December 7th, 2009 Has Alistair Darling succumbed to pressure from Gordon Brown and agreed to impose a “super tax” on individual bankers who receive bonuses over and above a certain level in his pre-Budget report on Wednesday? Well, this is what BBC business editor Robert Peston has said on his blog. So it’s got to [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 6th, 2009 Managing director Alan McFarlane to quit Edinburgh firm under terms of ‘earn-out’ clause One of Scotland’s highest-paid financiers, Alan McFarlane, 53, managing director of Edinburgh-based investment management boutique Walter Scott & Partners, is stepping down from the group he joined in 2001, three years after [...]
December 3rd, 2009 David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, is peeved that he was kept in the dark about the £61.6 billion of secret loans that the central bank issued to RBS and HBOS to prevent them from going bust at the height of the crisis last year. [...]
December 3rd, 2009 Bank of England governor Mervyn King has made clear that no-one can afford banks that are “too big to fail.” Giving evidence to the House of Lords economic affairs committee last month, King pointed out that building a credible regulatory regime while such dinosaurs roam the financial jungle is an impossible task. [...]
December 3rd, 2009 I’ve rarely read writing this good on the absurdities of Dubai and the hubristic vision of its despotic ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum. My favourite quotes from Charlie Brooker’s hilarious take on the sheer vulgar insanity and unsustainability of the place, published in Monday’s Guardian, are as follows: “In the cold [...]
By Ian Fraser and Stephen Vass Published: The Herald Date: December 3rd, 2009 Sir David Murray, chairman of debt-laden metals-to-property conglomerate Murray International Holdings (MIH), has parted company with one of his most trusted lieutenants. Ian Tudhope, managing director of MIH’s largest operating subsidiary, Edinburgh-based Premier Property Group (PPG), has resigned after 23 years with [...]
December 3rd, 2009 Archie Kane today admitted what everyone else has suspected for some time — that HBOS was bust at the time Lloyds TSB acquired it in September 2008. He also admitted that HBOS had been unable to lend into the corporate market for the whole of 2008 due to its absence of funds [...]
December 2nd, 2009 Sir Win Bischoff, the chairman of Lloyds Banking Group and a past chairman of US bank Citigroup, is clearly a man who is easily misled. In December 2008, soon after Citigroup was bailed out by US taxpayers — from whom it received a $306bn ‘undisguised gift’ last autumn — Bischoff signed off [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: CA Magazine Date: December 1st, 2009 Bank of Scotland’s office on the Mound remains fog-bound Potential vendors are waiting for a recovery, potential acquirers are waiting for the bottom of the market and, as Ian Fraser reports, corporate finance professionals are waiting for dealflow to pick up Scotland’s dealmakers have had [...]
December 1st, 2009 Given Dubai World’s recent decision to shaft its own creditors, it is worth revisiting the remarks made by Dubai’s leader Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum in a speech to a recent investment conference. Al-Maktoum (pictured above) was addressing a conference organised by Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Dubai’s Raffles Hotel on [...]