I’m asking your opinion. That you won’t consider the evidence that is publicly available tells its own tale.
You can’t understand how expensive lawyer can manipulate justice? Never heard of OJ Simpson, and you believe he didn’t kill his wife?
What powers are these you talk about? They are not able to look at records of sovereign off shore nations. They have - excuse my French - fuk all power and reach.
Yes because they don’t find the transfer from the Kremlin to Banks. Big deal.
The NCA are not the best lawyers money can buy, nor are they actually lawyers. Nor was Banks' defamation a SLAP case. A SLAP case is a case brought without legal merit by someone that can.afford to lose against someone that cannot afford to lose in the calculation that threat alone will silence the target.
You are losing credibility now. Nineteen separate organisations believe his action to be just that:
https://rsf.org/en/nineteen-organis...pport-carole-cadwalladr-she-faces-slapp-trial
Cadwalladher's own legal team right from the beginning never attempted to argue that she was telling the truth, nor that her claims were reasonable.
There is no doubt in my mind, had she had Banks 35k a day law firm they’d have got her acquitted in no time.
They attempted a novel approach to attempt to get their client out of a hole she'd dug herself and succeeded at first with their "echo chamber" defence. However not only did they fail at appeal, ironically the fact she initially succeeded by successfully confusing the first court meant that the legal costs she was eventually ordered to pay almost trebled. If she'd lost the initial case she'd have been looking at £400K odd. Getting taken to appeal and losing ramped it up to £1.2 million. Banks won and his case had obvious legal merit right from the beginning therefore wasn't a SLAPP case
See above.
Why the fuk would you sue someone as an individual unless you were looking to outspend them!!? Bank could have sued the Guardian. He didn’t.
The NCA investigate "level 3" criminality. Which is cross-border in nature. They use "international letters of request" to request investigations by foreign FIUs where necessary and within the UK have the powers of a police constable, an immigration officer and a customs officer (triple warranted). The NCA station an officer in every British embassy overseas.
One of the key powers the NCA have is to issue a POCA production order on a UK bank to provide details it holds on financial movements.
UK banks are required under Funds Transfer Regulation to obtain verified details on the payer of cross border transfers and if this detail isnt provided by the originating bank or any intermediary banks in the payment chain they must either reject the funds transfer or pend it while they seek the relevant information on the funds transfer. They are required by the UK money laundering regulations to retain this information for a minimum.of 5 years and produce it on request to law enforcement.
if law enforcement want further information they can ask the UK bank to make the investigation on their behalf, which may be easier than an international letter of request. The UK bank will send a SWIFT enquiry message to the foreign banks involved in the payment chain to attempt to obtain any further information on the source of the payment and people involved. The UK bank will already know the original country the funds came from as SWIFT messages will record all the banks involved in the payment chain including the BIC and IBAN of the originating institution.
In the case in question, Leave EU funding came in the form of loans made to an English company that administered the Leave EU campaign. The source of the loans was indeed an "offshore" company, in the isle of man. Cadwallader claimed that Banks was not as declared in the electoral return the true originating sources of the loans but that the loans were funded by a third party. These concerns were also shared by the Electoral Commission, who referred the matter to the NCA in a public statement. The NCA accessed and assessed banking transaction data and company filings in the Isle of Man that the EC did not have access to and did not therefore form part of their investigation. They found that Banks was the sole director and owner of the isle of man company and that assets held by that company were derived from Banks' legitimate business dealings. They found that Banks had instructed his isle of man company to provide a loan to the administrative company of Leave EU to fund the campaign, which he was entitled to do and did not breach electoral rules. They found the funds were routed via a third party company as Cadwalladher and the EC suspected but that Banks was also the sole director and owner of this company which was a service company that administered financial transactions across his various business holdings and that the funds from the isle of man company.were not intermingled with funds from any other party but were transferred directly to the UK company administering the Leave EU campaign. They found no evidence of any third party funding or of any.wrong doing. This is all in the NCA statement of findings.
Banks had threatened to sue the Electoral Commission for defamation due to the public statements it had put on its website citing their concerns and the NCA referral and after the NCA investigation announcement the EC came to an out of court settlement with Banks which included agreeing to remove their press releases making the allegations.
The Guardian was initially party to Banks' defamation however successfully argued their article (published prior to the NCA findings) was, while subsequently found to be untrue, was in the public interest at the time).
The problem for Cadwalladher is she continued to maintain the claims on her own social media accounts and in a Ted Talk published globally AFTER the NCA investigation had established the claims to be false.
FYI, I was wrong.previousky about the appeal court not awarding damages. The court of appeal judgement was that she:
- Issue a public apology to Banks
- delete all social media posts and other public content making the allegations
- Pay Banks £35K in damages
- Pay Banks legal costs of £1.2 million
As to the question of what would have happened if Cadwalladher had better lawyers? I think they'd have advised her to settle out of court in the tens of thousands from the get go rather than trying a novel but risky legal gambit which even if it first succeeded had a high chance of being overturned on appeal and incurring costs that would bankrupt their client.
Basically, she was Apollo Creed getting f***ed in the ring by Ivan Drago and her lawyers were the trainer that decided to hold the towel like a dumbass watching their client get killed rather than chuck it in the ring and end the fight early.
that it delivered so little is a crying shame. But we won’t get sidetracked. It’s yesterdays lament 
