April 4th, 2012 In the third in a series of guest posts, Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a financial crime consultant and former Scotland Yard detective, examines the strange assumption that ultimately led to the failure of the FSA When I was a detective at the Metropolitan Police Company Fraud Department, in 1984, my commander sent me to the USA to […]
March 16th, 2012 In the second in a series of guest posts, Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a financial crime consultant and former Scotland Yard detective, provides a historical perspective on the UK authorities’ lack of appetite for prosecuting high level financial crime Edwin Sutherland, the American sociologist and criminologist (pictured right), is perhaps best known for his 1949 book ‘White […]
March 20th, 2012 In this guest post, financial crime consultant and former Scotland Yard detective Rowan Bosworth-Davies, puts his finger on the fundamental flaws in the way in which the financial sector is regulated in the UK. He believes the major issue is a cultural one. If fellow bankers are in charge of the regulator […]
November 12th, 2014 Guest Post by Rowan Bosworth-Davies One of the major unexplained elements in the foreign exchange (forex) rigging case is the level of knowledge of manipulative activity possessed by the Bank of England. If it, as a leading market participant and a regulator, had prior knowledge that the forex markets were being manipulated, or […]
June 26th, 2014 By Rowan Bosworth-Davies One of the over-riding principles of free and well-regulated markets is that everyone who seeks access to trade must be permitted equal rights to knowledge of the prices being quoted, whether “buy” or “sell”. Anything less, and the market becomes a private playground for insiders who seek to benefit from […]
Ian Fraser’s Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain was named as Book of the Year by the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Week and Huffington Post and one of best books of the decade by the Financial Times. Shredded has also been described as the “definitive account” of Royal Bank of Scotland’s collapse, one of the five best books on the global financial crisis, “a model of the […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 1st, 2013 In a recent Business Focus, the Sunday Herald presented a rough guide to the £1 trillion of time bombs metaphorically ticking beneath the plush carpets of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters. What we didn’t predict was that two of these would explode in the […]
October 18th, 2012 By Rowan Bosworth-Davies “Go where you will, in business parts, or meet who you like of businessmen, it is – and has been for the last three years – the same story and the same lament. Dishonesty, untruth, and what may, in plain English, be termed mercantile swindling within the limits of […]
September 28th, 2012 (updated Sept 29th, 2012) In the days after the Libor scandal erupted with the Barclays settlement of June 27th, there was little doubt about it. Banks including Barclays had been systematically engaged in the rigging, and attempts to rig, the Libor interbank rates as well as other aspects of the financial markets […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: August 12th, 2012 STANDARD Chartered, the London-headquartered bank that does most of its business in Asia, was – until the beginning of last week – the last good bank standing. It was one of the select band of banks to characterise themselves as a cut above the rest, having […]