Sky News reports today that Bill Nighy, the veteran British actor, has obviously touched a raw nerve in the City.
Nighy’s endorsement of a global ‘Robin Hood Tax’ on the world’s banks attracted international media coverage earlier this week. In a short film to promote the launch, Nighy plays a banker who eventually agrees to a 0.05% tax on international bank transactions to raise up to £250bn annually to fight poverty and climate change in the UK and abroad.
And on the website www.robinhoodtax.org supporters of the idea (slogan: “not complicated, just brilliant”) registered their enthusiasm in their thousands.
Until, that is, 3.41 on the afternoon of the day of the launch, when the team behind the website noticed that opponents of the tax were suddenly registering votes at the rate of six every second. Within five minutes, the ‘No’ votes had soared from 1500 to 8000.
The site was promptly closed down, and after some investigation, the Robin Hood Tax team tracked the address on their database server from which the thousands of ‘No’ votes had emerged to a domain name registered to the London offices of…Goldman Sachs.
A Robin Hood Tax Campaign spokesperson said: “We’re delighted with the reception our proposal has received in little over a day since we launched and it’s great that public support for a tax on banks’ financial transactions is making people in the City of London sit up and notice.
“With millions suffering as a result of an economic crisis they did nothing to cause, it will take more than a few dubious no votes on our website to undermine support for a tiny tax on banks to fund action on climate change and tackle poverty at home and abroad.”
As I write, the vote counter stands at 20307 in favour and 2574 against.
A Goldman Sachs spokesperson said: “We have just received this information and are investigating the matter fully.”
Oh dear.
Leave a Reply