Conor here: Naomi Fowler and Leo Schick detail missed opportunities when tax officials and law enforcement do manage to recover assets and money from criminals. They also touch on how Trump’s pardon of convicted money launderer Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, hurts what’s left of the integrity of the US financial system.
The Taxcast is produced by Naomi Fowler and Leo Schick of the Tax Justice Network. Guests on this episode are Scott Greytak, Deputy Executive Director at Transparency International US; Dr. Amber Phillips, Senior Criminology lecturer at the University of Bristol; Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire; Alison Lowe, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime in West Yorkshire, England; Tasha Dyson, CEO, Fusion Housing; Derek Jones from the All Saints Landmark Centre; Tony Macaluso, Co-Director of Chapel FM Art Centre; Nigel Crowther,West Yorkshire Police Senior financial investigator; and Alysha, a dancer from Dance United. Cross posted from The Taxcast.
Naomi Fowler: Hello and welcome to the Taxcast from the Tax Justice Network, a monthly podcast about corruption, tax abuse, financial secrecy, and how we fix it. I’m Naomi Fowler. Coming up later, social reuse of assets recovered from crime.
Amber Phillips: It has that basic human appeal. It appeals to our sense of justice.
Naomi Fowler: It’s quite an uplifting podcast this month.
Before that though, some quick news on President Donald Trump who’s pardoned convicted money launderer Changpeng Zhao, known as ‘C Zee’ (or C Zed’ as we would say in the UK). He’s the billionaire founder of Binance, which is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Both Zhao and Binance pleaded guilty a couple of years ago now to several things: violating the Bank Secrecy Act, failing to register as a money transmitting business, ignoring US anti-money laundering law and the law to counter the financing of terrorism. US courts gave them the biggest fine in the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s history, which was over $4 billion. Zhao himself was fined $50 million and he served a four month prison sentence. This is Scott Greytak, the Deputy Executive Director of Transparency International US:
Scott Greytak: The recent presidential pardon for Binance’s founder raises extremely serious questions about how the United States will handle accountability in major financial crime cases. Binance operates the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and about two years ago, US authorities resolved a really sweeping investigation into anti-money laundering and sanctions violations with a $4.3 billion global penalty package against the company. As part of that resolution, Binance agreed to retain an independent compliance monitorship for three years under the DOJ and a separate five year monitorship under the US Treasury Department in order to overhaul and verify its anti-money laundering and sanctions controls.
In particular, according to the DOJ and Treasury, Binance had been prioritizing growth over compliance with these laws for years. The investigation showed among many other things that Binance failed to file Suspicious Activity Reports, facilitated transactions involving sanctioned jurisdictions like Iran and North Korea, and it basically became a conduit for illicit funds that were tied to ransomware, dark net markets, and other criminal activities.
The DOJs filings in particular noted nearly $900 million in trades between US users and users in Iran. And Treasury’s findings showed interactions with wallets that were associated with Isis, Hamas, and Al-Qaeda, for which suspicious activity reports were never filed.
Naomi Fowler: These are really serious crimes and the ramifications of this stuff is, and all the ramifications of this stuff is global. Here’s Scott again.
Scott Greytak: When an executive convicted in a landmark financial crime case receives clemency after that kind of record enforcement action, it creates uncertainty about how consistently the United States will apply its own rules. The United States has long positioned itself as a leader on illicit finance enforcement, but now these sorts of signals will complicate efforts by partners, allied countries around the world, and reformers who are looking to the United States as a benchmark on these issues and those global knock on effects for trust deterrence on the perceived durability of our own enforcement actions. These aren’t partisan questions. They go to the fundamental rule of law framework that the US wants other countries around the world to emulate. At the end of the day, the monitorships that were imposed in 2023 will remain central to rebuilding confidence after this scandal. The DOJs three year monitor and Treasury’s five year monitor will give them access to Binance systems audits of past activity and required off-boarding of US users from binance.com and their regular reporting required to US authorities for those monitorships.
It’s really important that clear, transparent updates on that remediation effort and steady, even-handed enforcement of those agreements are going to be really critical to helping to maintain the integrity of the US financial system and supporting global anti-corruption, anti-money laundering norms around the world.
Naomi Fowler: Shortly after President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, his company Binance’s US Exchange announced it was gonna start allowing the trading of two Trump linked cryptocurrencies. Very worrying developments, very worrying.
And here’s a trailer coming up now of a podcast that we’ve been working on that’s coming out soon.
TRAILER for The Corruption Diaries:
Naomi Fowler: Hello. The Tax Justice Networks podcast series, the Corruption Diaries is coming. It brings you the stories of anti-corruption veterans in their own words.
Richard Allen: If you’re going to fight back against something that’s unjust you’ll go through some dark places when you’re doing it.
Naomi Fowler: I’m Naomi Fowler and I’m back for Season Two, all about a man who took on the British authorities from his garden shed, and exposed two huge tax abuse schemes.
Richard Allen: We’re talking about industrial levels of abuse. Fraud, to the value of 1.5 billion.
Naomi Fowler: It all began in the 1990s when Richard set up a mail order business and a record label to sell the alternative music that he loved. It wasn’t long before he discovered progressive rock band Porcupine Tree.
Richard Allen: I remember listening to a track on my bicycle on the way to work thinking ‘I could hear this being played in a stadium.’ And of course, years later, it was.
Naomi Fowler: This series is about his fight to build a record label and push great music into the spotlight, and it’s about his revenge on the authorities who turned a blind eye to tax loopholes and the businesses exploiting them that took all of that away from him.
Richard Allen: I wandered off from the high court and the whole thing felt surreal. It was almost like I had successfully caused all of this to happen, which I suppose I did.
Naomi Fowler: So, don’t miss it. Listen out for Season Two of the Corruption Diaries, released every week starting on the 2nd of January, 2026. Search and subscribe now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Naomi Fowler: That’s the Corruption Diaries series two, coming out soon. Okay. We talk a lot on this podcast about how to fix our global and national financial systems to stop tax abuse, money laundering and other crimes but when those crimes have happened, and tax officials and law enforcement do manage to recover assets and money from criminals, what happens next?
How are those seizures used to benefit taxpayers and society? We think there are missed opportunities here to promote the importance of financial transparency, also to popularize the brilliant work of tax officials, asset recovery specialists, financial investigators, and law enforcement.
[Audio clip]
Naomi Fowler: What you’re hearing are the sounds of a man with disabilities , being very gently winched down into a beautiful dazzlingly white 13 metre long sailboat in Galicia in Spain. The sky’s are blue. The man’s got a huge smile on his face and he’s holding up his right hand making a ‘V’ sign, it’s really nice. The Leion sailboat has two masts. It can sail round the world. It was seized from drug traffickers at the end of the nineties, and now an association of people with disabilities uses it to make sailing open to people who’d never normally get the chance. Thousands of people have benefited from it since then. You can see it’s life changing and that’s one example of the social reuse of seized and confiscated assets. There’s lots of other examples. They’re far from perfect, there’s plenty of scope for improvement, but they do show the potential for social reuse of seized assets.
According to Europol, only 1% of the profits generated annually from crime in the EU are confiscated, which is amazing. And the European Commission has said that only 19 out of 27 member states have adopted specific legislation on the social reuse of assets. So there’s so much for nation states to catch up on there. But so much can be done on a local level too, as we found out speaking to Bristol University Senior Criminology lecturer, Dr. Amber Phillips. Her work is focused on the social reuse of recovered assets.
Amber Phillips: The social reuse of confiscated assets is about using the proceeds of crime for positive purposes. So it’s kind of seeing society as a victim of crime. So obviously with asset recovery, a priority is always to compensate the victim so in cases of fraud, that’s more straightforward because there’s often a clearly identifiable, specific victim of that fraud, but where there isn’t a clear victim, there we can think more of society being a victim. So it’s logical then to think, how can we put this criminal money back into society in a way that is beneficial. So that might be in crime prevention projects, it might be in investing in youth services, in rehabilitation for, for drug users. Or it could be things that maybe we don’t think of as connected to crime, so, um, baby banks, it’s just like a food bank focused on babies. Or rejuvenating local parks. There’s all sorts of different ways that that money can be used in a positive way.
My interest in social reuse started a long time ago when I was working in Italy, and I was coming into contact with a lot of people who were working with anti-mafia organizations. And in Italy, they have a really fantastic piece of legislation which allows assets that have been confiscated from convicted mafiosi to be handed over to the community and used for community benefit. And that’s got a double function. Not only is it depriving the mafioso of that asset, it’s also depriving them of that symbolic power that they had over that community. So if a Mafioso had like a really big, luxurious villa in the middle of the town with gold gates and whatever that’s a real, obvious show of their power and status. But if you take that away and you give that to a local charity, you’re saying this power, this wealth now belongs to the community. It’s showing people look, the law is stronger than these people.
Naomi Fowler: And that’s a really powerful thing.
CLIP
These children are standing outside a a 1,600 meter squared farmhouse in the north of Italy. A beautiful looking house. And they’ve just finished a guided tour.
Boy 1: Oggi abbiamo visto una villa, la più grande della Lombardia, confiscata alla mafia.
Naomi Fowler: This young boy is saying ‘today we’ve seen a villa, the biggest one in Lombardy confiscated from the mafia.’ And this girl:
Girl: Io mi sono emozionata molto quando ho sentito la sua storia.
Naomi Fowler: She’s saying, I was really moved when I heard its story. And this boy:
Boy 2: A me la cosa che mi ha stupito di più è che a questo criminale quando ho saputo che la casa gli è stata confiscata, ha iniziato a distruggere le cose che poteva e mi ha colpito questa cattiveria.
Naomi Fowler: ‘The thing that shocked me the most was that this criminal, when he learned that his house had been confiscated, started to destroy everything he could, and I was struck by that wickedness.’
Imagine these kids and their families, they’ve been living in the shadow of this mafioso-owned villa for a long time. Then there’s this big change that happens. There’s lots of examples of social reuse of assets like this one in Italy. In Calabria, Amber came across it a lot.
Amber Phillips: People that I was working with, they were working out of various different mafia properties, so a piece of commercial property that used to be run as an illegal gambling centre, for example, was taken over by some friends who were running it as a local community centre or a mafia villa that was way up in the hillside and had like swimming pools and all of this fancy stuff, that had been turned into a museum and a cultural centre for the benefit of the community. And from having no interest in the mafia before that, I became very interested and very passionately anti-mafia and that ultimately is what got me in interested in asset recovery. And the legislation we’ve got in the UK is very different to what they have in Italy, but there are some parallels and there is still a version of social reuse happening here, which I’m really excited about.
Naomi Fowler: And our Taxcast co-producer Leo Schick went with Amber to take a look at some really interesting stuff that’s happening in England.
Leo Schick: Yeah, it was really interesting and it was uplifting too. And the social reuse of assets really shows how important financial investigators and asset recovery specialists are.
Naomi Fowler: Yeah, they really are. And with the investigations they do, they come up against all the things the Tax Justice Network campaigns on, so hidden ownership, following the money and assets through all these multiple secrecy jurisdictions and tax havens, all that kind of stuff.
Leo Schick: Yeah and when I met Amber, I kept coming back to this idea in the interview of making this gripping Netflix series about a financial investigator, and I totally agree with her that talking about their work and that of asset recovery specialists is such a great way to explain why our financial and legal systems just aren’t serving us as well as they could. And now I just really want to see this series happen.
Naomi Fowler: Oh, I’d watch that, definitely! And I think seeing all the brick walls that these investigators come up against really helps us all see how ending financial secrecy could make investigations so much easier. Here’s Amber.
Amber Phillips: They’re kind of the unsung heroes of law enforcement, I think, because you never see a financial investigator in a TV police drama. You never really read about financial investigation or even asset recovery in news stories about, about crime busts and it’s a huge part of justice. I think when you explain to people what asset recovery is, which is recovering money from bad guys, that appeals to people’s natural sense of justice, it sort of feels right. So it’s doubly disappointing that a lot of the news reporting of crime just doesn’t engage with asset recovery really.
I think there’s a classic issue with anything to do with finance that there’s an assumption that people will switch off and not be interested. There’s also the element that post-conviction confiscation happens after a case has been concluded. So the sentencing has already happened, and then a few months later, or even a couple of years later, you might get the final confiscation order through, by which time the case has moved on. People perhaps don’t wanna read a headline about the same case.
It’s perceived as being complex. I mean, I will fly the flag and say, I don’t think it is that complicated and I think we’ve gotta give people more credit that they would understand and actually people are interested in asset recovery because there is that more appealing kind of justice going on where you get to see kind of a tangible impact, especially when we think about the conversation around custodial sentences in the UK there’s a lot of conversation around prisons and do they work and overcrowding and separate to that conversation is the fact that stripping a criminal of their assets is arguably more impactful than a short custodial sentence, which for professional criminals, they might have worked into their business plan.
In terms of the wider public people’s faith in the police, in law enforcement in, in the rule of law in general, I think if people are aware that all of all of this really complex, hard work is going on behind the scenes, that teams of really, really dedicated, hardworking people who are really passionate about getting justice, are working really hard to sift through the finances of these people that have done a lot of harm. Many of these criminals, the harm that they do is on a really significant scale and it’s affecting people at different areas of the community and financial investigation has the ability to impact those people and limit the further harm that they can do. And even beyond that, when we get into questions of social reuse, not only are we stopping that criminal, we’re bringing that money back in and potentially using it to either enable further investigation or funnelling it back into the community that has suffered as a result of that crime.
Leo Schick: I asked Amber what success looks like for her, and her answer surprised me because she says it’s not just about numbers.
Amber Phillips: I am just coming to the end of a research project about measuring success in asset recovery. The project is called Beyond the Figures, so moving beyond quantitative measures of success because numbers are not a very good way of measuring impact in asset recovery because there’s a lot of different ways that we can achieve impact that don’t involve getting a really big headline figure. And when I was talking to financial investigators about what success meant for them, they said all sorts of different things, but one of the things that came up a lot was turning bad money into good. And that was really important for them as a motivation, and as a result it’s become important to me.
I think the most harm happens when people aren’t told – that’s very disheartening – where the funds that are being recovered are disappearing into a black hole. Certainly the financial investigators that I interviewed as part of my research expressed quite a lot of disenchantment when the money that they’d worked hard to recover was kind of just disappearing, and they weren’t aware where it was going. And that is a problem. That’s, that’s a problem in all sorts of levels, but certainly in terms of morale and job retention, that’s a problem.
Retaining these excellent people that are working so hard is gonna be more difficult if you don’t show them the fruits of what they’re doing. And that wouldn’t take much and it’s free, you know, just saying, by the way, as a result of what you did, we were able to employ a few more people or fund this new training or pay for some software, you know, those are some examples of what recovered funds can do. All of them were instinctively keen on the idea of social reuse because I think again, it has that basic human appeal. It appeals to our sense of justice.
Leo Schick: And she says the motivation behind doing social use of assets needs to be right too.
Amber Phillips: Using social reuse as a photo opportunity won’t cut it. Um, using social reuse for political ends is not appropriate and can happen sometimes where projects are kind of earmarked by people that don’t necessarily have an interest in supporting the community, but they want to make it look like they’re doing something good.
Leo Schick: What came through when chatting with her is that there’s just so much about social reuse of assets that we just don’t know.
Amber Phillips: Asset recovery is an understudied area. It’s gaining traction in the research community but social reuse, certainly very few people are looking at social reuse, certainly in England and Wales. As far as I know, I’m the only person looking at it, so we don’t have that body of data to draw on.
Naomi Fowler: But there are some examples of really great practice that are happening in the UK so Leo, you went with Amber to see social reuse of asset recovery in action.
Leo Schick: Yeah, I, so I went to Wakefield, uh, in West Yorkshire for the very first time. It’s in the north of England. I joined Amber there for this kind of special award ceremony event and Amber told us about how West Yorkshire really stands out as a place where there’s particularly good practice in this area, and she was very complimentary about it.
Amber Phillips: This kind of social reuse, this level of community engagement is not the norm in the UK. There’s a lot of places where this isn’t happening, but it’s fantastic that it’s happening here. There are lots of police forces in this country, but there are very few, as far as I know, that are doing this. There are financial investigators in this country who don’t know this is happening. This is a rare and fantastic example of social reuse in action, where the community is involved from the start and it’s really putting its money where its mouth is.
Naomi Fowler: So what exactly is happening in West Yorkshire then? What did you find?
Leo Schick: Well, I got off the train and we went to this well-attended event that was in a school. And when we got there, there was this lovely buffet outside, a really big assembly hall, and about 70 people turned up. Maybe more. And there were a mixture of financial investigators, police, and most of all, just lots of people from these organizations who do all kinds of great work in the community. They’re all bid for funds from seized assets. And this was a ceremony where they award the proceeds of these funds to the groups. Here is the Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, introducing the event.
Mayor Tracy Brabin: So good to see you, I just want to say thank you all so much for coming across West Yorkshire. I just love this evening because it means so much that we are able to divert proceeds of crime back to communities that are harmed by, so thank you. So I’d like to welcome officially my Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Alison Lowe. Let’s hear it for Alison wooohh!!
[Applause]
Alison Lowe: Best part of my job is getting to meet all the fabulous organisations that I work with year in, year out.
Leo Schick: Alison Lowe works for the Mayor Tracy. You can really see how much need there is for this money, just judging by the sheer volume of applications she received. And I think deciding who gets the money must have been really tough.
Alison Lowe: We had, uh, 217 applications, uh, who requested just under 2 million pounds, and we have just under 400,000 pounds. So you can see the disconnect. So you are the creme de la creme in this room tonight. You wrote the most brilliant bids.
Leo Schick: I asked her to explain how this works.
Alison Lowe: One of the things that we do as a combined authority working for the people of West Yorkshire is to identify monies working with our police that have come through criminal activity. We get that money. And we give it back to the communities that have been harmed. That’s called Proceeds of Crime Act monies, or ARIS. It’s got two names. And tonight is the culmination of all the hard work of West Yorkshire Police and their economic crime unit bringing that money into West Yorkshire, and then our ability to give it back to really brilliant grassroots organisations who are doing brilliant work across West Yorkshire.
If you’re working in your communities and you’re doing great work and you, you’re really struggling with funding, we know that, you can deliver aspects of our police and crime plan on our behalf, and we will give you small sums of money to do that so up to 10,000 pounds, sometimes it’s up to 20, depending on how much money we get from proceeds of crime.
Leo Schick: I spoke to some of the people who run these organisations and who successfully bid for these funds seized by West Yorkshire’s Economic Crime Unit.
Tasha Dyson: My name’s Tasha Dyson. I’m the CEO of a company called Fusion Housing, we’re a registered charity and we offer housing and support and food poverty sort of focused services across Kirklees and Wakefield and Calderdale.
Leo Schick: Tasha turned up to this event to be presented with a giant check for Fusion Housing.
Tasha Dyson: So what we’re using the money for is to help rough sleepers essentially. We do a lot of work with people who’ve been sleeping rough for an extremely long time, we have some grant funding that helps us offer them accommodation and support. But this enables us to do more basically.
Leo Schick: There was a huge spread of organisations there. Art, community projects, self-defence counseling and therapy, housing. Probably missing some.
Derek Jones: My name’s Derek Jones. I’m chair of Trustees of All Saints Landmark Centre. Our charity helps to respond to the challenges associated with poverty in our area,
Tony Macaluso: I’m Tony Macaluso and I’m with Chapel FM Art Centre, which is a community radio station and a school for radio in Seacroft East Leeds.
Naomi Fowler: Aw well, as podcasters we have a special place in our hearts for them, obviously.
Leo: And journalists, I felt an affinity with him. I asked the deputy mayor, what is so special about West Yorkshire and why is this happening here?
Alison Lowe: It’s happening here because the mayor wants it to happen here, and the police want it to happen here. The police are really committed to bringing this money in, knowing that it’s gonna go to the communities, the grassroots groups operating in West Yorkshire, they want the people of West Yorkshire to benefit from this money because they’re the ones most harmed.
There’s various different iterations of the Proceeds of Crime Act monies being spent up and down the country, and we’ve got a brilliant engagement team and they came up with the idea actually so our fabulous engagement team, they decided that, ‘cos they engage with these community groups all the time, they listen to these, the voices of all these organisations on a daily basis, and they identified that the difference that they were making needed to be acknowledged, but that money was the barrier. So, it was their idea. Tracy loved that idea and it’s now happening.
Naomi Fowler: Wow, what an amazing event. It must have been fun to be there.
Leo Schick: It really was. It was very, really heartening to see this happen and there were a lot of surprises that evening. So the first presentation was actually, and I think you’re gonna like this, from a financial investigator who spent over 15 minutes, I’ve checked in the recording, explaining his work to community organisations and it’s the kind of talk that you and I would expect to see at a conference.
Nigel Crowther: Good evening everybody. I’m Nigel Crowther, the senior financial investigator with the police. We do proceeds of crime and it is a fabulous job. Just taking money from the bad guys and giving it to the good guys. I feel like Robin Hood.
Naomi Fowler: Ah, yeah and who doesn’t wanna be Robin Hood? He obviously really loves his job, doesn’t he? And after he’d finished his speech, you spoke to Nigel about his work as a financial investigator for West Yorkshire. I’ve heard about how challenging it is to retain these accredited financial investigators, partly ’cause some of them just go off and work for the private sector and they make more money that way. And I think Amber thinks that social reuse would really help tackle that.
Leo Schick: Yeah so as we were waiting for a taxi to come at the end of the night, she was talking to me about this retention issue among AFIs. And I was saying to her about how I spoke to Nigel, the financial investigator, and I have to say West Yorkshire really doesn’t seem to have this issue because Nigel loves his job.
Nigel Crowther: I’m Nigel Crowther. I’ve been doing this job for 21 years and it’s absolutely fantastic. I will never retire, we’ve got a really good group of people and the three other people that started on the same day as me, so the four of us, we all still work for West Yorkshire Police. We’re all doing the same job 21 years later, and we all still love it.
Leo Schick: So he loves his job and events like this bring him that extra layer of joy.
Nigel Crowther: We’re just doing a job, but when we come to events like this, you can see how much benefit we are able to give back to the communities. It is absolutely brilliant. I, I just love doing those sort of talks just explaining the work that we do and then seeing the full circle of the criminals making the money, us taking the money from the criminals and giving it back to the communities where we’ve taken the money from, the criminals where they lived. So it goes the full circle so the communities are benefiting by us taking out the criminals and taking their money from ’em. Fantastic.
Leo Schick: Depending on how Nigel and his team got hold of the money, different amounts are made available to communities. Nigel explained it to the audience at the event. There’s seizures using civil law, and then there’s seizures under criminal law.
Nigel Crowther: This is how we do it, taking money off drug dealers, fraudsters, and money launderers. We’ve got two routes that we can take money off people – through the criminal courts, and through civil recovery. Cash, seizures, listed assets, account freezing orders, cryptocurrency, that’s all done through the magistrate’s court and so we try and get, do more, that way than through get more money back if we go through the magistrate’s court as well, anything we do in the magistrate’s court we get 50% back to the mayor and only 18% through confiscation.
Leo Schick: That’s just the way it’s divided up between all the different authorities. Some of it goes to the government and some of it goes to the police as well. He had some great stories about hunting down criminal money. He spoke about one case where they searched someone’s home for a firearm and found cash in a jacket, in a whicker basket, and they just kept hunting…
Nigel Crowther: …Keep on looking. In the basket of an air fryer. Yeah!
Leo Schick: …and the list went on with accompanying photos…
Nigel Crowther: In the microwave, just in case it’d frozen, so we could defrost it all.
Leo Schick: They seized 15,000 pounds this way, but the search didn’t stop there. They looked outside too.
Nigel Crowther: And there was some undergrowth and when they went out there, they found eight bags, these white bags wrapped in bin bags, just hidden in the undergrowth.
Leo Schick: That’s how they found an extra 80,000 pounds.
Nigel Crowther: So eventually we took 95,000 pounds off him.
Leo: They looked into the man’s tax returns and did further investigating before taking it up the chain to the magistrate’s court.
Nigel Crowther: And the magistrates agreed with us that on the balance of probability that it was criminal property and the cash was forfeited: 95,000 pounds. So the mayor gets nearly 50,000 pounds of that. Happy days!
Leo Schick: Throughout the rest of the event organisations presented their work and collected their cheques, places like Tasha’s Fusion Housing.
Alison Lowe: Fusion Housing will use their funding to support individuals who are rough sleeping.
Leo Schick: Here’s Tony of Chapel FM talking about his work to the other attendees.
Tony Macaluso: It’s a beautiful art centre, a former chapel turned into a radio station art centre, and we are big believers in the power of community stories. People coming together to tell stories, especially using things like radio and podcasts along with theatre and writing. And in fact, we would love to help you tell some of the stories that the work that you’re doing using those resources as well.
Naomi Fowler: Oh, that’s brilliant. And I know how life changing these places can be, and I feel like now I’ve gotta give a shout out to where I first got started in radio production in Birmingham. They used to call it radio back then obviously, but it’s podcasting as well. It was the Afro-Caribbean Resource Center. It was run on a shoestring, brilliant place, amazing people. And look, many years later, here we are on the Taxcast!
Leo Schick: Yeah, I actually have my own community radio origin story, which is Residence FM in South London, so we can’t thank them enough.
Alison Lowe: Chapel FM Arts Centre produce a weekly radio podcast show featuring voices of asylum seekers and long-term residents in order to increase understanding and dispel false information, reducing tensions that otherwise might spark conflict and violence.
Leo Schick: This is Tony Macaluso, again from Chapel FM Art Centre.
Tony Macaluso: I mean, it’s always nice to get money to support great projects, but the fact that it comes directly from money that’s been reclaimed from organised crime, from criminals, things that are causing harm and damage to the community, and then to have that money get turned around and put into reuse, it’s just so nice. It’s something we’ll talk about with young people at our radio station too over the next week or so when I come back and I can show them our big cheque. We have a lovely big cheque for 9,770 pounds and it’s gonna help support really three main things which is us running a regular training course for people that have never done any radio or podcasting before. We have a retired BBC journalist who’s on our board who runs it along with a couple staff members. And then we have a tech training group, which is more about all the nuts and bolts of how to use microphones and how to edit sound and all those kind of practical things. And then the third thing is we’re doing a good old fashioned grassroots local journalism course in partnership with the people that run the East Side Story and West Side Dispatch, which are print newspapers, and they’re teaching everything from, you know how to do an interview or the inverted pyramid of structuring a journalism story and all that stuff, it’s really good basics, and that’s getting us thinking about linking the radio and print journalism as well.
Tracy Brabin: Okay folks. That’s it. And that’s all the money, it’s over 400,000, isn’t it? That’s the amount that’s gone out this evening, and what a difference you’re all making and it’s such a proud moment to be able to take, as we’ve heard, the money that criminals have taken from our communities and to put it right back where it’s gonna make a massive difference.
Leo Schick: It was a really lovely and uplifting kind of event and at the end they all posed for big group photo.
Taking a photo: Right, three, two, one…big smiles please. Perfect, I’ve got loads!
Leo Schick: One of the organisations Dance United told us about their work and one of the dancers there, Alysha, shared a poem about what rehearsing means to her. Here’s a little snippet of it.
Alysha, Dance United: No backward glance, just our very own passion held in our own hands while we prance about on our stage, a little like a cage. Then the light comes along in waves, opens that cage to a place full of welcoming and praise. Leaves me in a place of creation and wonderful days.
Naomi Fowler: Aw. Amber really loved that, didn’t she?
Leo Schick: She really did, and so did I.
Amber Phillips: I wasn’t expecting to cry this evening. Um, somebody wrote a beautiful poem about the impact that a dance society had had on their life and their confidence, and it was moving and beautiful and I, I cried. We’ve heard from all different types of people, um, from all different areas across West Yorkshire and I’ve come away with my faith in humanity really firmly restored, it’s great.
Naomi Fowler: I’ve gotta say, it’s been really nice to take the opportunity to see the less awful side of some of the work we do and campaign about, you know, the corruption, economic crime, the structures we’re trying to take down that helps all that to happen and it’s stuff that really hurts people and this is really the good side, isn’t it? It’s just really nice to see how some of these seized funds are being used.
Leo Schick: Yeah, and how that helps on so many different levels when you get it right from the financial investigators themselves to people’s understanding of the value of these people who work in economic crime and why financial transparency is just so important.
Naomi Fowler: Yeah and it’s also interesting to see how much just one city or one region can actually do by itself, really impressive. So, that’s it for this month. Many thanks to you Leo for going off to West Yorkshire and for the production work. We’ll be back with you next month, so thanks for listening and goodbye from us both.
