“In 1986 the Economist reported that recent scandals had “raised doubts abroad that the City of London is the most honest place to do business”. Lord Roskill, the senior judge Margaret Thatcher’s government appointed to examine the state of fraud in the UK, agreed. ‘While petty frauds, clumsily committed, are likely to be detected and punished, it is all too likely that the largest and most cleverly executed crimes escape unpunished’, his commission reported.” That is in line with a Czech proverb: the big thieves hang the small ones. “The harder and more complex the investigations it [the Serious Fraud Office] takes on, the more it is fulfilling its mission – and the likelier it is to fail.” “Having ruled that the agency mistreated the Trio’s corporate empire [ENRC/Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation], a judge will now decide how much UK taxpayers’ money should be paid to the oligarchs’ company in damages. The SFO has set aside a quarter of a billion pounds.” “On 24 August 2023, 10
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51