By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: February 10th, 2013 It has been described as the biggest banking felony in history … yet no-one has been prosecuted for the Libor fixing scandal. Ian Fraser looks at the RBS sacrificial lambs. [An edited version of this article was published on pages 34-35 the Sunday Herald on [...]
November 18th, 2012 Image: WilliamBanzai7 The bigwigs of the City of London, corporate governance ‘gurus’ in asset-management firms and leading figures from FTSE-100 companies have a penchant for patting themselves on the back over the brilliance of the corporate governance framework they have erected over the past two decades. The UK Corporate Governance Code (formerly the Combined Code of [...]
November 11th, 2012 Here is the video that cost Barclays head of foreign-exchange strategy, Asia-Pacific ex-Japan, his job. Foul-mouthed trader Olivier Desbarres was captured on camera outside his house in Wimborne Road, in Singapore’s Katong district, hurling abuse, racist slurs, physical threats and sheets of zinc at Chinese construction workers. The incident occurred at about [...]
November 7th, 2012 In a fresh outbreak of Mad Banker Disease, Barclays head of foreign-exchange strategy, Asia-Pacific ex-Japan, Olivier Desbarres (pictured above), has had to be ‘let go’ after an altercation outside his house in Singapore. Desbarres, who was hired from Credit Suisse last year, seems to have taken exception to the noise emanating from a construction site near [...]
October 8th, 2012 On Thursday, October 4th, The Banker’s Investment Banking Awards 2012, a black-tie do in the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel, were successfully gatecrashed by a group of activists known as The Intruders. They managed to join the veteran BBC newsreader Peter Sissons (what was he doing there, I wonder?) on the stage of the Sheraton Park Lane [...]
October 8th, 2012 Despite a banking and financial crisis of near biblical proportions in 2007-09, which saw the collapse and state-funded rescue of many of Britain’s banks, the country’s regulators have singularly failed to get to the bottom of what happened. The way in which the Financial Services Authority has sought to close the book [...]
Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards Submission from Ian Fraser, 24 August 2012 [Update: January 12, 2013. This is my submission to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, which is being chaired by Andrew Tyrie MP. Written in August 2012, it was published on the Parliamentary website [pdf 28mb] on December 19th, 2012 — it can be found on [...]
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 [...]
August 11th, 2012 According to a Reuters report earlier, Standard Chartered is this weekend in talks with US regulators with a view to reaching a carefully choreographed settlement along similar lines to the “sweetheart” deal that Barclays reached with the US department of justice for similar Iran-related criminality in August 2010. Reuters says the settlement may [...]
August 1st, 2012 (minor revisions September 4th 2012) by Rowan Bosworth-Davies The most prestigious names in the British banking and finance routinely engage in criminal activities on a scale that would make any Mafia family proud. Whether it’s by facilitating international money-laundering; manipulating markets through Libor rigging; institutionalised insider dealing; misappropriating money from clients’ pension savings [...]