Blog
It is with great sadness that I announce that Jeff Katz, my good friend and Bishop Group’s Chief Executive for the past 20 years, died suddenly of a heart attack on Wednesday, 9 December. It is made all the more difficult because he was in such robust health. Everyone who came into contact with Jeff […]
CORONAVIRUS stole into our vocabulary like a thief in the night, silently taking away normality in our working lives, our relationships and our pleasures. As an organism it has no intent, no reason and no goal. But it has opened doors for criminals and opportunists who, unchecked, will compound the damage it does. In March […]
THE FINANCIAL crisis of 2008 generated much hatred against Western bankers who are regarded as villains who walked away with millions of dollars while millions of other people lost their homes. The worst the bankers suffered was the embarrassment of televised appearances before angry US congressmen or the removal of honours bestowed by the British […]
THE BISHOP blog and newsletters always try to stay on trend—especially when the trend involves potentially misappropriated assets. On page 2 of our Summer 2019 Newsletter we highlighted the case of Claudia Sassou Nguesso, a Congo MP, who allegedly used proceeds from a contract with the government run by her father, President Sassou Nguesso, to […]
The news that a prosecution supported by evidence from an unqualified “expert” led to the collapse of a fraud trial in London will come as no surprise to those who have watched the fracturing of the forensic expert sector over the last ten years or more. The prosecution at Southwark Crown Court relied on Andrew […]
Five billion dollars is a lot of money for a company to pay for wrongdoing. But if the company has a market capitalisation of more than $500 billion and more than $20 billion in cash reserves, how painful is a $5 billion fine? The company in question is Facebook. The business disclosed an anticipated fine […]
An obituary in The Times of London this week got us thinking about the value of patents. John Wall, who died in January, was an English amateur astronomer who invented an eyepiece that enables telescopes to focus smoothly. It is known as the Crayford eyepiece, named after the Kent town in which he was born. […]
Money laundering continues to be the plague upon which organised criminals depend to fund both their lifestyles and their efforts to extract ever more ill-gotten gains from their victims. It takes a lot of money to establish call centres, boiler rooms, illegal drug shipments and other labour intensive operations by which to separate you and […]
The everyday work of a corporate investigator are the foibles of the business world: fraud, litigation, tracing assets, trademark and patent infringements, etc. But once in a while something comes our way that’s different and more important. Such was the case of Richard Alden. As readers of The Sunday Times and MailOnline will know, Richard […]
The problem with our so-called post-truth environment is that we have to make decisions based on conflicting information. Therefore, we are told, we should consider the sources of conflicting information. But it’s not always a clear-cut solution. Take the case of everyday computer security. The anti-virus software Kaspersky Lab has been offered free since 2008 […]