 Given how far we've gone. Okay. Well, the one does actually we have modern technology. Yes. It's amazing how only a few years ago this would have been unimaginable. So can our extensive audience hear us, right? Can we go live? Are we live? Okay, well hello one and all. I'm delighted to start this discussion with Jack and B.J. about individual accountability for corporate wrongdoing. B.J. recently joined us in discussion at the House of Lords on this topic. And it's an issue which I've discussed with Jack over a number of years as part of our corporate accountability initiative here at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy in the University of London without spending a large amount of time on introductions to say that in different ways B.J. and Jack have been involved in the law courts and their firms over many years in looking to address issues of corporate wrongdoing. And quite recently Jack wrote me and we discussed the fact that he had come to the view that indeed the issue of corporate limited liability was one that really needed to be made much more. And it's from that correspondence that this conversation has started. And I just wanted to turn it over to Jack and just talk to us for a little bit about why he thinks corporate limited liability is an issue that needs to be much more prominent on the international stage. So Jack. My concern has been that there's been very little personal accountability on the part of both corporate executives and directors for any of the activity which has led to the financial crisis we're now going through. And that failure to have personal accountability spills over into a wide variety of other areas not just financial crime but liability for bad behavior on environmental issues, bad behavior in terms of dealing with customers. And I'm not talking about minor league belt bad behavior. I'm talking about seriously bad behavior as an example. Just within the last number of weeks we had a huge chemical spill in a river in Charleston, West Virginia that left hundreds of thousands of people without access to clean drinking water. The first thing the company did was go and file for bankruptcy. And that just doesn't cut it. We really have to have some accountability on the part of the individuals and on the part of the corporate shareholders because without that people have no real concern for the end consequences of their action. Now in the area of finance it's particularly difficult because using criminal law to go after the head of the corporation is extraordinarily difficult because you have to prove that there was intent. And that's where the prosecutors sort of throw in the towel. The only really serious way you can go after them is to go with a civil lawsuit. And the civil lawsuit doesn't work because the typical modern corporation is not just a corporation. It's a collection of corporations and the question of where the liability is and who's responsible is almost impossible to figure out. And when the lawyers get into it they wind up giving up because it's just too difficult. So we have to come up with some modification of this system so that there is personal accountability by the people involved because otherwise they view the corporation as a way of making as much as they can consequences be damned and then making off with the money they've made and not actually paying for anything, leaving the mess for other people to sort out. And I think personal responsibility is the heart of the matter. Dare I ask, Jack, have you given any thought to how we make this happen either through public opinion or the courts of law or legislatures? I'm thinking that it wasn't so long ago that the idea of tax justice being a big issue was laughable. We all we cared about it, but nobody else did. And yet in a few short years this issue has risen to international prominence. And I was wondering if you hadn't given any thought to how we start to move this agenda forward. Well, tax justice is actually involved in a key issue here, which is the use of offshore shell companies. And that has a lot to do with limited liability. I'll give you an example. There's an insurance case that I've been involved in where the insurance company has turned itself into a collection of shell companies in a variety of offshore locations. A policy holder has tried to sue and suddenly discovered that instead of going after a corporation, he's got the problem of a mayor's nest of offshore shells that lead nowhere. And in fact, if he wins the litigation, there's a high probability that he won't be able to collect because one or another of these shell entities will wind up bankrupt and there will be no liability on the part of the parents. It seems to me that a good starting point would be to say no subsidiaries. If you're a corporation, that's it. You're a corporation and you're incorporated in one place. You're known, you're understood. And the responsibility goes to that corporation. If you look at the structures that were involved in the offshore shenanigans of the banks, there were literally thousands of corporations. Every one of the separate entities was a different corporation. And frequently they evolve corporate ideas like corporations with no known ownership. Now, some of this was for tax, but the rest of it was for regulatory and liability purposes. So the beginning of this I think would be to say, look, just as it's a problem for tax, it's a problem for liability and responsibility to have corporations become a collection of shells in a wide variety of different places. That seems to me to be a very profitable beginning point. Now, there are some other possibilities as well, but perhaps we should talk about that for a minute. Talk about the number of shells. Yes, I'd like to bring Vijay in and his company, his firm was involved in the infamous Asbestos case, channel of Asbestos Cape. And he's also, as you are, involved in these sorts of issues day-to-day in the law courts and in the legal system. Vijay? Yeah, I mean, just as I was going to give a bit of introduction about the work we do and then talk about how limited liability affects the claims that we bring. And my speciality is that I do industrial disease cases. So usually I'll be acting for an individual. Sometimes my firm has done cases on behalf of groups of individuals doing large corporate entities. And limited liability is a major problem in respect of the work we do because a lot of my cases are Asbestos related claims. So you might have somebody exposed to Asbestos in the 60s or 70s. And because of the passage of time, because many decades have passed, the company that you're looking to suit is rarely still in existence. And the problem with limited liability is that a company can close down completely and then reopen as a new company with the exact same directors, the same place of business, the same customers, you know, doing exactly the same thing it did before. But because in law they're regarded as different beings if you like, different entities, you can only sue the company that has gone bust and of course you can't do that because it's no longer in existence. And it's a major problem for the type of cases that I bring because you're reliant on trying to identify who provided the insurance at that time, which can be a hit in this operation. And, you know, just to echo what Jack was saying about group structures, you know, it's really bad that you'll have a parent company which is essentially the controlling mind of a group of subsidiaries. And, you know, with, again, because we're looking at events many decades ago, the parent company usually is still in existence because, you know, it might be a blue chip company such as Cape. But the subsidiaries tend to, you know, they tend to go out of business, there's no insurance, so you're left with no option but to be inclined against the parent company. But I think that the shocking thing about limited liability for me is that even if it's obvious that a parent company or any other sort of organization has used limited liability to escape claims being made against them, the courts have said there's a case of Adams and Cape Industries in 1990 that said that, you know, even if the outcome is unjust or improper, that's completely fine. They can still do that because of limited liability. If they follow the provisions of the company's act in terms of all the practicalities, then that's absolutely fine. So, you know, the case that we brought, which is Chandler and Cape, which went to the Court of Appeal, was we were forced to find another way to get around this limited liability issue because, you know, in Chandler I was acting for, you know, the claimant who was employed by a subsidiary company. The subsidiary company is basically a defunct company now. It's got no assets. The insurance policy had an exclusion clause which excluded any claims relating to asbestos related illnesses. So we had no option but to bring a claim against the parent company. You can't do that because of limited liability. So we had to use tort. And the beauty of tort is that it allows more flexibility. And, I mean, it's a good outcome in that, you know, my firm does cases involving parent companies here such as BP and Shell. And, you know, they engage in all kinds of activities overseas. You know, we're doing a claim in respect of Colombian farmers and, you know, there's a kind of environmental damage that resulted from subsidiary. And hopefully cases like this will help. But as I say, this is just restricted to tort law. And, you know, each case is very fact-specific. You need a lot of evidence. There's all kinds of challenges. The evidence that you need is frequently held by the person that you are suing. And they're not always willing to disclose that information. So, you know, there's all kinds of challenges with that. Charles, Jack. Well, my reaction to that is that the matter is even worse in the United States. Because here we have a notion of form non-convenience where the courts say, look, if you had a subsidiary, let's say in Ecuador and that subsidiary was polluting, we in the United States are really not going to deal with a challenge to the parent corporation when in fact it's an Ecuador subsidiary that did the damage. And the case is a case that should be tried in the courts of Ecuador. And of course, the subsidiary will then go bust. And the consequences are nothing left. This problem of jurisdiction is a massive problem. And in the U.S. it's meant that most of these claims simply can't be made in an American court. That I find to be an unacceptable proposition because it means you can get away quite literally with murder with no consequence. Now, the criminal cases that have been brought are typically criminal cases, let's say in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act setting, criminal cases against individuals. And the tendency is to bring them against lower level individuals or reach a settlement with the parent corporation. But uniformly when the country that has been victimized by the corruption or the illicit payment, tries to go after the individual or tries to go after the corporation to get a restitution for the monies that have been paid as bribes. The case falls apart because there's no way for the country that was victimized to get at the evidence. I represented the government of Nigeria in an effort to get evidence in the Halliburton case so that Nigeria could both recover money and prosecute individuals involved. The U.S. government refused to cooperate with the Nigerian government despite having a mutual legal assistance agreement. Now, if you find that kind of barrier in a criminal case, imagine the difficulty in a civil case and the unwillingness of American courts to follow up. So this business of having no responsibility by managers, no responsibility by the parent corporation, means there's in effect an open season for bad behavior. And we've seen that. We're getting that kind of open season for bad behavior. Yeah, I mean, we have probably not as bad, but we also have jurisdiction problems here. We also have to argue that this is a convenient forum. And it's worse with when the subsidiary is based in an European Union country because there's some new regulations that have come in, which means that even if we do bring proceedings in the U.K., if the tort or the damage occurred overseas, then the liability issues are decided with regard to local law and likewise the level of damages as well. So there might not be scope for making a damages claim in an EU country and also the damages or the compensation often might be very minuscule. So, you know, we do have similar problems here as well. Well, it's all very depressing. It's good to get an issue which is large but beneath the surface. And I wonder if we can start to continue our discussion about how we get more people engaged in the topic and also to think about how we raise the issue. I think Jack's point about subsidiaries is a very important one. I just wonder at a more fundamental level whether one needs to raise the issue that limited liability is a fundamental violation of property rights and of the principle of equality before the law. And actually the Anglo-Americans are going to be beating their chests in glee at the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. And I think probably all of our constitutions and precepts through the U.S. Constitution up to the Universal Declaration make property rights the environment and equality before the law fundamental principles. And I wonder whether the scope to really take a sort of guardian, cut into guardians, not a guardian, not approach to this and start to go to, let us say, the Geneva-based human rights and business communities and so on and say, listen, isn't this a violation of political rights and go to have a discussion with Human Rights Watch who are most concerned about political rights and legal rights and say, is this an issue that you really should be taking? Where are our lines of attack and who, how can we mobilize our allies if I can put it in military terms? Well, if I can jump in on this, my view is we begin with the proposition that every society has had almost from the beginning of time that there becomes a moment when you're an adult and you are responsible for your own actions. Now, the question here is, are individuals in a society to be held accountable for what they do or don't do when it damages other people or it damages a society as a whole? What has evolved here is a system in which individuals escape all responsibility to their own society for the actions they undertake. And these could be criminal, they could be tortuous, they can be a question of, are you paying the fair amount of tax? But the sophisticated use of multiple corporate shells has simply put these people in a situation where they're not responsible for their own society. And they are also, as a practical matter, beyond the reach of that other basic proposition, which is criminal law, which is supposed to be what holds you accountable. Now, it seems to me the question of responsibility is widely understood globally. A week ago, actually, I was in New Zealand and quite accidentally sitting in a museum at a coffee bar, wind up sitting next to a couple of average working people who began talking about the lack of responsibility by senior bankers and the impact that had caused globally. Now, to hear that coming from a railway worker nearing retirement in a coffee shop in New Zealand is absolutely remarkable. I think there's a real resonance to the proposition that nobody in this huge mess we've encountered has been held accountable and moreover they've walked away with all the proceeds of all the things they've done that have been improper. Now somewhere along the line, that should resonate and leave us with a real opening for a public debate on what are your responsibilities as a member of a society and how do we hold you accountable. And as I said, criminal law by and large operates through a proposition of deterrence, that is you prosecute a relatively limited number of people, but you do it in a very public way so that you scare the people who might do something wrong into being honest. What has occurred in this situation is there is no deterrent effect. And as we know from studies and criminology, there's about 40% of the population when there's no comp on the beat and no prospect of you're getting caught that will behave badly. And we're reaching a point where that 40% is really out there and behaving badly. So we've got to find a way to pull this back. I think the whole problem is a tendency to treat companies as separate beings. So there is this kind of hypothetical concept that each company is a separate person and you can't do one person or another. But of course when you're talking about a parent subsidiary relationship, that concept is meaningless in a sense because they'll share directors. The parent company will be involved in controlling exactly what the subsidiary does in terms of its manufacturing decisions and such like. It'll own the full share capital of the subsidiary companies. So this concept that somehow you've got two separate minds operating is completely fictional and defies reality. And I think the problem in law is that when it comes to this area and when claimants try to argue for lifting the corporate veil as it were to kind of get around the limited liability concept. The courts have adopted a very kind of vigorous and strict approach. They don't tend to adopt that in other areas of law. There is a tendency I've noticed from recent cases to look at the reality of the situation and just see what's actually going on, who's in control, who could have done something to prevent certain damage and so on and so forth and act on that. But when it comes to limited liability, it's a very sort of sharp barrier if you like. It completely prevents any kind of claim being made. Well, I would take what you've just said a step further. We now have an amazing number of corporations that really don't exist. And here's what I mean. You can go to any one of these offshore centers. And for a couple of hundred dollars by a corporation that has professional directors, officers, shareholders, all of whom are anonymous and none of whom by the law that jurisdiction have any fiduciary responsibility for what the corporation does. Moreover, they don't even have knowledge of what the corporation does. Yet the courts are perfectly prepared to treat these entities as real. That absolutely is beyond understanding. Now this issue of no no fiduciary responsibility by directors, officers, or anyone else involved with a corporation is a completely unacceptable concept. We've got close to a million corporations in the British Virgin Islands, and I can assure you that the directors there have no idea of what those corporations are doing, who they're doing it to or what damage is being created. And that it seems to me is a beginning point of saying that these corporations shouldn't be recognized anywhere in the world for any purpose. Yet the courts have been willing to not only recognize them, but because of structures that have been put in place by the OECD with respect to tax, treat them as kind of sacred for purposes of taxation. But that has spilled over into issues of liability. And that is where this debate has to really focus. Can we allow major corporations to pretend that the activities they're engaged in are really being conducted by a real entity that has nobody in charge of it? Approaching this as a historian of sorts, the Salomon case in the English House of Lords seems to stand out as being the defining moment when this got inked in and fundamentally established. And I think that was a case where the Lords, basically Lords at the time, around about 1900 if I remember right, basically said this entire operation is crooked, but there's a law which commits it, therefore there's nothing we can do. It's legal. I wonder whether there's any room to ask the English Court law, whatever it is now, the English High Court, Supreme Court, to revisit Salomon versus Salomon in light of, for example, European human rights law or other modern laws pertaining to equality before the law and property rights, particularly creditor rights, which are, of course, defensively abolished in limited light. And I wondered whether that is just, much of what we're talking about is pie in the sky because we're, in a sense, taking this issue from the point of ground zero, but I've got to always try to look for potential bits of traction to get a grappling hook into to start to engage. And I wonder whether revisiting getting a revisiting of Salomon versus Salomon might be, you know, one way into this. Well, one way, one way that has come up recently, which you might want to think about and which is a way in, are the efforts that have been made to recover the money that has been stolen by the Obiang family of Equatorial Guinea. The Obiang's, as you may know, have run Equatorial Guinea for 40 plus years and have ruthlessly stripped the assets of the country. And the US government, for example, tried to seize the mansion and the cars and various other things that they had in California and the private jet. But then wound up confronting the fact that they were all owned by corporate entities through a variety of structures that made proving that these were in fact owned by the Obiang's very difficult. Likewise, there have been efforts in France to go after the French assets of the Obiang family and there have been similar difficulties that have come up. I think that this involves some gross violations of human rights and a perfect example of how the corporation is used to field literally proceeds of crime. I think you're going to find the same thing is true. Some of the richest people in the UK are Nigerians who have profited wildly from what they've done with respect to taking money from the oil revenue of the state. And there's very little that anybody can do because it's all in collections of structures that can't be tracked down. And in fact, it takes years and years and years, even when you catch someone to try to come up with a way to recover the money. A friend of mine who was a lawyer on the island of Jersey just spent 10 years to recover money from a state governor in Brazil who stole money. And that required going through a trail of offshore corporations and entities and proving that those entities were connected to the crime that was involved. This is one way in one place that I think one can go after it. There are various international conventions, the UNCAC convention, which is supposed to limit the ability of people to protect corrupt money. There are provisions in it for asset recovery. It could be that some litigation relating to that might begin to be something that could spotlight the way corporations are used to dodge responsibility. What I was going to say with regards to where we go with Solomon and Solomon is that the problem with challenging that principle in the courts is that you've had case after case after Solomon, which has affirmed the principle. So if you go to a court with a new case, effectively they've got a long history of precedence which further affirms the principle. So probably the only way around it is via legislation. So it would be down to the government whether they would be keen to prioritize commercial interests or individual or group claimant rights. And I have to throw in that the American Supreme Court has all but said a corporation has the civil rights of an ordinary citizen. We have this Citizens United case with respect to campaign contributions and what that has allowed is a complete dodging of all of our campaign finance laws. And as a gag, a corporation in Maryland literally filed to run for public office because the ruling said corporations are citizens. So we're going to have President Google. There's something like that. Well, if you go to President Google, don't give them our ideas, Jack. There's considerable reasons to believe we already have it. No, indeed. The URA is the World's Day Factor. But this is an issue which really requires much more sophisticated further discussion. We've been looking at some of these issues through a particular lens. It can be the lens of tax payment. It can be the lens of responsibility for tortuous acts that have injured individuals. It can be through the lens of corruption. But whichever angle you come at it, the misuse of the corporate form and the removal of personal responsibility from the people who are running the enterprises. And that's my focus has really been a corrupting influence. And the more that this goes on, the more people behave as if it's open season. You can do anything you want. There will be no consequence. If you're rich enough, you have enough layers and enough lawyers, you're home free and the society is left with the consequences. This debate has to be joined across the board. We have to draw in the people who worry about it from a human rights perspective. The people who are looking at it from the injury and torque perspective. The people who are looking at it from the corruption and criminal behavior perspective. And even the election corruption perspective to figure out where we go with a solution. Well, one small step is I wonder whether we could make this transatlantic discussion the beginning of a regular monthly online discussion. As we continue to explore the topic with wider groups and wider networks. But I obviously there are the Center for Financial Integrity Networks for the business and human rights community. But what we might do is to send around this web discussion and we'll see if in a few minutes any of our listeners want to chime in with a few questions and discussion. But it is not compulsory. But we might think about sending around this discussion within an invitation to resume the dialogue for the monthly with hopefully a snowballing group of participants. Because I think we've got a nice crunchy snowball here but it's a little small still. And that might be just a small way to start to build momentum. I wonder what the two of you think of that. Well, here in America we certainly have enough snow. All we've had is water this year, Jack. We haven't had any snow at all down here. My kids want snow. Well, we have we have more than enough but I think the the idea here would be to begin to get people to focus on this issue of the corporation in a way they haven't focused on it before. And I think that, you know, the real vulnerability of the people who defend this nonsense is the way these offshore entities are being used, literally by the hundreds. If you go to any major corporations filings with the securities people, you'll find that there are literally hundreds of corporations. And the court the financial statements says, we're not going to tell you the names or what they do, because they have no material effect on the balance sheet. So then you ask the question of well what the hell are these corporations for anyway. And the answer is to put distance between the people who are running them and the things they do. And that to me is the huge point of vulnerability where we can focus in on the lack of responsibility and the consequences for our societies. Yeah, I think also we will need to preempt some of these sort of other side arguments as well. So, you know, it's certainly clear from my reading of the cases that there is a paranoia that if you somehow tamper with the limited liability concepts, you're going to engage the whole commercial world as it were. And that might not necessarily be the case. So we probably need to do some research into that as well. If you will, there are ways to begin the discussion without appearing to be completely against any form of corporation. So for example, when I said at the outset, you have a corporation and that's it. No subsidiaries. You have a corporate entity that has officers and directors and will allow that as long as there is no officers and directors liability insurance. There are a variety of ways to limit the use of the corporation as a dodge without undermining the capacity of the corporation to raise money or to do a variety of other things. So we don't have to throw the whole system out. And I think we can actually begin a discussion of how it got out of control and where it has to be pushed back as a way of not scaring the horses. I think this system of having subsidiaries overseas is going back to an olden era. It's just as an organization grows, it's very difficult to monitor what each and every subsidiary in various different countries is up to. Whereas now with email, with conference calls, with all kinds of technology, a parent company can monitor exactly what's going on overseas. It can open up a branch company. It doesn't mean to open up a separate entity. Some of these companies that are the huge entities that we're dealing with really manage the subsidiaries as separate entities. If you work inside of one of these corporations, the fact is that it is centrally managed and it is centrally managed in an extraordinarily authoritarian way. You have to be a litigant, but suddenly there's this paperwork maze of subsidiaries which are thrown up at you as being the real entities. I have worked inside with corporate clients. And there was one corporate client where the first day of my involvement in the case, I spent being briefed on the corporate structure. And I had to take notes, sadly, because there were so many different entities. And each entity supposedly had been created to respond to a different government, a different regulatory agency. But they had nothing to do, nothing whatsoever to do with the way the business was run on a day-to-day basis. So I think I mean, that's my experience. Yes, I would hope that we could try to find a date for the two of you and others to renew the conversation possibly in late March. And try to set up a schedule with more people. I'm doing a guest lecture at the law school at the Chinese University in Hong Kong on this. It would be nice to be able to invite them to give them this discussion, but invite them to participate in a further discussion that we and other people have in a few weeks' time. Because I think it's one of these things where once people see, it's a bit of an emperor's new clothes issue, I think. Once people see that it's okay to talk about this without the sky falling in, then we'll find more and more people who will want to join the discussion. I hope you're right. I think with respect to your speaking in Hong Kong, there is a place that is sort of an epicenter of the problem. Most of these newly formed BVI corporations are owned by Chinese. And a huge amount of money that is being siphoned out of the Chinese economy is going back into the Chinese economy as investment from the British Virgin Islands, which is perfectly nonsensical. And a lot of that money is money that is the product of corruption. This is an issue that the Chinese government is going to have to confront. Further, the Chinese government has a mountain of debt that has financed the huge economic expansion. And I'm all for the economic expansion. So the question really is, what is the responsibility for that debt? And what happens if there's a real inability to service it? Do all of these entities go bankrupt? Is the government left holding the bag? Has anybody in the government even asked that question? And I think these are all things that for the Chinese are front and center as major issues. Well, I will see what they think about them when I raise them with them in a week or so. I'll let you know. Well, I hope you get out of Hong Kong in one piece. Having worse places. Okay. If anybody would like to chip in, please do so. If you look along the top message bar, you'll see there's something you can click on to raise your hand to get into discussion. Also, you can type in messages and we would welcome them. It isn't compulsory and you're allowed to listen and treat this as a radio program. But we wouldn't want anybody to think that they weren't invited to take part. Well, you're thinking about that. We are colleagues here who are involved in the UN Human Rights and Business Network. And I think we want to look to take this discussion into that community. But maybe we can talk with colleagues and the next time we have a discussion, perhaps in a few weeks' time, we can start to map out the different constituencies that we want to try to raise awareness with. I don't know what the two of you are thinking of that as a notion. I think any step forward is a good step. You should be a diplomat, Jack. You should be a diplomat a little later. Maybe you considered me as being diplomatic, but anyway. Well, I'll be the first. I'll just take a device from our technical advisor here. Okay. Well, we're not going to embarrass people by putting anyone on the spot. We've been chatting for a good 50 minutes and have managed to violently agree with each other. The question I think is whether we can get into violent agreement or disagreement with a never-growing circle. Hold on. By blathering on, I've managed to produce at least one question, which is why don't you shut up? No. Yeah. Go right ahead, Ellen. I'm getting no audio. Hang on a second. We're just trying to hook her in. The software is free, which probably means it's been marketed by the MSA, I suppose. Well, I hope that means... Somebody said to be a great aphorism. If it's free, it means you're the product. I hope somebody is telling us. Have we got it on that, Robert? I'm not hearing the silver estimation. Unpaired, the attendee hasn't entered their audio pin, so they need to. Can we just get a typed message? Yeah. Ellen, could you type a message in? Because our technology, I don't think it's quite up to things as we would like. In the bottom left-hand box, you can type, I believe. We shouldn't be frustrated as astonishing as it even exists. I sometimes remind our colleagues that I was berated for spending money on a fax machine by a foundation in... by American Foundation in 1986. They said, why are you wasting... You've only given me $5,000, and why are you wasting it on a fax machine? What nurse do you want that for? Oh, I don't know. Great. Hi. I figured out the pin. Sorry. Hi. Yes, I'm Eleanor. I'm from the Whistleblowing Territory, Public Concern at Work. Some very interesting points, so thank you very much for that. I just had a couple of points from the perspective of whistleblowing. Obviously, whistleblowers are very important in exposing wrongdoing in the first place. When it comes to greater accountability and reform of the court for limited liability, there's clearly an argument that this may reduce the need for whistleblowers by deterring wrongdoing in the first place. But there's also the point perhaps that it might encourage whistleblowers because one of the main reasons in the UK why people don't raise concerns is because there's a cynicism. They think that nothing's going to happen as a result of them raising concerns. So perhaps if greater accountability is seen, then this might encourage people to come forward and perhaps in effect expose more wrongdoing where it could be. Not really a question there, but just a couple of points. Well, Jack, you do an awful lot of whistleblowers. Do you want to comment on that? Sure. Whistleblowing is indeed very important. But the way the system now works, there's very little to protect a whistleblower. And indeed, I've given continuing legal education for lawyers who propose to represent whistleblowers. And the first thing I tell them is you better tell your whistleblower to expect immediate, unmerciful retaliation and pass that low probability of anybody successfully following up on what you're going to tell them. For the very reasons I've just described that the criminal prosecution is virtually impossible because of these layers of corporations getting the evidence and showing what the criminal law requires, to use the legal Latin mens reo, which is intent. And so you're not going to get the criminal prosecution. And then what about civil? And again, you're up against this set of issues of corporate shells which protect people from civil liability. So whistleblowing is something incredibly important to the society. But the hard truth is that it's very hard on the whistleblower. And there are very few people out there ready to protect the whistleblower against anything. And the way that success is relatively small. So maybe if we improve the situation of limited liability, we'll help whistleblowers. But I think that that's still a huge problem and would be even if we solve the limited liability question. Yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that. I think if there's threat of litigation, a company will move forward to act. And they can make life very difficult for a whistleblower. I mean, one thing about the cases that we do is that you need massive evidence. So each bit of evidence is a strand, if you like, and you put everything together to make what's called your factual matrix, which is your case, really. So the whistleblower's evidence might be helpful, but you still need lots of other documents and evidence to make your case, really. So it's still a difficult one, I think. And I think, you know, if you've got a company turning against you, I think it makes matters worse. Eleanor? Yeah, that's very interesting. Thank you for that. Well, have we got other folks out there, Rohit? That's okay. Well, I found it to be a very interesting and, dare I say, profitable discussion intellectually, if not financially. And I think there's quite a lot to build on. I'll let you know part of Hong Kong in one piece Monday week. And maybe as part of the follow-up to this, we'll have this online reasonably soon. And we'll send it to each of you and hope that you can put it up to your respective networks. And at the same time, we'll try and see if we can agree a date for the end of March to advertise at the same time as we send this around to build the discussion. How does that sound? Sounds good to me. I would also propose something else. I'm going to be in London the third week in June, and it may be. The third week of June? Yeah. We might very well be able to put together a somewhat larger group to have a discussion around the table and see where we can go with these ideas. That's brilliant. We'll take you up on that offer right now, and absolutely, that's a deal. Back at the March and in person in June. That's great. I hope you could talk to Ray Baker and see where we go. I've lived most of my life working in the anti-bombs and guns field. To my mind, this feels a little like the discussions that we had when there was a discussion about, well, do we think we can do anything about landmines in the early 1990s? And there were about six people, I mean about a dozen people. And I think when it got about 20 people, I was in the room. And on the one hand, it felt like exactly the right thing to do and desperately improbable. But the successive initiatives like that make me think that if our instincts and our judgment is right, then actually it is possible to make things happen, however improbable it seems. Possibly that is my sort of upbeat, raw, raw note to end on. Is that what I do? I'm all for that. Well, great to see you, Jackie, only virtually, and see you in June. Indeed. I'll talk to you in March. Okay, bye-bye. Bye. Bye. See you.