January 31st, 2012 The man who destroyed the Bank of Scotland with a reckless and seemingly out-of-control corporate and real-estate lending spree is in the media again. Mortgage Strategy has an article (Living in the age of less reason) which touches on the “pig on pork” or integrated finance model favoured by Peter Cummings, who [...]
January 28th, 2012 Labour is being supremely hypocritical over the £1 million share-based bonus recently awarded to RBS boss Stephen Hester. It was the government of Gordon Brown, which didn’t leave Downing Street until May 2010, that signed off the original contract and subsequent long-term remuneration policies that made the bonus possible. The ministers who [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: January 27th, 2012 The board of Royal Bank of Scotland and its remuneration committee, led by the ex-Coca Cola executive Penny Hughes but also comprising ex-Standard Life boss Sandy Crombie, must have decided let’s just go for it and to hang with the consequences. The RBS board of directors [...]
January 26th, 2012 Apparently the topic on everyone’s lips at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss alpine resort of Davos this year is income inequality and how to reduce it. Does the global corporate elite not realise there is a fairly obvious solution, and it’s staring them in the face? As a starting point [...]
January 24th, 2011 I watched Channel 4′s Krishnan Guru-Murthy interview the prominent US economist Larry Summers on Channel 4 News last night. The first half focuses on the stimulus vs. austerity debate and Monday’s release of secret memos detailing advice given by Summers to President Barack Obama. But what I found more interesting was the [...]
January 23rd, 2012 As part of its special report on state-sponsored capitalism, published in its January 21st issue, the Economist berated emerging markets including China and some developed countries for adopting a model of capitalism in which the state owns many of the prize corporate assets. The special report was credited to the magazine’s management editor [...]
January 21st, 2012 The current cross-party campaign to have Sir Fred Goodwin stripped of his knighthood makes for entertaining viewing, but I’m afraid I don’t agree with it. The current witchhunt is handy for the politicians. It gives the impression they’re doing something to punish a perpetrator of the banking crisis but, call me cynical, [...]
January 19th, 2012 Another whistleblower has emerged from the bowels of Lloyds Banking Group with what appears to be well-documented evidence of illegal sales practices in the bank’s retail arm. Ex-Army officer and former UBS and Towry Law executive Ian Taplin was fired by Lloyds in August 2010 after he sought to alert its senior [...]
January 18th, 2011 Ian Fraser’s introduction: This blog was written by Golem XIV, a pseudonym for filmmaker and author David Malone. The lies which got us to the purgatory we are in are being told all over again, right now, inside every bank in the Western world. Not by accident but on purpose, by men with [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: January 15th, 2012 Eamonn Rice struck off by ICAS for professional misconduct One of Scotland’s highest-profile chartered accountants has described as “excessive” the ruling that led to his being struck off by the professional body, the ICAS. Eamonn Rice, a former partner and head of financial services at [...]