Why have we seen such a media outpouring of sympathy for Nigel Farage over the closure of his Coutts & Co bank account when the same thing has been happening to Muslims since the turn of the century and they’ve had no coverage?

Is it because Sir Paul Marshall, owner of Farage’s employer GB News, runs a hedge fund that took out a “short” position on Coutts’ owner NatWest’s stock – bet that the bank’s market price would fall? Stock has now fallen by £850 million and Marshall’s hedge fund – Marshall Wace – has made a fortune.

And is the Tory government also preparing to sell its 40 per cent shareholding in NatWest and an incident that artificially lowers the price would mean any of their friends and donors who bought those shares would be able to make a very fast profit when they rise after the scandal is over?

That would be very corrupt, wouldn’t it?

Here’s what has been happening over at GB News:

In its report, The London Economic adds that “it’s only a snip of the billions under management at the firm and is likely to have been computer driven” – but how do we know that?

It seems clear that Sir Paul Marshall has been in a position both to know in advance about the situation with Farage’s bank account, to use it to give the bank bad publicity and engineer a share price collapse, and to profit from that collapse via his hedge fund.

That would be insider trading, which is illegal. Anyone convicted of it faces unlimited fines and/or up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

It depends on when Farage’s account was closed, when news reports of the closure appeared, and whether GB News was among the first to report it (it doesn’t even have to be the first). Did Farage mention it to his boss?

Next:

This makes sense as the Tory government has ‘form’ in this regard; it sold shares in Lloyds Bank at a loss in 2017.

Finally, and possibly damningly: perhaps the biggest reason this whole affair smells worse than a pile of Haddock that have been dead for four weeks is that the media have known about people having their bank accounts closed for no reason since some time around the turn of the century.

That well-respected (and then right-wing) reporter Peter Oborne spent years trying to get UK news outlets to report on the plight of innocent Muslims whose accounts were closed in this way, to no avail.

I’ll let him explain:

So we have a situation that has been ongoing for two decades or more, of which reporters, editors and bosses in the mass media are well aware; it becomes a public scandal only when a high-profile political figure who is now a presenter on a news channel is disadvantaged by it – allowing the owner of that channel to make millions of pounds from it; and it lowers the share price of a commercial organisation in which the UK government has shares, leading to speculation that those shares will be sold to make a profit for people who are already very rich.

Are you prepared to shrug and say it all seems perfectly innocent to you? Or would you like an investigation of what may be considered fraud under UK insider trading laws?

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