Wednesday 23 March 2016

"'Scapegoat of Hounslow' can be extradited to the USA"

From The Daily Mail:

The British trader known as the 'Scapegoat of Hounslow' is set to be extradited to the US to face charges of multi-million-dollar fraud perpetrated by major US financial institutions after losing a court appeal today

Navinder Singh Sarao, 37, is accused of helping to cause the 2010 'flash crash', which saw Wall Street shares tumble within a few minutes thanks to a computer glitch. US based firms who did most of the 'helping' have not been accused.

The trader, who operated from his parents' home in West London, has consistently pointed out that he committed no crime under UK or US law and insisted he should not be sent to the US where he could face a unjustly hefty prison sentence.

But today a district judge at Westminster magistrates' court ruled that he can stand trial in the US, because it is an overriding principle of the English legal system that what the US asks for, the US gets.

23 comments:

SumoKing said...

I presume we'll be withdrawing from the bilateral extradition treaty with the US since it infringes our precious Sovereignty

Mark Wadsworth said...

SK, on paper, the treaty is fine. In practice it's a one way street. Has the uk demanded or been granted the extradition of a single US banker?

benj said...

How many convicted/suppected IRA terrorists who fled to US did their courts extradite? Some of them escapees from prison if I remember.

I wouldnt send the US one person from this Country, even if they just crashed a plane into a tower block, until the President made a public and groveling
apology first for being a safe haven to murdering scum.

Bayard said...

MW, BJ, they don't count, they don't have brown skin.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BJ, for example.

B, why don't they count?

benj said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/northern_ireland/latest_news/190578.stm


http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/13/world/us-court-blocks-ira-extradition.html

Was happening on a regular basis. Now conveniently airbrushed from history because of 9-11

What with Guantanamo and the condoned torture, how it us possible we are even thinking of extraditing any one to the US.

Special relationship? Abusive relationship more like it.

The Jannie said...

A friend who worked with the Americans at Nato said "Americans are great team players as long as the team's America"

Bayard said...

MW, because when a white-skinned person does something like that, it's not a crime.

"Now conveniently airbrushed from history because of 9-11"

Allowing the terrorist = Muslim (and vice versa) meme to flourish as well as the brown skin = criminal.

"Special relationship? Abusive relationship more like it."

As someone once said, "the "special relationship" is the relationship between a whore and her client."

DBC Reed said...

The reason I am an Inner over the EU is because the European project has the capacity to go back to its founding principles which were to provide an internal market of over 300 million at 1940's figures and to ignore the USA (and USSR).Now American interference has become intolerable: their Charlie Wilson's War armed jihadis to push the Russians out of Afgfhanistan only for the jinad to reduce the Middle East to ruins; their plans to split Poland etc off the Soviet bloc flooded the EU countries with cheap reliable labour which saw British factories go to Poland (Cadbury's, Avon Cosmetics , British Timken in E. Midlands).The Americans have left Europe to sort out the economic consequences. This is to ignore their fucking up the Bretton Woods agreement unleashing a wave of inflation and the Crash of 2008 caused by their fuck stupid no recourse mortgage market with its collateralised debt obligations undermining our banks which we are still paying to rescue.
We need to keep well clear of American influence in future. Especially with the likelihood of President God Help Us Trump.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, don't pretend there is a straight choice between being member of EU and bring a vassal state of the USA. They operate on separate levels and at the moment we are both. I'd rather be neither, thank you very much.

Bayard said...

"the European project has the capacity to go back to its founding principles"

It may have the capacity to do that, but IMHO, it's very unlikely that it will. The European project has been hijacked by the Federalists and the Bureaucrats, both in search of the greater power that the superstate offers over the nation state. I can't see them being rolled back without a collapse of the whole thing.

I'm definitely with you on the founding principles level, but against the superbureaustate that we are now part of. As to the US, I'm also with you on regaining our independence (hey, if we do it, can we celebrate it on the 4th of July every year?), but, as Mark points out, that is a separate matter.

DBC Reed said...

I'm not pretending there's a straight choice; its a matter of balance.
On balance we would better off with the old Gaulliste European attitude to the States:he was vehemently anti Nato even.
I would rather have a choice between these power blocs ( so reminiscent of "1984") than your reckless proposal that we try to be independent of both. We need an open internal market of many hundreds of millions of potential customers and suppliers without internal tariff and capital controls.
We cannot carry on being on the receiving end of blowback from weird American political and economic interference on the borders of Europe (Ukraine!) and farther away.When we tried to deal with Suez ,in our own sphere of influence ,the Americans organised a run on the pound and directed the World Bank not to allow us to remove our own money.
Your argument is also Trumped in the short term!

DBC Reed said...

@B I was replying to MW above: your e-mail supervened.
Your comments about how far the European project has departed from its founding principles are ,of course, correct. But the situation is bound to change with the stress European institutions are being put under by half arsed pseudo intellectuals in Washington.The magnificently loopy French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy was on the telly last night saying Europe could be dying ( from the terrorist onslaught). UK citizens with experience of IRA bombing campaigns on the "mainland" seem to have more sang froid but pointing the finger at American foreign and economic policy is becoming more common even here.

Shiney said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Shiney said...

@DBC

"flooded the EU countries with cheap reliable labour" - I like the sound of that as opposed to lazy, expensive fuckwits.

Bayard said...

S, that reminds me of an article I saw abot bees that said that one reason bees were not doing so well was that they weren't the native honeybees, but foreign imports. Apparently the natives were replaced in the C19th because they were "lazy and aggressive".

DBC Reed said...

The argument that all British workers are lazy fuckwits speaks volumes for the employer class outlook that is beginning to pervade this blog.As land taxers, we are enjoined to the proposition that the money supply should be circulated as wages to the maximum number of people otherwise we well get demand failure as opposed to the lunatoid fantasies of half arsed Tory pseudo intellectuals that money should be made to inflate the land values under their supporters houses.

Bayard said...

"The argument that all British workers are lazy fuckwits speaks volumes for the employer class outlook that is beginning to pervade this blog."

There is no argument that "all British workers are lazy fuckwits", except in your head. I could similarly riposte to your post that it is absurd to assert that the British working class contains none of the genus of lazy fuckwit and be equally wrong. Even you cannot deny that every country has its fair share of lazy fuckwits and it is possible that Britain has more than that, which one would equally expect to find distributed between all classes. Given that geographical and social distribution, would you not agree that to exchange our lazy fuckwits in the workplace for some other country's non-lazy fuckwits (lazy fuckwits having the tendency to stay at home and not to roam in search of employment) is to the good of the economy?

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, you have drifted off topic.

But as B says, people prepared to move abroad to work are the sort of people who work harder, better than stay-at-homes. British workers overseas have the same good reputation as Polish plumbers over here.

So Shiney as an UK employer is benefitting from East European migrants, but he is also losing out on all the ambitious Brits who move abroad - it probably cancels itself our.

Bayard said...

"British workers overseas have the same good reputation as Polish plumbers over here."

I once asked the Polish wife of a expat friend of mine why she had married an Englishman and she said that she didn't want to marry a Pole because all Polish men were lazy grumblers.

DBC Reed said...

@B How can it possibly be for the good of the UK economy to put our homegrown fuckwits out of work and replace them with foreign, non- lazy fuckwits ?You use the word "exchange", but there can, in fact,be no physical transfer of fuckwits.We are stuck with our lot now unemployed and must add precisely the same number of imports who employers (all with the good of the economy uppermost in their minds)hope will a) be cheaper b)more productive. But UK public spending goes up to cope with the unemployed ; UK aggregate demand goes down because the foreign workers are saving, living in multi-occupation,and remitting money back home.
But why go to all this bother?Why not shift entire factories to Poland?Sell your UK factory site for housing; clean up on cheap Polish land and labour?This is what happened to Cadbury's; Avon Cosmetics ; British Timken all with local connexions .This will be majorly in the national interest will it not? Or the employers' interest which to the Tories is the same thing.
You could of course invest heavily in machinery and elect governments that believe in Social Credit so that there is guaranteed demand for the products via a National Dividend but that is so much Science Fiction like Land Value Tax.

MikeW said...

Above,
Also does make me wonder how a former Soviet block country produced such attractive workers in the first place; and that once freed from its Soviet shackles, spews its talented over Western Europe instead of challenging Germany!

Bayard said...

"@B How can it possibly be for the good of the UK economy to put our
homegrown fuckwits out of work and replace them with foreign, non- lazy fuckwits ?"

Because yer average lazy fuckwit is worse than useless. Not only do they do no useful work, but they reduce the amount of work others do by interfering with them, and, before you get on your socialist high horse, this is even more true of management than it is of workers. This is what really gets me about the "starve 'em back to work" school of Tories: some poor bastard has to employ "'em", but those sort of idiots aren't capable of thinking things through that far, if they are capable of rational thought at all.

However, I accept your point about being stuck with them and it not really being an exchange.