Oh, the irony ...

Here's one I overlooked from last Saturday's Times:

After vigorous criticism from the European Union (1) and a series of scandals, culminating in the notorious BAE Systems case in which a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation was halted on government orders, Parliament is due to pass one of the most comprehensive laws in the world to stamp out the use of bribes, kickbacks, gifts and corporate corruption to secure contracts, especially overseas (2)... Britain’s tough new legislation will make it an offence for any company to use agents who try to bribe potential customers.

OK, (1) the EU are hardly ones to complain about back-handers and (2) it's the self-same Parliament which halted the BAE case which is now passing a law that would have prevented it from halting the BAE case (which IMHO was quite innocuous in the grander scheme of things). Now, I don't approve of people paying back-handers to government officials to drum up business (it being the thin end of the corporatist wedge) - the problem is how to enforce it/punish it.

Spotting it is relatively easy, of course, if a particular industry benefits disproportionately from a particular piece of government legislation, then alarm bells start ringing. Ah, here we go...

Law firms, accountants and consultants have been quick to seize the market opportunity. The big accounting firms — PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young — are offering courses and seminars to warn their clients of practices that could be illegal. Eversheds, a large law company, has devised an online briefing pack that its clients can customise and install on each employee’s computer...

The symbiotic/parasitic relationship between these large 'professional' firms and the government and the Labour and Tory parties is well documented of course (here's a nice pamphlet from Unison tearing into their involvement with PFI, for example) and apparently law firms derived nearly a quarter of their income from the state, but this is just taking the piss.

As if to ram the point home, right next to it (in the print edition) is an article written by "Robert Wardle ... the former Director of the Serious Fraud Office, who is now a consultant to DLA Piper, the law firm"