Corruption and plunder in Britain: the example of Branson "What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose. Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind" . And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those