Sex, drugs and outrageous double standards…

Quick question: why isn’t the European Commission facing criminal charges for flagrant breach of its own money laundering laws?

Reason I ask is that the Commission has just sent out a series of bills to its member states, based on a revision of their annual contribution to the EU’s budget. In Malta’s case, the requested top-up came to €13 million. In the case of Britain, it was an astonishing €2.1 billion.

On one level, it is hardly surprising that the UK’s bill would be 160 times the size of ours. It’s a simple reflection of the disparity in the size of our respective economies. But what no one seems to have noticed is how these different bills were actually calculated.

I won’t bore you with the precise mechanics of this budgetary exercise: you can look them up here [http://ec.europa.eu/budget/financialreport/2013/annex/3/index_en.html]. Suffice it to say that the amounts due are a percentage of each country’s Gross National Income: – i.e., the total amount of money generated by the economy, not taking into consideration that country’s corresponding debt levels, etc.

Please note: the TOTAL amount generated by the economy. I’ll come back to this point in a second.

On the face of it, this is good news for Malta. It means our economy has grown beyond both our own and the Commission’s expectation. Indeed, Malta is one of only six out of 28 EU states that can currently make that claim. As a result, we are being asked to contribute more to a fund which will be used to bail out other less fortunate member states.

And yet… how odd. It seems like only yesterday that people were gleefully predicting how Malta would “need a bail-out” with a change in government in March 2013. Well, those same people have gone awfully quiet all of a sudden, now that the clean opposite has materialised…. and Malta has been asked to bail out other European economies instead. Perhaps the change in weather has made them all hoarse…

But let’s leave all that aside. The truly astonishing thing about this development is that the European Commission has calculated its revised figures for Britain (and not, it seems, for anyone else) in part on the profits generated by that country’s illegal sex and drugs industries.

Yes, that’s right: the UK’s €2.1 billion contribution to the European budget also includes money made illegally by organised crime networks involved in human trafficking – namely, a thriving trade in young women enslaved for the purposes of prostitution – and drugs. That shady heroin trafficker on the street corner, who would be jailed for 20 years if caught red-handed? His profits are now taken into consideration when mapping the size of the United Kingdom’s economy. The prostitute who takes £50 a trick off the Tottenham Court Road? Any money she pockets, including the cut she will be forced to give to her pimp for her own ‘protection’… that’s all now officially part of the UK’s Gross National Income.

Never has the adjective ‘gross’ been used in a more apt context, I would say. And as you can probably imagine, it amounts to a rather large sum of money in the end.

In fact, the only reason why the UK’s revised contribution is so overwhelmingly enormous compared to all other countries… seriously: project it on a column-graph, and the UK’s bill looks like the frigging Empire State Building jutting out of the Sliema seafront skyline… is because underground activities such as prostitution and drugs have contributed £10.1 billion to that country’s GDP this year alone. This was announced last May by the UK’s National Statistics office, and that figure was duly added to the national economic growth statistics.

So of course, the European Commission now wants a cut. Like any grubby little criminal organisation of the kind it passes laws against – the Mafia, the Camorra, the ‘Ndrangheta, etc. – the Commission expects to take a slice out of the profits of human traffickers and dope dealers. And everybody just accepts this without batting an eyelid. Nobody even mentions the fact that any European citizen who tries to do something similar – and gets caught – will probably spend most of the rest of his miserable life rotting away in a prison cell.

For in case no one noticed, it is a crime – a very, very serious crime – for anyone who is not a European Commissioner to accept money that has been made illegally. In Malta, the legislation that makes this a crime is called the Money Laundering Act… and it was introduced on the Commission’s own insistence. In practice, it works like this: if you or I (or any company, business, NGO, non-profit organisation, etc.) accepts a payment or donation of more than €1,000… and that money is later traced to profits from illegal activity (any illegal activity)… it is enough to be tried and convicted under the Money Laundering Act.

It can happen to anyone. Let’s say you advertised something worth €1,000 on Maltapark. Someone pays you in cash. You deposit the money in your account. Well, you’d better hope that the money you’ve accepted as payment will not turn out to be the profits on the sale of a little cocaine or cannabis. You’d better hope that the fellow who answered your ad wasn’t also running an illegal brothel under the guise of a Chinese massage parlour. Otherwise, you’re in deep, deep shit, my friend. You’d better start thinking about how much of your legally earned money you’re going to spend on a top-notch criminal lawyer…

Meanwhile, the effects of this legislation go somewhat beyond the mere threat of prison sentences. Money laundering laws also compel European companies and corporations to invest significant resources in due diligence. Accountants have to be employed to trace the source of all transactions. Entire departments, with their own budgets, have been set up to deal with these new exigencies. Why, I hear you ask? Well, there are two answers to that question.

The first (and largely theoretical) answer is because European countries have generally accepted the argument – and I won’t go into whether they’re right or wrong – that people should be penalised for participating in illegal activities, no matter how indirectly. This in turn invokes a host of vaguely philosophical questions about the nature of criminal responsibility. Is a man ‘involved’ in human trafficking, because he pays a sum of money to a prostitute without realising that she is a victim of a human trafficking ring? Is a business trying to hide and legitimise money made through drug trafficking, if it unwittingly allows that money to be reintroduced to the economy through its own bank account? Etc., etc.

The second, much more practical answer is because the European Commission made it a mandatory requirement for all EU states to have money laundering laws which conform to the same basic principles. Yep, you guessed it. The same European Commission that sees no contradiction whatsoever in not only accepting – which would be bad enough – but actually DEMANDING a cut on the profits Britain’s illegal drug and prostitution industries, in order to re-inject that same black money into the European economy.

How do they get away with this, I wonder? Asking for a cut on the profits of criminal activity is not only a thunderingly flagrant breach of the same laws we all accepted at the insistence of the Commission… but it is an obvious and instantly recognisable ingredient of the phenomenon we all call ‘organised crime’. It’s how the Mafia operates, for crying out loud. You can almost hear Bugsy Malone talking through a haze of cigar smoke. “You wanna do business in this neighbourhood? You just pay-a your protection money like all the others…”

In return, the Mafia sees to it that no one (least of all the police) upsets your nice little illegal operation. Unless, of course, you don’t pay up, in which case… well, you’ve all watched enough mafia movies to know how it usually ends.

Yet when the European Commission does the same thing – you know, the same European Commission that preaches endlessly about the need to combat the “scourge of drugs”, to counter the “evil of human trafficking”, etc… when these people need a bit of extra cash to cope with a spectacular series of overrun European budgets… oh, they have no hesitation whatsoever in dipping their own arms elbow deep into the pots of black money made out of the same ‘scourge of drugs’, the same evil human traffickers, the same murky underworld of cut-throat criminals and psychotic Mexican drug lords, etc.

Suddenly, that’s no longer a crime called ‘money laundering’. Suddenly, it is official European economic policy. So what are you all waiting for? Start selling more drugs, and allowing more sex slaves to be trafficked into your country. Europe needs the money, you know…