February 27th, 2010 PETER Cummings, former head of corporate lending at HBOS (pictured above), is the archetypal ‘fat bloke’ banker. He was handed an astonishing £660,000 pay-off on leaving the bank he helped destroy in January 2009. Worse, the Dumbarton and Marbella resident was also, according to this Daily Telegraph article , awarded an annual [...]
February 27th, 2010 HBOS’s entrance on The Mound; Image: The We Lessons must be learnt from the short and calamitous history of HBOS, the bank which went effectively failed in September 2008, writes Ian Fraser (Note: This article was first posted under the headline “HBOS: When did the rot set in? And were shareholders asleep [...]
February 26th, 2010 Lloyds Banking Group, AKA “the most hated bank in Britain“, today unveiled higher-than-expected annual losses of £6.3bn. The Gresham Street-based bank also admitted that bad debts, arising largely from the poisonous legacy of Peter Cummings, HBOS’s former head of corporate lending, soared to £24bn in 2009. As BBC economics correspondent Hugh Pym [...]
February 23rd, 2010 Jo Dawson and Dan Watkins, the two senior executives who resigned from Lloyds Banking Group on February 5th 2010, were apparently forced out after the FSA told them that, unless they made themselves scarce, it intended to strip them of their “approved person status”. Or so rumour has it. There has been [...]
By Ian Fraser and Michael Tait Published: The Mail on Sunday Date: February 22nd, 2010 AN SNP donor whose ski resort went bust owing the taxpayer millions of pounds has been allowed to buy it back in a cut-price deal. The Aviemore complex, which was jointly owned by Nationalist supporter Donald Macdonald, collapsed last summer. [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: February 14th, 2010 The Royal Bank of Scotland has seized operational and boardroom control of subsidiary Adam & Company and purged the private bank’s board of all but one of its ten former directors. Following the boardroom clearout, only two members of the bank’s eleven-strong board remain as [...]
February 11th, 2010 This video of Danny MacAskill doing stunt cycling in Edinburgh was first released in April 2009 and put on this website in May 2009. I am putting back on at the request of nine-year-old son. Danny, a 24-year-old from the Isle of Skye, has perfected a form of urban trials biking, or [...]
February 11th, 2010 This French-produced television commercial for Evian mineral water is hilarious. There’s a saying that one should “never work with children or animals” but this seems to have been disproved by the guys at the Paris-based advertising agency Roux Séguéla Cayzac & Goudard, now known as Euro RSCG, presumably thanks to the advent [...]
February 10th, 2010 In this short video made by Richard Curtis of Four Weddings & A Funeral fame, the actor Bill Nighy plays a typically complacent banker. He squirms at suggestions that banks should be asked to pay a global ‘Tobin tax’ of less than 0.05% on certain types of transaction. It’s a commendable effort, [...]
February 9th, 2010 This morning’s shock resignation of the FSA chief executive Hector Sants leaves plenty of unanswered questions in its wake. Sants can hardly be considered blameless where the banking and financial crisis is concerned. From 2004 to 2007 he was the FSA’s managing director of wholesale and institutional markets, and some shocking things [...]