Lord Oakeshott, a LibDem peer, has used parliamentary privilege to say what everyone knew: the seven Barclays memos about tax avoidance schemes are available on Wikileaks. Those are the memos that Barclays had removed by an injunction – aka gagging order – at half past two in the morning on the seventeenth of March.
From today’s Lords (link here; it may stop working tomorrow morning when Hansard is posted):
Lord Oakeshott: […] Documents leaked to the Liberal Democrats, which appear to detail systematic tax avoidance on a grand scale by Barclays, were injuncted last week. The Sunday Times and the Guardian had already made them front-page news and these documents are widely available on the internet from sites such as Twitter, wikileaks.org, docstoc.com and gabbr.com. Yet the Guardian had to remove them from its website and cannot tell its readers where to find them. These documents describe deals worth billions of pounds set up by the bank in order to make money out of depriving the UK and foreign exchequers of revenue. Barclays would not last for one minute without the British taxpayer standing behind it, yet it is holding out one hand for taxpayers’ money while it picks taxpayers’ pockets with tax avoidance activities on the other. […]
I think congratulations are in order to Lord Oakeshott. Aside from that, it does suggest that any other banks who have unfortunate leaks are going to have to think twice about injunctions in the small hours if parliamentary privilege is going to be used to tell people where those memos can be found. I am not sure of my ground, but I think I’m right in saying that the actual text of the memoranda is still covered by the injunction; it is only the fact that “these documents are widely available on the internet from sites such as Twitter, wikileaks.org, docstoc.com and gabbr.com” which may be repeated.
xD.