economy (4)

Fraud costs UK economy '£38bn a year'

Debit card and computer keyboard Police say the nature of fraud, much of it involving modern technology, is "constantly evolving"

Fraud costs the UK economy £38bn a year, with more than half of that suffered by the public sector, according to official estimates.

The National Fraud Authority (NFA) said that if the total cost was broken down, every UK adult would be £765 worse off.

The NFA said "a stronger counter-fraud culture" was needed.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said the £21bn cost of public sector fraud could pay for 800 secondary schools or 615,000 nurses...

He said: "Contrary to what many people think, fraud and error is not just confined to benefits and revenue.

"It affects every government department and impacts on the government's ability to deliver better public services, while stripping the civil service of vital resources. We can't and won't allow this to happen any more."

The cost to the private sector was £12bn and charities lost £1.3bn, the NFA reported, while individuals' losses were estimated at £4bn.

Frauds included marketing scams, bogus operators, fake lotteries and online ticketing and rental crimes.

The scale of public sector fraud reflected better reporting procedures, said the researchers, who added that it remained a relatively small proportion of total spending.

ADVICE ON AVOIDING SCAMS

  • Don't be rushed into any deal
  • Ensure you have complete contact details for any trader you deal with
  • Protect yourself online
  • Use a credit card for extra protection on purchases over £100

Source: Consumer Direct

Bernard Herdan, of the NFA, said the authority's annual fraud indicator was a "blueprint" for work to tackle the "rising tide" of fraud.

Everyone should make an effort to protect themselves and share information on suspicious behaviour with the authorities, he said.

"We want to develop a stronger counter-fraud culture, which helps to disrupt fraudulent activity across the UK and globally," Mr Herdan said.

Last year's first annual fraud indicator reported a total cost of £30bn, but the NFA said the two reports were not directly comparable because some areas of fraud had been included for the first time this year.

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A Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has called for a debate, on the economy, among all the presidential aspirants on the economy.Photo Atiku ? this man looks like a Hitman sha



Abubakar, a former vice-President, made the call after submitting his nomination form at the PDP national secretariat on Tuesday in Abuja.



The Adamawa State- born politician said the economy should be the main issue in the 2011 election campaigns.



“The issue of economic recovery for Nigeria cannot be a matter of wishful thinking nor of rhetoric. It is a subject for rigorous analyses and provision of well-thought, viable, practicable and sustainable strategy,” he said.



Abubakar said that all aspirants must be able to tell Nigerians how they intended to confront the challenges of the economy and reposition it for the benefit of all at the shortest possible time.



He said, “Of all the aspirants that have declared interest in the presidential election, I consider myself the most qualified to address the daunting economic challenges facing the country.



“I am the only one who has successfully managed a business and you need extensive knowledge of the private sector to combine its potential with the authority of the public sector to address this challenge.”



The former vice-president said his approach to resolving the economic crisis in the country was contained in a 47-page Policy Document he presented on August 15, 2010 while announcing his intention to contest the 2011 presidential poll.



He said, “We are faced with a job crisis of monumental proportions. Unless we evolve strategies to dealing with the teeming population of young people churned out almost on a daily basis, we may risk the destruction of the next generation.



“If we fail to channel the energies of this huge population, they could be a potent force for instability and social unrest.”



Abubakar, however, stunned journalists when he said that he was not aware that the President had declared his intention to vie for the PDP ticket.



“I didn’t see it (declaration). Honestly, I didn’t watch it,” he said.



Twenty seven out of the 28 PDP governors were among thousands of people that attended Jonathan’s presidential declaration at the Eagle Square on Saturday in Abuja. The event was shown live by some public and private television stations nationwide.



On the reported move by some politicians to produce a consensus presidential candidate among the Northern aspirants, Abubakar said, “There is a process for the emergence of a consensus candidate in the North. It shows that North is even more united if “they” agree to bring out a consensus candidate.”



He also said he was not aware of the support that Jonathan was getting from the northern states.



Reacting to the challenge, the Presidential Adviser to Jonathan on National Assembly Matters, Senator Mohammed Abba-Aji, said the President was ready for such a debate.



“We are ready for it (debate) anytime. The President has talked about all the aspects of the economy when he declared. If they want more, we are ready for them,” he said.



Another aspirant, who is also the Kwara State Governor, Dr. Bukola Saraki, also expressed readiness for the debate.



“We are ready for the debate. That is what we have been calling for. Without such an issue-based debate, we will not be able to get the best candidate. Saraki is ready for it,” one of the governor’s aides, Mr. Billy Adedamola, said.
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(CNN) -- As the country was sinking into its worst financial crisis in more than 70 years, Security and Exchange Commission employees and contractors cruised porn sites and viewed sexually explicit pictures using government computers, according to an agency report obtained by CNN.

"During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time," said a summary of the investigation by the inspector general's office.

More than half of the workers made between $99,000 and $223,000. All the cases took place over the past five years.

The inspector general's report includes specific examples of misuse by employees.

A regional office staff accountant tried to access pornographic Web sites nearly 1,800 times, using her SEC laptop during a two-week period. She also had about 600 pornographic images saved on the hard drive of her laptop.

Separately, a senior attorney at SEC headquarters admitted to downloading pornography up to eight hours a day, according to the investigation.

"In fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office," the inspector general's report said..

"It is nothing short of disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at pornography than taking action to help stave off the events that brought our nation's economy to the brink of collapse," said Rep. Darrell Issa. The Republican is a ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

"This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority," he said. "Inexplicably, rather than exercise its existing regulatory enforcement authority, SEC officials were preoccupied with other distractions."

The investigation came to light on the same day President Obama gave a speech in lower Manhattan, calling for reform in the finance industry.

On Capitol Hill, the Senate is working on a reform bill that would set up regulatory oversight of the financial industry's practices with the goal of preventing another Wall Street meltdown like the one in 2008 that launched the U.S. recession..

The bill includes an "early warning" system intended to spot signs of crisis, as well as a $50 billion liquidation fund created with money from banks and other finance industry corporations to ensure an orderly transition in closing down failing entities. It's approved by the Senate's Banking and Agricultural committees.

The House passed its version of the bill in December.

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A double strike Mar 12th 2009 | LAGOS From The Economist print edition Africa’s second-largest economy has home-grown problems, too STAND on the beachfront of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, and a puzzling scene emerges from the tropical haze: a stately line of container ships, each at anchor, queuing to enter the harbour. Despite the global slump, congestion is not letting up, says the director of the company that runs the privatised port. The number of inbound containers has doubled in the past three years; so far in 2009 there has been no decline. Such is the crush in Lagos that getting cargo from ship to port to lorry still takes an average of six weeks. Such blockages are nothing to celebrate. But they indicate how 140m-odd Nigerians, despite being battered by a sharp fall in oil revenues and by an equally painful 20% devaluation of their currency, the naira, remain hungry for imports. Retailers tell a similar story. Coca-Cola plans to serve Nigerians over 2 billion bottles of sugary drinks this year, as it did last year. Procter & Gamble, which sells nappies, washing powder and so on, reports some slackening growth but still expects the young and fast-growing population to push up consumer demand in the next few years. Mobile-phone companies, notably MTN, which dominates the local market, are even more gung-ho. They continue to brag about healthy sales of handsets and new armies of subscribers, though the rising costs of imported equipment cut into profits; Nigeria now has some 64m lines, up from a handful a decade ago. Anecdotally, at least, businessmen’s bullishness seems so far to be borne out. Good hotels in Lagos still charge astronomical rates, building sites are crowded and vendors throng the city streets as ever; bootleg DVDs of Barack Obama’s inauguration are particularly popular. But like many poor countries (see article), Nigeria has not escaped the global storm. It relies heavily on oil and gas exports, which provide more than 95% of all foreign-exchange earnings and most of the government’s revenue. Both have been thumped by the tumbling price of crude, now at about $40 a barrel, more than $100 less than at last year’s peak. With nothing else to export—all those containers leave empty—Nigeria is especially vulnerable to volatile oil prices. Capital which washed merrily into the economy a year or two ago is flowing the other way. Most of it had served the hydrocarbon industry but some foreign investors, notably Americans, had started to see Nigeria as an emerging market; braver ones were tempted by its stockmarket. No longer. A property bubble has popped; the Nigerian Stock Exchange has tumbled by around 40% from its peak. Speculators and local banks are painfully out of pocket. No wonder the federal government is starting to sound worried. On March 10th President Umaru Yar’Adua at last signed into law a much-delayed expansionary budget, with spending for 2009 at $21.2 billion, a lot more than in early drafts. The newish finance minister, Mansur Muhtar, recently admitted to a meeting of businessmen in Lagos that he saw a “very gloomy picture in the short and medium term”. Nigeria, along with Africa as a whole, should be spared outright recession. Chukwuma Soludo, the central bank’s governor, says he still expects sub-Saharan Africa’s economies to grow by roughly 3% this year. Nigeria, he reckons, should muster more than that, though not the 6%-plus of recent years. That would barely match the rate of population growth, but if those figures are right Nigeria will be doing better than most and should avoid the acute pain of previous commodity-price busts, as in the 1980s, when the government could not pay civil servants and political instability ensued. Nigeria is also in better shape to deal with a slowdown because of some decent macro-economic reforms. Inflation, food aside, is quite low. The government has paid off sizeable debts or been relieved of them. It also has ample foreign-exchange reserves and has ferreted away $20 billion in a fund called the Excess Crude Account, which will help cushion public finances from the downturn. On the other hand, raising cash is getting harder: Mr Muhtar has just postponed plans to sell $500m of bonds on the international market. Trouble at home Yet even if the global crisis has not hit Nigeria as hard as elsewhere, it is exposing some unresolved problems at home. Take the banking system, which Mr Soludo says would have collapsed months ago but for an early round of government-driven consolidation. He calls the banks “shock absorbers” for the economy. But they look increasingly wobbly. Despite claims that they are well capitalised, with generous capital ratios of 22% said to be typical, they have all but stopped lending to each other or to local firms, especially smaller ones. Critics say the banks are frozen because many are dangerously exposed to the stockmarket slump, after rashly securing a large portion of their loans with now almost worthless equities. Without government support, some banks would almost certainly fail. None trusts the others. Oil and gas production, the economy’s mainstay, is also in bad shape. Long Africa’s biggest producer, Nigeria last year ceded the top spot to Angola. Production is dropping, in part, because militants in and off the Niger Delta kidnap workers and scare away oil firms. A new pipeline built to export gas to Ghana, Togo and Benin should have opened in January but lies empty. Talk of spending $12 billion to build another pipeline running 4,400km north across the Sahara to send gas via Algeria to Europe sounds fanciful. A sizeable share of local gas is simply flared off at source. Meanwhile, Nigeria still cannot keep its own lights on. Manufacturers, who account for a feeble 3-4% of GDP but at least create some jobs, grumble that they must rely entirely on costly diesel generators. Power cuts are common. It has long been obvious what should be done: existing turbines lack supplies of gas, transmission cables should be rolled out, more power stations must be built. Successive governments have let power generation dwindle, yet none has let private contractors act instead. Shortly before leaving office the previous president, Olusegun Obasanjo, passed a law ordering the privatisation of some power stations. But Mr Yar’Adua quickly reversed this, saying he was worried about corruption. A rare bright spot is agriculture. Nigeria’s lands are fertile; water, at least in the south, is plentiful. A fertiliser plant has been privatised and is supposed to start supplying farmers. Local food and tobacco prices remain high compared with world prices, which should give farmers good incentives. One day—who knows?—goods may once again flow out of Lagos harbour as well as into it.
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