{"id":9134,"date":"2015-06-16T05:39:14","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T10:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9134"},"modified":"2015-06-16T05:39:14","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T10:39:14","slug":"bilderberg-2015-where-criminals-mingle-with-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9134","title":{"rendered":"Bilderberg 2015 \u2013 Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bilderberg 2015 \u2013 Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians<\/a><\/h3>\n

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Out at my car I couldn\u2019t be bothered to get into the whole \u2018probable cause\u2019 thing so I flung open the doors and with as much good cheer as I could muster, said: \u201cHelp yourself\u201d. They did. While one set of police searched my car with their torches, another lot clustered round me and asked me questions:\u00a0\u201cWhere do you live? What are you doing here?\u201d I\u2019m a journalist and I live in a police state. What about you?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A little while later, bored and a bit cold, I decided to point out to the officers that while they were treating a journalist like a criminal, there were actual criminals about to arrive at the hotel they were guarding. Convicted criminals. Such as disgraced former CIA boss,\u00a0David Petraeus, who\u2019s just been handed a $100,000 (\u00a364,000) fine and two years\u2019 probation for leaking classified information.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I decided to reward their vigilance with a chat about HSBC. The chairman of the troubled banking giant, Douglas Flint, is a regular attendee at Bilderberg, and he\u2019s heading here again this year, along with a member of the bank\u2019s board of directors, Rona Fairhead. Perhaps most tellingly, Flint is finding room in his Mercedes for the bank\u2019s busiest employee: its chief legal officer, Stuart Levey.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

A Guardian editorial this week branded HSBC \u201ca bank beyond shame\u201d after it announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs in the UK, while at the same time threatening to shift its headquarters to Hong Kong. And having just been forced to pay \u00a328m in fines to Swiss regulators investigating money-laundering claims. The big question, of course, is how will the chancellor of the exchequer,\u00a0George Osborne, respond to all this? Easy \u2013 he\u2019ll go along to a luxury Austrian hotel and hole up with three senior members of HSBC in private. For three days.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2013 From Charlie Skelton\u2019s excellent article:\u00a0Bilderberg 2015: Where Criminals Mingle with Ministers<\/a><\/p>\n

Charlie Skelton is a Oxford University educated\u00a0comedy writer, journalist, artist and actor who has covered the Bilderberg meeting for the\u00a0Guardian\u00a0<\/em>since 2009. This year\u2019s meeting took on a particularly eventful twist for Mr. Skelton, something he wrote about in a powerful article published last week.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bilderberg 2015 \u2013 Where Criminals Mingle with Politicians Out at my car I couldn\u2019t be bothered to get into the whole \u2018probable cause\u2019 thing so I flung open the doors and with as much good cheer as I could muster, said: \u201cHelp yourself\u201d. They did. While one set of police searched my car with their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6393,6396,135,6394,6395,3123,3372,4285,6174,6397,6398],"class_list":["post-9134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-bilderberg","tag-charlie-skelton","tag-cia","tag-david-patraeus","tag-douglas-flint","tag-george-osborne","tag-hsbc","tag-liberty-blitzkrieg","tag-michael-krieger","tag-rona-fairhead","tag-stuart-levey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9135,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9134\/revisions\/9135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}