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RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: So that's why they called it an oil rig!

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First it was the banks, now it’s the oil companies. In the same way the bankers rigged interest rates to maximise their profits and bonuses, traders at BP and Shell stand accused of fixing artificially high oil prices.

Just as manipulating inter-bank lending rates put up the cost of borrowing for everyone, so it is alleged that a conspiracy to inflate the price of crude oil has cost each British motorist £2,000 at the pumps over the past ten years.

Fraud investigators working for the European Commission this week raided the London offices of three major oil companies in search of evidence.

BP and Shell are two of the oil giants accused of fixing prices by claiming to have paid more for oil than they actually have, and passing these fake price hikes onto the consumer

There’s no need to dwell on the minutiae of this kind of outrageous scam. Essentially, it boils down to traders pretending they have paid more for oil than they actually have. It’s called lying.

The inflated figure pushes up the price which retailers have to pay for the petrol they sell to motorists. Naturally, the extra cost is passed on at the pump.

Experts believed artificial inflation of petrol prices may have cost UK households an average of £2,000

Some industry experts believe that as a direct result of this cynical manipulation of the market, petrol prices may be 20 per cent higher than they should be.

In the past, we have tended to blame the exorbitant cost of filling our tanks on heavy taxes imposed by successive governments.

Compared with the 60 per cent plus raked off by the Treasury in VAT and duty, the profit made by the oil companies in exchange for drilling, refining and transporting their product to thousands of petrol stations seemed relatively modest.

David Cameron said the allegations against British oil companies of price-fixing are 'hugely concerning' and has said those responsible for it should face jail

But, to his credit, George Osborne cancelled Gordon Brown’s automatic fuel tax escalator and has cut duty by 1p. Yet the price of a litre has continued to rise inexorably, up from 75p to 133p since 2002, when the price-rigging is said to have begun.

We first realised the oil traders were up to something when we saw giant tankers moored off British ports for weeks at a time, waiting for prices to rise again before making their deliveries.

This was profiteering at its worst, or so we thought. We are now told the oil companies have been ripping us off to the tune of billions of pounds simply by juggling a few decimal points on a computer screen.

David Cameron says that those responsible should be jailed. The Energy Secretary Ed Davey has promised that any guilty men will ‘face the full force of the law’. That would appear to be little more than wishful thinking.

No one has been sent to prison in Britain as a result of any banking malpractice, not even for rigging interest rates, which put up the cost of mortgages and other borrowing and helped bring about the economic crash.

We first realised the oil traders were up to something when we saw giant tankers moored off British ports for weeks at a time, waiting for prices to rise again before making their deliveries

And it turns out that new legislation designed to prevent a repeat of the lending rate scandal does not apply to the oil industry and can’t be imposed retrospectively.

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It is instructive that this week’s raids on the oil company headquarters were mounted not by British Government investigators, but by the European Commission.

Our own Office of Fair Trading has been asleep at the wheel and reluctant to impose a tough regulatory system on the oil firms.

Last year, the OFT concluded that ‘competition was working well’ in the oil markets.

Britain has always been notoriously limp-wristed when it comes to tackling corporate corruption.

In America, they realise that for the free market to work in the interests of everyone, it has to be coupled with a rigorous regulatory regime and a willingness to come down like a ton of bricks on reckless, greedy executives who break the rules.

Plenty of former high-flyers from the finance industry who brought about the banking crash are now behind bars. On the other side of the Atlantic, the disgraced ex-RBS boss Fred Goodwin wouldn’t just have been stripped of his knighthood, he’d have been stripped of his liberty for a very long time.

Kenneth Lay, head of the collapsed, corrupt Enron energy giant, was indicted and found guilty of corporate abuse and accounting fraud. He died before he could be sentenced to between 20 and 30 years.

So if some way can be found of bringing criminal charges against the oil companies in Britain, can we expect to see the bosses of Shell and BP in the dock at the Old Bailey?

Don’t hold your breath. Any price-rigging will be blamed on junior traders well down the pecking order.

The best solution so far has been put forward by the Tory MP Robert Halfon, who wants the Government to impose massive, punitive windfall taxes on the oil companies.

But instead of simply handing over the fines to the Exchequer, Halfon says the money should be used to cut fuel duty and slash the price of petrol at the pump.

Britain’s hard-pressed motorists have suffered enough.

 

Police were called to break up a brawl between Star Wars fans and Doctor Who enthusiasts at a sci-fi convention in Norwich.

They arrived to find people in Jedi and Darth Vader costumes engaged in a heated dispute with two Time Lords and another man wearing a Judge Dredd outfit.

The Doctors were accused of disrupting a convention dedicated to the Star Wars movies and featuring bit-part actors from Episode V and The Empire Strikes Back.

Police were called to break up a brawl between Star Wars fans and Doctor Who enthusiasts at a sci-fi convention in Norwich, but it is not the first time they have been looking for some unusual suspects

Apparently, there is a history of bad blood between Star Wars and Doctor Who fans in the Norwich area, although it is not clear what any of this had to do with members of the Judge Dredd community.

One of the Doctors claimed he had been assaulted, but after studying CCTV evidence police sensibly decided not to take any further action.

With around 1,000 people present, many of them in fancy dress, the Old Bill would have had a hell of a job assembling an identity parade.

Round up the unusual suspects.

The city of Norwich has a unusually colourful past when it comes to crime including the police searching for two men dressed as Oompa Loompa's

But I can’t help wondering what they are putting in the water in

Norwich these days. Back in January I brought you news that police were hunting for two men dressed as Oompa-Loompas, from Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, who had allegedly mugged a man outside a kebab shop in Norwich city centre.

This followed another incident, also in Norwich, in which two men dressed as Ozzy Osbourne and Elvis Presley attacked an off-duty policeman in a Wyatt Earp costume.

Doesn’t anyone in Norwich dress normally any more? I’ve heard of dress-down Friday, but this is ridiculous.

A group of immigrants who got covered in flour were described as looking like Casper

This week it was revealed that under the Government’s Equal Marriage Act, Jedi weddings may soon be legal.

Let’s hope they don’t hold the first one in Norwich, otherwise all police leave will have to be cancelled.

Nine illegal immigrants were arrested soon after jumping from the back of a flour lorry on the M26 in Kent. Police had no difficulty rounding them up.

They were covered from head to foot in flour.

One eyewitness said: ‘They looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost.’

Here’s an idea. Why not spray the inside of every container lorry entering Britain with that smart-water stuff used by security firms? That way we’d soon spot any illegals.

They’d all glow in the dark.

One in five funerals is interrupted by mobile phones, according to the Co-op. For instance, during a recent burial a phone rang just as the coffin was being lowered.

The ringtone was: If You’re Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands.

If you must leave your phone on during funerals at least have the decency to change your ringtone to David Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes.

  Mintea cum ati merge *

Police in West Sussex are advertising for Community Support Officers who speak a range of Eastern European languages.

Top of the list are Polish speakers, but they are also keen to hire those fluent in Hungarian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Slovakian. Not that they are suggesting mass immigration has brought with it an increase in crime, perish the thought.

It’s just that they are having difficulty communicating with new arrivals who can’t speak or understand English.

This will only get worse when the Bulgarians and Romanians arrive en masse in January.

* Mintea cum ati merge might come in handy. That’s Mind How You Go in Romanian.








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