On the morning of May 14, EU competition officials raided oil companies BP, Shell, Statoil and oil price agency Platts, in search of evidence for price colluding. Suspicions are they´ve been fixing the price for crude oil for at least ten years. While we´re waiting for the investigation to tell us if they´re guilty or not (Yes, yes, we are all thinking the same thing here), we can send a happy thought to the lawmakers that decided Europe needs a competition authority with sharp teeth, taking on the really, really big guys. Who is taking on the big banks? The EU competition people are. They´re investigating the Libor set-up whereby big banks (Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, Rabobank…) have been colluding to arrange the interest rates on loans so it benefits them… at ...

In Iowa, tongues mismatch on climate change On the old prairie plains between the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers, the US state of Iowa now contains some of the world’s most fertile farm lands. Flying into Des Moines, the capital of the American Corn Belt, one sees squared fields all the way to the end of sight, forming a great agricultural chess board. A similar sight of intensive production greeted Soviet leader Khrouchtchev during his visit to Iowa in 1959; years later during the 80s the than USSR foreign minister Shevardnadze visited too, and most recently, in 2012, the current Chinese President Xi Jinping stopped over in Des Moines whilst touring the US ahead of the recent leadership transition in Beijing.  Indeed, is seems leaders from countries that matter come to Iowa, wh...

One of these days Libyan Members of Parliament, Ministers and most probably even the President of the GNC (General National Congress) will have to resign, due to the Political Isolation Law. After this law was voted by the Libyan parliament I wrote on Twitter: “Mahmud Gebril is excluded from running in elections. The man who prevented the Benghazi massacre. Justice?” I was pretty surprised about the reactions I received. And not by the least informed. They all found my statement very much exaggerated. It was not because Gebril was on TV a lot that he also has done something substantial, they said. It made me realize that in fact the real story behind the no-fly-zone in Libya has not been told. The most told version of what happened has been loudly spread by Bernard Henri-Lévy. On how he...

Great news that seems to have been lost in…the Europeans going on a few days´ holiday?, spring finally arriving?  – the EU Parliament will revisit a particularly disappointing vote. Surprising (can they even do that?) but it seems to be true. It was last month that the Parliament decided NOT to save the European carbon trade, the system for making industry reduce CO2 emissions. It has all the makings to become a great success, this idea to have industry either reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases OR pay for their pollution with emission rights. The lobbying against it was fierce so the system was watered down to a ridiculous level but since introduced in 2005, it really has made the companies change their ways. Even though the carbon market was flooded with free or cheap emissi...

Every day, 2400 plants pose for a photo session at the Monsanto research greenhouse outside Raleigh, North Carolina. One by one, like bags arriving on an airport belt, they are taken from the sun to the studio and captured, for scientists from four corners of the world to subsequently examine their genetic potential. Here, in the middle of what is known as the Research Triangle Park – one of America’s biggest scientific hubs – some of the world’s leading biotechnology companies have clustered to develop new seeds and plants for 21st century agriculture. In 1977, Mary-Dell Chilton demonstrated that genes responsible for disease can be removed from a bacterium without affecting its ability to insert its DNA into plant cells, hence modifying a plant’s genome. On this day of in spring, wi...

”Rise in terrorist attacks in 2012” exclaims the headline of one of the latest Europol press releases. Terrible. And scary. After the Boston bombers, are we next in line? The press release goes on: “Findings from Europol’s latest strategic analysis product – the 2013 EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report – show how the total number of terrorist attacks and related arrests in the EU significantly increased in 2012, in contrast to previous years. This and other findings in the report describe a threat from terrorism that remains strong and varied in Europe.” Oh dear. And there are statistics to back up the claims: * The number of EU attacks in EU states were 219, up from 174. * 537 individuals were arrested in relation to terrorist offences, up from 484. * 17 people died in 20...

Cross-posted with the Treasure Islands blog The Financial Times is carrying an important and fascinating story about the tax haven of Ireland. It focuses on a particular issue which is dear to my heart, and the subject of a whole chapter of Treasure Islands. This is, at heart, a story about how small financial centres become entirely 'captured' by financial services interests, with the deliberate removal of democratic checks and balances and carte blanche given to financial services interests to write laws in secret. This is exactly why I call offshore the 'smoke-filled room,' where gentleman arrange the world's financial affairs over cognac and cigars. In the 'Ratchet' chapter of Treasure Islands I compared Delaware's Big Bang of 1981 with another episode in the British tax haven...

The May Day holiday seemed more than usually loaded with significance this year: there is an ingrained notion that a prolonged cold snap ought to be followed by a flowering of ideas. May 1st, the pagan celebration of fecundity and the modern-day excuse for grassroots protest, was a neat turning point. It reflects hopes that this summer will finally tip the European Union into crisis, in the positive sense. The word crisis after all contains the inference of  judging and deciding, and there hasn’t been much of that up to now. The past five years have instead been characterised by a kind of ‘turboparalysis’. The term was coined by the author Michael Lind to describe a condition “of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and th...

A few days ago, a Belgian mother called me to ask if I could contact the Syrian Jihadists of Jabhat Al Nusra. Her son left his family to join them a month and a half ago and since then she hasn’t heard anything of him anymore. I had to disappoint her, as I have no contact with the Jihadists. In fact, when in Syria, I always try to avoid them. She was of course very worried, but also embarrassed. Her son is fighting in a battle she does not at all support and even not understand. I kind of recognize this embarrassment as it made me recall the story of a relative whom my family barely ever talks about. He was killed in the Second World War when he decided to fight with the Nazis against the Communists. He believed he had to choose between Rome and Moscow; between God and the Devil and t...

A friend of mine, illustrator by trade, was asked by a company to sign a permanent lease for them to use one of his drawings as their logo. In exchange for a small amount of money. He was happy to do so until he found a clause in the contract saying that if the originality of the drawing was challenged in court, he would have to accept all responsibility. No worries, right? He knows he drew the logo. Except he doesn´t know how to prove that he did, should it be challenged on court. Now, he´s an over imaginative guy, what are the odds?, really? But that´s the way he is. And when it dawned on him that he is always liable for his illustrations, whether he signs a contract or not, that really hit his peaceful nights. What if someone says he stole the idea for an illustration from them? ...