We recently reported on Interpol's interception of fake CoVid-19 vaccines (here ). It was not the first: Brazil had identified, some weeks earlier, fake Sputnik vaccines. But this is just one aspect to a problem that is undermining both vaccination schemes and, therefore, public health but also undermining the possibility of "vaccination passports."
The Styrian Grand Prix was very misleading. It looked processional, almost pedestrian. But it was far from that. Equally importantly, it wasn't a race of pit-stop strategies. Yes, there were some tyre management strategies employed - and if they demonstrated anything it was that, in general, it doesn't matter what tyres are used in which order and, equally, it isn't critical if drivers burn the tyres early in a stint or at the end. In fact, the only thing about tyres was whether they would determine a one or two stop race.
What really matters is that Red Bull and their soon-to-be-former engine supplier Honda have quietly gone about producing a car that is faster and handles better than the Mercedes. At the Red Bull Ring, Hamilton implied that his only hope for a win was that it would rain. It didn't.
Foster Wheeler Limited a UK registered subsidiary of a complex group, part of which is listed on the USA's NASDAQ and therefore falls within the jurisdiction of many US laws even though it is a Swiss domiciled subsidiary of a UK group. Amongst those is the Foreign Corrupt Payments Act or FCPA. This relates to payments by a person with a US footprint making corrupt payments to persons outside the USA. Foster Wheeler Energy Limited is also part of the same group and is also a UK registered company. That brings its actions squarely within the remit of the Serious Fraud Office, regardless of where those actions take place. Moreover, there are agreements with Ministério Público Federal (‘MPF’), the Comptroller General’s Office (‘CGU’) and the Solicitor General (‘AGU’) in Brazil.
We had an e-mail this morning from Google about our Adsense account. That was a rabbit hole we thought we'd escaped from. But they said they owed us money so we thought we'd claim it.
That's when it all started to go very, very badly wrong.
The USA is, at the best of times, very good at shouting that it's a leader in combating money laundering but it's all mouth and no trousers, most of the time.
Take, for example, the noise it has made about so-called "beneficial owners" of companies, a misuse of the term that goes back to, at least, 1980s Senate Hearings into the laundering of the proceeds of drugs trafficking and the use of shell and offshore companies. 40 years on, the USA has still done nothing about it and all the signs are that nothing is going to happen soon. ADDENDUM: Comment by Jim Richards.
Here's the irony: FinCEN doesn't need to build and maintain a database at all, especially as the law restricts access to the data it holds, so voiding any KYC benefit it may have across the world.
One would have thought that Initial Coin Offerings had been a flash in the pan and already out of fashion. And that may, to a point, be so: their heyday was, of course, three or four years ago.
But the essential problem seems to be that things take a while to filter through so that, when stories reactivate interest, everything old becomes new again, to coin a phrase. So the news that a case relating to conduct in 2017 and 2018 may be the spark that reignites burning embers as some people remember the concept of the ICO and think "that might be a way to help my business that's struggling through the CoVid-19 Pandemic.
There's an old story of the boy who cried wolf: he told villagers that a wolf was coming so often that, when it was true, no one believed him. Mercedes have the opposite problem: they have been so dominant for so long that they could rely on Hamilton's genius and a rock-solid car to win race after race, championship after championship, break record after record.
Nothing in Formula One is easy but getting a great start and bolting out of reach, for so long Mercedes' stock in trade, has made it look simple. And they have been complacent.
It seems that they have failed to develop the thing that wins races when there are competitors: they don't know how to build winning strategies.
The USA's Securities and Exchange Commission has frozen the accounts of a foreign registered fund operated by two US residents.