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Fans and Friends of Betty MacDonald, author of The Egg and I and The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Series
Don't miss Wolfgang Hampel's fascinating Betty MacDonald biography and his very witty interviews with Betty MacDonald's family and friends.
Saturday, April 9, 2016
Betty MacDonald, Wolfgang Hampel and 1st Betty MacDonald fan club ESC 2016 TOP 10
Wolfgang Hampel's new project Vita Magica
is fascinating because he is going to include Betty MacDonald,
other members of the Bard family and Betty MacDonald fan club honor
members.
Dear Betty MacDonald fan club ESC fans, thank you so much for sending your votes.
We are publishing our first Betty MacDonald fan club ESC 2016 TOP 10 in alphabetical order: Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Ukraine.
We are going to publish the next Betty MacDonald fan club ESC voting result very soon. Come on. Send your votes, please. It's really very exciting.
David Cameron was left dangerously exposed on Tuesday after repeatedly failing to provide a clear and full account about links to an offshore fund set up by his late father, as the storm over the Panama Papers gathered strength in both the UK and elsewhere around the world. The prime minister and his office have now offered three partial answers about the fund set up by his father Ian,
which avoided ever paying tax in Britain. The key unanswered question
is whether the prime minister’s family stands to gain in the future from
his father’s company, Blairmore, an investment fund run from the
Bahamas.
After Downing Street said on Monday that the fund was a “private
matter”, a journalist asked Cameron about it during a visit to
Birmingham on Tuesday. Cameron replied: “I own no shares, no offshore trusts, no offshore funds, nothing like that. And, so that, I think, is a very clear description.” He dodged the key part of the question about whether he or his family stood to benefit.Having failed to satisfy reporters, Downing Street issued a further
statement that Cameron’s wife and children also do not benefit from
offshore funds but again left the main question about the future
unanswered. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had called earlier in the day for an independent investigation,
told the Guardian: “Three times Downing Street has been asked to
provide a full and comprehensive answer. The public has a right to know
the truth. “We need to know the full extent of the links between Britain and the
web of tax avoidance and evasion revealed by the Panama Papers at all
levels.”
The leak of 11.5m files from the Panama-based Mossack Fonseca
continued to create uproar and upheaval around the world. The documents
were leaked to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them
with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists, the Guardian, the BBC and other media organisations. The latest developments include:
The German justice minister, Heiko Maas, said the country planned
to introduce a new national transparency register to make offshore
companies disclose their owners’ identity.
France’s finance minister announced that Panama would again be blacklisted as an uncooperative tax haven.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, announced that he would set
up an independent judicial commission to investigate whether his family
was involved in anything illegal through ownership several offshore
companies.
Revelations that the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has secretly built one of the single biggest offshore property empires in Britain, owning dozens of central London properties worth more than £1.2bn through offshore companies supplied by Mossack Fonseca.
The row embroiling Cameron picked up pace on Tuesday morning when
Corbyn responded to Downing Street’s assertion that the matter was
private by telling reporters: “Well, it’s a private matter insofar as
it’s a privately held interest. But it’s not a private matter if tax is
not being paid. So an investigation must take place, an independent
investigation, unprejudiced, to decide whether or not tax has been
paid.”
Later in the day, Cameron told reporters: “In terms of my
own financial affairs, I own no shares. I have a salary as prime
minister and I have some savings, which I get some interest from and I
have a house, which we used to live in, which we now let out while we
are living in Downing Street and that’s all I have.” Downing Street returned to the issue later. A No 10 spokesperson
said: “To be clear, the prime minister, his wife and their children do
not benefit from any offshore funds. The prime minister owns no shares.
“As has been previously reported, Mrs Cameron owns a small
number of shares connected to her father’s land, which she declares on
her tax return.”Downing Street also attempted to shift the argument back to Labour. A
source called on people “suggesting that Mr Cameron and his family are
benefiting from off shore trusts” to come forward with evidence. “The
onus is on them to put up or shut up. The prime minister has put out a
very clear statement.”As well as pressing Cameron, Corbyn called for a cleanup of Britain’s
overseas territories and dependencies, such as the British Virgin
Islands, which accounts for about half the companies named in the Panama
Papers, the Cayman Islands and Anguilla.He said the government should consider imposing direct rule on
British overseas territories and crown dependencies, which lie at the
heart of the allegations.
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The
government had already scheduled a meeting of G7 countries in London on
12 May to discuss the overseas territories and crown dependencies. Tax
campaigners, however, said that government officials had been
downplaying expectations for months, telling them that tax would not be
high on the agenda and that instead the main item would be corruption,
such as the low-level bribery of officials. The shadow leader of the Commons, Chris Bryant, who was responsible
for overseas territories and dependencies when Labour was in power and
was involved in a standoff with them over transparency, said: “There is a
great deal of power the government has if it chooses to exercise it,
even without the nuclear option of direct rule.” He said he had pressed them to be more transparent and tried to put
pressure on them by refusing to authorise loans, but the standoff ended
when the Conservatives took power. The City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, also responded
to the Panama Papers. It said: “The FCA has written to a number of firms
about this issue, including those on our systematic anti-money
laundering programme, and we are working closely with a number of other
agencies who are also looking at this. “As part of our responsibility to ensure the integrity of the UK
financial markets, we require all authorised firms to have systems and
controls in place to mitigate the risk that they might be used to commit
financial crime. We have also today published our annual business plan
which identifies financial crime and anti-money laundering activity as
one of our priorities for the year.” In
the US, Obama addressed reporters at the White House, making the
highest profile intervention yet in favour of the global reform of tax
avoidance. “There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally
is a huge problem. The problem is that a lot of this stuff is legal,
not illegal,” he said. The US president said the leak from Panama illustrated the scale of
tax avoidance involving Fortune 500 companies, running into trillions of
dollars worldwide. “We shouldn’t make it legal to engage in transactions just to avoid
taxes,” he said, praising instead “the basic principle of making sure
everyone pays their fair share”. Only about 200 US citizens have been identified so far in the leaked
data, but the US justice department, which aggressively pursues cases
both domestically but internationally, issued a statement saying it
“takes very seriously all credible allegations of high level, foreign
corruption that might have a link to the United States or the US
financial system”.
Cologne, GermanyTonight, the German TV public has chosen which song will represent the country in the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest: It's Ghost by Jamie-Lee Kriewitz, a young singer with her very own colourful style - and a strong voice! Unser Lied für Stockholm
featured 10 acts, both famous and new, presenting a huge variety of
styles from Gregorian chant all the way to a modern version of German Schlager.
17-year old Jamie-Lee Kriewitz will represent Germany in the 2016
Eurovision Song Contest. The young singer, who had previously won The Voice of Germany 2015, will enter the stage in Stockholm with her first big hit Ghost.
The song already reached the first place in the German iTunes Download
charts and the 11th rank in the German music charts. Jamie-Lee is famous
for her manga style, which was well visible in her outfit tonight.In the super-final, Jamie-Lee Kriewitz had won against third-placed
Avantasia and second-placed Alex Diehl. These three acts had first
topped the ranking in the first round of voting among the 10 candidate
acts. 1.89 million votes were cast by televoting, SMS voting and the
official Eurovision app.You can watch Jamie-Lee's winning performance of Ghost below!
Betty MacDonald Fan Club, founded by Wolfgang Hampel, has members in 40 countries.
Wolfgang Hampel, author of Betty MacDonald biography interviewed Betty MacDonald's family and friends. His Interviews have been published on CD and DVD by Betty MacDonald Fan Club. If you are interested in the Betty MacDonald Biography or the Betty MacDonald Interviews send us a mail, please.
Several original Interviews with Betty MacDonald are available.
We are also organizing international Betty MacDonald Fan Club Events for example, Betty MacDonald Fan Club Eurovision Song Contest Meetings in Oslo and Düsseldorf, Royal Wedding Betty MacDonald Fan Club Event in Stockholm and Betty MacDonald Fan Club Fifa Worldcup Conferences in South Africa and Germany.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club Honour Members are Monica Sone, author of Nisei Daughter and described as Kimi in Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald's nephew, artist and writer Darsie Beck, Betty MacDonald fans and beloved authors and artists Gwen Grant, Letizia Mancino, Perry Woodfin, Traci Tyne Hilton, Tatjana Geßler, music producer Bernd Kunze, musician Thomas Bödigheimer, translater Mary Holmes and Mr. Tigerli.
Marco Brey
