Thursday 15 February 2018

Laundering out the taint

Last week billionaire investor George Soros gave 400,000 pounds (€450,000, $550,000) to the anti-Brexit group "Best for Britain." This should be not particularly noteworthy, as the Leave campaign had received over 24 million pounds from some of Britain's richest people: Among them right-wing UK Independence Party financier Arron Banks, investment billionaire Peter Hargreaves and hedge fund manager Crispin Odey. The ultra-rich detest the European Union, probably because its rules impede their quest to become even richer.

So what is a few hundred thousand from Soros? The finance tycoon is of Hungarian and Jewish descent and that seems to change everything. When Nick Timothy, former adviser to Theresa May, kicked off a campaign in Brexit-supporting newspaper The Telegraph, a heated debate ensued over whether or not he had used anti-Semitic tropes, prompting comparisons with the smear campaign against Soros in Hungary.

Hungarian Prime Minsiter Viktor Orban clearly uses the EU and Soros as punching bags and an excuse for his increasingly right-wing radical politics. But British headlines triggered by Soros' donation did not fall far short in venom, either: "Man who 'broke Bank of England' backing secret plot to thwart Brexit" wrote The Telegraph, which described him as a "rich gambler … accused of meddling in nation's affairs." And the Daily Mail called it "tainted money." So why is Soros' money more tainted than that of other, Brexit-supporting billionaires? The suspicion is all too obvious.

Soros, however, is not defeated that easily. Instead, he donated another 100,000 pounds to "Best for Britain" and in the Mail on Sunday deplored "the toxic attacks" against him and his foundation. Welcome to the wonderful new world of global Britain after Brexit.
From Deutsche Welle's Brexit diary.

Good question. Why suggest that Soros' money is more tainted than all that pro-Brexit money? If it's not simple anti-Semitism, maybe it's just that the Soros money hasn't been laundered like some of the pro-Brexit money.

Such as the money Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) found to throw at the Brexit campaign in other parts of the UK. Money that according to the DUP's own accounts, the DUP couldn't have afforded and which was later found to have come from a group called the Constitutional Research Council (CRC), an Unincorporated Association, the sort of entity often used as fronts for secret donations. Like so much of the money that bought Brexit, its ultimate source remains a mystery.

No "taint" there - just dark money laundered whiter than white.

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