Laws 'broke six expenses rules'

10 May 2011 Last updated at 11:22 ET  Mr Laws helped negotiate the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government deal Lib Dem MP David Laws has been found guilty of breaching parliamentary rules over more than just his claims for rent, the BBC has been told.

The standards and privileges committee - due to report on Thursday - will say Mr Laws broke "around six" rules.

But it will stress he did not intend to benefit himself or his partner.

He quit as Chief Secretary to the Treasury last year when it emerged he had claimed about ￡40,000 to pay rent to his partner - which is banned.

The committee has been considering the findings of a long investigation.

Mr Laws has previously indicated he would be keen on a return to government.

Prime Minister David Cameron has also signalled he would like to see him back quickly.

Phone bills

But the language used by the committee in reprimanding Mr Laws, when it publishes its report, and the level of sanction imposed could decide his future.

Continue reading the main story

Mr Laws has always maintained that his decisions were driven by his desire for privacy, rather than to benefit in any way from the expenses system”

End Quote Liberal Democrat statement Mr Laws resigned after just 17 days as a cabinet minister, following reports he had claimed about ￡40,000 to pay rent to his partner, the lobbyist James Lundie. Such payments have been against parliamentary rules since 2006.

Mr Laws apologised, saying the claims had been part of an effort to conceal his homosexuality rather than make financial gain, and promised to pay back the money.

The BBC's deputy political editor James Landale said he understood a long investigation by the parliamentary standards commissioner had discovered other breaches relating to phone bills and building work.

But the Parliamentary commissioner for standards has made clear in his report that there is no evidence the MP made his expenses claims with the intention of benefiting himself or his partner, the BBC understands.

'Serious matter'

The commissioner will conclude Mr Laws acted to protect his privacy, it is further understood.

The Liberal Democrats are refusing to comment until the report is officially published.

In a statement the party said: "Mr Laws has always maintained that his decisions were driven by his desire for privacy, rather than to benefit in any way from the expenses system.

"Mr Laws has also always maintained that his actions led to a lower cost for the taxpayer than would otherwise be the case."

The standards and privileges committee, which decides on sanctions for MPs found guilty of breaches, discussed the commissioner's findings earlier on Tuesday behind closed doors.

A source said: "This is considered a serious matter."

After his resignation, Mr Laws won praise from his Conservative colleagues for his role in coalition negotiations and his approach to tackling the budget deficit in the short time he worked alongside Chancellor George Osborne.

He was replaced as chief secretary by Danny Alexander, one of five Lib Dem MPs in the cabinet.

Seeking Business, States Loosen Insurance Rules

Today, all it takes is a trip to Vermont.

Vermont, and a handful of other states including Utah, South Carolina, Delaware and Hawaii, are aggressively remaking themselves as destinations of choice for the kind of complex private insurance transactions once done almost exclusively offshore. Roughly 30 states have passed some type of law to allow companies to set up special insurance subsidiaries called captives, which can conduct Bermuda-style financial wizardry right in a policyholder’s own backyard.

Captives provide insurance to their parent companies, and the term originally referred to subsidiaries set up by any large company to insure the company’s own risks. Oil companies, for example, used them for years to gird for environmental claims related to infrequent but potentially high-cost events. They did so in overseas locations that offered light regulation amid little concern since the parent company was the only one at risk.

Now some states make it just as easy. And they have broadened the definition of captives so that even insurance companies can create them. This has given rise to concern that a shadow insurance industry is emerging, with less regulation and more potential debt than policyholders know, raising the possibility that some companies will find themselves without enough money to pay future claims. Critics say this is much like the shadow banking system that contributed to the financial crisis.

Aetna recently used a subsidiary in Vermont to refinance a block of health insurance policies, reaping $150 million in savings, according to its chief financial officer, Joseph M. Zubretsky. The main reason is that the insurer did not need to maintain conventional reserves at the same level as would have been required by insurance regulators in Aetna’s home state of Connecticut.

In other big transactions, companies including MetLife, the Hartford Financial Services Group, Swiss Reinsurance, Genworth Financial and the American International Group, among others, have refinanced life, disability and long-term-care insurance policies, as well as annuities.

For the states, attracting these insurance deals promotes business travel and creates jobs for lawyers, actuaries and other white-collar workers, who pay taxes. States have also found that they can impose modest taxes on the premiums collected by captives.

For insurers, these subsidiaries offer ways to unlock some of the money tied up in reserves, making millions available for dividends, acquisitions, bonuses and other projects. Three weeks after Aetna’s deal closed, the company announced it was increasing its dividend fifteenfold.

And as changes to the nation’s health systems are phased in, such innovations might even help hold down the cost of insurance for consumers, much as selling pooled mortgages to investors has made buying a home less expensive.

The downside, though, is that the states are offering a refuge from other states’ insurance rules, especially the all-important ones requiring companies to have sufficient reserves. California, for one, has already chosen not to try to lure such businesses. “We are concerned about systems that usher in less robust financial security and oversight,” said Dave Jones, the California insurance commissioner.

While saying that he wanted to remain open to innovation, Mr. Jones added, “We need to ensure that innovative transactions are not a strategy to drain value away from policyholders only to provide short-term enrichment to shareholders and investment bankers.”

The cost of some of the deals has been considerable. In 2008, MetLife used a subsidiary in Vermont to handle a crucial $3.5 billion letter of credit, with help from Deutsche Bank, because the subsidiary was not subject to the same collateral requirements as in New York. The trade immediately bolstered MetLife’s balance sheet, helping the company to endure that year’s market turmoil without government assistance. But MetLife agreed to pay Deutsche Bank $3.5 million a year for 15 years, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times — locking itself into high costs for years.

MetLife said its transaction was in keeping with industry rules and norms, and Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

Another issue is public oversight. State regulators normally require insurance companies to make available reams of detailed information. A policyholder can find every asset in an insurer’s investment portfolio, for instance, or the company the carrier turns to for reinsurance. But not if the insurer relies on a captive. The new state laws make the audited financial statements of the captives confidential.

 

Six Years and Hundreds of Witnesses Later, Coroner Rules in London Bombings

Stories of bystanders fighting their way into mangled, pitch-black subway cars and refusing to leave passengers whose lives were slipping away. Stories of body parts strewn in the rubble of a sliced-open bus. Stories of grievously wounded people who somehow cheated death because of resilience, luck and the extraordinary efforts of strangers.

And the story, too, of how four British men of Pakistani descent committed one of the worst acts of terrorism in British history on July 7, 2005, setting off four bombs in London’s transportation network that killed 56 people, including themselves, and wounded at least 700 more.

Nearly six years later, after a highly unusual inquest in which the final moments of each of the 52 victims’ lives unfolded in forensic detail in a courtroom here, the coroner in the case made her ruling: “unlawful killing.”

It was a foregone conclusion, as, in a way, was her other finding: “That the evidence I have heard does not justify the conclusion that any failings on the part of any organization or individual caused or contributed to any of the deaths.”

But the coroner, Lady Justice Hallett, explained that the inquest, standard practice after violent deaths in Britain, had in this case a larger purpose: to provide a way for the surviving families to “find out what happened, how their loved ones died and if their deaths could have been prevented.”

The inquest into the 7/7 bombings, as they are known, has been widely praised for its humane and sensitive approach. Though inquests are usually held soon after someone dies, this one was delayed until after the end of several terrorist trials that had bearing on the evidence.

It was an immensely complicated proceeding, dealing with four crime scenes, three in the subway system and one on a bus in central London, and detailing the background and movements of the four men responsible. It heard from 309 witnesses, including intelligence officers, and listened to the written statements of 197 other people.

In her remarks, Lady Justice Hallett said she was certain that the bombings could not have been prevented, even though two of the bombers were known by MI5, Britain’s domestic security service.

She also acknowledged that there were widespread problems in the emergency response to the bombings: some people who survived the attacks died while waiting for up to an hour to be rescued. But she also said that after hearing all the medical evidence, she was convinced that none of those victims would have survived.

“The evidence I have heard does not justify the conclusion that any failings on the part of any organization or individual caused or contributed to any of the deaths,” the coroner said.

But she made a number of recommendations about how the security services could improve intelligence gathering and the emergency services their coordination and organization.

The families of some of the victims said that her recommendations did not go far enough and called for a new inquiry. At the same time, 10 of the families said they were grateful for how the inquest had been conducted.

“The coroner should be commended for her efforts in ensuring that these proceedings have been conducted at all times in a dignified, timely and sensitive manner to those who lost their lives,” they said in a statement.

Day after day, the inquest heard from an array of witnesses, some arriving in wheelchairs or using crutches or canes, others still traumatized and in counseling. Some of the witnesses said that anyone would have helped the way that they did.

The inquest heard how Group Capt. Craig Staniforth of the Royal Air Force smashed his way into one of the bombed subway cars, swinging onto the wreckage from handrails and then discussing his daughter’s college applications with a severely wounded passenger in an effort to keep him conscious.

“I can almost reel off to this day what four universities those were,” the passenger, John Tulloch, told the inquest.

It heard how another passenger, Steve Hucklesbury, climbed into a wrecked car to try to resuscitate Laura Webb, 29, with help from a woman shouting directions through the window, but how he had to give up when her mouth and nose filled with blood and it was clear that nothing more could be done.

It heard how Gill Hicks, on the subway near the Russell Square station, seeing that her legs were “literally hanging by a sinew of skin,” fashioned two tourniquets out of her scarf and willed herself to remain alert because otherwise, “you know, I would die,” she said. She lost 75 percent of her blood and both her legs.

“Until I started this process, I had no idea that people could survive injuries as horrific as yours,” Lady Justice Hallett told her at the inquest. “You are amazing.”

And it heard how Gerardine Quaghebeur, a neuroradiologist who was sitting in the same subway car as one of the bombers, refused to evacuate the wrecked, pitch-black train. wounded, dead and dying passengers, stacked one on top of the other.

Speaking of a woman who had been seated near her, Ms. Quaghebeur said: “She asked, ‘You can’t be leaving us. You aren’t going to leave us?’?”

“No,” she replied. “No, I’ll stay.”

View the original article here

G.O.P. Rethinking Bid to Overhaul Medicare Rules

While top Republicans insisted that they remained committed to the Medicare initiative, which had become the target of intense attacks by Democrats and liberal groups in recent weeks, the lawmaker who would have to turn the proposal into legislation said he had no plans to do so any time soon.

The lawmaker, Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said that while he still supports the party’s Medicare approach, opposition from Democrats made it pointless to proceed.

“I’m not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in,” Mr. Camp said in an appearance at the National Press Club. “I’m not interested in laying down more markers. I am interested in solutions.”

Coupled with remarks by other House Republican leaders, his statement suggested that the party’s Medicare proposal had been shelved, even though the party’s lawmakers had taken a risky vote to pass the budget in the House just last month, and in the past two weeks had attempted to sell it to constituents in often-stormy town hall meetings.

Republicans suggested that they would continue to press to rein in the growing costs of Medicare, even if not through the current proposal, which would transform the program into one in which the federal government subsidized the purchase of private health insurance coverage by Americans 65 and older.

Putting aside the proposal would remove one of the biggest points of contention between the parties as they address both the nation’s long-term budget problems and the more immediate need for an agreement on raising the federal debt limit.

The development came as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. held a first negotiating session with members of both parties to try to find a deal that would allow Congress to raise the debt ceiling this year.

Republicans are demanding spending cuts and other measures to reduce the budget deficit as the price of support for raising the debt ceiling.

The Republican Medicare plan was never likely to be adopted as part of any deal on the debt limit. But the decision by Republicans to pull back the proposal was a tacit acknowledgment that the politics of entitlement reform remain so volatile that pressing ahead in the face of intense Democratic opposition could cost the party dearly at the polls.

As they rolled out their budget last month, Republicans hailed the Medicare plan as a bold attempt to address chronic deficits. All but four House Republicans voted for the budget proposal, which was developed by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee.

President Obama and Congressional Democrats quickly went on the attack, condemning the Republican plan. Mr. Camp’s statement on Medicare was in sync with similar comments by other top Republicans, including Representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Mr. Ryan. They said Republicans recognized that they were unlikely to win approval of their sweeping Medicare overhaul in the debt-reduction talks that began at Blair House on Thursday.

“The reality is this president has excoriated our budget plan and the Medicare proposal in the plan,” Mr. Cantor told reporters.

The negotiators, who agreed to meet next on Tuesday, are combing their respective budget proposals to find common ground.

But given the parties’ differences and the short time frame for negotiations before Congress must increase the debt limit, both sides have indicated that any compromise is likely to be based less on specific policy changes than on proposals setting deficit-reduction targets for coming years. Those targets would be combined with triggers to make automatic cuts in spending — and tax increases, in Democrats’ view — if the targets are exceeded.

While Mr. Cantor outlined the House-passed Ryan budget as Republicans’ opening bid in the Blair House negotiations, he said little about the Medicare proposals, participants said.

“He didn’t need to talk about it in that room,” said one participant. “Everyone knows it’s dead.”

Still, the leadership comments surprised many Republican lawmakers, who said they had expected to move forward on the plan.

Some members — especially freshmen from districts with steep re-election hills to scale — were upset to hear that the plan could be scotched after they had voted for the budget proposal and then invested so much hard work trying to sell it back home over the spring recess.

“I would be very disappointed if we didn’t follow through,” said Representative Joe Walsh, whose district lies in the Chicago suburbs. “We have spent, gosh, a month or two now trying to educate the American people to a pretty good reception. I appreciate the chairman’s notion, but I would continue to respectfully challenge him to get this thing through committee.”

Representative Bobby Schilling of Illinois said backing down now would be giving in “to lies and deceit told by the other side.”

“We’ve just got to address this problem,” he said. “Is it going to be perfect? No, but it needs to be addressed.”

The House speaker, John A. Boehner, said Thursday that the party was not backing away from the Medicare overhaul. But he said Mr. Camp’s view was a recognition of the “political realities that we face.”

Democrats said it did not matter if Republicans decided to jettison their Medicare plan because they had already voted for it as part of the budget.

“The Republicans are slowly realizing their plan to privatize Medicare is a political disaster,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat. “But until they renounce their vote for it, they are still going to own it.”

Mr. Ryan said he believed the future of the Medicare proposal would be decided in next year’s elections.

“At the end of the day, I think 2012 is going to make the decision,” Mr. Ryan said at a budget forum Thursday, predicting voters would back the plan he said protects Medicare from insolvency. “The people are ahead of the political class.”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

 

Digital Domain: Opt-In Rules Are a Good Start

Many Web site visitors are willing to share personal information about themselves — provided that their consent is obtained first. Consent cannot be presumed, however. Sneaky is not O.K.

Facebook appeared to figure this out the hard way: it would make unilateral changes that seemed to force users to share more, not less, and then it would look bewildered when many users cried foul.

Now, Apple and Google are learning that their users will not automatically assume that everything the companies do out of view is in their customers’ best interests. A furor erupted after reports that the companies were engaging in secretive location tracking using customers’ iPhone and Android cellphones.

Both companies said they were logging the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers, not keeping tabs on the phones’ owners. But the issue was serious enough that Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, emerged from his medical leave to oversee the wording of Apple’s official explanation. The company’s statement blamed “very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a sound bite.”

It’s clear that tracking of any kind is a touchy subject. On the Web, tracking can take the form of “behavioral targeting,” based on the digital bread crumbs that people leave as they go from one site to the next. Or it can involve Web sites paying data brokers for personal information about a Web visitor known only by his or her e-mail address.

A Web site that tracks the actions of its anonymous visitors is peering into the darkness, trying to determine its users’ identities and interests so it can serve up targeted advertising or purchase suggestions.

“Ad networks infer tastes,” says Bret Taylor, Facebook’s chief technology officer. “They make a profile that you can’t edit or delete — and you may not even know about. At Facebook, it’s completely in your control.”

In the normal course of business, Facebook naturally comes into possession of highly detailed personal information on its hundreds of millions of members. Its knowledge of what members are doing online is no longer limited to what is done at its Web site. Members are now offered the option of using their Facebook user name and password to log in at other Web sites, which permits these sites to tap the visitor’s personal and social network information.

Here’s the key: the feature, called Login With Facebook, is opt-in only, and users can opt out any time. If they do revoke their permission, all information that was pulled in from Facebook must be purged.

Facebook forbids partner Web sites from transferring any information about its members to ad networks or data brokers. It also uses technology to detect the attempts of data brokers to “scrape” — that is, record — Facebook members’ publicly visible profiles. (Search engines are permitted to scrape Facebook’s public profiles, but users can elect to disallow that.)

Privacy settings are best managed in one place, not many. For our landline phones, we have the National Do Not Call Registry, at donotcall.gov, maintained by the Federal Trade Commission. But for privacy protection around the Web, there is no equivalent.

Maybe the closest thing we have to such a registry online is the Facebook privacy settings page. It’s true that contemplating the options it offers will make your head hurt — it bears no resemblance to the simple binary toggle of the Do Not Call list. Some people may wonder whether Facebook wants to overwhelm them with privacy options, in the hope that the typical user will simply give up trying to restrict the range of information shared publicly. For those who persevere, however, the system works in the way a Do Not Track list would work: when a member makes changes in his or her privacy settings, the changes propagate to all of Facebook’s partner sites.

In April Senators John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, introduced the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011. It is a strange amalgam of mediocre proposals that would not do much of anything, other than place the onus on individuals to manage their relationship with every Web site that collects information about them, which means just about every site. People who have tons of free time can opt out — but only one Web site at a time.

If a Web site visitor uses an e-mail address as a user name — and shares no other personal information — that site can buy from data brokers a dossier of personal information about the visitor that is matched to the e-mail address. One broker, Rapleaf, says it has information associated with “over 70 percent of active U.S. e-mail addresses” and recently set a new monthly record for itself: responding to more than one billion information requests from its clients.

The opt-out model advocated in the Kerry-McCain bill means that a consumer would have to know about every Rapleaf out there and visit each one to edit information or opt out. It offers the much preferable opt-in design only for a few special categories of “sensitive” information, like medical conditions, health records or religious affiliation.

It was almost 20 years ago that The New Yorker ran its cartoon of a dog in front of a computer, telling another dog sitting nearby, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Without your consent, that’s still as it should be.?

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

 

Russia Is Set to Propose Stricter Rules for Reactors

Power plants would become safer if the 29 countries that operate them accepted common and binding safety standards, Sergei V. Kiriyenko, the director of the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, said at a briefing for journalists Wednesday in Moscow.

These countries should also commit to detailed procedures for releasing information about a leak, given the propensity of radiation to float across borders, Mr. Kiriyenko said.

The third proposal calls for governments to commit to taking the lead in responding to accidents. That would supplant the role typically taken by the operator or owner of a power plant. Governments, under the proposal, would intervene once a disaster passed Level 4 on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s ’seven-level scale of nuclear disasters. Level 4 is defined as an “accident with local consequences,” while Level 5 is an “accident with wider consequences.”

In laying out these ideas, which Russia plans to present to the Group of 8 industrialized nations at a meeting this spring in France, Mr. Kiriyenko elaborated on a proposal announced Tuesday by the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, at a ceremony observing the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

The setting for that ceremony, near the ruins of the reactor, couched the Russian proposal as a magnanimous effort — the latest of many — to share the lessons of Chernobyl with a world at risk of nuclear blunders. Russia is also deeply invested in the continued global expansion of nuclear power, because it exports uranium fuel and reactor technology.

Vast commercial interests are tied up in the continued adoption of nuclear power and development of reactors, particularly in emerging markets, which are the primary customers of Russia’s nuclear exports. Those business prospects help make Russia particularly committed to improving safety, rather than letting demand disappear in a din of protests against nuclear power.

The Russians say they are now building more nuclear power plants than any other country, or 15 of the 60 new reactors under construction around the world today.

Rosatom says it has an additional 30 firm orders for reactors and plans to sell more.

Rosatom sells reactors for $2 billion to $5 billion. A subsidiary, Tvel, exports about $3 billion worth of low-enriched uranium fuel each year, or about 17 percent of global demand.

Some of that market is already drying up. Germany will close seven aging plants ahead of schedule, and Italy has extended indefinitely a moratorium on building plants.

Mr. Medvedev’s proposal, though announced in Chernobyl, may have been aimed at seizing some initiative in the public debate to restore confidence in the technology, more than at making a significant contribution to safety.

The proposal is intended to amend several decades-old global treaties, like the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage of 1963, to render International Atomic Energy Agency safety standards binding on the countries with civilian nuclear power plants.

Jeremy Gordon, an analyst with the World Nuclear Association, a trade group in London, said most national nuclear regulators already adhered to International Atomic Energy Agency standards, making it unclear why they would need to be made binding.

“Anybody who is using nuclear power in a serious way is already well within those guidelines,” he said. Of the Russian proposal, he added, “I could not put my finger on a concrete change that would make.”

For now, safety recommendations set by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based group known for its work to prevent the proliferation of bomb-making knowledge and materials, are voluntary for most countries. This is in contrast to nonproliferation rules, which are enforced by agency inspections and come under treaty obligations.

 

Arizona Governor Rejects Bid to Loosen Gun Rules

The surprise veto of the gun measure disappointed advocates of gun rights, who vowed to bring it back next year. The bill, as originally proposed, would have allowed guns everywhere on campus, including in classrooms. In the face of strong criticism, it was amended to permit weapons only on “a public right of way” within campuses, which legislative supporters said they understood to mean sidewalks and roads.

But Ms. Brewer, a strong advocate of gun rights, who has supported loosening restrictions on guns in the past, said the language was unclear.

Cheering the governor’s decision were university administrators, faculty members, police chiefs and students, all of whom strongly opposed the measure because they said it would have brought an element of danger into the academy.

“We come to school to learn and don’t need any more distractions,” said Kim Sell, a nutritional sciences major at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who was interviewed near a sign at the entrance to campus that declares, “Weapon free zone.”

A desire to spare additional problems for Arizona prompted Ms. Brewer to veto the so-called birther bill that would have required presidential candidates to present their long-form birth certificates or other documents to prove their citizenship, a measure pressed by lawmakers who question President Obama’s birthplace.

“I never imagined being presented with a bill that could require candidates for president of the greatest and most powerful nation on earth to submit ‘early baptismal or circumcision certificates’ among other records to the Arizona secretary of state,” the governor wrote in her veto statement. “This is a bridge too far.”

On the gun measure, State Senator Ron Gould, a Republican from Lake Havasu City , argued that students and professors were vulnerable to armed attackers and should not have their Second Amendment rights restricted on campus. Utah is the only state that requires universities to allow guns on their campuses.

A requirement in early versions of the bill that those carrying weapons on campus complete a concealed-weapon training course did little to assuage the concerns of critics.

“Law enforcement intervention should be done by law enforcement personnel who have been specifically selected and trained to perform these duties, not by individuals who may have marginally completed an eight-hour course years ago or other marginal training and possibly have not practiced with the firearm they are now carrying,” the chiefs of police from Arizona State University, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University said in a joint letter to lawmakers urging defeat of the bill.

Arizona leaves it up to the state’s colleges and universities to set their own policies on firearms, and all institutions of higher education currently ban them.

Marisa Gerber contributed reporting from Tucson.