Bankers: Prosecute The Swine

WHEN will enough be enough? Ask your MP (substitute politician titles in the country you wish to seek justice) to join with others and demand prosecutions for the scheming beggars who ran our banks.

The buck should not stop at the last lard butt incumbents of the chief executive and directorship roles. The scythe of retribution should sweep across the doorsteps of bankers who started the rot such as the now very defensive Sir Peter Burt.

Now there’s an interesting man. Today in The Herald he says bankers’ greed was to blame for the current meltdown crisis in general and the HBOS collapse in particular.

Now that is Cheshire Cat griningly curious, since he was the man who made it to the big time. A Shrek-proportioned fat cat who got the cream by the barrel load. The man who walked away with a huge pay-off and superb pension rights and loadasmoney when he engineered the reverse cash snatch of the Bank of Scotland by the then Halifax new Bank old Building Society.

It was touted as the great bank of the future was HBOS. It kept the pretence of being a Scottish bank while being headed by a non-banker…the former big wheel at Asda.

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It became the biggest loss leader of all time.

Similar deals were struck with the RBS and NatWest…NatWest accountants were brought into the Edinburgh HQ (the new one secreted away out by Edinburgh Airport -handy for a quick getaway) by the tumbrel-load and are still there drawing fat salaries and bonuses for sitting idle on hands terrified to touch a calculator.

If Whitehall has a problem identifying a suitable “proper” accountant to sort this out, I can recommend a couple who were in the Anderson partnership when it went down in the Enron debauch. At least they will have a idea where any bodies might be buried. (Check how many new paper shredders have been brought by bank central purchasing departments since this lot began. It would probably have meant a great deal less borrowed public cash if everything had been kept intact for the audit trail.)

As it is, several former high-flyers are known in the industry by names such Sir Porcine (Shredder) Snout-Lancelot, OBE (Other Buggers’ Efforts) and INPR (I’m Not Personally Responsible), NMG and bar (Not me Gov, mine’s a pink gin). It is a inverse badge of pride, apparently.

I know, I know, but it’s said I always end on a preposition when furious, allegedly.

Send the tumbrels out again Gordon Brown and let’s have a dozen banking swine in the dock at a time. It will save money. Their greed, incompetence and venal behaviour isn’t in doubt. Prosecute them for false accounting and fraud…should do for starters.

AGW

Anorak

Posted: 17th, February 2009 | In: Money Comments (4) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink