By Brett Scott May 15th, 2012 (edited May 16th, 2012) The greatest barriers to financial whistleblowing are social and economic, not legal. Fear of being shunned by colleagues, passed over for promotion, bullied and harrassed, summarily dismissed and even shut out of Wall Street or the City for life plays a big part in dissuading [...]
February 27th, 2010 (updated May 13th, 2012) HBOS’s entrance on The Mound; Image: The We Lessons must be learnt from the short and calamitous history of HBOS, the bank which effectively went bust in September 2008, writes Ian Fraser (Note: This article was first posted under the headline “HBOS: When did the rot set in? [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 27th, 2012 The debate over executive pay is turning ugly. In the UK, investor disquiet about the unwarranted rewards routinely doled out to bankers despite weak and unethically achieved performance is reaching boiling point. It could well explode at the Barclays AGM in London’s Royal Festival Hall which [...]
April 16th, 2012 Barclays, Citibank, HSBC and Abbey National (now owned by Santander) helped to launder some $250 million for James Ibori, former the former governor of Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta State. The money was almost entirely siphoned from state funds. Ibori has been described by Sahara Reporters as:- “one of the most ingenious and mindless embezzlers of [...]
March 16th, 2012 Ian Fraser’s introduction: This blog was written by Golem XIV, a pseudonym for filmmaker and author David Malone. Imagine if you were in a plane and you looked down and spread out beneath you, majestic in the ocean, was an entire mighty battle fleet. And then it sank; not just one, but every [...]
November 30th, 2011 I had a bizarre sense of déjà vu yesterday on learning of the mass downgrade of 37 of the world’s largest banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, by Standard & Poor’s. Something very similar took place in July 2007, when Moody’s downgraded hundreds of CDOs – opaque bundles of securitized ‘toxic’ subprime [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: November 4th, 2011 What’s up with Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond? In January, the US-born investment banker, who had recently taken over as Barclays boss, seemed in denial about the role of banks in the destruction of the global economy. Speaking to the Treasury Select Committee in January 2011, Diamond told [...]
September 12th, 2011 This morning I was listening to Nicky Campbell’s phone-in programme on BBC Radio 5 Live. The topic was the final proposals of Sir John Vickers’ Independent Banking Commission for reforming the UK’s banking system, which were published this morning. To many, including Philip Augar (who since leaving the City in 2000 has done [...]
August 22nd, 2011 There are eerie parallels between the continuing precipitous falls in the shares of European and UK banks and the stomach-churning gyrations seen in September and October 2008. And it’s kind of ironic that one of the biggest fallers, Barclays, bought Lehman Brothers before superimposing its own investment banking logo on the failed [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: June 17th, 2011 The announcement from Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne (pictured above), that British banks are going to be forced to “ring fence” their retail and commercial banking (“utility”) activities from their investment banking (“casino”) activities has received wildy different receptions on either side of the Atlantic. [...]