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 [...]
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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: January 15th, 2012 Eamonn Rice struck off by ICAS for professional misconduct One of Scotland’s highest-profile chartered accountants has described as “excessive” the ruling that led to his being struck off by the professional body, the ICAS. Eamonn Rice, a former partner and head of financial services at [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 18th, 2011 One of Fred Goodwin’s first acts on being appointed RBS’s chief executive in 2000 was to sack PWC as auditors and to wheel in his ‘alma mater’, Deloitte. Ex-insiders suggest this was because Goodwin believed that Deloitte – where he cut his teeth in the [...]
December 17th, 2011 By Brett Sherman Is it reasonable to believe that Wall Street used complexity as a tool to dupe even sophisticated investors as to the quality of bonds backed by non-conforming mortgages during the United States housing bubble? In a word – ABSOLUTELY. Indeed, there was so much complexity in the various methods [...]
December 16th, 2011 Here is the half hour interview I gave to Dori Smith of US-based Talk Nation Radio on December 9th, 2011. There theme is the wilful blindness of the Financial Services Authority to corruption in the UK banking and finance sector. Produced by Dori Smith in Storrs, Connecticut, USA Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here or [...]
December 15th, 2011 Writing in the Monday’s Daily Telegraph Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton said the FSA’s report into the RBS collapse would be “an important contribution to the steps needed to restore public trust in RBS, the banking sector, and our regulators”. Unfortunately, the report has had no such effect. Indeed, if the comments [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: October 20th, 2011 There may be a good few Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and even the odd deluded benefit scrounger among them, but it is simply wrong to characterize the Occupy Wall Street protestors who are camping out in 1,500 cities worldwide as wanting to overthrow capitalism, in the same way [...]
October 5th, 2011 David Cameron displayed an astonishing lack of understanding of the banking sector in his interview with Sarah Montague on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning (as I’m afraid did Sarah, given her blinkered obsession with “bonuses”). If Cameron’s stumbling performance was due to ignorance, then it’s simply inexcusable. If [...]
October 3rd, 2011 So it was endemic fraud and the collapse of the rule of law—not global imbalances or government and regulatory failure—that destroyed the financial system. In a keynote speech given at the Post Keynes conference in Denmark earlier this year, the Keynesian economist James K. Galbraith of the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at [...]