US and UK - Dangerous financial transactions:are democratic principles and national security pushed aside by greed ?
This week two financial news items silently slipped by in front of us. There were barely any reactions from political circles on both sides of the Atlantic. The first one was that Qatar bought 20 percent of the London Stock Exchange Group Plc in a deal worth about 85 million euro's (US $1.2 billion). On the same day neighboring Dubai agreed to acquire a stake in the U. K. bourse from Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.
Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority said, they bought the LSE stake as part of a plan to ``build long-term investments in high quality businesses'' The other report we noted was that "in a complex set of transactions, Dubai is moving to acquire 19.9 percent of the Nasdaq in New York, placing the Arab government in an ownership position of the key U.S. stock exchange". But that is not all. "As a result of the transaction, Dubai also will acquire 28 percent of the London Stock Exchange, one of the oldest and largest in the world." The transaction is being made through Borse Dubai, a holding company 100-percent owned by the government of the Emirate of Dubai and controlled by Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the head of the Dubai ruling family.
Have the British and American Governments gone out of their mind to allow this? Have democratic principles and national security been pushed aside by greed? On the one hand the US and Britain call themselves the "Defenders of Democratic principals, ready to fight terrorism on every corner of the globe", while on the other hand they allow feudal oligarchies from the Middle East to take control of some of their most important and sensitive financial nerve centers in the world.
This has nothing to do with liberalization of world trade. We can only hope the US Congress, the British Parliament and the EU Commission will have "the stomac" to take vigorous action to stop this.
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