By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: July 22nd, 2012 Editorial note: This is a more detailed and complete version of an article published in the Sunday Herald on July 22nd, 2012. Police are poised to press charges against several HBOS bankers and consultants after a two-year investigation into large-scale fraud, money laundering and corruption […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: July 22nd, 2012 The Royal Bank of Scotland has reneged a job offer to a leading anti-money-laundering expert who it appointed to help improve anti-money-laundering systems and controls on discovering he had blown the whistle on drugs money-laundering by a former employer. In an employment tribunal to be […]
July 20th, 2012 I entirely agree with Matt Taibbi here. Rush transcript from Democracy Now below:- JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with Matt Taibbi. He’s a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia: How America’s Biggest Banks Took Part in a […]
July 18th, 2012 Senator Carl Levin has given an ultimatum to HSBC, after a lax approach to money-laundering for drugs cartels and terrorist groups saw the banking giant fail to review thousands of suspicious transactions or properly to vet clients over the past decade. Levin, famous for berating Goldman Sachs’ executives over their “shitty deals“, […]
July 18th, 2012 Image by WilliamBanzai7 A friend who works for for Barclays told me what the culture is now like at such banks these days. In response to a question about how bankers have changed — in terms of culture, motivations, behaviour — over the past two decades, he said: “I have the advantage […]
July 17th, 2012 In this interview with Bill Moyers, Sheila Bair, the former chairperson of the FDIC, describes the Libor rigging scandal as a wake up call for governments around the world. She says that governments, including the US government, must now “stand up to the banks and tell them they need to start doing business differently, […]
July 17th, 2012 Seems like this Parisian barge owner is ready for anything! The only civilian amphibious passenger vehicles to have been mass produced, Amphicars are rear-engined and powered by a four cylinder British-built Triumph Herald engines that produce 43hp. They were designed by Hanns Trippel and manufactured in Germany. Some 3,878 rolled off the Quandt Group production lines at Lübeck and at Berlin-Borsigwalde […]
July 16th, 2012 Another great piece of subversive art by William Banzai 7
July 16th, 2012 By The Left Banker Image: WilliamBanzai7 For the past 30 years, the global economy has built up increasingly vast amounts of public, private and household debt. This was to compensate for the fall in real wages and to avoid a repeat of the crisis of over-production of goods and services seen from mid-1970s […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Signet Magazine Date: July 16th, 2012 (minor edits March 28th, 2013) Scottish banking was once renowned for prudential management. Today the association is rather different. Financial journalist Ian Fraser gives his view of events behind the collapse of RBS and HBOS and calls for a Leveson-style inquiry. PDF version of this […]