Fred "the shred" Goodwin, who presided over the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland and is now collecting a £200,000/year pension at taxpayer's expense (over and above his £3m bonus) for his work in helping to destroy one of Britain's great financial institutions, has secured a "super-injunction" prohibiting the press from discussing his affairs. — Read the rest

It's not just Amazon and Apple that expect massive taxpayer subsidies in exchange for locating physical plant in your town: when Google builds a new data-center, it does so on condition of multimillion-dollar "incentives" from local governments — but Google also demands extraordinary secrecy from local officials regarding these deals, secrecy so complete that city attorneys have instructed town councillors to refuse to answer questions about it during public meetings.

The "super-injunction" (previously) is a weird feature of English and Welsh law through which the very wealthy can hire bulldog lawyers to get judges to pass an order prohibiting any newspaper or journalist from disclosing true facts about them, on pain of jail-time.

Former MI5 agent and Guernsey native Annie Machon sez, "In the teeth of all the anti-SOPA and -ACTA demos, the Channel Island of Guernsey is proposing it become an offshore libel tourism haven for image control. The lawyers see this as a potentially huge revenue stream, much as the tax haven laws have been or the island over the last 3 decades." — Read the rest

Commodities firm Glencore just had a weak IPO in London, going underwater by the end of day one. But have you heard of them? Probably not! The news is of little interest outside of the finance pages. Journalists, however, have started receiving bizarre legal warnings telling them how to cover the "extremely private individuals" who run the company—letters from a law firm notorious for getting "super-injunctions" for clients that need the British press gagged. — Read the rest