By Ian Fraser Published: The Guardian Date: September 29th, 2010 Thames Valley police arrest two men and a woman as part of investigation of ‘large-scale fraud’ allegations Two men and a woman were arrested in dawn raids in Berkshire, Warwickshire and Cheshire today as part of a police investigation into allegations of “corruption and large-scale [...]
September 27th, 2010 GOOGLE which celebrates it’s 12th anniversary today, has come a long way in the past dozen years. It has about 65.1% share of all web searches and, according Interbrand, is the fourth most powerful brand in the world after Coca-Cola, IBM and Microsoft. So what are the secrets of the California-based internet [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: September 26th, 2010 If British banks want to win back friends, they sure have an odd way of going about it. Their crabbit response to the Basel III rules, which will require them to increase capital reserves and retain better quality capital, was a case in point. FSA [...]
September 23rd, 2010 (Updated October 2nd, 2010) Talk about foot-dragging. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has been investigating the Bristol-based law firm Burges Salmon LLP and its partner Peter Williams for more than three years over the alleged misselling of mortgages to cash-strapped farmers. The loans, often priced at usurious annual interest rates of 22% or [...]
September 20th, 2010 Lloyds Banking Group must live in some sort of parallel universe. The press release announcing that chief executive Eric Daniels has finally taken the hint and will retire within a year, gives the impression the American’s seven years at the helm have been an unqualified success. In the release, the bank’s chairman [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Financial Times (FTfm) Date: September 20th, 2010 Martin Gilbert, fund-management’s deal maker extraordinaire, may have lost his appetite for deals but he has lost none of his enthusiasm for growth. The chief executive of Aberdeen Asset Management, who has led the fund management group for a quarter of a century, said [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: September 19th, 2010 The former chairman of Adam & Company has accused the current management of causing “dismay” and “anger” among customers of the genteel Edinburgh-based private bank, after a management clear-out and abrupt changes to customer services, including a new system of charges. Ray Entwistle, who resigned [...]
September 15th, 2010 Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I’m somewhat sceptical about the integrity of most bankers and suspicious of the motives of the governments, regulators and, yes, also the professionals (accountants, lawyers and the like) who insist on:- Turning a blind eye to bankers’ manifest wrongdoing, including their persistent looting [...]
September 11th, 2010 David Mills, the founder of Core Enterprise Management and Quayside Corporate Services, is a past master of prepackaged administrations and corporate phoenixings. It therefore came as no surprise when I learnt today that a company where Mills was chairman, London-based interdealer broker Mint Partners, went into administration on August 16. Nor that [...]
September 10th, 2010 The Financial Services Authority—founded by ex-chancellor Gordon Brown in May 1997—is widely regarded as having made a dog’s breakfast of regulating the UK’s financial sector over the past decade. The Tories pledged to scrap the FSA before they gained power in May, a commitment which together with talk of breaking up “too [...]