This Is How Our Aid Budget Is Spent

[lindapalmara]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42217132

[anthro-nerd]

Well, this is depressing...

[dannyk13]

At least the government has acted quickly to suspend the aid.

[Bigbad]

Wasn’t it funding some girl band a while ago?
Another good reason to get rid of the Foreign Aid budget altogether, especially as we, as a country seem to borrow money to give away to futile causes.

[Peter Pedant]

yeah I sort of think in these situations -
how do you stop money laundering to the terroristen ?

and the answer seems to have been - "er we dont, duh!"

I mean jesus - its not rocket science

mon 27 Nov - Last Men in Aleppo - life and death on the streets and the casques blanches BBC- FOUR
Listen carefully - they are all ex-terroristen who cant make a living shooting people and themselves and so turn to digging people out of the rubble they and their colleagues have previously engineered.

" ee vase a shooter an now ee eez a fire-fighter" - the arabic dialog supports this rather than refutes it.

[Gladeian]

Time to stop this nonsense of foreign aid. NHS failing, our own people resorting to food banks because of poverty, homeless on the streets in freezing conditions - where is the sense in giving away close to £13bn to corrupt nations when the money is desperately needed at home?

[Gromit]

Syria was a big mistake.
So was Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so will the next place we follow the US into war.

The UK involvement in those conflicts cost the UK £33 Billion.
The money wasted on dodgy policemen in Syria is not the scandal. It is the fact that we were supporting the Islamists who were stoning people to death.

[ToraToraTora]

time to cancel all foreign "aid" I doubt much of actually is of any "aid" to anyone anyway.

[Togo]

//Much of the money was handed over in bags of cash.//

We must be mad.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5142027/12m-foreign-aid-project-axed-cash-jihadis-storm.html

[Gromit]

The Good news is that the Alan Smith International who were running the scheme on behalf of the British Government has had its funding cut.

The bad is they they were a bunch of crooks who were ripping us off all along.

// The founders of Adam Smith International (ASI), one of the biggest UK foreign aid contractors, have stepped down after the government froze future contracts with the firm over questions about its ethical integrity.
Last month [ March 2017 ] DfID cut off funding after it emerged that ASI, which has been entrusted with £450m in development cash since 2011, had tried to profiteer by exploiting leaked department documents. It was also heavily criticised for trying to “unduly influence” a parliamentary inquiry by engineering “letters of appreciation” from beneficiaries of its projects. //

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/02/uk-aid-company-bosses-quit-crackdown-profiteering-adam-smith-international

Scandalous.

[Gromit]

Just fancy that...

Adam Smith International (ASI) were a chosen contractor when delivering British Aid was Privatised in 2010. Previously the work was done by NGOs.

If the name rings a bell, you may remember ASI were advisors to Margaret Thatcher and John Major on ...Privatisation.

[Peter Pedant]

// It was also heavily criticised for trying to “unduly influence” a parliamentary inquiry by engineering “letters of appreciation” from beneficiaries of its projects. //

sock puppetry - been around for a long time
" a historian Orlando Figes had to admit that he had been the author of reviews of others' books, like; "the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published." Of himself, in another ghosted review, he gushed concerning himself- "I wish he would write for ever." Let's be fair, how many academics would murmur on reading that, "Good on Figes, I feel the same about myself." ? "

harvey weinstein tried that - and he was only concerned with the relatively idle pursuit of playing around with a pork .....

wasnt there an Aber who had such an idle life
that he did a bit of sock puppetry on AB ?

[hereIam]

End ALL foreign aid while we have homeless kids on the streets and pensioners suffering in appalling care homes and the NHS struggling etc etc etc ....

[scooping]

It's as plain as a pikestaff. A lot of money goes to worthless causes. Answer: either reduce the aid budget or (my view) spend it on worthwhile causes.