Posts Tagged ‘contracts’
Rupert Murdoch’s phony Wall Street Journal circulation numbers
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
One of Rupert Murdoch’s most senior European executives has resigned following Guardian inquiries about a circulation scam at News Corporation’s flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.
The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the Journal’s true circulation.
The bizarre scheme included a formal, written contract in which the Journal persuaded one company to co-operate by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities, a move which led some staff to accuse the paper’s management of violating journalistic ethics and jeopardising its treasured reputation for editorial quality.
Internal emails and documents suggest the scam was promoted by Andrew Langhoff, the European managing director of the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones and Co, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in July 2007. Langhoff resigned on Tuesday.
The highly controversial activities were organised in London and focused on the Journal’s European edition, which circulates in the EU, Russia, and Africa. Senior executives in New York, including Murdoch’s right-hand man, Les Hinton, were alerted to the problems last year by an internal whistleblower and apparently chose to take no action. The whistleblower was then made redundant…
This stinks like someone digging up the bodies of Wall Street barons from the 19th Century and using them for reanimation experiments. Zombie subscribers and counterfeit editions of the Wall Street Journal indeed.
Former employees who fled before the paper was occupied by Scumbag Murdoch’s obedient lieutenants can pat themselves on the back for escaping the stain of association with this journalistic corruption. The complicity of bodies like the Audit Bureau of Circulation needs to be investigated as thoroughly as any of the other alleys reeking of deception and collaboration between Murdoch’s mafia and the businesses paid to participate.
RTFA for the details of the elaborate money-laundering, phony reconstruction of circulation numbers for a once-great newspaper.
Money from Pentagon trucking contracts funded Taliban
A U.S. military task force has discovered that part of a $2.16 billion transportation contract was diverted through a murky network of subcontractors and into the hands of a group of Afghan power-brokers, criminals and Taliban insurgents…Roughly $600 million of the contract had been spent before authorities were alerted to the scandal…
Only part of that money, however, is believed to have been diverted to “nefarious elements,” the source added…Well, that makes me feel better.
The official said it appears some of the payments were given for truckers to be assured of safe passage through insurgent areas of Afghanistan. As has happened in other instances, trucking contractors paid off local drivers who then turned around and paid local security forces, who in turn paid insurgents in their areas…
Actually, when I worked in traffic management, we did the same thing to get our shipments through Mafia checkpoints in Newark.
The contract program, called Host Nation Trucking — which expires in September — has since been replaced by a more stringent system that requires up to 40 different contractors — an effort to reduce overall reliance on a single firm.
The new program is also meant to tighten accounting measures of second and third party vendors, an area various groups had previously been able to exploit, the source said…
Government officials are currently pursuing corrective actions against the trucking firms, including suspensions and limits on work, though all eight companies still remain on the U.S. payroll.
If you’re functioning here at home within a Republican-devised system like “mark to market” accounting, why expect the Pentagon to deploy legitimate accounting and oversight in a war zone created by the same phonies?
How two phony Wyoming corporations duped the Pentagon
Wyoming house big enough to house 2000 corporations?
Two companies incorporated at a little house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, won Pentagon contracts after their owner took advantage of the state’s liberal incorporation laws to create the firms using an alias, and then represented them as minority-owned to win favorable treatment as a military supplier. The firms and their owner were later banned from doing business with the Pentagon for providing knock-off parts.
A Reuters investigation has found that more than 2,000 companies are registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne, the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business incorporation company that specializes in corporate anonymity.
Among the firms incorporated there is a small subset that make their money from government contracts.
A Reuters review of federal contracting databases found nine firms registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue have been awarded 93 contracts worth more than $1.6 million by a half dozen government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
More than 90 percent of the contracts were awarded by the Department of Defense…
Vietnam signs major nuclear power contracts
Dimitry Medvedev and Nguyen Minh Triet celebrate the contract signing
Daylife/AP PHoto used by permission
Russia and Vietnam on Sunday signed a deal worth an estimated 5.6 billion dollars for the energy-hungry Southeast Asian country’s first nuclear power plant…
An official with Russian state nuclear conglomerate Rosatom has told AFP the construction cost of a two-reactor plant is estimated at more than four billion euros…
Vietnam wants to build eight nuclear facilities in the next two decades. Initial government plans call for four reactors, with a total capacity of 4,000 megawatts and at least one of them operational in 10 years’ time.
Sergei Kiriyenko said a 2020 timeframe for the Russian plant was “absolutely realistic”.
Russian President Medvedev earlier held talks with Vietnamese officials centred on expanding his country’s presence in Vietnam, which he said is “actively developing” on various fronts.
“On all these directions Russia will assist Vietnam, which is our close friend,” he said after paying his respects at the mausoleum of Vietnam’s revolutionary hero Ho Chi Minh…
Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan, also on a visit to Hanoi, announced with his Vietnamese counterpart that the two countries will join forces to build two other nuclear reactors.
Moscow is willing to provide a loan to help finance the Russian plant’s construction…The two sides signed additional agreements on construction of a hydro power station and cooperation in the oil sector.
If the United States government, U.S. industry had brains located anywhere near their heads instead of the nether portions of their anatomy, we could have been providing those services to developing nations in Asia and elsewhere.
Back in the day, when I worked for a vendor to the nuclear power industry, I became fed-up with the policy of treating nuclear power generation as a short-term cash cow to supplement welfare for American capital goods producers. I quit. Went on to other aspects of metallurgy. Literature, Philosophy. Politics. You understand how that works.
When a couple of world-class safety screw-ups made nuclear power unpopular – and we had plenty of wars serving up supplemental income – our nation walked away from the dance. Leaving us decades behind productive commerce on the world stage.
Add to that the political history of America’s imperial adventures in the 3rd World…and you understand why there’s no American participation in any signing ceremonies like this.
Biggest data breach in UK didn’t require a hacker
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers, the firm has confirmed. Details emerged after the firm alerted the information commissioner, who said his office was preparing a prosecution.
Christopher Graham said brokers had sold the data to other phone firms, who then cold-called the customers as their contracts were due to expire.
A T-Mobile spokesman said the data had been sold “without our knowledge”.
Mr Graham, who was appointed earlier this year as the watchdog responsible for safeguarding personal information, said the data breach was the biggest of its kind.
Initially Mr Graham had said he would not name the operator involved as it could prejudice a prosecution. But after phone firms 02, Vodafone, Orange, 3 and Virgin said they were not the subject of his investigation, T-Mobile confirmed it had been…
Mr Graham said investigators had been working with the company after it reported suspicions of an unlawful trade in customers’ data…
A spokesman for T-Mobile said the sale of the data had been “deeply regrettable” and that it had been asked to keep it secret to avoid any criminal prosecutions being prejudiced…
No doubt TV talking heads will be stretched to come up with a definition other than the perpetual “hacker”. You should look back into the history of white-collar crime and discover the term “thief” is still pretty sound.
The commodity may vary. The process of stealing – and selling stolen goods – remains the same.
Firms cited in bridge collapse get $55 million in new contracts
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
Since the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge two years ago, state transportation officials have awarded more than $55 million in contracts to URS Corp. and Progressive Contractors Inc. — the two companies it now holds largely responsible for the disaster.
Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) records show that it gave the two companies contracts for projects across the state in those two years, including work to predesign other bridges. At least one of the companies played a small part in building the new I-35W bridge.
URS’ most recent contract with MnDOT is for a traffic simulation project in the Twin Cities metro area. The agency authorized the $99,892 contract July 23 — just a few days before the state filed suit against URS, a San Francisco-based company that for four years was MnDOT’s main consultant concerning the bridge. The lawsuit cites URS as negligent and accuses it of violating basic engineering standards.
MnDOT spokesman Kevin Gutknecht said Friday that the agency would not comment on other contracts it has awarded to URS because of its lawsuit against the company regarding the I-35W bridge. “We do not comment on matters under litigation,” he said.
But it’s OK to give away taxpayers’ dollars – without comment.
In its lawsuit, the state accused URS of failing to adequately inspect and analyze the 40-year-old steel-truss bridge and of failing to detect that the bridge’s gusset plates were underdesigned and inadequate. It collapsed Aug. 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145 others.
In May, the state filed a legal claim against Progressive Contractors, saying that the construction company whose workers were on the bridge the day it fell did not tell MnDOT the details of its plan to place heavy equipment and materials on the bridge.
Bureaucrats so rigid and unable to change they’d rather give money away to incompetents than find a new way to do business.
