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(Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a thumping election victory last week on a campaign to get Brexit done, but not before some wealthy donors to his Conservative Party quietly took steps to stay inside the European Union.

FILE PHOTO: Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks during a final general election campaign event in London, Britain, December 11, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo

Cyprus government documents seen by Reuters show that Conservative Party donors have sought citizenship of the island, an EU member state, since Britain voted to leave the bloc in 2016.

They include billionaire Alan Howard, one of Britains best-known hedge fund managers, and Jeremy Isaacs, the former head of Lehman Brothers for Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Cyprus interior ministry recommended that both mens applications be approved, the government documents show.

The Conservative Party won another term in office last week after an election campaign that was dominated by Brexit. Johnson called the election to try to gain a majority in Parliament to push through his plan to take Britain out of the EU early next year.

That some Brits who made a career out of assessing risk have applied for second passports may suggest sagging confidence in Britains economy after it leaves the EU. A broker who makes his living handling such passports says hes seen a surge of enquiries from Brits looking for ways to keep their European Union citizenship.

Brexit is the only factor driving this, says Paul Williams, chief executive of passport brokerage La Vida Golden Visas. The right to live, work, study or set up business anywhere in Europe, says Williams, that all changes with Brexit.

According to Britains Electoral Commission, Howard donated at least 129,000 to the Conservative Party personally and through his company between 2005 and 2009. Isaacs made personal and corporate donations of at least 626,500 to the party, 50,000 of it earmarked for The In Campaign, a group lobbying to remain in the EU.

The Cyprus government documents show that Howard, and Isaacs and his wife all sought Cypriot citizenship in 2018. A spokesperson for Howard declined to comment. Isaacs did not respond to requests for comment. His assistant said he was travelling and unavailable. The Conservative Party didnt respond to requests for comment.

Britain voted narrowly to leave the European Union in 2016 but the details of the countrys future relationship with the bloc are still unclear. Economists have said Britain will be economically poorer under every form of Brexit, compared with staying in the EU.

Cypriot citizenship costs a minimum of 2 million euros of which at least 500,000 euros must be permanently invested. At no point in the application process is the applicant compelled to live in or even visit Cyprus.Cyprus is popular with people seeking a second passport because the entire investment can be in real estate, and it has low taxes.

The Cyprus government documents reviewed by Reuters also list a man named David John Rowland as having sought citizenship. The documents that name Rowland contain scant details, showing only that he applied for a Cypriot passport as part of an investor group.Separate Cypriot company records list a UK national David John Rowland as a director of a company called Abledge Ltd, which was registered on Dec. 31, 2015. These records show Rowlands home address to be on the British tax haven island of Guernsey - the home of the David John Rowland who is aConservative Party donor, former Party treasurer, property developer and financial adviser to Prince Andrew. Reuters couldnt determine Abledge Ltds line of business or any other information about the firm.

A spokesperson for a bank owned by Rowland, Banque Havilland, declined to comment. Repeated requests through another of Rowlands businesses and his personal email address went unanswered. A spokesperson for the palace declined to comment. The Cypriot government declined to comment about any of the individuals named in this story or on the status of a government review of its passports-for-sale scheme, citing EU privacy rules.

Electoral Commission records show that Rowland has donated at least 6.5 million to the Conservatives since 2001, 854,500 of it since the Brexit vote. Prime Minister David Cameron named him Tory treasurer and chief Conservative fundraiser after the millions of pounds he donated to the 2010 general election campaign - to protect Britains liberty and economic future, Rowland told media at the time. He quit before officially taking up the post.

Isaacs was once seen as a successor to Dick Fuld, but ended up leaving Lehman shortly before the global financial crisis. In 2015, he became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire at the Queens birthday honours.

Howard made billions on the 2008 financial crisis by predicting interest rate and currency moves, and profited again on the Brexit vote by accurately tracking voter sentiment, media reported.

When an emergency UK budget raised taxes on the wealthy in 2010, Howard moved to Switzerland. He has since returned to Britain. But last year the master of hedging hedged his bets against holding only British citizenship.

Another British financier who sought Cypriot citizenship is James Brocklebank, a managing partner at private equity firm Advent International. In 2016, he said that even if Brexit were ultimately a good thing, it would create significant challenges and cause the UK to lose out on investment. He applied for Cypriot citizenship in 2018.A spokesperson for Brocklebank declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Tom Bergin and Andrew R.C. Marshall; editing by Janet McBride

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Exclusive: The Brits who won't Brexit - Reuters

Almost a decade ago, the European Union proposed a novel strategy to cap greenhouse-gas emissions from the airline sector. Foreign airlines using the EUs airports would be forced to either cut emissions or buy carbon credits. It didnt work. The proposal raised the fury of the US and China, who feared billions in charges. Facing angry trading partners, the EU backed down. Today, aviation is one of the worlds fastest-growing sources of emissions.

Last week, the EU announced its intention to bend the trajectory of the worlds emissions down yet again. That wasnt the headline: It was the EUs Green Deal, a slate of 50 or so proposed policies to make the bloc net carbon-neutral by 2050. But deep inside the measures was something called a carbon border adjustment mechanism,according to leaked European Commission documents. Proposed for the steel, cement, and aluminum sectors in 2021, the de facto border tax (pdf) would force importers to buy allowances of CO2 emissions in the EU (now priced around 25 per tonne).

Its designed to put domestic producers of goods on the same playing field as foreign manufacturers. A steel maker in Europe, for example, must pay for credits to emit carbon dioxide from the EU Emission Trading System after it has surpassed its allotted emission credits. Foreign firms do not. The carbon adjustment cost reflects the carbon price had the goods been made domestically. Analysts estimate such credit costs could account for about 5% to 10% of the gross cost of steel and more for cement.

If the EU succeeds at imposing what is effectively a carbon border tax, it will have achieved something significant: A global incentive for firms to cut emissions without ever signing a climate deal. In theory, companies in targeted sectors that wish to sell into the 28-nation bloc, the worlds largest economy by some measures, will have to meet the EUs own standards or pay up. It may even expand to shipping and, yes, aviation.

Why would a carbon border tax succeed today when a very similar strategy failed with airlines in 2014? The geopolitics are different, says Michael Mehling, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Energy Initiative. The question is whether the EU will be more resolute, and smarter about the process, Mehling told Quartz.

The EU had a few things working against it before: Free trade was ascendant, the US was a diplomatic powerhouse, and America led climate talks. None of that is true today. The Trump administration has escalated global trade wars. American diplomacy has been hollowed out by an exodus of career diplomats from Foggy Bottom and abroad. The White House, which has promised to yank the US out of the Paris climate accords as soon as possible, sent no high-ranking officials to the climate talks in Madrid this month. Without its trading partners unified against it, the EU may find it easier to implement its latest program.

The mood has shifted as well. A decade ago, when carbon border adjustments were formally floated, the benefits werent as clear, and political costs were real. Obama signaled his disapproval of a 2009 climate bill over free-trade worries.

Things have evolved a fair amount since then, says Carolyn Fischer, a senior fellow with Resources for the Future. The topic is much less controversial. Legal scholars feel the EU ison solid footing to comply with World Trade Organization rules. The EU carbon price has climbed five-fold since 2017. Theres also a flood of new data: About 50 different efforts around the world (paywall) now price carbon in schemes that account for about 15% of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions.

But the devil is in the details. In a 2019 paper Fischer co-authored, she called a carbon border tax one of the most efficient unilateral actions to curb global emissionsbut also one of the most challenging to get right. Designed well, says Fischer, it should not have a problem.

Even if a carbon border tax levels the playing fieldfor nowEurope cant get there alone. Eventually, the world will need to strike a deal to realize the net-zero decarbonization targets recommended by scientists by 2050. Without it, carbon-intensive export industries may concentrate in a few unaccountable countries, while the rest of the world claims cuts.

This is already happening. Switzerland and Sweden, for example, already import more greenhouse-gas emissions in the form of goods than they produce domestically, says Mehling. In the future, you can get a handful of countries left in the world emitting while everyone else says, Were clean, were clean,' he says. It will become more and more of an issue if we are not able to get all countries moving in this direction.

Originally posted here:
A border tax in the EU Green Deal might force global carbon cuts - Quartz

The European Parliament could block Boris Johnson's Brexit deal over the UK's treatment of EU citizens, its Brexit coordinator said this morning. Guy Verhofstadt called for the "remaining problems" with citizens' rights to be solved before consent could be given by the parliament, which is yet to vote on the deal. MEPs are worried that problems with the UK's settlement scheme for EU nationals could leave some citizens with no immigration status.

He said: "Everyone presumes the European Parliament will give automatically its consent to the Withdrawal Agreement. Not if the remaining problems with the citizens' rights are not solved first.

"Citizens can never become the victims of Brexit."

Mr Verhofstadt's speech comes almost a week after Mr Johnson won a thumping majority in the general election a result which undeniably gives him a "stonking mandate" to deliver on the result of the 2016 referendum.

Unlike the former Belgium Prime Minister, who strongly campaigned for the Liberal Democrats during the election campaign, the majority of EU leaders welcomed Mr Johnson's win.

Mr Verhofstadt's opposition, though, should not come as a surprise, as he was reportedly not too pleased when Theresa May called for a general election in 2017, either.

In 2019 book 'Blind Man's Brexit', documentary maker Lode Desmet and BBC broadcaster Edward Stourton provide the first in-depth fly-on-the-wall view of "how the negotiations slipped out of Britains hands" and recall how the European Parliament's Brexit Coordinator reacted to Theresa May's call for a 2017 general election.

The authors wrote: "Verhofstadt was scathing about Mrs Mays decision to call for a snap election.

"In an opinion piece in The Guardian, he wrote or rather co-wrote with his British spokesperson Nick Petre As a Belgian, I have a long standing appreciation of surrealism.

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"Having informed European leaders that Britain is leaving the European Union, and, after laying out the UKs negotiating position in a detailed notification letter, the Prime Minister is now asking the British people how they would like their full English Brexit served.

"In Brussels, we now wonder who will be joining us at the breakfast table after all.'"

Mr Desmet and Mr Stourton added that Mr Verhostadt had voiced the fear, widely shared within the EU, that the former Prime Minister was giving party management priority over national interest.

They quoted Mr Verhofstadt as saying in his Guardian piece: "With the referendum, which many European leaders saw as a Tory cat fight that got out of control, I have little doubt many on the continent see this election as again motivated by the internal machinations of the Tory party.

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EU contempt laid bare: Verhofstadt's 'scathing' reaction to general election revealed - Express

Nicola Sturgeon has insisted democracy must and will prevail as she confirmed she has now written to Boris Johnson formally requesting the power for Holyrood to hold a second independence referendum.

The SNP leader and Scottish First Minister said that following last weeks election victory in which her party took 47 of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, the case for another referendum is unarguable.

Speaking at Bute House, her official residence in Edinburgh, Ms Sturgeon said: The alternative is a future that we have rejected being imposed upon us.

Scotland made it very clear last week it does not want a Tory Government led by Boris Johnson taking us out of the European Union.

That is the future we face if we do not have the opportunity to consider the alternative of independence.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly made clear his opposition to a second independence referendum.

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Scotland doesnt want Tory Government taking us out of European Union Sturgeon demands indyref2 - The London Economic

A Florida prosecutor slammed New England Patriots owner Robert Krafts arguments to suppress surveillance tapes made at a Florida spa allegedly recording sex acts, calling the case a significant Fourth Amendment ruling in filings submitted Tuesday.

Kraft, who pleaded not guilty to two prostitution charges in February for sex acts allegedly recorded in January at the Orchids of Asia Spa in Jupiter, Fla., earned a victory in May when a Palm Beach County judge suppressed police surveillance evidence, calling filming of non-criminal massages unacceptable.

Prosecutors appealed the May decision to suppress video, and Florida Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Paul DeSousa refuted Krafts arguments to support the May decision in a 23-page reply brief filed last night.

(Kraft) urges that massages should not have been recorded at any time other than the end of a massage; but the first of his offenses came at the end of a massage, DeSousa wrote. And he insists that recording was improper when men left on their underwear at the start of a massage; but he removed his own underwear immediately.

DeSousa also argued Jupiter polices nonstop covert surveillance over a five-day period was necessary to gather all facts, and it would have been a difficult burden for police to determine when to film and not film activities for signs of prostitution.

The sides have argued case law surrounding video surveillance in briefs filed since October, and DeSousa wrote in a motion attached to his reply brief the appeals decision in Floridas Fourth District Court of Appeals will be the first state appellate court to resolve the Fourth Amendment questions at play here.

Krafts misdemeanor case has been on hold since the appeal filed in May, and another appeal by the women charged with running the Orchids of Asia Spa is locked in a similar appeal battle.

Also in the brief, DeSousa says third parties have filed at least one federal lawsuit for monetary damage alleging the Orchids of Asia tapes violated their own Fourth Amendment rights.

A civil lawsuit by Kraft in a Florida court alleging denial of investigative documents by prosecutors is also pending a ruling on a motion to dismiss by the state.

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Prosecutor slams Krafts appeal to block Orchids of Asia tapes - Boston Herald