By: Ian Fraser Published Financial Times Date: April 23rd, 2012 Ten days ago, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership was caught on the hop by a leak. Though not quite Watergate, an informant, assumed to be a disgruntled fund manager at risk of being collateral damage, had leaked news that the group’s equities business was being savagely restructured. [...]
March 13th, 2012 You couldn’t make this up. Given the shocking way in which Bank of Scotland treats its customers – and particularly how it and parent company Lloyds Banking Group have treated the former business customers whose lives and companies have been destroyed as a result of the bank’s £1 billion plus ”Reading Fraud” of 2003-08 [...]
March 10th, 2012 Yesterday was an extraordinary day in the world of banking. First we had confirmation from Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland that they are doling out obscene sums in bonuses to executives, even as performance flags and share prices plunge. Then we had the ridiculous saga of the IDSA determinations [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: February 26th, 2012 Results released last Friday showed a sea of red ink engulfing the state-rescued Lloyds Banking Group. Trumpeted at the time of its September 2008 formation as the “bank for Britain”, the 41%-taxpayer owned business unveiled annual losses of £3.5 billion for 2011, nearly double those [...]
February 23rd, 2012 Stephen Hester was in combative form in his interview with Channel 4 News’ Jon Snow earlier this evening. He sought to defend the bank’s decision to pay a total of £985m in staff bonuses during 2011, despite mounting losses and scepticism it can be returned to the private sector within the original [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: February 12th, 2012 From the perspective of its head office in Melbourne’s Bourke Street, National Australia Bank’s UK subsidiaries Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank are looking increasingly like dead weights at the moment. The Australian economy, where the Victoria-based bank has the bulk of its operations, is booming and [...]
January 31st, 2012 The man who destroyed the Bank of Scotland with a reckless and seemingly out-of-control corporate and real-estate lending spree is in the media again. Mortgage Strategy has an article (Living in the age of less reason) which touches on the “pig on pork” or integrated finance model favoured by Peter Cummings, who [...]
January 23rd, 2012 As part of its special report on state-sponsored capitalism, published in its January 21st issue, the Economist berated emerging markets including China and some developed countries for adopting a model of capitalism in which the state owns many of the prize corporate assets. The special report was credited to the magazine’s management editor [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 18th, 2011 KPMG was already auditing Halifax when the ex-building society merged with the Bank of Scotland a decade ago, and the audit firm took over responsibility for checking the HBOS books from September 2001. The firm fulfilled this function until HBOS had to be rescued via [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: December 5th, 2011 Ever since its failures as a regulator first became widely apparent with the collapse of Northern Rock in September 2007, the UK’s Financial Services Authority has shown a remarkable lack of enthusiasm for rooting out financial crime, and very little introspection or contrition about its own pre-crisis performance. The reported [...]