Uncovered: Luxury lifestyle of US lawyer set to cash in on car loan scandal By CALUM MUIRHEAD Updated: 21:50 GMT, 30 November 2024 e-mail View comments A wealthy American lawyer whose lifestyle features private jets, beachside properties and snazzy yachts is among the predatory legal eagles trying to cash in on Britain's growing car finance scandal. Harris Pogust, 61, a veteran of the US legal scene, has boasted online of his sprawling mansion which includes a pool, gym and wine cellar. His firm, London-based Pogust Goodhead (PG) provides him and his British partner Thomas Goodhead the means to live in luxury thanks to the cut the firm takes from compensation rulings on big cases which can run into hundreds of millions of pounds. The firm told The Mail on Sunday that 60,467 of its clients from previous cases had been brought on board for a car loan case. When it wins class actions, it pockets up to 50 per cent of the victims' money for itself. But consumer experts say motorists can make their own claim and keep 100 per cent of any payout. New Jersey-born Pogust, frequently flaunts his wealth on Instagram, including a post last month showcasing his six-bedroom, eight-bathroom home. His wife's social media features pictures of Pogust and their dog on a private jet and snaps on board yachts. Fishing for business: Harris Pogust shows off his catch online Goodhead is a barrister educated at both Oxford and Cambridge who co-founded the firm with Pogust in 2018. It is locked in a high-profile battle in London's High Court with Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP over the Samarco dam disaster in Brazil, which killed 19 people and contaminated waterways and land spanning several villages in 2015. The class action is estimated to be worth £36 billion. PG will reportedly receive up to 30 per cent for individuals and firms. But Brazil's former ambassador to the UK, Rubens Barbosa, accused the firm of encouraging hundreds of thousands of claimants to reject a £24 billion settlement scheme in favour of continuing action in the High Court, which they have no guarantee of winning. A PG spokesman said: 'Pogust Goodhead is representing 620,000 victims whose lives have been devastated – we make no excuses for using the means at our disposal to try to level a massively uneven playing field against some of the largest, most powerful and well-resourced companies in the world.' RELATED ARTICLES Previous 1 Next Motor finance scandal to cost lenders £25bn Car finance scandal plunging Close Brothers into turmoil Share this article Share HOW THIS IS MONEY CAN HELP How to choose the best (and cheapest) stocks and shares Isa and the right DIY investing account The firm itself is looking to save on costs as it spends millions on its legal crusades including plans to cut about 20 per cent of its staff with up to 50 job losses at its London office, according to reports. The Court of Appeal ruled last month that commissions paid to car dealers may be unlawful if they were not flagged to customers. Firms implicated include Close Brothers, one of the UK's oldest merchant banks, as well as Lloyds and Santander. 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We do not write articles to promote products. We do not allow any commercial relationship to affect our editorial independence. More top storiesAT&T to Release Fourth-Quarter 2024 Earnings on January 27The grant is part of the U.S. Department of Labor's YouthBuild program. According to a news release from the agency, the program supports pre-apprenticeships that educate and train individuals from 16- to 24-year-olds who are neither enrolled in school nor employed in construction or other high-demand industries. In total, over $99 million in grants were awarded to 71 organizations across 31 states. Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | SoundStack | All Of Our Podcasts YouthBuild participants will split their time between classroom instruction — where they can earn a high school diploma or equivalent degree — and workplace training sites where they will learn vocational skills in industries including construction, healthcare, manufacturing, information technology, culinary arts and hospitality, according to the U.S. Department of Labor website. Participants will also build or rehabilitate affordable housing for local low-income and homeless families. The YouthBuild program is supported by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022. The Times reached out to the United Way Northwest Indiana for comment regarding the grant award but did not receive a response as of Friday afternoon.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president, has died at 100
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Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here . ••• “It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence which should be true in all situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ “How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction!” — Abraham Lincoln, 1859 ••• Weary and wary, Americans have emerged from yet another “most important election in the nation’s history.” By my count it was at least our 17th consecutive most-important-campaign-ever. (Dwight Eisenhower’s re-election in 1956 was something of a snoozer, particularly for us 4-year-olds.) Anyhow, we’re now fully engaged on at least our 17th consecutive post-vote debate over the causes and consequences of the most seismic political realignment in generations (or something like that) — an outcome the estimable Ross Douthat of the New York Times recently labeled “a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to another.” Well, maybe. Donald Trump’s restoration might mark a watershed in American culture and governance. We have reached such moments before, and will again. And surely the president-elect’s comeback against an utterly unprecedented grand alliance of establishment institutions determined to stop him by almost any means (two impeachments, four indictments, untold investigations, trials and lawsuits, petitions to banish him from ballots, etc., etc.) does constitute the most astounding personal vindication in the annals of American rabble-rousing. And yet, it’s also quite possible that Trump’s hair-raising triumph remains at bottom a mere continuation of our decadeslong age of indecision and serial upheaval. Republicans have now won two of the last three presidential elections. But Democrats have won three of the last five. The parties have evenly split the last eight. And Republicans hold a one-election edge in the last 12. This is hardly an epoch in which political shifts, however striking, can safely be assumed to be “irrevocable.” The electorate’s affections weren’t always so fickle. Between 1896 and 1928 Republicans won seven of nine presidential contests. Democrats then won seven of the following nine (1932 to 1964) — after which the GOP took five out of six (1968 to 1988). According to Bruce Mehlman’s “Age of Disruption” Substack , the 2024 vote also was the sixth in a row, including off-year elections, to change party control of at least one of Washington’s three elective power centers — presidency, House and Senate. It’s the longest such streak of instability in American history. Meantime, Trump’s margins were shallow, if respectably widespread. And as a lame duck who can never be on the ballot again, he will have to defy historic norms once more to achieve transformative policy change in his final term. One hesitates in his case to say anything is impossible just because it’s unheard of — but still. All this being said in the somewhat forlorn hope of chastening MAGA end zone dancers and consoling afflicted progressives, the 2024 election actually may have revealed that on one big issue a turning point has already been reached. The results suggest that America may at long last be on its way toward a compromise on abortion. Perhaps “settlement” would be a better word for making a hard and bitter peace with differing state-by-state resolutions on legal access to abortion. But if any one public policy choice was squarely before voters this year, it was whether America would continue to tolerate being a “house divided” on abortion. Returning abortion regulation to the separate states was the essence of the Supreme Court’s landmark “Dobbs” decision in 2022, overturning nationwide legal abortion guaranteed for a half century by the Roe vs. Wade ruling. This year’s election was the second in which a vow to restore abortion rights coast to coast was the Democrats’ central, almost single-minded campaign theme. Kamala Harris and company also were foursquare for “Democracy,” of course. But it wasn’t clear what that meant beyond keeping Trump out of office. Otherwise, it was easier to list bold progressive positions Harris had abandoned than ones she championed. She had more to say about small-business subsidies than climate change. But restoring “reproductive freedom” — while preventing Republicans from imposing abortion bans on every state — was a clarion battle cry. Trump helped sharpen the issue when he declared that he did not favor any kind of federal one-size-fits-all policy. In the 2022 off-year election, Democrats’ abortion-centered campaign had enjoyed considerable success, blunting GOP gains in Congress. Along with voter approval of several state ballot measures favoring abortion rights — including one in Republican-leaning Ohio in 2023 — this led to high hopes that the anti-Dobbs backlash could boost Democratic prospects again in 2024. No fewer than 10 states had referenda guaranteeing abortion rights on their Nov. 5 ballots, measures pushed not least in hopes that they would fuel progressive turnout and provide “reverse coattails” for Democratic candidates from Harris on down. It didn’t turn out that way. The abortion rights ballot measures did well; seven out of 10 passed . But Trump carried four of those seven states, including two battleground states (Arizona and Nevada). And of course Trump also carried Ohio, along with Kentucky, Kansas and battleground Michigan, all states whose voters had earlier approved referenda protecting abortion rights. This could be evidence that as the state-by-state abortion debate has unfolded, more voters have accepted the idea of supporting abortion rights in their own states while letting other states go their own way. Or at least that fewer feel they must let the cause of nationwide abortion rights override other considerations in their votes for president and Congress. While 27% of voters in 2022 told exit polls that abortion was their most important issue, barely half that, 14%, said that Nov. 5 . Reinforcing this interpretation, an analysis for KFF Health News shows that in all 10 states with abortion referenda on the ballot, abortion rights polled significantly more votes than Harris did, “indicating that many people voted both to elect Donald Trump and to protect access to abortion.” In Arizona and Nevada, abortion rights outpolled Harris by 14 and 17 percentage points, respectively. If support for or opposition to legal abortion is becoming disconnected from partisan allegiances, at least at the national level, that’s a realignment of some note, with at least some potential to lower the ideological temperature in America. But it won’t necessarily please fevered advocates on either side of the issue. Following this year’s votes, 19 states across the South and Great Plains — what used to be called the Bible Belt — will have abortion bans or limits in place beyond what Roe permitted. The other 31 retain Roe-era laws or have enacted more spacious abortion rights. Hence America now enforces far too much restriction on reproductive freedom for some, and far too little protection for the unborn for others. Doubtless state-level battles will continue. In the near term it’s anti-abortion forces who will feel tempted to reimpose uniformity – to use the GOP’s trifecta control of Washington to enact a nationwide restriction. Despite Trump’s disavowal, I warned of this among other hazards in a recent column making an ill-fated wish for post-election gridlock . Clearly the sentiment that human rights cannot properly differ from one state to another is potent and pungent on both sides of the abortion divide. In “The Party of Lincoln Resurrects the Corpse of Stephen Douglas,” in the Claremont Review of Books, conservative essayist and novelist Mark Helprin denounces Trump and other Republicans who would disinter the pre-Civil War doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which held that each state was free to decide the issue of slavery for itself. America, Helprin argues, must not again tolerate “two contradictory answers to a fundamental question that demands only one.” Is abortion that kind of question? Or is there some irreducible moral uncertainty, some room for different social settlements, about where to draw the line between a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and a fetus’ right to live? If nothing else, the 2024 election suggests America is irrevocably grappling with that question. D.J. Tice is a retired Minnesota Star Tribune commentary editor.
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Jimmy Carter, the 39th president and a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, has died at 100