Margaret Hodge

Margaret Oppenheimer - J'accuse!

Know Your Enemy.

CAPE TOWN. Putin With De Beers Chairman Nicholas Oppenheimer.

Diamonds aren't forever - but Children are.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said there had been a "veil of secrecy" over the establishment for far too long.

Quite right, luv - and you're right in the middle of it (in every sense).

Appearing on the Sky News Murnaghan programme, she added: "Thank God it is coming out into the open. I think the really interesting thing about it is there has been a veil of secrecy over the establishment for far too long.

"Now the establishment who thought they were always protected...find actually they are subject to the same rigours of the law and that's right.

"What we really need to get right as well is how children are cared for today.

"Let's learn from the historic abuse, let's actually give victims the right to have their voice on that, but let's actually also focus on the present."

17. In 1985, 14-year-old Jason Swift was killed by a child-abuse gang. 

Jason is believed to have lived in Islington council's Conewood Street children's home. (Jersey child abuse link to Islington, London) 

Sidney Cooke, Leslie Bailey, Robert Oliver, and Lennie Smith, were imprisoned in 1989 for the manslaughter of Jason Swift. 

Cooke and his gang had sexually tortured and prostituted a number of boys. 

The gang is believed to have killed at least nine children.[2] 

Cooke was sentenced to 19 years in prison. 

In 1998, Cooke was let out of prison eight years early. 

There have been allegations that very powerful people have been involved in a child-abuse ring connected to Islington children's homes. ( Jersey child abuse link to Islington, London) 

In 1982 Margaret Hodge (nee Oppenheimer) became Islington council leader. 

She became a close friend of Tony Blair, who lived in Islington, a few doors away from Hodge. 

In February 1990 Liz Davies and David Cofie, senior social workers, discovered evidence of sex abuse of children and reported it to a residents' meeting attended by Mrs Hodge. 

In May 1990 Mr Cofie and Ms Davies were told by Lyn Cusack, assistant director of social services, to stop interviewing children about the abuse claims. 

On 1 May 1997 Tony Blair moved from Islington to Downing Street. 

In June 2003 Mrs Hodge was made minister for Children. (Another minister under fire: call for Hodge to quit over child ...)

The IRA are extremely political.

The personal fortune of one of Parliament’s most powerful committee chairs has taken a hammering thanks to a major corporate reorganisation within her family’s deeply troubled steel empire.

Margaret Hodge’s stake in Stemcor, the multinational founded by her father Hans Oppenheimer, was once worth millions but is now perhaps worth less than £250,000.

Meanwhile annual dividends, which in happier times furnished the famously feisty of the Public Accounts Committee chairwoman a probable income of at least £50,000, will vanish for years to come.

Vulture funds have swooped in to buy up its debt at huge discounts, as banks cut their losses and run.

The former Labour minister’s brother, Ralph Oppenheimer, 72, retired “with immediate effect” as executive chairman in September.

Stemcor was set up by Ms Hodge’s father, Hans Oppenheimer, and had been run by Ralph for decades after his father died in 1985.

It ran up debts of more than $1bn (£620m) with a host of banks through its revolving credit facilities. But the business, which suffered massive losses in its international trading division, has struggled to service the loans.

The banks agreed to a number of standstill deals on repayments throughout this year and are close to launching a major restructuring, with a host of its businesses to be sold around the world.

Because Stemcor is privately owned, it is hard to value, but accounts for last year said shareholders’ funds totalled £184mcompared with £241m the previous year. It will now be a fraction of last year’s value. Full details of the plan will emerge when it is finalised early in the New Year.

In the meantime, some bankers to the company have been selling their debt to vulture funds led by the Manhattan billionaire Leon Black’s Apollo at as little as 30 cents for $1 worth of loan.

Companies like Apollo buy up debt cheaply and demand dramatic change to the company to increase the value of the loan. Others thought to be buying into Stemcor’s “distressed debt” include Australia’s Anchorage Capital Partners and London-based Duke Street.

News of Stemcor’s troubles could arguably be good for Ms Hodge’s image, however. Because of the Oppenheimer family wealth she is among a cadre of senior Labour politicians criticised by the right for being “champagne socialists”.

British employees will also be relieved as the restructuring is unlikely to affect the UK workforce or plants.

Ms Hodge’s son from her first marriage, Nicholas Watson, is listed at Companies House as a director of the Stemcor division, Barclay & Mathieson.

A spokeswoman for Ms Hodge, who as culture minister in the last Labour government criticised “nepotism” in the arts world, declined to comment on her son’s position, or on the financial difficulties of Stemcor.

Across Stemcor’s businesses worldwide, company accounts show there were 118 injury accidents last year, 39 of which were serious. Ofthose, 25 were in the group’s Barclay & Mathieson UK stockholding business and a German site. The company said safety performance overseas was “encouraging” but the total number of lost days (over 1600) remained a “matter for concern”.