I should declare my own position. I campaigned to stay in Europe. I spoke at a couple of public meetings. I talked to those who would listen. And over all my impressions is that there was very little listening going on. There was instead a barely restrained hostility. People may not always have shouted over each other. No, no we are far too democratic for that. No, we waited with rictus smiles until the ‘other side’ had paused for breath and then shouted past them. Is shouting past better than shouting over?

Each side seemed uninterested in finding out why the other side felt as they felt. There were plenty of assumptions about what people felt or thought or feared. But no concern to get behind the shouting and try to understand, ‘what is it that you fear?’   Each side seemed keen to paint the other as variously racist, or stupid or right-wing. And of course there were some of all of those.

There were, it is quite true, noisome and emboldened racists and closet Xenophobes who were gleefully paraded and quoted by The Sun and The Guardian alike, though for opposite purposes. On the other hand there has also been, more recently, a revolting fungal efflorescence of  outraged condescension describing the moral and educational deficiencies of those who voted to Leave.

Here is one recent example By Laurie Penny in The New Statesman from 24 June, called “I want my Country Back.” I shall quote from it extensively so that no one thinks I am just picking only the bits that suit me.  Please read the whole thing to assure yourself I am not ‘taking things out of context’.

Laurie Penny begins by describing the vote as a victory of,

…prejudice, propaganda, naked xenophobia and callous fear-mongering have won out over the common sense…

Straight out of the gate, Ms Penny suggests that Remain was guided by ‘common sense’, while Leave and its voters were ruled by prejudice, naked xenophobia or craven fear. They are also, she lets us know , very stupid.

“Well done turkeys. Santa’s on his way.

Apparently the referendum was a painful catastrophe of good people with common sense, being smothered by a mob of stupid people. But what kind of stupid people? Does the author have an inkling where this stupidity lurks? Well, yes she does.

It was a referendum on the modern world, and yesterday the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain voted out,…

The parochial are to blame. So not the urban metropolitans who write for the New Statesmen and live, as she tells us she does, in London? No not them. But parochial people. People who, apparently, are governed by their lizard-brain.  An interesting sentence isn’t it? Those who voted ‘out’ are painting with a metaphor suggesting they are lizard-like. A lower form of life that has not got the higher mammalian ability to care for others.

And this lizard-brained, lack of caring goes along with a selfish concern with their own personal welfare.

Leave voters are finding they care less about immigration now that their pension pots are under threat.

Such unattractive people. And the author is afraid of them. Seems to be keen we should all be frightened of them and their nasty plans for the future.

I’m frightened that those who wanted “their” country back will get their wish, and it will turn out to be a hostile, inhospitable place for immigrants, ethnic minorities, queer people…

Us and them.  Always a good rhetorical move. For someone who seems to want to claim the caring high- ground for herself, as opposed to the lizard-brained lower forms of ‘them’, she seems quite quick to resort to ‘them and us’. No room here for different reasons, different thinking, different world views. The author seems above all to want to control how we see the debate. She wants to have her description of who ‘us’ and ‘them’ are, what ‘we’ and ‘they’ are like, what ‘they’ think, why ‘they’ think it, and upon what nasty grounds ‘they’ decided. And that is what bothers me most.

This article is not simply a lament from one side of an argument. It is a thinly veiled exercise in condescending bigotry. The bigot’s eye view of all those who she lumps together in her glib and condescending description of parochial, lizard-brained, stupid people who are full of fear and empty of concern except for their pensions. In short, craven stupid lumpenproles.

But enough about them. What about her?

But the thing is – I want my country back too….I want to wake up tomorrow in a country where people are kind, and tolerant, and decent to one another.

Which the Leave people don’t want? She doesn’t say that. That would be inelegant. No she simply sets up the dichotomy. Her readers can fill in the rest in private.

I want to go back to a Britain where hope conquers hate; where crabbed, cowed racism and xenophobia don’t win the day; where people feel they have options and choices in life….

Just a little reminder of the Leavers and the country they are arranging for us – hate-filled, crabbed, cowed racist and xenophobic.  Yes. Let those Leavers get in charge and this is what we’ll all get. Unlike the future if we let the author and her friends in Remain be in charge – which will be one where we all have options and choices.

Options and choices.  I have heard those words before. To me they smell of Blaire and Cameron and the debt -fuelled fictions of the last thirty years of Thatcher and sons.

That country, of course, is fictional.

No! Really?

But it’s no less so than the biscuit-tin, curtain-twitching, tea-on-the-lawn-with-your-white-friends-from-the-Rotary-Club fantasy Britain the other side have been plugging for years,..

Ah, so the lizard brained cowards are allied with White, small-town Tories?  I think this is a reference to John Major’s cricket playing idyll.  So our choices according to Ms Penny is a ‘Remain’ Britain filed with options and choices or a ‘Leave’ Britain, which is some pastiche of small town suburban and rural England where stupid working class people vote like turkeys for tea-on-the-lawn- white people.  I think Ms Penny might need to get out of London a little more often and widely.

But Ms Penny is not stupid. She does eventually get round to something approximating an insight.

This was not just a vote against Europe, but a vote against Westminster and the entirety of mainstream politics. Every political party campaigned hard for a “Remain” vote – but Britain still chose to Leave, even if we’re regretting it this morning.

Now surely there is a realisation there, at odds with all that preceded it. A glimmer of understanding beyond the rhetoric and generalisations. Perhaps there were some ‘leave’ voters who voted because, on balance, they thought doing so would do more to shake the hegemonic certainties of neoliberal globalism that all the major parties surrendered to a generation ago? All the same parties that were then arguing for Remain. They could of course be wrong. But they would have voted for very different reason to those Ms Penny was so quick and so confident to ascribe to them.

But she just can’t seem to imagine the ‘Leave’ voters could be so thoughtful. No ‘thoughtful’ is something she seems to want to reserve for ‘Remain’ people. ‘Leave’ get to be turkeys and cowards.  ‘Leave’ are not to be accorded such thoughtfulness, because they live in places – and lets cut to the chase – they live in the North – I mean, don’t they! Or at least not in places where lovely people have options and choices. And, from the description below, they are evidently working class and quite possibly old! Ugh!

There are huge areas of post-industrial decline and neglect where people are more furious than Cameron and his ilk could possibly understand, areas where any kind of antiestablishment rabble-rousing sounds like a clarion call. In depressed mountain villages and knackered seaside towns and burned-out former factory heartlands across the country, ordinary people were promised that for once, their vote would matter, that they could give the powers that be a poke in the eye.

Yes! Now we’re getting to it. They’re just a rabble. A rabble roused from their depressed, knackered, burned out lives in sea-side towns, former factory heart lands (that’s London chattering class code for the midlands and north).  Yep. The chattering class, when they get together and do democracy, they do it with panache and style. When the rest of us do it we’re just a knackered, depressed rabble.

I was born in London. Perhaps the city can secede.

I am sure this was said with a degree of flippancy. But to the knackered rabble of the north it sounds like a glimpse of a true desire. A little hint of the real us and them.

And then finally we get to some hint of analysis. And how thread-bare it is.

British people are used to being lied to by incompetent spivs in the name of “protecting the economy”.

Unarguably true so far.

Unfortunately, this time the spivs were dead right….more damage has already been done to our economy, to our prospects and to the job market than years of open borders ever could have.

Said with such breath-taking brevity of thought. Whose economy?  The question so rarely asked.  The stocks and shares economy?  That economy that the rest of us keep bailing out and paying for with austerity? That economy?  The broken and dysfunctional economy? The economy of ‘choices’ based mostly on debt.

Is it not an ‘option’ to wish to deal such an undead monster a blow? Why so certain that the spivs are right?  I happen to think the spivs are wrong. And I say that not because I am a depressed, craven xenophobe, but because I have thought about it.

Don’t get me wrong. Remember I argued for Remain. But I dislike the bigoted generalizations and crude stereotyping of the Leave voters. I met some of them and some of them were thoughtful and considered, decent people. Who voted according to a logic which Ms Penny is either ignorant of or finds inconvenient to admit exists.

I agree with the author when she says,

…the Conservatives have spent six years systematically defunding the health service and cutting public spending to the bone. Brexit will mean more of that, not less.

When I spoke for Remain I suggested it was not simply about what people wanted to leave, but that they should think hard about what they would be left with. In this case, as Laurie Penny says, the choice they made has delivered us all to a Tory government that can hope to do as it wants free of any restrain at all. I agree with this. I think we are now facing the battle our times. The fight for democracy itself. But all this vote has done is bring the battle nearer.  It was upon us anyway. The outlines of the fight are perhaps less easy to ignore that’s all.

And this battle, THE battle of our time, will require a courage and a faith in each other that we are squandering with every word of this bilious brexit name-calling.  Just because the vote went against what I felt was better, what Ms Penny is certain is better, does not mean, as she concludes,  that this nation must somehow re-find the,

…capacity for tolerance, a new resilience, a way to recover ourselves and remember our common humanity.

I personally resent the implication that simply because the vote did not go as she decided it must, that somehow common humanity is endangered. Common humanity is not the exclusive preserve of ‘Remain’ voters.

If you can bare it one last time.

I want my country back. I want my scrappy, tolerant, forward-thinking, creative country,

I am all these things. So are my friends. We are all still here. Living in the North. Some of us are even working class!

…the country of David Bowie, not Paul Daniels; the country of Sadiq Khan, not Boris Johnson; the country of J K Rowling, not Enid Blyton; the country not of Nigel Farage, but Jo Cox.

Let me just get this out.  You do not have to like Paul Daniels if you don’t like David Bowie. Ms Penny should refrain from endlessly deciding what the range of choices are and what you must be like if you’re not like her.  I don’t particularly like either Sadiq Khan or Boris Johnson. And I wouldn’t chose to read either JK Rowling or Enid Blyton.  I have completely other tastes, other concerns, other ideas. Ms Penny might not realise it but there are other world views not defined by her narrow views.

Britain, like everywhere else, has always had its cringing, fearful side, its cruel delusions, its racist fringe movements, its demagogues preying on the dispossessed.

True. It has also had its condescending, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, leave-it-to-your-betters pundits who get themselves in a terrible state whenever they think the great unwashed, working-class are in danger of interfering in a decision their self-declared social betters feel should definitely be left to them.

I am sure Ms Penny is well-intentioned and essentially good-hearted. The problem is, at least in this article, she comes across as feeling she, and those in her in-group, are the only ones who are. Her article reeks of the assumption that  ‘Remainers’ are well intentioned, whereas “leavers’ are either malign or simply stupid, selfish and craven.

I think we would do well to remind ourselves that not every “remain’ voter thinks as Ms Penny’s does. And not every ‘Leave’ voter is as her stereotype. There are people who thought there was no good choice in this referendum. People who thought remaining in a Europe that is being corrupted by corporate lackeys is only marginally better than a Uk that is already very definitely corrupted by corporate lackeys. People who thought all the arguments over lost sovereignty were misdirection, distracting people from the fact that far more of our sovereignty will begin away by signing the CETA, TTIP and TISA trade deals than was ever given to Europe.

None of our problems were on the ballot. None would have been addressed let alone solved by the referendum no matter which way it was decided.

All our battles are still before us. The real question, perhaps the only question, is whether we descend into the spite-filled bigotry of ‘Us and Them’ or chose to actually listen to and understand the realities of each others lives and fears. And in so doing re-find all the things that people tell us we have lost.

When we hear of a bank caught money laundering there is a tendency, gently encouraged I think, by the banks and the media, to think of it as we would if we heard of someone in our street having been caught fencing stolen goods.  We would think – ‘Ah, so there is the crook among us’, and by unspoken extension assume that since he’s the crook the rest of us aren’t.  Not unreasonable when dealing with people, but entirely misplaced when thinking of banks.

That might seem a rather sweeping generalization but it isn’t.  The drugs business is huge and mostly in our countries. The drug producing nations are relatively minor players in the financial side of the drug business. Most of the drug money is made , moved and stored/banked/invested outside the producing countries but inside ours.

Latest official figures estimate,

 In the 2005 World Drugs Report the UNODC put the value [of the global drug trade] at US$13bn at production level, $94bn at wholesale level and US$332bn based upon retail prices.

The critical thing to note here is not the figures, large as they are, but the careful break down of the trade into production, wholesale and retail. There is the tendency in the news and newspapers to talk just about ‘the drug trade’. This piece of laziness is useful because it conjures up pictures of Mexican murders and Colombian jungles.  Rather than what it should conjure up, images of smart bankers in London and New York.

Let’s look at the breakdown more carefully. Production is the third world part of the trade. It is also the smallest by far. It is the total money involved in making the stuff, paying the farmers and processors as well as those who begin the shipment towards the export centres and, of course those who have to be paid off to make sure the war on drugs is never won. Only a part of that $13 billion is actual profit. But it is still13 billion which is far too big to stuff under any mattress. So we can be sure that the bulk of those billions is banked.

That means in the producing nations there must be businesses willing to accept the drug money (Casinos are a favourite) , a network of businesses who will provide services and products such as cellophane and cardboard suppliers, trucks and boat rental companies, a whole range of  import/export companies and, of course,  all those up-market professionals like accountants who work in them. Whenever I go to Lima I laugh at the sheer brazenness of streets where for every casino there is a bank just across from it.

Like any commodity, once the drugs make their way to the export centres they move from Production to Wholesale. At some point a wholesaler, who has deep pockets, the ability to store and move the product and contacts in retail, gets involved. Of course this may be part of the same business empire that also produces the stuff. Many businesses are vertically integrated. But it is worth still making the distinction, not only because different people and services come in to play but also because a different set of financial institutions must be called upon.

Once the drugs move countries local banks are of no use. The business now needs the services of international banks who can transfer money across the world and into banks in other nations. Needless to say these banks tend to be big banks – our banks. So to give an example, cocaine produced in Peru will first use local banks. They will be banks with local branches such as Banco de Crédito del Perú and BBVA Continental. Some of you may read that last name and be thinking, ‘That’s not a local bank that’s a Spanish bank’. I know, I know, bear with me. We’ll come back to them soon.

Once we get to the export centre we have new expenses and business to conduct. We need to charter planes and boats. Remember at this point we’re not yet importing in to the retail network inside the US and Europe. We are transferring the drugs from the producer nation into the wholesale transport routes. For Peruvian cocaine much of this now goes through Brazil and Venezuela and then over to Africa’s West coast. That coast, from Mauritania down to Togo, is a perfect drug route because it is close to S. America, thus smaller planes can make the crossing, has little coastal policing and is by and large an area where the three currencies of dollars, drugs and violence are all accepted as payment. As The Globe and Mail reported earlier this year,

An investigation by the United Nations drug-control agency has estimated that up to 2,200 pounds of cocaine is flown into Guinea-Bissau every night, and more arrives by sea. About 50 drug lords from Colombia are based in Guinea-Bissau, controlling the cocaine trade and bribing the military and politicians to protect it, the UN investigation found.

Across the region, an estimated 50 tons of cocaine is transported through West Africa every year, mostly from Colombia and Venezuela, destined for the lucrative street trade in Europe.

The report continued,

Another key drug route is northern Mali,…The smugglers in Mali transport huge quantities of drugs through the Sahara desert and eventually to Mediterranean ports, where they are shipped to Europe.

The most dramatic sign of the Sahara smuggling route was the discovery of a burned-out wreck of a Boeing 727 jet airplane in a remote corner of northern Mali in 2009.

According to UN officials, the Boeing carried a cargo of cocaine and other illegal goods from Venezuela. Its crew landed it on a makeshift runway in Mali’s desert, and then unloaded as much as 10 tonnes of cocaine. After the plane was emptied, the traffickers apparently set it on fire, either because it was damaged or because it wasn’t needed any more.

That is wholesale, ‘drug style’. It requires big money, which in turn requires big banks. You cannot rent or buy a jet with cash. You have to have a business which can deal with such things as permits, maintenance and fuel companies. That business, even if it doesn’t have an office, will need a bank account.

When you are in Lima and your client in is Guinea-Bissau, you don’t exchange paper bags of greasy cash. You arrange bank transfers. Which means a smart, well educated man in an air conditioned office has to know that, in Guinea-Bissau there is someone who needs to pay another someone in Lima or Venezuela many millions of dollars or Euros. What does he think? A large rental of deck chairs in a holiday resort? I don’t think so.

That banker will then be asked to move that money from Guinea-Bissau to some where else. Probably to some other bank.

So who are the banks of Africa’s west coast? Well Portugal has a big presence in Angola. The President, his friends and his daughter own and run most of the banking sector as I wrote about in The Eurofiscal Corruption Contest – The Portuguese Entry. France too has a certain presence in the Francophone countries. A more recent and interesting player is Ecobank. Now, it is not the done thing to ever point a finger at Ecobank because it is the only pan African bank run by Africans and as such is seen as a shining example of Africans asserting their independence and struggling to give Africa what it deserves, its own financial muscle. And I agree with all of that in principle. But a bank run by Africans is no more nor less likely to be targeted by criminals, and to harbour its own criminals, than a western bank.

EcoBank operates in 30 nations in Africa with a very heavy presence on the West coast from Mali to Togo. But it is not all African. Its largest shareholder, holding nearly 19% of the bank, is a financial vehicle registered, I think, in South Africa, created and run by Renaissance Direct Investment. Renaissance Direct Investment is part of the Renaissance Group . Renaissance Group is a Russian company, which prides itself on being a leading, if not the, leading investment company in Africa, but which is run, half and half, by Russians and White Westerners.  Not that being white or  a westerner is a crime. But nevertheless Renaissance, a Russian investment bank, owns 19% of EcoBank. Again not a crime.

Ecobank is a major presence in all the countries where one of the largest sources of cash is Drug money. (The other in those countries is oil.) And that cash money must be banked somewhere. Cash is NOT put in bags and transported to Europe. It is banked where the drugs land. And remember the wholesale slice of the global drug trade is estimated at $94  Billion a large slice of which flows through Ecobank’s patch.

So, for the lawyers who may be reading, let me be very clear I am not accusing Ecobank of any wrong-doing at all. I am merely noting that a vast amount of drug money is around in the nations where Ecobank among others (such as the Angolan/Portuguese banks) operate. It could be that despite doing business in a river of dirty money not one single cent of it passes into Ecobank. This would be much the same argument as was put to me many years ago when I visited the City Police anti-money laundering division in the City of London who told me with absolutely straight faces that despite London being the centre of international banking, not a single penny of laundered or drug money entered the City banks. I kid you not that is what they said to me. I asked them if they thought I was on day release from a special needs school. They did not laugh.

Now when we left the drugs, they were in Guinea-Bissau and the money was banked in whatever banks were on hand with large enough operations to be able to handle the amounts.  Now, the drugs are put on lorries and moved north across the Sahara. The money needs to be moved through shell companies and either invested in lucrative African developments, or shifted to some more ‘respectable’ financial centre where more investment opportunities are on offer.

The drugs will head to the coast of the Med. One popular route is up to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Mellilo which I wrote about in Money Laundering and Drugs in Romania and Spain. These enclaves are small, cause all sorts of immigration troubles for Spain, make a mockery of the Spanish government’s righteous indignation over Gibraltar, but are held on to tenaciously. Why? Well a clue might be that they are stuffed with branches of Spain’s major banks all offering funds transfer and private banking services in a place where nearly all the actual residents are dirt poor. So whose money are the banks banking? Who in Ceuta or Mellio has so much spare cash that their money needs ‘transferring’? And who feels the need for ‘private wealth management services’?  I don’t know, but the bankers in those places, in those ‘respectable banks’, do. They speak to the mystery people who have all the cash that needs banking, meet them, shake their hands and bank their money, knowing what that money is. And their colleagues across in Europe accept it in turn and mix it safely in to the world of European banking and finance.

In a liquidity crisis a cash business is the kind you want to attract to your bank. And drugs are the largest cash business in the world.

BBVA and Santander are the big Spanish banks and BBVA has appeared already in this story, back in Lima.  Funny that.  While Santander and BBVA also have large operations in …Mexico. No drug connection there I can think of. Except, of course, that both Citi and Wachovia laundered very large amounts of drug money in Mexico. How could I forget. See also Money Laundering and the Moral World of Bankers. And then of course there is HSBC.

Now we are on the subject of properly Western banks lets move finally to retail. The retail end of the global drug trade is by far the largest, at an estimated $332 billion.  Billion with a B. Now given that no one pays for their drugs on their Visa card, most if not all of this is cash. As the money moves up the chain the piles of cash become too large, plus, what the drug businesses want to do with all this money, is also too ‘legit’ for cash to be an option. So ALL of it has to be banked one way or another. Trunks of cash are not exported from the UK back to Lima. Nor is there a river of cash flowing from America to Colombia or Mexico. Some? yes. Much? No. The rest get’s washed in London and New York. And the people who do it are criminals.

They are also very wealthy, very arrogant, and they have friends in government , the police and the judiciary.

Up and down the UK, cash businesses are guilty, every day of accepting drug money in to their cash earnings, banked as their own profits and then ‘paid’ back to the drug pushers minus a percentage. Up and down the country banks accept large cash deposits from pizza shops which are doing unbelievably good business. No one asks. Where there are slot machines or casinos there is money laundering.  Where there is gambling and betting there is money laundering. Accountants launder. Lawyers launder. All of them? Of course not. Enough of them to suggest an endemic culture of criminality in those professions? I belive so and so do others (Take a look at various publications by Prof. Prem Sikka).

A report published by the Home Office in 2006 estimated the UK drugs market to be worth £4.645bn in 2003/4. Most of that £4.6 billion had to have been banked. Not just in one year, but that amount EVERY year. Year after year. That bit does not get talked about so much. £4.6 Billion a year is more than a rogue teller or two. When we get to retail in the West we are NOT just talking about banking a fist full of tenners from a dirty looking user/pusher. We are talking about the people the pushers work for, the people they in turn work for and the businesses that they ‘work for’ or own, which then use that money for ‘legit’ investments, such as buying luxury property in London.

When it was found that Citi had been laundering Mexican drug money, it also revealed how the brother of the then President Salinas, had a private banking agreement with Citi. When the shit hit the fan that banker, Amy Elliot, told her colleagues,

…this goes in the very, very top of the corporation, this was known…on the very top. We are little pawns in this whole thing”

What did Citi do for Salinas? According to the official US government report into the ‘affair’,

Mr. Salinas was able to transfer $90 million to $100 million between 1992 and 1994 by using a private banking relationship formed by Citibank New York in 1992.

The funds were transferred through Citibank Mexico and Citibank New York to private banking investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland. Beginning in mid-1992, Citibank actions assisted Mr. Salinas with these transfers and effectively disguised the funds’ source and destination, thus breaking the funds’ paper trail. Citibank.

More specifically Citi,

• set up an offshore private investment company named Trocca, to hold Mr. Salinas’s assets, through Cititrust (Cayman)9 and investment accounts in Citibank London and Citibank Switzerland;

• waived bank references for Mr. Salinas and did not prepare a financial profile on him or request a waiver for the profile, as required by then Citibank know your customer policy;

• facilitated Mrs. Salinas’s use of another name to initiate fund transfers in Mexico; and

• had funds wired from Citibank Mexico to a Citibank New Yorkconcentration account—a business account that commingles funds from various sources—before forwarding them to Trocca’s offshore Citibank investment accounts.

Know your customer, anti money-laundering requirements?  Don’t make me laugh.

These are the sorts of things that the Spanish Banks and the Portuguese banks and Ecobank, IF they were laundering money, would do for any clients of theirs. Have they?  I have no idea.  Wachovia did. Citi did. HSBC did.

The reality is that drugs are a massive banking business. And it is also a fact that the bulk of that business is done in the industrial nations, in their banks, NOT in the drug producing nations.  The Drugs business is mostly a western business. It’s a banking busness. Not unlike global mining where the mines are in the third world but the mining companies are listed and work in London.

A recent study on the Colombian drug trade reported in The Guardian found

 …that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

If that study is anywhere near accurate then the fact is the drug business is our business. We, the rich West, use it, we finance it, we provide the laundering services for it, and we then use the money it generates to feed the financial system. That money keeps our banks going, especially in ‘hard times. That money is what is used by the financial industry to speculate with, to buy up sovereign assets with, to speculate on food with. That money helps create their bonuses and pays off our politicians in ‘soft donations’ and ‘access to decision makers’.

The drug money laundering business is a staple and important part of global banking. Money laundering is one of the things bankers do well. They should, they practice every day. It is not a one off rogue teller or rogue ofice. It is not something the bank does once and never again. Amex did it many times. HSBC has a history.  You only have to go back to the murkey and bloody AGIP affair to find the same names and the same widespread conspiracy to commit financial and legal crimes. Dig deep enough and you’ll find the names of politicians, senior ones and find yourself meeting some of the people who make sure the truth of such matters does not come out and whose job it is to protect the guilty and do their dirty work.

Drug money, criminal at the start of its journey, is still crminal at its ‘respectsble’ end. Drug Money is criminal and dirty no matter how many times it is laundered, by no matter how many banks. The bankers know this better than anyone. Yet they do it every day, every week, every year and every decade in every major financial centre and everyone knows it.