UK Continues To Censor The Press: Orders Wall Street Journal To Pull Details From Already Published Story

from the no-freedom-of-the-press dept

The UK's issue broad injunctions that try to silence the press from naming names of people accused of crimes. Given that, a court apparently ordered the Wall Street Journal to remove the names of bankers the WSJ had noted were expected to be named as being involved in the criminal manipulation of the LIBOR rate:

A British judge ordered the Journal and David Enrich, the newspaper's European banking editor, to comply with a request by the U.K.'s Serious Fraud Office prohibiting the newspaper from publishing names of individuals not yet made public in the government's ongoing investigation into alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

The order, which applies to publication in England and Wales, also demanded that the Journal remove "any existing Internet publication" divulging the details. It threatened Mr. Enrich and "any third party" with penalties including a fine, imprisonment and asset seizure.

Except, as the Journal notes, it had already published the story out on the wire, and while it took down its own web story, and is protesting the injunction, it's not at all difficult to find other stories that published the names:

In Friday’s U.S. edition of the newspaper, 11 names were printed, including former UBS AG (NYSE:UBS) and Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) trader Tom Hayes; his former boss at UBS, Michael Pieri; and two former brokers at R.P. Martin Holdings Ltd., Terry Farr and James Gilmour.

And, of course, anyone who got the print version, which had already gone to press, could see the names as well: And, in the end, all this has really done is draw that much more attention to the names.

Filed Under: censorship, freedom of the press, injunctions, libor, press, super injunctions, uk, wall street journal
Companies: dow jones

DailyDirt: Cheaters Sometimes Prosper...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you're going to commit a crime, there's a certain amount of logic to trying to pull off the biggest crime you can. Why risk going to jail over a relatively small amount of money? If you can get away with a multi-milion dollar heist, you only have to do it once (if you're not too greedy). And if you get caught, you might have the resources to escape the authorities. Here are just a few examples of some scams that might have demonstrated that crime can pay.

• In 2012, Italian police arrested 8 people related to a scheme involving $6 trillion (yes, trillion) in fake US Treasury bonds. According to US authorities, these kinds of documents are part of a growing trend of "fictitious instrument fraud" where fake securities are used as collateral in a scam aimed at unwitting investors. [url]
• How often do traders misplace a decimal point on purpose? David Miller would have made a killing buying 1.625 million shares of AAPL (instead of 1,625 shares!) if the stock beat its estimates, but Apple's shares actually fell... oops. [url]
• The London interbank offered rate (aka Libor) is a global benchmark for financial instruments worth over $300 trillion -- and it's part of one of the largest and longest-running banking scams in history. Traders at several large banks colluded to manipulate Libor for years... because bankers were trusted to report honest numbers. hmm. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: banking, cheaters, crime, fraud, libor, scams
Companies: apple