
I think you’re framing this at the wrong level: the cost-benefit analysis needs to be vs the rest of the rich world sanctioning Cyprus. It’s far from clear that it’s currently in Cyprus’s best interests to see heads roll for this, and so the rest of Europe needs to grow some balls for enforcement.
The cost-benefit analysis will move rather quickly if you add jail time into the calculation. If the penalty is a fine, you’ll see that just as a normal business risk.
This must be the first time someone important [0] has been involved in shady financial dealings. One of the joys of being in the internet era is we have much better visibility on the vast multinational web moving money around. We know that senior politicians are well aware of it because they use it to.
It would actually be reasonable if this was headline was news to Abramovich. I expect there are a bunch of standard services rendered to wealthy Russians and they just all use the same guy, who is known to get good results and no-one ever asks why. It is quite likely that there are a small group of fixers who maintain networks for certain geopolitical in-groups. They probably have excellent connections to people like Jeffery Epstein too. No surprise if the Russian circuit is actually flouting western law directly.
Cyprus deliberately set out to make itself attractive to wealthy Russians in the 2000s and 2010s.
Various controversies relating to bailouts after the financial crisis, the rise of anti money laundering controls in the late 2010s, and the Ukraine invasion have severed many of the ties but Abramovich was just one of many to take advantage in the past.
You might learn how tax havens work. Those of us familiar all went "Cyprus...shocker /s".
Deloitte Cyprus is a separate legal entity from all the other (separate, legal) Deloitte entities precisely so any consequences of tax evasion resulting from the...em...lax oversight in Cyprus don't impact all the other things called 'Deloitte'.
It is literally impossible to operate in any other way. We call them multinational but they just own the child company or the brand. If you operate at any country, your "parent" is irrelevant.
A while back there was a simple scheme available that allowed you to avoid taxes on the first few hundred thousand / million of taxes.
- You created an LLC in Cyprus and transferred some IP (usually a trademark) to it
- You licensed that IP to your LLC in an EU country for the amount that basically erased any profit that LLC made
- Cypriot LLCs were not taxed on non-Cyprus income
- Each of non-resident director (or board member, I don't remember) of a Cypriot LLC was not taxed on first 400k euro of income from those LLCs. Double taxation deals Cyprus had protected you from being taxed on that income back home.
I know this is no longer possible with Cyprus, but a variation of that is now happening with e.g. many EU clothing brands having their brand ownership transferred to Egyptian LLCs.
It is a similar mechanism, but there were major differences:
1. It was usable for small-medium companies, because the amount you avoided taxes on was 400k euro times number of people you involved in the scheme as board members.
2. It avoided taxation entirely and not just shifted tax burden to the country with lower rates.
3. It allowed the money to immediately return to the country where the profit originated in without any tax consequences. There is a reason why tech giants are sitting on a lot of cash.
I don’t think this is possible under the latest rules, especially in the EU. But a small firm could easily get bad advice and think it’s outsmarting the system. Right now in the EU, it’s either pay or leave completely.
It definitely is no longer possible, which is why I used past tense.
This scheme was unique, because it was available to small fish allowing nullify taxes on the first 400k euro of income (or multiple if you got more people to help you).
Similar ones, available to large corporations, are very much still possible, but they are getting more and more pushback.
Deloitte didn't deny it. The only possible interpretation of their statement is that they absolutely did do it, but they believe they can get away with it. Otherwise you'd just say "Deloitte doesn't falsify documents"
I get this is an unpopular opinion, but it’s even more important given the nature of the allegations. They “look bad” but it’s all accounting stuff in Cyprus, none of us know what’s actually legal here and what isn’t, it’s the BBC making insinuation about stuff to promote an investigative reports show or something they run.
I don’t want to defend anyone involved in the allegations, and don’t personally think they’re above shady business dealings, I just don’t like usual sensationalist “reporting” - essentially advertising like this and how people eat it up.
If you're a UK media outlet accusing a Big Four accounting firm and a Russian billionaire of tax fraud and you've got it wrong, you can bet there will be a case filed incredibly quickly in the High Court.
Treason by British citizens against the British state. If you have to charge the CEO or board, so be it, there is a British citizen who is liable here.
I dunno. This all implies a level of central control that doesn't reflect how professional services firms operate. Mostly they're loose partnerships and local offices and partners have the significant discretion. Even legally they're mostly not structured as a global corporation but rather a loose association of legally distinct entities.
There's a tension between having a brand that reflects trust and institutional rigor and avoiding liability for the actions of partners in some far flung jurisdiction.
I know this is anecdotal but I remember anywhere you went in financial or political circles in 1990s London, everyone was falling over themselves about the nouveau riche from Russia and former Warsaw Pact countries investing. There were some who said it would drive up real estate prices and some upset about lack of oversight but they were looked at in the media and by politicians as kooky or close to it. Decades later - the Panama Papers, the Epstein files and articles like this and from that journalist killed in Malta exposing corruption.
Mind-boggling what people and corporations knew and did in the shadows while we cheered on and cheer on their holdings.
It took enormously corrupted and murderous personality to be nouveau riche from Russia and former Warsaw Pact countries during the 1990s. With links to former Communist security and intelligence agencies on top of it. Anyone else back then in these regions was eating mud pies.
168 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 49.2 ms ] threadAnd that's a lower bound, assuming his commercial real estate hasn't dropped further, which is a BIG assumption given that everyone else's has ...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-donald-trumps-net-w...
Making the relative comparison is useful in understanding what a shitshow is going on in the USA.
Back in the day, we used to think Abramovich was corrupt as fuck and very dodgy.
In 2026, I understand him to be a relative amateur ...
I am interests in learning more about the oligarchs involved, and the accounts, and the tax evasion, but I am not interested in reading the same comments about Trump I have heard countless times before. If anyone has something new to say about Trump I am happy to read about it where it is relevant to the topic being discussed.
And that should be your, and our, number one priority.
Unless you like flirting and passively sleeping next to a pseudo-fascist dictator and hoping your frog-in-a-simmering pot act will be enough to get you through this.
Also real estate prices in London at the top of the market are going down and down now that the money pump of corrupt Russian money has been switched off.
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1x3vru3/deloitte_he...
Reddit changed recently to deter AI scraping so that to use "old", you needed to log in sometime in the past 6 months. The "old" lets you see all the comments while the 'new improved version' only lets you read comments to a shallow depth while inserting ads everywhere.
How this company can proceed to exist is beyond me.
For legal reasons I must emphasize that this is hear-say and should not be trusted as facts. At least one statement is a lie. What you believe is true is up to you.
From the footer on (the Uk section) of their website:
> Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”), its global network of member firms, and their related entities (collectively, the “Deloitte organisation”). DTTL (also referred to as “Deloitte Global”) and each of its member firms and related entities are legally separate and independent entities, which cannot obligate or bind each other in respect of third parties.
You can read more about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deloitte#Legal_structure
This is fairly typical for accountancy and law firms.
More explanation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_services_networks
WTF - I am being downvoted for explaining this above? Pure facts!
Which changes nothing about the GP's incorrect assertion.
Isn't the whole point of these companies to rubberstamp shady things corporations are doing, so they can shed resposibility more easily when caught?
All the while we were doing financial regulation software without any proper tests on the models being done outside of some spot checks.
And the idea of doing those was frowned upon :)
Lovely place.
There have been a couple of scandals in Australia, and yet they all remain part of 'the big four'. They're all tainted as fuck.
It was mostly regurgitating the AWS published best practices on Deloitte letterhead. We all grumbled how "this was not a good use of money", but one of the senior folks from the line of business side said "you guys were going to basically do this anyway...now noone can say you picked the wrong strategy". Which, to be fair, was true.
So that's probably why companies keep hiring them.
meaning: If your boss won't bother to ask it's own employees or trust their feedback, he might choose a well kept, well presented third party to gather that feedback from their employees, and then package it nicely with some cool logos and slides and decks, and charge you a shit ton of money out of it.
There's also a fine print at the bottom that says 'lolz'.
Don't open yourself up to charges of hilarity.
This one appears to be Cyprus - clearly the center of ethical business operations...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxd23UVID7k&list=RDGxd23UVID...
How can they not proceed. They are making money doing nothing and have no moral boundaries. And now we find out they have no legal boundaries either.
Things like escalate problems to correct teams, even where to (supposedly anonymously) whistleblow, but thats most probably 1 way ticket to unemployment office with a sife effect of appearing on some industry-wide even if local blacklist.
They are so predicrable I dont read accompanying materials anymore and usually just 1-shot final tests, maybe apart from stuff that I never touched nor heard of, that sometimes requires second go.
To sum it up - those trainings are not ultimate business guidelines. The more they veer on what to do in case of something bad/spicy happens, the more they are some court ordered result of some long legal battle and settlement&fine.
As a result of Siemen's execs bribing various Nigerian princes et al, new employees at the lowest levels were required to take training to teach them that bribing government officials is Bad, mmkay?
The execs did not do time, and AFAIK were not fired. But the secretaries now know they shouldn't do that!
What does this expression mean in this context?
That's convenient.
Also, I received a similar response when inquiring about a financial account that had been overlooked (there are reasons, I'm not getting into it) for a couple of decades. "Can't help you. Too old for us to have records." Well, my records are printed documents. Why can't you tell me anything? Reminds me of when the USA government stole my money from a bank transfer claiming suspicion of whatever (my landlord had a Middle Eastern sounding name and it was the 2000s) and then said they had no record of it when I provided all the required documentation to recover it.
In both cases, unfortunately, I concluded that the odds are so stacked against me that I gave up. Convenient system if you're fabulously wealthy or a massive org (such as corporations and government).
At my first job I made the mistake of discovering a cache of old documents, documents that were far older than the company's seven-year document retention policy. The cache, being my discovery, meant I became the one responsible for destroying it. It was dozens on dozes of bankers boxes filled with documents that I de-spine before shredding.
You would have thought that the process was a chore but for me it was exhilarating. The slowness of the process gave me the opportunity to speed read through it all. There was nothing scandalous in there, but I became somewhat of a historian over those many quiet nights.
It's not euphemistic – just diplomatic phrasing.
Of course you'd have compliance department to look over the processes to minimize the risk of mistakes and correct them ASAP (if you don't, you'd be liable for negligence and open yourself to a higher chance of failures). But since mistakes and miscommunication is inevitable anyway, you'd require hard limits in every obligation - in terms of time, money, scope etc.
Organizations that are not protecting themselves do not live long. And this principle has nothing to do with the nature of their activity.
On the whole, I would say the problem isn't so much using language to whitewash the practice as the troublesome tendency to turn a blind eye until someone becomes persona non grata.
Dont blame any private company that its not overstepping its legal requirements and adding risks and costs to their business. Its like blaming a guy, any guy, heck all HN we dont pay more taxes than we have to pay, it goes to good things and is moral no?
I also think the right and good for society means addressing crimes in a timely manner, which likely means more auditing by independent bodies. Punishing someone for a crime that happened 7+ years ago may feel good, but it is meaningless for a couple of reasons. Should we be punishing people who have reformed? And for those who don't reform, should we be letting criminal behaviour occur across multiple decades?
And storage costs.
Yup. With every data breach, HN is full of (correct, imo) comments about how tech companies should treat private data as a liability and prune it aggressively.
You go look at mature businesses and you'll find that they do exactly this.
Edtech in particular tends to be pretty conscious of just never having the data in the first place. PII for minors is radioactive.
Please step into the shredder, sir.
It's not personal–it's just policy.
Company finds 7 year old customer records with PII, location data, etc..: We're going to need a bigger production hard drive!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat#Transfer_agents_and_es...
You can argue where to draw the line, but arguing that there shouldn’t be a line at all is absurd
But after 2 decades for a financial account, I'd assume any recovery as a gift rather than a right.
I doubt they even knew what was going on
Having a universal rule is about the only way to ensure decisions aren’t being made for other reasons and that they comply with your privacy standards.
Details please! That is really interesting.
I have lost two bank accounts to these shenanigans cz I moved countries.
now I just view bank accounts as temporal - I have them for a period of time. & at a certain point in time in they disappear like snapchat photos.
In several EU countries the limit is about 6 to 7 years. Which coincides with what many banks allow to go back in time to fetch the statements (at least without additional costs).
I think that is fair. The question though is: why are my taxpayers dollars paying for incompetent public servants that only realize more than 20 years after the facts that documents were falsified? I don't want my public servants to be crybabies after they fucked up: instead I want them to discover fraudsters in a reasonable timeframe.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...
I couldn't agree with the guy more, when he says:
>> when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees
But that seems to be exactly the sane logic that old Jeff Bezos is spending his life and his billions trying to find a hack around. I'm still not clear who Amazon's customers will be if everyone's unemployed and AI and robots have taken all the middle class jobs... oppressive governments, I guess.
Great piece, and thanks for posting it.
Sanction Deloitte Cyprus: don't ever except any paperwork from them again. "Sovereign state", my ass...
And so it's actually easier to spot this fraud than to conduct it. What you need is people willing to go look and people willing to prosecute it even though that's uncomfortable because these crooks always have powerful friends.
Ultimately the bigger problem is the Big Four themselves. They are obviously Too Big To Fail and three of them are based in a single place, London. I believe that the Paris MOU provides us a model for how to fix this in the medium term but I've seen no political will to even look at the problem, much less address it.
i miss being able to donate my liabilities away.
there's no way to absolve yourself from the murder machine anymore.
The billionaire class made patriotism right-wing coded, thus dirty. They treat the borders as fluid as the millions of migrants they push through them.
They obviously haven't done anything wrong then.
Things change when the cost-benefit analysis moves. If you apply the law strictly and effectively, the behaviour will adjust.
It would actually be reasonable if this was headline was news to Abramovich. I expect there are a bunch of standard services rendered to wealthy Russians and they just all use the same guy, who is known to get good results and no-one ever asks why. It is quite likely that there are a small group of fixers who maintain networks for certain geopolitical in-groups. They probably have excellent connections to people like Jeffery Epstein too. No surprise if the Russian circuit is actually flouting western law directly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_named_in_the_Pa...
For those who don't know, Cyprus is widely regarded as one of Europe's tax havens. And, of cause, Deloitte has offices there.
It hardly seems surprising (nor damning) to have one in Cyprus.
Various controversies relating to bailouts after the financial crisis, the rise of anti money laundering controls in the late 2010s, and the Ukraine invasion have severed many of the ties but Abramovich was just one of many to take advantage in the past.
https://www.politico.eu/article/cyprus-is-losing-its-russia-... has a reasonable summary of how the relationship developed.
Deloitte Cyprus is a separate legal entity from all the other (separate, legal) Deloitte entities precisely so any consequences of tax evasion resulting from the...em...lax oversight in Cyprus don't impact all the other things called 'Deloitte'.
- You created an LLC in Cyprus and transferred some IP (usually a trademark) to it
- You licensed that IP to your LLC in an EU country for the amount that basically erased any profit that LLC made
- Cypriot LLCs were not taxed on non-Cyprus income
- Each of non-resident director (or board member, I don't remember) of a Cypriot LLC was not taxed on first 400k euro of income from those LLCs. Double taxation deals Cyprus had protected you from being taxed on that income back home.
I know this is no longer possible with Cyprus, but a variation of that is now happening with e.g. many EU clothing brands having their brand ownership transferred to Egyptian LLCs.
1. It was usable for small-medium companies, because the amount you avoided taxes on was 400k euro times number of people you involved in the scheme as board members.
2. It avoided taxation entirely and not just shifted tax burden to the country with lower rates.
3. It allowed the money to immediately return to the country where the profit originated in without any tax consequences. There is a reason why tech giants are sitting on a lot of cash.
This scheme was unique, because it was available to small fish allowing nullify taxes on the first 400k euro of income (or multiple if you got more people to help you).
Similar ones, available to large corporations, are very much still possible, but they are getting more and more pushback.
An article like like this could be auto-generated with anybody's name.
I don’t want to defend anyone involved in the allegations, and don’t personally think they’re above shady business dealings, I just don’t like usual sensationalist “reporting” - essentially advertising like this and how people eat it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deloitte
Treason by British citizens against the British state. If you have to charge the CEO or board, so be it, there is a British citizen who is liable here.
There's a tension between having a brand that reflects trust and institutional rigor and avoiding liability for the actions of partners in some far flung jurisdiction.
Mind-boggling what people and corporations knew and did in the shadows while we cheered on and cheer on their holdings.
Isn't that their core business?