Panel of Experts
Corruption UK has a panel of expert advisors who will review some articles before they are published, according to their expertise. They have no association with the site, or each other in this context; they have just kindly agreed to read over articles. It is hoped that we will be able pay experts an honorarium when finances allow but many of the experts will act pro bono. The finances page will show any payments made.
The experts will have no liability for what is published on the site. Full liability for what is published rests with the owner of the site, Nicholas Wilson. We are honoured to receive the support of such eminent experts. We hope to have as diverse a range as possible, and will add more names as they agree to come on board. We welcome panelists of any gender, orientation, nationality, political persuasion, creed etc. It is essential for the work we will do.
Mark Curtis is an author, historian and journalist and the editor of Declassified UK, an online journalism platform investigating UK foreign policy. He is a former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales, Paris and the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Auswartige Politik, Bonn.
Mark has written six books on British foreign policies and international development:
- Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam (Serpent’s Tail, 2012, updated 2018)
- Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses (Vintage, 2004)
- Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World (Vintage, 2003)
- Trade for Life: Making Trade Work for Poor People (Christian Aid, 2001)
- The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and World Order (Pluto, 1998)
- The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed, 1995)
Mark has also worked on international development issues for over 25 years, managing a consultancy that works with and supports progressive NGOs – Curtis Research. In this work, Mark has published over 120 reports on issues such as food/agriculture, mining, tax, corporations and trade. For this work, please visit curtisresearch.org
Mark is a former Director of the World Development Movement (now called Global Justice Now), Head of Global Advocacy and Policy at Christian Aid and Head of Policy at ActionAid. He is a graduate of Goldsmiths’ College, University of London and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Andrew Feinstein is the Executive Director of Shadow World Investigations, a role he previously performed with Corruption Watch UK from its inception. Andrew is a former African National Congress (ANC) Member of Parliament from South Africa. In Parliament, he served on the Finance Committee, chaired the Committee’s sub-committee that drafted the Public Finance Management Act, was Deputy Chair of the country’s Audit Commission and the ranking ANC member on the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. He resigned in protest at the ANC and government’s refusal to allow an unfettered investigation into massive corruption in a $10 billion arms deal.
His first book, the best-selling After the Party: Corruption, the ANC and South Africa’s Uncertain Future reveals details of this deal and its impact on South Africa’s young democracy. He is also the author of the critically-acclaimed The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, which was short-listed for the Alan Paton Prize for Non-Fiction. Andrew worked with director Johan Grimonprez and producers Louverture Films to create an award-winning feature documentary of the same title.
Andrew was named amongst the 100 most influential people in the world working in armed violence reduction by Action On Armed Violence (AOAV). Along with two colleagues, Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren, he was an anti-corruption champion and whistle-blower of the year in 2015 in relation to the South African arms deal’.
Andrew was an Open Society Institute Fellow. He appears regularly in a range of global print and broadcast media, and has contributed chapters on arms trade issues for a number of volumes. He serves on the Advisory Board of The Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), and Lighthouse Reports, an NGO promoting investigative journalism, including on the global arms trade.
Deborah Harrington is a director of Public Matters, an independent research and information partnership focused on public service. She is also on the board of directors of the Leathermarket Community Benefit Society, a community-based organisation in London which builds small scale social housing developments. From 2014-2017 she was in the campaign and policy team of the National Health Action party. She left the NHA to concentrate on research into the more hidden aspects of privatisation and its dramatic consequences for healthcare accessibility, such as the increase in private patient services within NHS hospitals and the extensive sell-off of the NHS estate.
Deborah says, “The patterns of dis-investment and privatisation of both property and service delivery appear across all areas. The propriety of many of these transactions is open to question. At Public Matters we research and inform on the consequences of that process; we aim to highlight the similarities in different service areas and add our voice to raising the alarm on the loss of the public voice and public influence in matters of public service. We see public ownership and provision as the most effective tool for tackling inequalities and providing equitable, universal and comprehensive services. By contrast the growing influence and role of the corporate sector opens up opportunities for practices which are not in the public interest. This includes ‘the revolving door’ between politicians, their SpAds and the corporate sector.”
Deborah Harrrington is a founder member of the Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies whose purpose is to provide an accessible information source on how our economy works to anyone from the compete beginner to academics.
Public Matters’ work has been published in OpenDemocracy; is used in the mainstream media (such as this in the Independent); and was recently referenced in The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers (Verso 2018).
Steve Keen is Distinguished Research Fellow at University College London. This is from his Patreon page:
In 2008, conventional economics led us blindfolded into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Over a decade late, they continue to defend a methodology that is utterly inappropriate for the economy, and dangerously misleading about the relationship between the economy and the ecology of our planet.
I am fortunate that I realised how bad mainstream economics was when I was an undergraduate student almost 50 years ago. Since then, I have worked tirelessly to develop an alternative, realistic economics. My book Debunking Economics has let tens of thousands of readers learn in one month the critical knowledge of economics that I spent four decades acquiring. The “complex systems” model of Hyman Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis I developed in 1992 let me warn of the 2008 crisis before it happened. I designed Minsky, the Open Source dynamic modelling program, to make it possible for anyone to build and understand monetary models of the economy. My latest book Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? explains why the crisis happened, and what we have to do to end it. I have just developed the first explanation of production in which energy plays an essential role, opening up the possibility to finally integrate economics and ecology.
But much more needs to be done, and I need your help to do it.
I have done everything till now with support from many colleagues, but with no support from official funding agencies. Almost all the money for economics research goes to develop the mainstream–even after it has failed so abjectly. That will continue to be the case.
Universities have also been starved of research funding over the years, and buried under bureaucratic controls. They no longer provide the time and freedom they once gave to original thinkers like me. It’s so bad now that the best way for me to have the time and resources to build a new economics is to leave the University sector, and get supported directly by the public.
Today, students and citizens across the globe are calling for a realistic economics to replace the delusional theories that led us into this economic mess. You can help me produce that realistic economics by becoming my Patron for as little as $1 a month. If I’ve changed how you think about economics, help me have that impact on others.
Matt Kennard is an investigative journalist and author. He was a Bertha Fellow and then Director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. While still a student journalist, Kennard exposed one of his university’s lecturers as a white supremacist, sparking an international story, and leading to the lecturer’s early retirement. After receiving the Guardian’s top student journalism prize, Kennard went on to gain a masters at the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York, where he was a Stabile investigative fellow.
After a short spell with Democracy Now! in New York, he spent three years working as a staff writer for the Financial Times in London, New York, and Washington DC, covering, amongst other things, the Pentagon, the White House, Wall Street, and the City of London.
Kennard has written extensively on the U.S. military and its conduct during the War on Terror. His first book, Irregular Army, investigated the recruitment practises of the U.S. military and exposed the carte blanche being given to neo-Nazis, gang members and criminals to sign up and serve in the Middle East. The Independent called it a “devastating critique”, while Daryl Johnson, the top domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security from 2004-2010, described it as “startling and powerful”.
His second book, The Racket, is an exposé of the hidden instruments used by the US government to apply economic and military control across the world. It includes reporting from 15 countries, from Israel-Palestine to Haiti to Mexico to South Africa. VICE described it as “the best noir thriller about shady mobsters you’ve ever read”, while Naomi Klein called it “devastating” and “urgent”. His third book, Stealing the World, which reveals the hidden mechanisms through which corporations rule the world, is scheduled for release in 2020.
Steve Middleton is a financial adviser who spent 25 years specialising in the high net worth, corporate markets and commercial finance for property development. When the Financial crisis started in 2007 and Banks took aggressive stances against customers, he worked successfully to save many companies from administration and insolvency particularly with the RBS Global Restructuring Group (GRG) by combining knowledge of the Financial Service Authority’s (FSA) Rules along with unique complaints processes. In 2014 he repeatedly reported the malpractices of the Banks in relation to Interest Rate Hedging Products (IRHP) and the illicit use of undeclared credit lines to the FCA Executive, highlighting the fact that the FCA’s IRHP Review process design was not compliant with their own Rules and that this was costing SME’s in the UK Billions in financial redress. Whilst making these disclosures he faced false allegations from undisclosed parties to the financial services Network he held his FCA authorisation through, forcing him to resign his licence before the network then admitted the allegations were unfounded and made in error but still they still refused to disclose their source.
Steve went on to work with law firms, Chambers and claims firms advising them on the application of the FCA’s Rules and statutory rights, helping SME’s recover tens of Millions in redress and was a founder member of the not for profit support organisation for small businesses the SME Alliance in 2014. In 2017 Steve had a technical debate via the Complaints Commissioner with the FCA Executive team which led to them being forced to apologise to Mark Wright a whistle-blower they had named along with his allegations to his employer in 2017, this forced the FCA to change their procedures so that from then on they had to record explicit permission on their files before being able to disclose a whistle-blowers name.
Realising the gap for technical support for whistle-blowers like Mark and himself, he went on to work with Mark to set up BankConfidential, a not for profit support service for bank whistle-blowers. BankConfidential’s collaboration with whistle-blowers and journalists have led to numerous disclosure’s in the press including articles and programmes on the BBC, in the Times, Independent, Mail on Sunday, Thompson Reuters, Mail on Sunday Scotland etc. with expose’s such as signature forgery training at RBS, credit file fabrication in bank court disclosure, undisclosed credit lines leading to SME’s insolvency, financial reviews being rigged to withhold consumer redress, regulatory cover up of Market Abuse and how the intentional distressing of bank customers had led to illicit profits for the banks.
Steve is currently working closely with the legal team on a case in the Belfast High Court which alleges collusion between the UK regulators and RBS to withhold £Billions in redress from Northern Ireland SME’s, in which the FCA, PRA and Andrew Bailey the current Governor of the Bank of England, are named as Defendants. A recent intervention at the High Court of Justice by BankConfidential with a witness statement challenging the authenticity of RBS credit file disclosures, led to an almost unique decision by the Judge to reopen a £14m claim.
Steve believes the only way in which the blatant financial corruption in the UK can be challenged is by criminal investigations into the unlawful bank practices of the last 10 years in particular, which he believes must lead to senior bankers and regulators facing custodial sentences.
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
Craig Murray was born in West Runton in October 1958 and educated at Sheringham Primary and Paston Grammar schools.
He graduated from the University of Dundee in 1982 with a MA (Hons) 1st Class in Modern History.
Nicholas Shaxson is a journalist and writer on the staff of Tax Justice Network. He is author of the book ‘Poisoned Wells’ about the oil industry in Africa, published in 2007, ‘Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the Men who Stole the World’, published in January 2011, and ‘The Finance Curse: How global finance is making us all poorer’, published in October 2018. He lives in Berlin.
Prem Sikka is Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Sheffield and Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of Essex in UK. His research on accountancy, auditing, tax avoidance, tax havens, corruption, corporate governance, money laundering, insolvency and business affairs has been published in international scholarly journals, books, newspapers and magazines.
He has appeared on domestic and international radio and television programmes to comment on business matters. He has advised and given evidence to a number of UK and EU parliamentary committees. He advised the UK House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee for its investigation into the collapse of BHS and Carillion.
Prem holds the Working for Justice Award from Tax Justice Network, Accounting Exemplar Award from the American Accounting Association (AAA), Lifetime Achievement Awards from the British Accounting and Finance Association (BAFA) and PQ Magazine, Personality of the Year Award from Accountancy Age and the inaugural (in 2017) Abraham Briloff Award from The Accountant and International Accounting Bulletin for promoting transparency and public accountability of businesses. In January 2019, he was named by Accountancy Age as one of 50 most influential individuals in the world of accounting.
Jessica is recognised as one of the country’s leading specialists in public/regulatory, EU and human rights law, acting for a wide range of clients, ranging from large companies, regulators, Government departments, NGOs, and for private individuals. She has particular experience in data protection privacy/data protection, tax, regulatory/competition law across different industries and in civil liberties work.
Jessica represented the second Claimant, Dos Santos, in R (Miller & Anor) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union & Ors [2017] UKSC 5, the challenge to the Prime Minister’s decision to use the Royal Prerogative to notify the EU of the UK’s intended withdrawal under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union. Jessica also recently acted for Privacy International and Open Rights Group in its intervention in a challenge to the emergency legislation adopted to require telecom companies to retain data showing the identity, time, location and duration of electronic communications in R (Watson and Davis) and the Open Rights Group and Privacy International v S/S Home Department [2015] EWCA Civ 1185; [2015] EWHC 2092.
Prior to taking Silk in 2013 she was a member of the Attorney General’s A Panel of Counsel. She is editor of ‘Human Rights Practice’, a qualified mediator, was in 2016 UK nominee for Judge at the European Court of Human Rights, is a member of BEG and vice chair of the Bar Council EU Law Committee. Jessica was listed in The Lawyer Hot 100 2014.
Professional and academic qualifications.
2016: Elected Bencher of Middle Temple (Inns of Court)
2015: Fellow, Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, British Institute on International and Comparative Law.
2013: Appointed as Queen’s Counsel
2010: Appointed to Attorney General’s A Panel of Counsel
2003: Appointed to Attorney General’s B Panel of Counsel
1994-1995: Post-graduate diploma in EC Law, King’s College, London
1991-1992: Bar Finals (Harmsworth and Inns of Court Law scholar)
1990-1991: City University London CPE
1986-89: St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, MA Hons (Oxon)
Steve Tombs joined the Department of Social Policy and Criminology at The Open University in January 2013, and was Head of Department from August 2015 until July 2018.
Before joining The Open University in January 2013 he worked at Liverpool John Moores University where, since 1998, he was Professor of Sociology. There, over 21 years, he taught across Schools of Business, Law, and Social Sciences.
He has long-standing interests in the incidence, nature and regulation of corporate and state crime and harm, and has published widely on these matters.
He works with the Hazards Movement and the Institute of Employment Rights, is a Board member and Trustee of INQUEST, and a founding Member and Chair (1999-2009) of the Centre for Corporate Accountability. The CCA was an independent, not-for-profit advice, research and advocacy organisation.
David Whyte is Professor of Socio-legal studies at the University of Liverpool where he researches the relationship between corporate power and law. He has written for The Guardian, The Herald, The Age and Red Pepper. His books include How Corrupt is Britain (ed., Pluto 2015) and Ecocide: kill the corporation before it kills us (Manchester University Press, 2020).
Corruption UK was founded by Nicholas Wilson, who is the curator of the site. He has over 30 years experience working in the law until he blew the whistle on a massive fraud by HSBC. He has campaigned since 2003 for recompense for consumers affected. His campaign has had a serious affect on his mental health and finances, being unemployable as a whistleblower. He is also a mortgage prisoner and under constant threat of repossession of his home.
To date he has recovered £30m for consumers from HSBC (out of £200m+) and is still fighting. He has many years of experience dealing with corruption, involving regulators, police, courts and parliament, and knows the impotent rage felt when something is continuously covered up to save careers, and is not reported. It was the extent of the corruption surrounding the HSBC fraud that determined him to set up Corruption UK. He has invented a word game, ketsudo, and is not easily intimidated.
Dr Mary Alice Young is a leading expert on the criminal use of secrecy jurisdictions and the interactions which exist between secrecy jurisdictions with transnational organised crime. As an interdisciplinary socio-legal scholar based at the University of the West of England (UWE), Mary’s research is primarily law-based and overlaps with areas of history, banking and finance, criminology, sociology, and economics. This interdisciplinary element informs a holistic approach to identifying and analysing the ways in which criminals manage their money and the policy responses to these issues. Dr Young is currently based at the University of the West of England (Bristol Law School) and lectures and researches in her specialist areas. Her work is widely cited and she holds the following positions:
Mary dislikes greed, pomposity and inequality. She loves good ice cream and a decent, well informed debate. The first preferably following the latter upon its conclusion. She has two sons and lives with a mountain biker in the countryside.