December 28th, 2011 It would have been even better that Brian Basham had been able to name the investment bank that used to use psychometric testing to ensure recruits to its corporate finance arm were ‘social psychopaths’. But Basham’s piece, published in today’s The Independent is very good. Over the years I’ve met my fair share of [...]
December 28th, 2011 The Jolly Roger – originally flown from pirate ships to frighten their victims into surrendering without a fight – is a strangely appropriate flag for the Royal Bank of Scotland to sail under. The bank’s approach to rewarding its top staff, more than 100 of whom were paid in excess of £1 million in 2010 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 18th, 2011 One of Fred Goodwin’s first acts on being appointed RBS’s chief executive in 2000 was to sack PWC as auditors and to wheel in his ‘alma mater’, Deloitte. Ex-insiders suggest this was because Goodwin believed that Deloitte – where he cut his teeth in the [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 18th, 2011 KPMG was already auditing Halifax when the ex-building society merged with the Bank of Scotland a decade ago, and the audit firm took over responsibility for checking the HBOS books from September 2001. The firm fulfilled this function until HBOS had to be rescued via [...]
December 17th, 2011 By Brett Sherman Is it reasonable to believe that Wall Street used complexity as a tool to dupe even sophisticated investors as to the quality of bonds backed by non-conforming mortgages during the United States housing bubble? In a word – ABSOLUTELY. Indeed, there was so much complexity in the various methods [...]
December 16th, 2011 Here is the half hour interview I gave to Dori Smith of US-based Talk Nation Radio on December 9th, 2011. There theme is the wilful blindness of the Financial Services Authority to corruption in the UK banking and finance sector. Produced by Dori Smith in Storrs, Connecticut, USA Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here or [...]
December 15th, 2011 Writing in the Monday’s Daily Telegraph Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton said the FSA’s report into the RBS collapse would be “an important contribution to the steps needed to restore public trust in RBS, the banking sector, and our regulators”. Unfortunately, the report has had no such effect. Indeed, if the comments [...]
December 14th, 2011 An edited version of this blog post is available at Huffington Post UK The FSA spent an estimated £10m on its report into the failure of RBS, including £7.7m paid to ‘Big Four’ accountants PWC. But the Canary Wharf-based regulator has lived up to its name (the Fundamentally Supine Authority) and concluded [...]
December 10th, 2011 Wal-Mart Stores Inc, founded in Arskanas in 1962, is now the world’s largest supermarkets group. With nearly 10,000 ‘supercenters’ in 20 countries, the US retailer dwarfs European rivals like Tesco and Carrefour. With annual sales of $405 billion in 2010, Walmart is the world’s largest company by global revenues and with 2.1 [...]
December 10th, 2011 A project with which I was involved… RBS: Inside the Bank that Ran Out of Money, a one hour BBC Television documentary charting the build up to the biggest bank failure in history, was first aired across the UK on BBC2 on Monday, December 5th. The one-hour film, produced by Tony Nellany [...]