That's convenient.
Also, I received a similar response when inquiring about a financial account that had been overlooked (there are reasons, I'm not getting into it) for a couple of decades. "Can't help you. Too old for us to have records." Well, my records are printed documents. Why can't you tell me anything? Reminds me of when the USA government stole my money from a bank transfer claiming suspicion of whatever (my landlord had a Middle Eastern sounding name and it was the 2000s) and then said they had no record of it when I provided all the required documentation to recover it.
In both cases, unfortunately, I concluded that the odds are so stacked against me that I gave up. Convenient system if you're fabulously wealthy or a massive org (such as corporations and government).
At my first job I made the mistake of discovering a cache of old documents, documents that were far older than the company's seven-year document retention policy. The cache, being my discovery, meant I became the one responsible for destroying it. It was dozens on dozes of bankers boxes filled with documents that I had to de-spine before shredding.
You would have thought that the process was a chore but for me it was exhilarating. The slowness of the process gave me the opportunity to speed read through it all. There was nothing scandalous in there, but I became somewhat of a historian over many quiet nights.
Yup. With every data breach, HN is full of (correct, imo) comments about how tech companies should treat private data as a liability and prune it aggressively.
You go look at mature businesses and you'll find that they do exactly this.
And storage costs.
It's not euphemistic – just diplomatic phrasing.
And in these specific cases, 20 years ago? They weren't handling stuff with computers 20 years ago? They didn't keep backups of that? (Another commenter notes a 10-year record keeping requirement in Europe, so in that case it may have legitimately been removed.)
But it's worse with the government. It wasn't 20 years ago, you just did it. And you don't have records? That's theft.
How this company can proceed to exist is beyond me.
For legal reasons I must emphasize that this is hear-say and should not be trusted as facts. At least one statement is a lie. What you believe to be true is up to you.
For those who don't know, Cyprus is widely regarded as one of Europe's tax havens. And, of cause, Deloitte has offices there.
It hardly seems surprising (nor damning) to have one in Cyprus.
Deloitte Cyprus is a separate legal entity from all the other (separate, legal) Deloitte entities precisely so any consequences of tax evasion resulting from the...em...lax oversight in Cyprus don't impact all the other things called 'Deloitte'.
Things change when the cost-benefit analysis moves. If you apply the law strictly and effectively, the behaviour will adjust.
There's a tension between having a brand that reflects trust and institutional rigor and avoiding liability for the actions of partners in some far flung jurisdiction.
Sanction Deloitte Cyprus: don't ever except any paperwork from them again. "Sovereign state", my ass...
And so it's actually easier to spot this fraud than to conduct it. What you need is people willing to go look and people willing to prosecute it even though that's uncomfortable because these crooks always have powerful friends.
Ultimately the bigger problem is the Big Four themselves. They are obviously Too Big To Fail and three of them are based in a single place, London. I believe that the Paris MOU provides us a model for how to fix this in the medium term but I've seen no political will to even look at the problem, much less address it.
Mind-boggling what people and corporations knew and did in the shadows while we cheered on and cheer on their holdings.
It would actually be reasonable if this was headline was news to Abramovich. I expect there are a bunch of standard services rendered to wealthy Russians and they just all use the same guy, who is known to get good results and no-one ever asks why. It is quite likely that there are a small group of fixers who maintain networks for certain geopolitical in-groups. They probably have excellent connections to people like Jeffery Epstein too. No surprise if the Russian circuit is actually flouting western law directly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_named_in_the_Pa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/1x3vru3/deloitte_he...
An article like like this could be auto-generated with anybody's name.
I don’t want to defend anyone involved in the allegations, and don’t personally think they’re above shady business dealings, I just don’t like usual sensationalist “reporting” - essentially advertising like this and how people eat it up.
i miss being able to donate my liabilities away.
there's no way to absolve yourself from the murder machine anymore.
They obviously haven't done anything wrong then.
Also real estate prices in London at the top of the market are going down and down now that the money pump of corrupt Russian money has been switched off.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...
I couldn't agree with the guy more, when he says:
>> when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees
But that seems to be exactly the sane logic that old Jeff Bezos is spending his life and his billions trying to find a hack around. I'm still not clear who Amazon's customers will be if everyone's unemployed and AI and robots have taken all the middle class jobs... oppressive governments, I guess.
Great piece, and thanks for posting it.
And that's a lower bound, assuming his commercial real estate hasn't dropped further, which is a BIG assumption given that everyone else's has, and ignoring that he's obviously going to be levered up with the interest on his loans at least tripling soon ...
Trump might have been bankrupt if he wasn't elected, especially given that commercial real estate not only has gone down significantly but there doesn't seem to be anything on the horizon that would help it out.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-donald-trumps-net-w...
Making the relative comparison is useful in understanding what a shitshow is going on in the USA.
Back in the day, we used to think Abramovich was corrupt as fuck and very dodgy.
In 2026, I understand him to be a relative amateur ...
All the while we were doing financial regulation software without any proper tests on the models being done outside of some spot checks.
And the idea of doing those was frowned upon :)
Lovely place.
This one appears to be Cyprus - clearly the center of ethical business operations...
It was mostly regurgitating the AWS published best practices on Deloitte letterhead. We all grumbled how "this was not a good use of money", but one of the senior folks from the line of business side said "you guys were going to basically do this anyway...now noone can say you picked the wrong strategy". Which, to be fair, was true.
So that's probably why companies keep hiring them.
There's also a fine print at the bottom that says 'lolz'.
There have been a couple of scandals in Australia, and yet they all remain part of 'the big four'. They're all tainted as fuck.
Isn't the whole point of these companies to rubberstamp shady things corporations are doing, so they can shed resposibility more easily when caught?
"The member firms are primarily organised on an individual country or regional basis and each operates within the legal and regulatory framework of its particular jurisdiction(s). They are separate and independent firms that have come together to practise under a common brand and shared methodologies, client service standards and other professional protocols and guidelines."
https://www.deloitte.com/ce/en/about/governance/network-bran...
I think that this type of thought about strengthening the middle class is possibly the most dangerous and verboten to the people with a radical utopian worldview who are looking for revolution. In a sense, it's probably more important to attack this than it is to attack billionaires. Massive inequality is a much preferable state for would-be revolutionaries than a stable middle class with centrist political views. Which only reinforces the author's point.
Oh sweet summer child
On the whole, I would say the problem isn't so much using language to whitewash the practice as the troublesome tendency to turn a blind eye until someone becomes persona non grata.
Of course you'd have compliance department to look over the processes to minimize the risk of mistakes and correct them ASAP (if you don't, you'd be liable for negligence and open yourself to a higher chance of failures). But since mistakes and miscommunication is inevitable anyway, you'd require hard limits in every obligation - in terms of time, money, scope etc.
Organizations that are not protecting themselves do not live long. And this principle has nothing to do with the nature of their activity.
I am interests in learning more about the oligarchs involved, and the accounts, and the tax evasion, but I am not interested in reading the same comments about Trump I have heard countless times before. If anyone has something new to say about Trump I am happy to read about it where it is relevant to the topic being discussed.
From the footer on (the Uk section) of their website:
> Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”), its global network of member firms, and their related entities (collectively, the “Deloitte organisation”). DTTL (also referred to as “Deloitte Global”) and each of its member firms and related entities are legally separate and independent entities, which cannot obligate or bind each other in respect of third parties.
You can read more about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deloitte#Legal_structure
*cringes in multiple ways*