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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: July 15th, 2012 Published: Sunday Herald In his glory days Fred Goodwin aspired to make Royal Bank of Scotland a global bank on which the sun never set. Corporate videos extolling the group’s global reach were routinely played at investor meetings. His legacy is a world of trouble, with the bank [...]
July 8th, 2012 The eventual outcome of the global Libor rigging scandal is impossible to call at this stage. There is a body of opinion that it might end up being a storm in a teacup (sounds familiar?), given that regulators and courts might end up stuggling to establish who got scammed and the true [...]
February 27th, 2010 (updated June 22nd, 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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Note: an edited version of this article was published on page 18 of the Scottish Mail on Sunday on April 1st, 2012 Scotland’s former top civil servant, Sir John Elvidge, is fronting a £500 million plus takeover bid for Edinburgh Airport, and has been told he will become the airport’s chairman if [...]
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 [...]
December 1st, 2011 The boardroom failures, and particularly the failure of the non-executive directors, at Lloyds Banking Group have been brilliantly highlighted in a leader in today’s Financial Times (Black Horse Blues). The article highlights a string of corporate governance errors made by the Lloyds board, which since September 2009 has been chaired by Sir Win [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: September 28th, 2011 Why does anyone rely on ‘sellside’ research? The investment analysts who produce it, for free, tend to work for investment banks that also have some very big ticket services to sell, such as the underwriting of IPOs, to the very companies whose performance they are supposed [...]