By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 12th, 2010 Scotland’s largest pension fund is considering disinvesting in Royal Bank of Scotland shares over concerns about poor environmental, social and corporate governance at the Edinburgh-based bank. Richard McIndoe, head of pensions at the £10.5 billion Strathclyde Pension Fund, told the Sunday Herald that Edinburgh Partners, [...]
December 10th, 2010 Much of the debate surrounding Wikileaks’s release of confidential cables sent by US diplomats to their bosses in Washington D.C. has revolved around whether the whistleblowers’ website is right or wrong to have selectively released some 1,000 of the 250,000 state department cables it has in its possession. There are many inside [...]
December 6th, 2010 “A great vampire squid, wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” was how Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs in a Rolling Stone exposé from 2009. Now, after what is perhaps the biggest example of private-sector market-failure the world has ever seen, the [...]
December 3rd, 2010 (update 3) The Financial Services Authority’s obsession with “light touch”, laissez-faire regulation in 1997-2008 did more than anything to transform London into the “Wild West” of finance. US investment banks dramatically built up their presences in the UK capital in the period: they knew they could rely on the FSA to turn [...]
December 2nd, 2010 The Financial Services Authority this morning declared that, after a 17-month “investigation”, it has concluded that none of the RBS directors who led the bank to the biggest banking failure in history, costing the British taxpayer a total of £1.3 trillion to bail out, did anything wrong. In an article called The [...]
December 1st, 2010 (update 1) The Financial Services Authority sat idly by while the UK’s building societies sector was allowed to destroy itself by gorging on Wall Street’s toxic waste, according to a leaked memo from a former FSA insider. The letter, originally forwarded by Vince Cable MP to FSA chairman Lord Turner on April [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Accountancy Magazine Date: December 1st, 2010 One aspect of her job that Alyson Stafford relishes is her interactions with Scottish politicians, including first minister Alex Salmond and finance minister John Swinney. ‘What makes this role really interesting are the strategic aspects of the work,’ says Stafford, the finance director to the [...]