Long-time readers may recall that I take a special interest in the art of corruption. And this week America has thrown up a delicious example. Democrat Senator Robert Menendez was indicted last week on bribery charges. This follows a raid on the New Jersey Senator’s home in which federal agents found more than $480,000 hidden in clothing and piled up in his closets. The agents also found 13 gold bars.
You have to go back to the 1990s for the last time that parliament was seriously accused of being ‘up for sale’
Menendez denies the charges and said on Monday that it has simply been his habit, for some years, to take thousands of dollars in cash from his personal savings account and store it around the house. He says that he kept it ‘for emergencies, and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba’. It is a strange defence, not least because keeping large wads of cash in your home is probably the easiest way to facilitate the confiscation of said money.
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