April 13th, 2013 Finally, we have evidence that banks and bankers are not above the law in the United Kingdom. It seems the courts have finally woken up to the fact that allowing them to lie, cheat, deceive and defraud without legal impediment may not be a particularly good idea. As such, yesterday’s appeal court [...]
April 11th, 2013 Yesterday, the government of first minister Alex Salmond gave a £1.7 million Regional Selective Assistance grant to the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firm KPMG to establish a tax avoidance centre in Glasgow. To me this is an astonishing waste of public money, a kick in the teeth to ordinary taxpayers, detrimental to the long-term [...]
February 6th, 2013 If this is the best he can do, Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester should consider throwing in the towel and conceding what most people already know — that RBS, as it stands, is unmanageable and running an unsustainable business model. Hester (who remains in denial about the egregious wrongdoing [...]
February 6th, 2013 Kevin Mason, a commenter on the Guardian website, had this to say about the £390 million settlement that Royal Bank of Scotland reached with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, US Department of Justice and Financial Services Authority over rampant Libor-rigging today [Mason's words sourced from Graeme Wearden's excellent Libor rigging live blog published [...]
January 24th, 2013 This is the first interview that Chicago lawyer Anton Valukas has given since the publication of his 2,292 page report into the bankrutpcy of Lehman Brothers on March 11th, 2010. At that time, Valukas found strong evidence of financial and accounting fraud designed to deceive investors at the defunct New York-based investment [...]
October 19th, 2012 This edited transcript is expanded from a live phone interview with Michael Hudson by Dimitris Yannopoulos for Athens News. It summarizes some of the major themes from Hudson’s new book, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis, published in the UK in July 2012 and available from Amazon.co.uk. 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 [...]
October 18th, 2012 By Tom Nicol ‘Then the flying machines started falling from the sky.’ Once upon a time in the Westerlands, people became aware of a developing phenomenon: flying machines were falling from the sky with a great deal more regularity than was previously the case. Understandably, the people became uneasy and started to [...]
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 [...]
September 14th, 2012 Kweku Adoboli, a former UBS’s trader, was a ’rogue’ who fraudulently gambled away the bank’s money, “cooked the books”, doctored documents, faked profits, fabricated clients and lied to his bosses to boost his earnings power, according to an opening statement from prosecutor Sasha Wass QC in Southwark Crown Court today. Wass, of 6 [...]