31 research outputs found
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Diamonds, gold and crime displacement: Hatton Garden, and the evolution of organised crime in the UK
The 2015 Hatton Garden Heist was described as the ‘largest burglary in English legal history’. However, the global attention that this spectacular crime attracted to ‘The Garden’ tended to concentrate upon the value of the stolen goods and the vintage of the burglars. What has been ignored is how the burglary shone a spotlight into Hatton Garden itself, as an area with a unique ‘upperworld’ commercial profile and skills cluster that we identify as an incubator and facilitator for organised crime. The Garden is the UK’s foremost jewellery production and retail centre and this paper seeks to explore how Hatton Garden’s businesses integrated with a fluid criminal population to transition, through hosting lucrative (and bureaucratically complex) VAT gold frauds from 1980 to the early 1990s, to become a major base for sophisticated acquisitive criminal activities. Based on extensive interviews over a thirty year period, evidence from a personal research archive and public records, this paper details a cultural community with a unique criminal profile due to the particularities of its geographical location, ethnic composition, trading culture, skills base and international connections. The processes and structures that facilitate criminal markets are largely under-researched (Antonopoulos et al. 2015: 11), and this paper considers how elements of Hatton Garden’s ‘upperworld’ businesses integrated with project criminals, displaced by policing strategies, to effect this transition
Regulatory barriers to equity in a health system in transition : a qualitative study in Bulgaria
Background: Health reforms in Bulgaria have introduced major changes to the financing, delivery and regulation
of health care. As in many other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, these included introducing general
practice, establishing a health insurance system, reorganizing hospital services, and setting up new payment
mechanisms for providers, including patient co-payments. Our study explored perceptions of regulatory barriers to
equity in Bulgarian child health services.
Methods: 50 qualitative in-depth interviews with users, providers and policy-makers concerned with child health
services in Bulgaria, conducted in two villages, one town of 70,000 inhabitants, and the capital Sofia.
Results: The participants in our study reported a variety of regulatory barriers which undermined the principles of
equity and, as far as the health insurance system is concerned, solidarity. These included non-participation in the
compulsory health insurance system, informal payments, and charging user fees to exempted patients. The
participants also reported seemingly unnecessary treatments in the growing private sector. These regulatory failures
were associated with the fast pace of reforms, lack of consultation, inadequate public financing of the health
system, a perceived “commercialization” of medicine, and weak enforcement of legislation. A recurrent theme from
the interviews was the need for better information about patient rights and services covered by the health
insurance system.
Conclusions: Regulatory barriers to equity and compliance in daily practice deserve more attention from policymakers
when embarking on health reforms. New financing sources and an increasing role of the private sector
need to be accompanied by an appropriate and enforceable regulatory framework to control the behavior of
health care providers and ensure equity in access to health services
The Effect of Low Corporate Tax Rate on Payroll Tax Evasion
It is a commonly held view that the widespread policy of cutting the corporate income tax has a positive effect on taxable income through decreasing firms' incentive to hide profits. A neglected side of this policy, however, is its potential to trigger more evasion in other tax bases, such as the social security base, especially if the corporate income tax rate is low compared to the payroll rate. We develop a model in which employers and employees cooperate in declaring lower wages to the tax authorities in order to evade payroll contributions
The effects of the 2007 global economic crisis on firm relocation factors: SME movements from Greece to Bulgaria
This chapter examines the ways in which the 2007 global economic crisis has influenced firm relocation factors. Firm mobility constitutes a dynamic process, with its aspects changing in response to significant broader processes, such as globalisation. Specifically, the recent crisis has modified the socio-economic conditions under which firms operate. In order to examine the crisis-driven changes in firm mobility, this chapter employs a comparative analysis of the pre- and post-crisis relocation of Greek small and medium-sized companies to Bulgaria, which has recently increased. Greece is at the epicentre of academic and political debate in Europe, being the European Union member state mostly affected by the crisis. In the context of the changing economic and institutional conditions, it is demonstrated that the significance of the firm relocation factors, such as labour cost and level of demand, records considerable differences between the pre- and the post-crisis period