Fingers in the Till - A regular look at the world of business, compiled by Insider Dealer. LET'S START with the sad tale of property entrepreneur Nazmudin Virani, once the Conservative Party's main fundraiser in the UK Asian community and now in the dock at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International trial.
According to Mr Virani's barrister, Anthony Scrivener QC, Mr Virani was 'duped' into signing letters that falsely showed that his companies owed loans of over £20 million to BCCI.Auditors Price Waterhouse treated the sums concerned as BCCI assets, thereby inflating the bank's profit figures.
Mr Virani so trusted Mohammed Haque, head of BCCI's London property division, that he appended his signature without closely studying the documents.
For the prosecution, Anthony Hacking QC claimed that BCCI granted Mr Virani a £1 million loan in 1988, on which no repayments had been made before the bank FEATURE collapsed three years later.
Mr Hacking told the jury: 'You will have to decide whether the £1 million... was a genuine loan or a sham which may be described as a reward for services provided or as a sweetener for future co-operation.' Mr Virani was a 'willing and essential partner' in the fraud, Mr Hacking argued. Mr Virani denies one charge of conspiring to defraud BCCI investors, one of theft, one of false accounting and 11 of furnishing false information.
The trial is expected to last until April. Mr Haque Is used to be that supporters of has fled to Pakistan, which does not have an extradition treaty with the UK. EVER wonder what happened to some of the thrusting free-market entrepreneurs you have met in past editions of Fingers?
Bent banker Wallace Smith (FITT, 15 January) has been found guilty of taking a string of banks for £100 million, and will be sentenced on March 23. Word is, he could be spending up to ten years as a guest of Her Maj, but I'll believe it when I see it.
It emerged during the trial that, despite the financial desperation that drove him to crime, he was still able to donate £12,000 to pay for a year's rent on the London offices of the Bruges Group, the Thatcherite anti-EC campaign.
Meanwhile, Darius Guppy (FITT, 1 May 1993) is appealing against the five year sentence and £533,000 fine he received last year for staging a bogus gems raid and then copping £1.8 million on the inStANA.
The good news is, he is getting legal aid. The bad news is, the appeal judges have ordered him to reveal the whereabouts of the jewels and the proceeds of the crime. Darius, incidentally, was the best man at the wedding of Princess Di's brother. Shephard and Sheila Taylor have in common? Well, they are all part-time directors of NHS opt-out trust hospitals, picking up £5,000 a year for their endeavours.
Anything else? They are all married to sitting Tory MPs, namely John Biffen, Robert Dunn, Gillian Shephard and Teddy Taylor respectively. Just fancy that.
Ms Dunn was one of five directors recently appointed to Dartford and Gravesham hospital trust. Of the other four, two are councillors and another is chair of a local political party.
I bet you can guess their affiliations. Other NHS nonexecs include Lord Wade of Chorlton, joint treasurer of the Conservative Party between 1982 and 1990.
And here is an update on the careers of a trio of former Tory ministers. What are Lord Barney Hayhoe Patrick (now Lord) Jenkin and lan Grist up to, now that they no longer grace the corridors of Westminster?
Lord His the chair of Guys -St Thomas's Hospital Trust (presiding over the closure of Guy's); Lord J is chair of the Forest Healthcare Trust, embroiled in cash crisis in Waltham Forest, while lan is chair of South Glamorgan District health Authority. Each gent picks up a miserly £19,285 for a three day week. Splashing out 'BUYING A Luxury Yacht' by Gillian Beach, is a 352-page publication jam-packed with 'advice and expertise on every aspect of superyacht purchase and ownership from leading authorities around the world'. At just £40, it is a veritable bargain.
From this invaluable volume, I learned that both Lady Ghislaine, the vessel from which robert Maxwell went skinny-dipping for the last time, and My Gail III, owned by Gerald 'Guiness trial' Ronson, were built at the same yard. It is currently working on Trump Princess Il on behalf of Donald Trump, but apparently you don't have to be a crooked businessman to place an order. Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won education, health and welfare services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis -an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership.
Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to tackle this crisis.
The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal class-war Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the wr.rking class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time, using the full powers of the state.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively proclaiming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialist alternative. Every retreat and concession they have made to the employers and the government has simply fuelled and encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union rights.
New realism is the latest form taken by the politics of reformism, seeking no more than improved conditions within the framework of capitalist rule.
Socialist Outlook rejects reformism, not because we are against fighting for reforms, but because we know that the needs of the working class - for full employment, decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy - can never be achieved under capitalism. Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class'- the overwhelming majority of society -to topple the corrupt and reac tionary rule of capital and establish its own class rule.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world. Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries world-wide.
Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. Too often this degenerates into : sectarian posturing and abstention from the actual struggle taking shape within the labour movement, playing into the hands of the right wing.
Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people, lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland and Wales should be left to await the outcome of a socialist revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now around their own demands, which are a part of the struggle for socialism.
But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism. The tiaht for policies which can mobilise and politically educate workers in struggle, must be taken into the unions, the Labour Party and every campaign and struggle in which workers and the oppressed fight for their To strengthen this fight we press for united front campaigns
Where are they now?
They've been quangoed