Where There's Brass, There's Muck

Rick: How can you close me up?
On what grounds?
Captain Renault:I'm shocked, shocked to find
that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce]
Oh, thank you very much.
[aloud] Everybody out at once!
[Casablanca (1942)]

Here's another angle on the scam that is Carbon Trading. When debit cards were first introduced in the UK I prosecuted several supermarket checkout girls who had been helping themselves to customer's money using the newly introduced cards. The company security officer witness told me that it took their staff under a week from the moment of introduction to work out how to steal using the cards.

It will, therefore, not come entirely as a surprise to learn that the bad guys have worked out how to subvert the European Emissions Trading Scheme to help themselves to loads and loads of money.

What is even less surprising is that they have chosen to use one of the most prevalent scams that exists in the European Union, the so called 'carousel fraud' scheme (also known as 'Missing Trader Fraud').

Given that carousel fraud is so widespread, you would have thought that the EU would have thought twice before making the trade in carbon emissions credits liable to VAT and that they should have thought to make it subject to a special trading tax.

Those of you who know the EU only too well will thus be unsurprised to discover that, yes, they did indeed decide to make it part of the VAT regime. Doubtless the unelected and unaccountable officials of the Brussels Diktat simply saw the word 'Euros' followed by lots of zeros as being the putative take for the Euro Coffers and wet their pants in their haste to batten onto the vast sums that might be accreted to service Le Grand Projet.

Others plainly saw matters differently. The Daily Telegraph gives us an example:

It is a building site, formerly a derelict car park, in a deprived part of West London, where the neon glow of curry houses and late-night grocery stores could not be further from the wealth and glamour of London's financial markets.

Described as a "consulting" business, this is the address of a UK company that has signed up to trade carbon permits under the European Emissions Trading Scheme in Copenhagen. But there is no trace of its existence on the Companies House database.

At the newsagent next door, nobody has ever even heard of emissions trading – the system where companies buy and sell the right to emit carbon dioxide – and there has not been a building there for many years.

That in many ways encapsulates just how simple it is to defraud this scheme, and, indeed, the EU as a whole. For it forcibly reminds us that the EU Court of Auditors has refused for over a decade to sign off the EU accounts on the grounds, inter alia, of the vast amount of fraud within the system. This is but another exemplar of the egregious nature of the European Union.

What the Telegraph report also suggests quite clearly is that the Scheme is not subject to any sort of even the most cursory of checks:

.............hundreds of UK companies selling anything from hair loss treatments to electronics have mysteriously registered to buy and sell carbon permits in the Scandinavian nation – mostly in the last 18 months.

Many give addresses in the regions such as Yorkshire, Lancashire, Essex and other places not known for their links to the world of finance.

This suggests that ten minutes of an investigator's time and a search engine would rapidly reveal the dodgy nature of some of those entities which are registered to tarde under the scheme. It also suggests that no such checking is undertaken.

We are not, of course talking about small potatoes here. The sums involved are those which would keep a small African country afloat, even one (and there are many) with a rampant kleptocrat as President:

Just a few weeks ago, Europol, the cross-border police force, said that carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90% of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn).

Just read that figure again: up to 90% of all such trading in some parts of the EU is fraudulent.

Of course one of the attractions of the scheme is that it involves no tangible goods, merely a set of digital impulses in computers which might be bought and sold at the click of a mouse, unlike the typical carousel fraud which often involved, for example, mobile phones which had a least to be shipped around the EU for the scam to work properly.

Belatedly the levying of VAT is to be ended and replaced by some other impot: cue the sound of a very large stable door being closed after a whole herd of shire horses has bolted through it.

Unless and until more stringent checks are introduced, however, the criminals will find other ways to defraud the taxpayers of the United Kingdom of huge sums of money, indeed billions of pounds at a time when Gordon Brown has so beggared us that we need every penny we can get.

So just as we have seen the splendid stripping bare of the financial interests of the great Dr. Rajendri Pachauri by my blog colleague Richard North at EU Referendum, we are now getting a look at the dirty entrails of the schemes which he and his ilk have foisted upon us. Thus we are able to contemplate two very different scams: the cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming and the Cult of Mammon dancing merrily hand in hand on their way along the street to who knows where and to the general acclamation of a lot of very stupid people.

You really could not make it up.

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