Big
Government, Big Business, Big Corruption
Fred explains American corruption. It is just like England.
Bribery
The American government is leaning on foreign bribes while
actively ignoring political corruption at home. They are unhappy with
Her Majesty's Government's enthusiasm for letting them get away with it.
Corruption Index 2010
Rates bribery and corruption by country. England comes higher
than our wonderful politicians deserve. The Jews are not amused by their
rating.
CDC
It really is a mauling
NOT a good December for publicly owned international development fund CDC,
formerly the Commonwealth Development Corporation, and its shareholder, the
Department for International Development. First, a National Audit Office (NAO)
report criticised the fund for failing to show development value. Then it was.
mauled by the Commons public accounts committee (PAC).
Thankfully for CDC chief executive Richard Laing (pictured), however, Christmas
comes every month along with his pay packet. In the three years since 2004, he
and his senior executives have seen their wedges treble, Laing's to £lm a year.
The NAO report exposed how CDC had been instructed by DfID to compare Laing and
Co's jobs with a range of others, including much lower-paid staff in other
development institutions. But that pay framework was quietly ditched in favour
of the best paid element of the comparator group - private equity bosses -
without telling DfID. The NAO concluded that the CDC board "approved
remuneration ... which exceeded levels set in 2004 as requiring consultation
with DfID".
Sounds bad; and at the PAC it was clear that CDC chairman Sir Malcolm
Williamson was going to take the rap. There's no danger of his head rolling,
though, as he has already announced his retirement. When Labour MP Alan Williams
raised the subject, Laing was quick to deny responsibility. Williamson agreed it
was "nothing to do with Mr Laing, you can blame the remuneration committee".
Laing, who CDC's accounts reveal attended remuneration committees and as chief
executive might have known how his pay was arrived at as he watched it treble,
was entirely blameless. As Williamson sat on the committee, he was happy to
"freely accept responsibility". Chairman of the generous remuneration committee
Andrew Williams, boss of private equity fund SVG Capital, warranted not a
mention.
DfID official Mark Lowcock explained how, following the cock-up, remuneration
consultants were brought in and "we concluded that the right comparators
actually were the ones that the company picked without telling us. So the main
issue that we had a problem with and were not very happy about was the process".
With hindsight the unauthorized pay hikes were justified - so that's all right
then!
Even DfID's granting CDC flexibility over bonuses "against explicit advice from
the Treasury" was down-played by a Treasury official claiming it "was just that
- advice". Lowcock was seen warmly greeting the Treasury man after the hearing
with the words: "See you at the next slaughtering!"
Quiller pen
MPs also learnt more about the PR campaign launched by CDC to spin its
"development impact".
Laing told Tory MP Richard Bacon that CDC was paying QuilIer consultants between
£10,000 and £20,000 a month. For this outlay of development funds, likely to be
over £50,000 so far, CDC has received advice on who to invite to its 60th
anniversary bash, which MPs to schmooze, and how to respond to a draft of the
NAO report and changes to the CDC case studies that it uses to selectively
impress anybody who is interested.
Thus when Laing was accused by Austin Mitchell MP of deserting agriculture he
could quickly deny the charge, despite the plummeting proportion of CDC's cash
put into the business, and paint an idyllic picture of one African investment it
does have. The coaching for the hearing that Bacon forced Laing to admit having
received from Quiller was paying off nicely.
Meanwhile CDC refuses to release more objective internal reports on the subject
under freedom of information laws. How surprising! What little the Eye has found
out so far suggests all is not well since the management of the fund was sold to
CDC bosses as Actis in 2004.
Each year CDC gives itself a development impact score, contributing 20 percent
to the CDC bosses' bonuses (profit contributes far more). In 2003 CDC gave
itself a score of 20 (out of 30), in 2004 it was 23.7, then in 2005, the first full
year of Actis management, back down to 19.3. Under the new arrangements CDC's
development impact was by its own admission deteriorating. Did this hit bosses
in the pocket, since 20 percent of their bonuses are determined by the score? No.
In 2005 the target development score was dropped from 20 to 15, so bonuses were
secure.
DfID has belatedly reined CDC in somewhat through an investment policy focusing
it on the poorest countries, even if the NAO report revealed that CDC's
financially-incentivised bosses resisted the change. After several attempts by
Laing to justify having poured hundreds of millions into China when private
investors were doing so anyway, DfID permanent secretary Nemat Shafik said that
as from November there will be no more new cash for the country except for the
smallest businesses.
The new policy will be monitored by new chairman Richard Gillingwater. He was
boss of the government's shareholder executive until last year - a body Shafik
admitted DfID relied on while it was, er, failing to monitor CDC.
NHS IT
Away in a Granger
SIX years after it was conceived by a bunch of IT consultants and blessed by a
grinning Tony Blair, the disastrous £13bn National Health Service IT scheme has
at last been officially recognized as deeply in the doo-doo.
The well-documented delays, generously estimated at four years, and chaos (Eyes
passim ad nauseam) stem from the big-is-beautiful approach adopted by the man
who set up the programme, Richard Granger. Rather than set standards to which
hospitals with hugely varying requirements should develop their own systems, he
handed out regional monopoly contracts to four big IT consultancies, who
themselves turned to large but completely unprepared software companies.
Now even NHS chief executive David Nicholson (pictured) can see the writing on
the wall. This month he conceded to a committee of MPs that the main software,
provided by US firm Cerner, was "based on billing, it's been developed in
America, and does not take into account a whole series of issues around 18-weeks
and patient tracking that we need, as a result we're having to change all of
those."
Sound familiar? Nicholson could almost have been reading from the Eye s special
report on the project, System Failure (Eye 1179), back in March 2007 which
explained that the software "was proving unfit for purpose because it had been,
er, written for US healthcare systems. These were built around billing for care
and were unable to produce the data on which NHS management depends".
The other software firm, iSoft, has an even worse record. The new "Lorenzo"
system it
promised for March 2004 is, claimed Nicholson nearly five years on, "being very
tentatively tested". Way to go!
Yet in the couple of years since the Eye pointed out the Cerner problem, instead
of ditching the project, Nicholson has been "resetting" the contracts relying on
its pisspoor product, with hundreds of millions more on offer to an IT industry
that now very profitably employs many of the men who handed them the cash (see,
for example, last Eye).
That was before Alistair Darling insisted on more efficiency savings to help
fund his fiscal stimulus; however. Now even the NHS boss admits: "We've got to
think about how we take it forward. We can't go on and on like this." Looks like
it might have taken a global economic meltdown to force a re-think.
CANCER SCARE
Diagnosing the problem
THE medical director of a private NHS clinic at the centre of a cancer scare has
himself been disciplined for misdiagnosing cancer patients in the US, it has
emerged.
The private Shepton Mallet independent sector
treatment centre sells procedures to the NHS
under the government's privatization plans. At
least one patient there has died of colon cancer
after having been given the all-clear by a doctor at the centre. The Dutch
doctor who gave a colonoscopy - a bowel examination - to Steve Davies, who
died of cancer eight month later, has since resigned and all his procedure- are
being
re-examined.
However, it has also emerged that Dr Naji Aburnrad, the medical director of
UK Specialist Hospitals, the firm that runs the centre. was found guilty of
misconduct in relation to cancer patients in 1997 by the State of New York
Department of Health.
Dr Aburnrad's failure to diagnose and treat
breast cancer in a group of women patients was
described as "practicing medicine with negligence" The charges related to
four patients and included
findings that Dr Abumrad failed to properly check
that there were "free margins" of cancer free tissue
after removing "a very aggressive carcinoma" from one woman's breast,
misdiagnosing breast cancer as mastitis and failing to order a biopsy to check
whether this was in fact cancer, The American review board also found "other
carelessness or
failure to practice according to accepted standards". Dr Abumrad was given a
"stayed suspension" of his licence, meaning he was put on probation for a year.
Denise Broomfield, solicitor for Steve
Davies's widow, told the Eye: "I now represent a
number of patients who appear to have been
misdiagnosed by doctors employed by UK
Specialist Hospitals at Shepton Mallet." The company, facing a group of
negligence claims, say, it "would like to apologies to patients for the
concern and distress caused by the independent
review of colonoscopies", but maintains there is as
yet no evidence of misdiagnosis.
Dr Abumrad is the only member of the
five-person board of UK Specialist Hospitals to
hold a medical qualification (the others are mostly financiers representing
investors). The Eye asked
UK Specialist Hospitals had disclosed Dr
Abumrad's discipline and penalty when bidding
for the NHS contract. A spokesman said that it had not, because the rules
only demand disclosure of any kind of "legal proceedings" if they happened
in the past three years, or resulted in clinicians having "their medical
registration removed" which was "not the case".
The spokesman added: "Dr Abumrad is one of the
world's leading endocrine surgeons and
currently chairman of surgery at the prestigious
Vanderbilt University" adding: "We have always have
had full confidence in Dr Abumrad ... the alleged carelessness and negligence was solely a
documentation issue."
