Dan Neidle

Global Counsel's sister company certainly had regulatory authorisation that would have let it do this, but that lapsed in 2016.

Because they moved on? Or because it never happened?

Interesting email. Mandelson in 2013 considering shifting Global Counsel towards doing deals/arranging financings, rather than just lobbying/advisory.

Did that ever happen?

it is! Like having brilliant and super fast trainee who is occasionally a convincing pathological liar.

This is all thanks to SH, who kindly got in touch with the prompt/command line utility that gets Claude to interact with the database

All on our GitHub: github.com/DanNeidle/ep...

Some technical skills are required - you have to be able to use a command line, figure our torrent downloads, start docker containers etc.

But no coding whatsoever needed

Last week I published instructions on how to create your own private Epstein files search engine. Faster, easier and more reliable than the public websites.

Now updated to add autonomous AI research . It's amazing how useful it is. Unedited prompt and results attached:

I rather like Andrew Neil!

I love that pedantry.

Over.

Just discovered Mandelson’s reaction to our first report he’d leaked government emails:

If you search for emails with his blackberry auto signature but without the word Mandelson you see quite a few (and some from other people)

Yup. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/685d21...

But he’s still very much quids in

Thank you!

I haven’t. Thank you!

I am confident almost nobody I meet day to day knows what a command line is.

I’m not! I’m desperate to get back to nerdy tax policy. I’m just have a couple of remaining threads re Epstein that I need to pull before I move on.

I found it a bit frustrating

I recommend deleting everything except the PDFs. I took legal advice and am comfortable in my position if it turns out that there is anything deeply unpleasant in the PDFs. Anyone uncertain should take their own advice.

My cooking is pretty good!

Random mad thing. There are emails in the Epstein files that appear to be from Bill Clinton. But actually it seems his assistant Doug Band shared Clinton's BlackBerry (!).

Worse. Humans.

There's other interesting stuff in the evidence which we'll write about when the tribunal has concluded.

Basically the usual deal of everyone swearing blind they didn't do things for tax reasons, when the contemporaneous material is stuffed with references to tax benefits.

This follows an attempt last year to obtain helpful witness statements from clients' using templates and lists of points to make. We wrote about that here: taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/25/w...

The obvious consequence of this is that the witnesses aren't very credible.

But there may be wider consequences if in fact a barrister has manufactured witness evidence. (I'm not sure this happened, and if it did, I don't know which barrister it was)

Another witness, Adam Revill, was asked why his witness statement had "identical linguistic formulations" to another.

Revill said he believed barristers are able to draft witness statements based on conversations for clients

Kumar went on to say that he accepted P118's witnesses used predominantly "the draft statement", because they were "guided" that was the right way to present their evidence.

I don't know what the "draft statement" was, and if that was picked up on, we missed it.

One of Property118's witnesses, Neil Kumar, was asked by HMRC's barrister whether significant parts of his witness statement were simply copied and pasted from someone else's

He replied that it wasn't copied and pasted - he said it was agreed with an (unknown) barrister.

There is a tax tribunal hearing this week; the unregulated firm "Property118" are appealing HMRC's decision to issue a notice that Property 118 promoted a tax avoidance scheme.

Something odd is emerging from the evidence...

thanks, that's really appreciated!

They should teach docker in schools...

I *think* that was the "important" documents the DOJ manually redacted

All the ones we in the UK care about are auto-redacted, and that's poor quality in terms of what gets redacted, but has been done properly.